In daylight, the water may look ordinary — or even unappealingly reddish-brown. Then darkness falls, a wave breaks, and the shoreline suddenly flashes electric blue. Footsteps sparkle in wet sand. A paddle draws a luminous line through a la...
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Few wildlife events are as disturbing as a whale stranding. An animal exquisitely adapted to life in deep water suddenly lies helpless on a beach, sometimes alone and sometimes alongside doz...
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Imagine two identical buildings on the same street. One has a broken window that is repaired the next morning. The other has a broken window that remains shattered for weeks. Graffiti appear...
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On the evening of May 17, 1884, New Yorkers witnessed a sight strange enough to compete with the bridge beneath it. A procession of circus animals moved across the East River from Manhattan...
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A solitary desert locust can spend its life trying to avoid other locusts. Put enough of them together, however, and something extraordinary begins to happen. The insects become more active,...
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When a tropical system appears in the Atlantic, the urge to watch it move across a map can become almost compulsive. A disturbance off Africa becomes a colored area on an outlook. A few days...
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When artificial-intelligence stocks surge, most attention goes to the companies designing the chips. Nvidia became the emblem of the AI boom because its GPUs perform much of the enormous par...
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Every September, the technology calendar suddenly becomes crowded. New phones appear within days of one another. Operating systems move from summer previews to public releases. Chipmakers an...
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On an autumn Sunday in the United States, a peculiar national clock starts ticking shortly before 1 p.m. Eastern Time. Televisions switch on. Fantasy lineups receive one last nervous inspect...
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Stand on a beach and the ocean looks almost two-dimensional: a glittering surface stretching to the horizon. The reality underneath is closer to an inverted mountain world. Plains, ridges, v...
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