Nelson Mandela did not die in a South African prison in the 1980s. He was released in 1990, became South Africa’s first Black president in 1994 and died in 2013 at the age of 95. Yet some people have reported vivid memories of hearing about...
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Look up on a clear night and the most obvious feature of the universe is not the stars. It is the darkness between them. That darkness seems perfectly ordinary, yet for centuries it posed a...
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Somewhere on Earth, while you read this sentence, babies are being born and people are dying. Others are crossing national borders, changing the population of one country without changing th...
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It is one of those questions that sounds almost too simple to deserve a scientific explanation. Look up on a clear afternoon and the sky is blue. Yet that familiar color is the visible resul...
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At this moment, Earth is moving in several different ways at once. It spins on its axis, circles the Sun at roughly 30 kilometers per second, and accompanies the entire Solar System on a vas...
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For generations, chemistry books could place bismuth near the end of the periodic table's stable territory. Its naturally occurring isotope, bismuth-209, showed no detectable radioactive dec...
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When sponge divers found an ancient shipwreck off the small Greek island of Antikythera around 1900, they brought up the kinds of objects archaeologists expected from a wealthy vessel of the...
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Quantum entanglement is often introduced with a sentence that sounds like science fiction: two particles can be linked so deeply that changing one instantly changes the other, even if they a...
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Listen to some of NASA's most famous recordings from the outer Solar System and space does not sound silent at all. Jupiter whistles, crackles and roars. Saturn produces eerie rising tones....
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There is a place in the South Pacific where the horizon contains nothing but water and the nearest scraps of land are roughly 2,688 kilometers away. No island marks the spot. There is no lig...
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