There is ordinary tiredness—the heavy-eyed feeling after a late night, a long flight or an exhausting week—and then there is the more puzzling question: Why am I tired all the time? You sleep, drink coffee, get through the day, sleep again,...
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Few English words have traveled as far politically as “woke.” Depending on who says it, the word can mean alert to racial injustice, broadly progressive, excessively politically correct, per...
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If someone asks when World War II ended, the safest short answer is 1945. If they ask for the exact date, history becomes more interesting. Was it May 8, when Nazi Germany's defeat ended the...
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“Why does my stomach hurt?” sounds like a simple question, but medically it is one of the broadest questions a person can ask. What we casually call the stomach is often the entire abdomen,...
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On a clear Arctic night, the sky can begin almost imperceptibly. A pale band appears above the horizon, faint enough to be mistaken for a cloud. Then it brightens. The band folds into curtai...
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The most spectacular sign of a geomagnetic storm can look almost supernatural. Green curtains ripple across the night sky, red light appears hundreds or even thousands of kilometres farther...
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On the evening of October 29, 1969, a student programmer at UCLA began typing a word into a computer. The machine was connected over a network to another computer at the Stanford Research In...
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Draw a line from Miami to Bermuda, another from Bermuda to Puerto Rico, and a third back toward Florida, and you have the rough outline of one of the most famous imaginary places on Earth. T...
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When George Herbert, the 5th Earl of Carnarvon, died in Cairo on April 5, 1923, the timing was almost too perfect for a sensational story. Only months earlier he had stood with archaeologist...
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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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