Space is famously cold. The number repeated in textbooks, documentaries and trivia lists is about 2.7 kelvin, or roughly −270.4 °C — less than three degrees above absolute zero.That number is real and extraordinarily well measured. NASA's C...
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On November 20, 1969, Apollo 12 astronauts Pete Conrad and Alan Bean left the lunar surface and rejoined Richard Gordon in orbit. Their lunar module's ascent stage was no longer useful, so m...
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Look up from a truly dark place and the Milky Way appears as a pale river of light crossing the sky. That glow is produced by stars so numerous and distant that most cannot be distinguished...
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Wi-Fi feels almost absurdly simple from the outside. Tap a network name, enter a password, and within seconds a phone can stream a film from a server thousands of kilometers away. No cable r...
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Science-fiction space battles have trained us to expect a particular soundtrack: engines roar, lasers crack and exploding spacecraft detonate with a cinematic boom. Put the same battle in th...
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From the air, parts of the Namib Desert look as if someone has stamped an enormous sheet of polka dots across the landscape. Thousands upon thousands of roughly circular patches of bare grou...
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Open the Voynich Manuscript and almost everything about it looks tantalizingly close to comprehension. Lines of neat handwriting run from left to right. Words are separated by spaces. Paragr...
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On the morning of November 14, 1963, sailors south of Iceland saw something that looked at first like a ship on fire. A dark column was rising from the North Atlantic. It was not smoke from...
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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...
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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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