Ice presents a small everyday mystery. A cold pavement can be dangerously slippery even when the air temperature is far below freezing, while many other crystalline solids are perfectly easy to walk on. A steel skate can glide across a rink...
Read article
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...
Read
The first message sent across the network that would become a crucial ancestor of the modern Internet was not profound, poetic or even complete. It consisted of two lowercase letters: lo.Tha...
Read
On September 9, 1947, somebody working with one of the most advanced calculating machines in the United States opened its hardware and found an unusually literal explanation for a malfunctio...
Read
A dashboard can be perfectly accurate and still tell the wrong story. Traffic rises 28 percent, engagement improves, impressions reach a record high and the chart turns reassuringly green —...
Read
Modern elections are designed to look ordinary. Voters enter a booth, mark a choice, deposit a ballot and wait for arithmetic to produce a winner. In medieval and early modern Europe, choosi...
Read
A setting exists on your phone but vanishes on your laptop. An onboarding screen refuses to advance even though every field appears complete. An organization account opens a dashboard that a...
Read
An email can be perfectly written, legitimately requested and sent from a real company — and still end up in spam. The reason is that modern email delivery is no longer determined only by wh...
Read
Astronomy has a reputation for expensive telescopes, complicated star charts and distant objects visible only through professional instruments. Yet some of the sky's most memorable events re...
Read
Look down at a computer keyboard and you are looking at a museum whose exhibits still work. Some keys preserve decisions made by nineteenth-century typewriter manufacturers. Others carry sym...
Read