There are about as many bacterial cells living in your body as human ones. Every animal on Earth carries the remains of ancient bacteria in its cells. And the oxygen you just br…
Somewhere in a data center right now, a chip colder than deep space is holding information in a state so delicate that a single stray photon could wreck it. Meanwhile, governmen…
On a Sunday in October 1900, a Berlin experimenter dropped by a colleague's house and mentioned some awkward numbers about glowing ovens. By that evening Max Planck had a formul…
Ask a room of physicists what really happens when an electron is measured and you will hear several answers, from people who all agree on the numbers. Quantum mechanics predicts…
In 2015 a team at Delft spent about 220 hours collecting just 245 measurements on two electrons in labs more than a kilometer apart. Those few numbers helped close an argument t…
Every time your phone puts a blue dot on a map, it is quietly allowing for the fact that time runs faster on a satellite twenty thousand kilometers up than it does in your hand.…
A dentist's numbing shot and the poison of a pufferfish do the same thing: they jam one tiny protein gate in the wall of a nerve cell. Your brain runs on billions of gates like …
Somewhere just below your ribs, two filters the size of your fists are screening the watery part of your blood dozens of times a day and handing back almost everything they catc…
The world has never burned more coal than it does now, and it has never built solar panels faster. Both facts are true at once, and the tension between them is the story of ener…
On the island of Guam, a snake that probably slipped ashore in military cargo helped turn quiet forests into tangles of spider webs. It ate the birds, and the birds had been eat…
Table salt is made from a soft metal that bursts into flame in water and a green gas that was used as a weapon in the First World War. Bonded together, they turn into something …
In the Jack Hills of Western Australia, geologists have found grains of zircon smaller than a grain of sand that formed about 4.4 billion years ago, when the planet was young an…
In 1856 a scientist and women's rights campaigner in upstate New York set glass jars of different gases in the sun and noticed that the one filled with carbon dioxide grew hotte…
In 1964 two radio astronomers in New Jersey scrubbed pigeon droppings out of their antenna, trying to silence a faint hiss that would not go away. The hiss turned out to be the …
In 1747 a ship's surgeon cured scurvy with two oranges and a lemon a day, and the navy took almost fifty years to act on it. In 1984 a doctor drank a flask of bacteria to prove …
Every time you stand on a floor, you are trusting a rule about electrons that nobody can picture: no two of them may share a state. Rules just as strange let the sun burn for bi…