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On a cold morning in a northern town, a lake freezes over. The ice is thick enough to walk on, and underneath it, in water that never freezes solid, fish keep swimming…
You wake up with a story in your head. You were flying, or late for an exam in a school you left twenty years ago, or talking to someone who died long…
The most powerful number in the world economy is 2%. It decides, indirectly, what your mortgage costs, whether your employer gives you a raise, and how much your savings will buy in…
Deep dive: For the quantitative version — Fried parameter, seeing measurements, aperture averaging and adaptive optics — see: Stellar Scintillation, Deep Dive: Why Stars Twinkle, Measured in Numbers Go outside on a…
In the mid-1550s, two men from Aleppo and Damascus opened a small shop in Istanbul. They served a dark, bitter drink that most of the city had never tasted. Within a few…
In 1887, two American physicists set out to measure something they were certain existed, and found nothing at all. Albert Michelson and Edward Morley built an exquisitely sensitive instrument to detect the…
In the mid-2000s, oyster hatcheries along the Pacific coast of the United States ran into a mystery. Billions of larvae were dying before they could grow shells, and nobody could say why.…
It is 3 a.m. You are asleep, and then you are not. Your calf has turned to stone. The muscle has seized into a hard knot, pain shoots up the back of…
In 2013, a journalist in Hong Kong handed a stranger a laptop and asked him to read the files on it. The stranger was Glenn Greenwald, the files were Edward Snowden’s, and…
Disclaimer: This guide is general scientific information only and is not medical advice. Clinical decisions about suspected Ebola disease must be made by qualified health professionals following WHO and national guidance, with…