Technology

Our first impressions, Chinatown storefront art, and things to do on a glorious spring day.

Here on Earth, signal degradation is a real problem whenever we transmit information to one another. Signals like sound, light, and gravity spread out through space in three dimensions, becoming weake...

H. Ross Perot, former presidential candidate and founder of multinational IT company Electronic Data Systems (EDS), once said, “Talk is cheap. Words are plentiful. Deeds are precious.”&nbs...

When most of us were children, and we went to a rural area with clear skies overhead at night, we were all greeted by the same familiar sight: a dark night sky, glittering with many hundreds or even t...

Whenever stars are born, their masses determine their fates. The (modern) Morgan–Keenan spectral classification system, with the surface temperature range of each star class shown above it, in k...

American culture demands that pain be productive. Historian Kate Bowler explores how the obsession with finding meaning in suffering turns into what she calls “purpose monsters”: the need to make ever...

Gretchen Rubin is a genuine multi-hyphenate. She began her career as a clerk in the Supreme Court and switched to writing when she had an idea for a book, Power Money Fame Sex: A User’s Guide, w...

There are, in general, two ways in which scientific advancement occurs. There’s the slow, incremental change that represents most scientific advances: where the existing scientific foundation ge...

Jim Al-Khalili introduces the technologies emerging from the second quantum revolution: computers that exploit superposition to solve problems that would take today’s best supercomputers billion...

Partway through our conversation about his new book Good Writing: How to Improve Your Sentences, Neal Allen lost his train of thought. He turned toward his wife and co-author, Anne Lamott. The two rif...

From a scientific perspective, studying consciousness is a bit like trying to describe the singularity inside a black hole from the window of a spacecraft in its gravitational orbit. We can see how th...