10+ hour, 27+ min ago   (1090+ words) Picture this: a pub quiz. The host asks where moonlight comes from. Every hand in the room goes up. The Moon has no light of its own. It reflects the Sun. Everyone learned this at about age seven. Then the…...

6+ day, 11+ hour ago   (1568+ words) Every few months a headline announces that the Moon could power the Earth. A startup wants to mine it. A space agency lists it as a reason to go back. The word in all of those stories is helium-3. Close…...

1+ week, 3+ day ago   (1479+ words) Dive to the bottom of a swimming pool and hold still. Your ears ache. That is the weight of three meters of water pressing on your eardrums, and it already hurts. Now watch a waterjet cutter at work, like the…...

1+ week, 5+ day ago   (1498+ words) Here is a fact that stops people cold. On March 11, 2011, a giant earthquake struck off the coast of Japan. It moved the island. It shifted a point deep inside the planet. And it made the day a tiny bit shorter....

2+ week, 6+ day ago   (1068+ words) That is a real paradox, not a play on words. Massless pieces, adding up to something with mass. To see how that works, we have to slow down on a word we use all day and rarely pin down. Mass....

3+ week, 6+ day ago   (1175+ words) Here is the strange part. Almost none of it is the computer. The real quantum chip is tiny, about the size of a fingernail. It is bolted to the bottom. Everything above it is a fridge. Its one job is…...