Insight
The Moon Is Drifting Away From Earth, and We Can Measure It to the Millimetre
The Moon is leaving. Slowly, by about 3.8 centimetres a year, roughly the speed your fingernails grow. That number is not an…
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The Placebo Effect Is Real Biology, Even When You Know It Is a Placebo
In 1799, a doctor in Bath named John Haygarth ran one of the first proper tests of a medical treatment. The treatment…
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How Migrating Birds Feel the Earth’s Magnetic Field
Every autumn, European robins that breed in Scandinavia leave for southern Europe and North Africa. Many of them fly at night, alone,…
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How a Lithium-Ion Battery Stores Energy, and Why It Slowly Wears Out
Your phone, your laptop and most electric cars run on the same basic idea: lithium atoms shuffling back and forth between two…
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Why the Sun’s Outer Atmosphere Is Hotter Than Its Surface
Stand next to a campfire and step back, and you get cooler. That is how heat is supposed to work. The further…
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Why Yawns Are Contagious, and What a Yawn Might Actually Be For
You have probably yawned at least once since you started reading this, or you will before the end. That is the strange…
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How Quantum Computers Use Superposition to Solve Problems Classical Computers Can’t
A classical computer bit is either a 0 or a 1, always, no ambiguity. A qubit, the basic unit of a quantum…
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How mRNA Vaccines Actually Teach Your Cells to Build Immunity
Traditional vaccines work by showing your immune system a weakened or dead version of a pathogen, or a piece of one, and…
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The Strangler Fig: The Rainforest Tree That Starts by Killing Its Host
Walk into a mature rainforest and you’ll eventually find one: a massive, lattice-like trunk, made of what looks like dozens of woody…
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Why Is the Night Sky Dark? The Paradox That Took 400 Years to Solve
Look up on a clear, moonless night and you see mostly black, punctured by a scattering of points of light. It feels…
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Why You Can’t Tickle Yourself: The Brain’s Own Prediction Engine
Try it right now. Run your own fingers along the bottom of your foot or under your arm, the exact spots that…
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How General Anesthesia Actually Turns Off Consciousness (and Why We Still Don’t Fully Know How)
Every day, millions of people are put under general anesthesia, wheeled into an operating room, cut open, stitched back up, and wake…