How Interest Rates Affect Everyday Life
A central bank changes one rate and the effects reach mortgages, rents, jobs and prices through a chain of borrowing costs. Each step takes time, which is why the results lag the decision.
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How the Calendar Was Invented
A calendar has to reconcile three cycles that do not fit: the day, the month and the year. Every calendar in history is a different answer to that arithmetic problem.
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How a Computer Stores Information
Everything a computer holds is patterns of two states. The interesting part is not the binary, it is the ladder of storage types trading speed against size and cost.
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Why Do We Get Hiccups?
A hiccup is a sudden contraction of the diaphragm followed by the vocal cords snapping shut. Most attacks are harmless and self-limiting, and the reason they start is still not settled.
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How Antibiotics Work and Why They Stop Working
Antibiotics target structures bacteria have and human cells do not. Resistance is what happens when a bacterial population evolves around that difference, and every course of treatment applies the pressure.
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A Public Atlas Predicting Every Possible Single-Letter DNA Change
A new atlas publishes predicted molecular effects for all nine billion possible single-letter changes in the human genome, turning a question that used to need a lab into a lookup.
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Using Supernovae to Hunt for Particles Nobody Has Seen
A physics team has proposed using the gas a dying star throws off before it explodes as a detector for extremely weakly interacting particles, and set new limits using a recent supernova.
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Why Data Centres Are Turning to Nuclear Power
Commitments to build AI computing capacity are now arriving with power agreements attached, including nuclear deals running for decades. The constraint has stopped being chips.
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How Do We Know the Age of the Earth?
The Earth is about 4.54 billion years old, and we know that because certain atoms decay at a fixed rate. Rocks containing them behave as clocks that started when the rock formed.
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Why Do Languages Die?
Languages disappear when communities stop passing them to children. That almost never happens by force alone: it happens when speaking the majority language becomes the rational choice.