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our number system took hold in the West only in the 13th century, after the Italian mathematician Leonardo of Pisa—better known as Fibonacci—introduced the numerals to Europeans. He’d learned them from Arab traders, who presumably adopted them during travels to the Indian subcontinent. ...
Captain Jim "Bones" Schneiderman, a B-52 copilot who attended the first briefing, was not impressed. "It was clear before we even took off on the first mission that the tactics were really dumb, everybody coming in from the same direction, same altitude, same exit routes," he says. "...
Jane, was interrogated at length without being given the reasons why. She, too, apparently passed. Eventually, Collins and others chosen for the program were flown to Washington, D.C., and told for the first time they’d be undertaking high...
Fortunately, the detectors showed no signs of poison; the wind was blowing the gases away from the building. Phone lines in the battered facility remained operational, and the engineers quickly established contact with their colleagues at the mission control center, perched on the mountain slope som...
Just as compact mirrors did in the early 20th century, selfies on social media have propelled an explosion in technologies of self-presentation, from custom lights for taking self-portraits on your phone to photo-filtering software that airbrushes your appearance. “You just look like you have ...
unlocked front door, told them about the fire and offered to take them someplace safe. They might not have survived the night. If they had, and if they lived for decades—if it reallywasLouis in that photograph—they failed to contact their parents only because they wanted to protect them...
For science fiction writers, embracing technology was also a savvy career move. Authors who dreamed of being published in Hugo Gernsback’sAmazing Stories—the first magazine devoted solely to science fiction, which published from1926 through 1980—knew that Gernsback himself was a pioneeri...
“Isaac Franklin had no children who survived,” Thomson had told me on the phone. “His four children all died before they grew up. But he had three brothers, and there are hundreds of their descendants living all around the country. My direct ancestor is Isaac’s brother James. Which ...
“It led me on a deep dive to understand more and more about him and the fact that the South wasn’t monolithic during the Civil War,” says Ross, speaking on the phone from New York. “I didn’t realize it was going to be two years of research before I began writing the screenpla...