Explore the Technology section of The Pulse for insights into innovation, artificial intelligence and technologies shaping the future.
Turn on the kitchen tap in New York City and water arrives in about two seconds. Most people assume it traveled a few miles through a…
Picture a farmer in Kenya waking to find a whole season of crops flattened overnight. The culprit was not a storm or a thief, but the…
Picture a Tuesday morning commute through a tunnel running beneath a harbor. The radio is on, the coffee is warm, and tons of seawater press against…
A gecko can run straight up a pane of glass and hang there upside down. No glue, no suction, no claws digging in, just its bare…
A trip by hot air balloon is typically a quiet, peaceful event. A traveler can float over vineyards and rolling hills, taking in the view from…
On an April morning in Beijing, a crowd of 12,000 runners lined up for a half marathon. Among them stood something that had never entered a…
After a house fire in Florida, a family found a mysterious metal sphere that moved on its own and reacted to music In March 1974, the…
It lands on your park bench, pecks at your lunch, and lifts off the moment you move. You have almost certainly never given the city pigeon…
Over the Rhine valley on a November night in 1944, three airmen aboard a Bristol Beaufighter were scanning the darkness for German planes when something else…
A lot of people in China had been looking out their windows and saw strange things happening in the sky. Several large trucks had projectors sending…
In 1997, scientists listening beneath the Pacific Ocean reported hearing something they couldn’t identify. A sound wave was generated with such immense power that it radiated…
Iron is one of the ocean’s most critical and scarce nutrients, limiting phytoplankton growth across vast stretches of the Pacific, the Southern Ocean, and beyond. Scientists…
Picture a two-by-four that a bullet cannot pass through. Not a steel plate dressed up as lumber, but real wood, grown in a forest, cut at…
Something enormous is happening under the Hudson River right now, and almost nobody above ground can feel it. Workers have been stabilizing the riverbed using deep…
Something strange occurred on a serene section of Colorado land. A creek turned bright pink. The color did not diffuse randomly or disappear rapidly. Instead, it…
An unusual object stayed in the sky far longer than expected—neither a satellite nor an airplane, but a solar-powered airship designed to provide internet connectivity. The…
Somewhere beneath a city right now, a machine the size of an apartment building is eating rock. It does not drill in the way you might…
Look down at the sidewalk under your feet and you are staring at one of the most important materials in human history. Concrete built the Roman…
It appears like something that could be tossed into a glass without much thought—a small capsule, lightweight and easy to carry. This floating water purification device…
A photon is supposed to be the smallest possible unit of light — indivisible by definition, with nothing smaller hiding inside it. Trying to cut one…
Turn on a faucet in New York City and cold, clear water arrives in about a second. Most people assume a pump somewhere nearby is doing…
So how can this drone respond so rapidly? Danish researchers have developed a solution to a critical maritime issue—finding sailors who go overboard in time. The…
Somewhere beneath the ash that buried Pompeii in 79 CE, workers had simply stopped mid-task. Tools abandoned, raw materials stacked, walls half-finished. For nearly two thousand…
For years we were all told the same thing. Swap your old bulbs for LEDs, because they are brighter, cheaper to run and kinder to the…
Picture the most ordinary object in the world, a vending machine humming on a street corner, an invisible thread of electricity tying it to the grid.…
A submarine wreck off New Jersey that divers have discussed for years did not appear to be typical of others. It was found well outside the…
The gym in Tokyo felt ordinary enough. A regulation table, a licensed umpire, two players stretching at opposite ends. But one of those players had no…
Underwater, the ocean doesn’t just surround you — it deceives you. Light bends, scatters, and loses its color long before it reaches a camera lens, wrapping…
There is a small, almost invisible trick that energy experts keep quietly recommending, and most people have never even tried it. It costs about the price…
Our planet was shaped by ice. Glacial forces heaved colossal boulders across continents. We’ve believed for centuries that nature did all the heavy lifting. There’s no…
In 1934, a French entomologist declared that bumblebees theoretically shouldn’t be able to fly — their wings were simply too small to generate enough lift. It…
For centuries, the Maya divine king existed as an almost untouchable figure — a ruler whose decisions emerged from the depths of enclosed palace chambers, hidden…
Place a handful of dots on a sheet of paper and measure the distances between them. Rearrange the dots — how many pairs can you get…
Google Is Asking the EPA to Release 32 Million Mosquitoes Across California and Florida to Fight a Dangerous Invasive Species Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has filed…
World Cup 2026 tickets aren’t just expensive — they’re expensive in ways that feel almost theatrical. A seat by the corner flag for Jordan vs. Algeria,…
Norway’s high-voltage power grid stretches across 130,000 kilometers of forested land. Every winter, trees fall onto the lines — knocking out power for households and straining…
A crescent moon sits on a lab bench, glowing electric blue — and it’s alive. It’s made from marine algae, the same single-celled organisms that flash…
On an old airstrip at Princeton’s Forrestal Campus — once a working airport — a small radio-controlled plane kept doing something it wasn’t supposed to do:…
For 4,600 years, the Great Pyramid of Giza has stood while empires rose and collapsed around it. Two major earthquakes — a 6.8-magnitude tremor in 1847…
Every day, kayakers paddle across Lake Union, seaplanes lift off its surface, and crowds fill the waterfront restaurants lining its shores. It’s one of Seattle’s most…
It started with a Facebook thread — neighbors in the Oxfordshire village of Bloxham trading half-remembered stories about tunnels running beneath their streets and gardens. Most…
Inside an MIT lab, a robot smaller and lighter than a paperclip recently hovered in midair for nearly 17 uninterrupted minutes — long enough that the…
A huge limestone boulder sits high above the coast of Tonga. Its size and weight make this one particularly special. Experts wanted to understand how it…
Deep inside a cave in central China, stalagmites preserved a climate record stretching back thousands of years. Archaeologists now believe those mineral layers explain why the…
Massive coral boulders litter the inland scrub of Anegada, a low-lying British Virgin Island. These colonies weigh up to 10 tons and sit 1,200 feet from…
On a glass slide no bigger than a thumbnail, liquid crystals swirl into striped, shifting patterns — and keep going for hours. No battery powers them.…
Pompeii was already operating in emergency mode long before Mount Vesuvius buried the city. Seventeen years earlier, a violent earthquake devastated the region Many buildings never…
Tiny buttons and cluttered menus are disappearing from American digital platforms. New federal mandates are forcing a total redesign of mobile and web interfaces. The Department…
A haunting melody drifts through three New Jersey cities at 5 a.m., piercing through walls and sleep. It isn’t a car alarm. It isn’t construction. It…
In March, thousands of KitKat bars vanished without a trace. It sounds like a clever marketing stunt, but it isn’t. A full shipment of limited-edition bars…
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