The Economist

The Economist

A mysterious hacker named Jia Tan nearly compromised the entire internet by inserting a backdoor into XZ Utils, a critical compression library maintained by a single

The Economist

Asbestos, a fireproof mineral once celebrated for saving lives from urban fires, has become a global health crisis causing millions of deaths from lung disease and cancer due to decades of industrial suppression and weak regulations.

The Economist

This video traces how Boston merchant Frederic Tudor built a global billion-dollar monopoly shipping natural ice from New England to tropical climates using ancient Persian preservation techniques, transforming American cities and food distribution through the "cold chain"—while Dr. John Gorrie's quest to cure yellow fever patients sparked the mechanical refrigeration that would ultimately destroy Tudor's empire.

The Economist

While classical physics treats force fields as fundamental and potentials as mere mathematical tools, quantum experiments from the 1950s reveal that particles are affected by electromagnetic potentials even in regions with zero fields, suggesting potentials are the more fundamental physical reality.

The Economist

This video explores the evolution of ultra-high-speed photography from Harold Edgerton's 1930s stroboscopic technique that froze bullets in flight to modern single-pixel cameras that visualize light moving at one trillion frames per second by trading spatial resolution for temporal precision.