Machines that are smarter than people? A utopian dream of science-fiction novelists and Hollywood screenwriters perhaps, but one which technological progress is

In the early 1600s, in a haunting tale titled New Atlantis, Sir Francis Bacon imagined the discovery of an uncharted island. This island was home to the descend

How devastating viruses, pandemics, and other natural catastrophes swept through the far-flung Roman Empire and helped to bring down one of the mightiest civili