A Brief History of the Universe (and our place in it) review: A new tour of the cosmos paints a wide picture

No tour of the cosmos is complete without a description of black holes MARK GARLICK/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY A Brief History of UniverseSarah Alam Malik, Simon & Schuster (UK, 12 February) William Morrow (US, 5 May) IN 1988, Stephen Hawking published A Brief History of Time, an exploration and explanation of cosmology by the renowned physicist…

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What if everything you think you know about passwords is wrong? Here’s what really makes a strong password in 2026

February 1 was National Change Your Password Day, a well-intentioned reminder that, ironically, highlights everything wrong with how we think about security in 2026. Here’s the truth: if you spent the first day of the month dutifully changing “Summer2025!” to “Winter2026!” across your accounts, you didn’t make yourself safer. In fact, you might have made…

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U.S. political polarization started a lot earlier than you might expect

Forget Donald Trump. A new analysis suggests the U.S. public’s sharp lurch into polarization began in 2008, years before his first presidential campaign. Researchers at the University of Cambridge’s Political Psychology Lab tracked shifts in Americans’ views across nearly four decades and found that divisions were broadly stable through the 1990s and early 2000s, before…

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