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In 1911, the Dutch physicist Heike Kamerlingh Onnes cooled a thread of mercury to 4.2 kelvin in a bath of liquid helium and its electrical resistance vanished completely, and a current set circulating in a superconducting loop like that will still be flowing years later, indistinguishable from the day it began

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Drop a small ring of superconducting metal into a bath of liquid helium, nudge a current through it, and remove…

In 1959, a Soviet research team in Novosibirsk began breeding silver foxes for nothing but tameness, and within forty generations the animals had floppy ears, curled tails, piebald coats, and a bark, traits no one had selected for but which appeared on their own once fear was removed.

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In 1959, Soviet geneticist Dmitri Belyaev began a breeding experiment in Novosibirsk with a dangerous simplicity: choose only the silver…