Infographics

The smartphone leapt from cyberpunk fantasy to ubiquity so fast you might be forgiven for forgetting what it was like to not have a map of the world, encyclopedia, tip calculator and mailman in your pocket. To remind you of just how much power you’re carrying around, we’ve got a chart that shows just how much of the wondrous technology of the past few millennia has been condensed into a little plastic-and-metal box:

You’re probably already familiar with the decline in Arctic sea ice, but there’s another climate change meltdown happening on land. Greenland’s vast ice sheet is melting at an unprecedented rate. See the numbers for yourself in the infographic.

In movies, time travel methods are mostly explained along the lines of “something something plutonium something wormhole.” But physicists do have some idea of methods that might allow for actual time travel—though they might not necessarily prevent you from killing your own grandfather. One trope in time travel science fiction is slightly plausible, if physically impossible—traveling faster than the speed of light. The crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise did this in Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, by using the sun’s gravitational pull to accelerate their spaceship to super-light speed. If it were possible to travel faster than light (Einstein calculated it would take an infinite amount of power), it is theoretically possible for signals to be sent back in time; it’s questionable if the same method could work with people. What about going forward in time by going really fast?

America is facing an animal invasion on multiple fronts. These invaders aren’t looking to start a war — only to make a home. But however benign their intentions might be, invasive species unfortunately pose threats to native species, and upset the balance of native ecosystems. Some are relatively new arrivals; others have been fortifying their position for more than a century. All are especially adept at out-eating and out-reproducing their native neighbors. To help you guard the home front, we lined up 12 of the most pernicious invasive animals in the U.S.

March 18 marks the 49th anniversary of the first extravehicular activity (EVA), or spacewalk. When Russian cosmonaut Alexei Leonov left his capsule during 1965’s Voskhod 2 mission, he became the first of 205 people who have donned a spacesuit and ventured outside the hatch. Here’s everything you need to know.

By Julie Rossman and Michael Q. Bullerdick 138 years ago—on March 10, 1876—Alexander Graham Bell spoke the first words into a “tele-phone,” as it was called, to his assistant Thomas Watson, positioned at a receiver in another room. “Mr. Watson!” Bell exclaimed in staccato bursts. “Come here! I want to see you!” And for decades, telephones looked like elaborate pieces of furniture, affixed to walls and hard-wired out to the street, and up and down the blocks to local-area switchboards. If you wanted to talk on the phone, you had to go stand next to a wall. What a difference just over a century makes! Modern smartphones still require electric power to operate, a microphone and speaker to translate voices into signals, and a ringer of some type to make your party aware you’re calling. But beyond that, virtually everything has changed. Check out this infographic showing, from a scientific and technical perspective, what happened then and what happens now, every time you make a call.