'In life, unlike chess, the game continues after checkmate.'

'In three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on.'

-Poet Robert Frost (1874-1963)

A Guardian writer turned midlife chess slump into an obsession

Journalist Stephen Moss embarked on a chess self-improvement journey described in "The Guardian." Not a how-to, but a reflection on loss, drive, and whether mastering chess can mean mastering oneself.

'You only go around once, but if you play your cards right, once is enough.'

- Frank Sinatra (1915–1998)

Explore (digitally) the Computer History Museum

When IBM’s Deep Blue supercomputer won its famous chess rematch with then world champion Garry Kasparov in May 1997, the victory was hailed far and wide as a triumph of artificial intelligence. But John McCarthy—the man who coined the term and pioneered the field of AI research—didn’t see it that way. An obituary about McCarthy—who passed in 2001—and his ideas.

'The true measure of all our actions is how long the good in them lasts.'

- Queen Elizabeth II (1926-2022)

The first chess game in space ended in a draw in 1970

Soviet cosmonauts Andriyan Nikolayev and Vitaly Sevastyanov played a game of chess against mission control while orbiting Earth aboard Soyuz 9 in 1970. The match ended in a draw—the first recorded game in space.

'A life is not important except in the impact it has on other lives.'

- Jackie Robinson, the first Black MLB player (1919-1972)

'A word after a word after a word is power.'

- Author Margaret Atwood (1939-present)

'Imagination is more important than knowledge. For knowledge is limited, whereas imagination embraces the entire world.'

- Albert Einstein

'I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.'

- Author Douglas Adams (1952-2001)

There are more chess game variations than observable atoms in the universe

Mathematician Claude Shannon estimated there are 10 to the 120th power variations of chess games possible. Known as the "Shannon number," this is more than the estimated number of atoms in the cosmos.

A quote by Alex Haley

"Either you deal with what is the reality, or you can be sure that the reality is going to deal with you."

'A lion never roars after a kill.'

-Coaching legend Dean Smith (1931-2015)

'Keep working on a plan. Make no little plans. Make the biggest one you can think of, and spend the rest of your life carrying it out.'

- President Harry Truman (1884-1972)

Friedrich Nietzsche theorized that we will live our lives over and over again: the myth of eternal recurrence

Rather than a theory of physics, the idea is designed as a moral argument. While Nietzsche famously eschewed the Christian afterlife, he wanted to avoid the nihilism that results from no longer having such an ultimate horizon. In a mystical moment, the philosopher came to believe that the fleeting moments of our lives would be repeated, presenting a test: would you want to relive this moment? If not, he would argue, you're not living well.

'Life is like a ten speed bicycle. Most of us have gears we never use.'

- "Peanuts" cartoonist Charles M. Schulz (1922-2000)

'Let us learn to show our friendship for a man when he is alive and not after he is dead.'

Meyer Wolfsheim in F. Scott Fitzgerald's "The Great Gatsby"

'The minute you start talking about what you're going to do if you lose, you have lost.'

- Diplomat George Shultz (1920–2021)

'The man who can drive himself further once the effort gets painful is the man who will win.'

- Roger Bannister (1929-2018)

Later in life, the clock in Grace Hopper's office ran counterclockwise

Acknowledging that most people have "an enormous tendency to resist change," Hopper's clock served as a reminder for the computer scientist that just because things have been done a certain way does not mean they should forever remain that way: "They love to say, 'We've always done it this way.' I try to fight that." (Some users may experience a paywall.)

'Pioneering is never done in front of cheerleaders urging on a roaring grandstand of popular approval.'

- "Star Trek" actor George Takei (1937-present)

Supreme Court justices serve for life

The Constitution grants Supreme Court justices lifetime appointments to shield them from electoral politics and outside pressure, a design meant to preserve judicial independence but now widely debated due to longer lifespans and partisan balances of the court.

Before Dawkins, other biologists proposed the power of mutating ideas

Nobel Prize winner Jacques Monod proposed, “Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms. Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.”

Samuel Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot' dramatizes existential absurdity

The play, originally staged in 1953, is notorious for its lack of action. For the most part, its two principal characters, Vladimir and Estragon, spend the majority of the play wondering whether a mysterious Godot will ever appear. By the end, Godot has still not arrived, yet Vladimir and Estragon do not move, a choice that reflects the existential notion that humans often hope in vain for meaning that does not exist.

Existentialist writer Jean-Paul Sartre coined the famous phrase 'Hell is—other people' in his play 'No Exit'

Quantum superposition makes Schrödinger’s cat both dead and alive until observed

Erwin Schrödinger's famous cat thought experiment illustrates how quantum objects can exist simultaneously in multiple states. This superposition allows electrons to behave as particles and waves, enabling chemical bonds and the function of modern electronics.

Apeirophobia is an overwhelming fear of living forever, perhaps stemming from the brain's inability to conceptualize an infinite life.

SpongeBob exemplifies Aristotle's philosophy for living well because he understands that happiness doesn't come from external factors like money, recognition, or power.

A vending machine run with Anthropic's AI went out of business after it was convinced to give away items for free and sell a video game console.

Browse a detailed visual analysis of over 200,000 similes—comparisons that often use 'like' or 'as'—from popular fiction to see how frequently writers the same idiomatic expressions.

This site reaches millions of visitors who are tired of AI chatbots and seeking human connection. Pretend to be an AI chatbot and ask questions, provide answers, and draw for people in real time.

Against his wishes, Albert Einstein's brain was removed before his cremation, and the pathologist responsible stored it for decades in mason jars within a beer cooler.

English mathematician Ada Lovelace wrote the first computer algorithm a century before computers existed and hypothesized that computing devices would one day be able to compose music—foreseeing the generative AI systems of today.

How Amazon operates a 'flywheel' business model, a self-reinforcing cycle that drives continuous growth

Explore our favorite visualization of the immense scale of space, from an astronaut to the size of the observable universe

In 1939, baseball star Lou Gehrig delivered his inspirational 'Luckiest Man' speech after retiring due to the health condition that now bears his name.

Indefinite cloning of some endangered species may not sustain their longevity because cloning success rates decrease as genetic mutations accumulate.

See the most iconic photos from four decades of LIFE magazine

Search a massive database of over 4 decades of clues from the TV quiz show 'Jeopardy!'

Play the role of a student in a game where you try to navigate college and remain debt-free, selecting different income levels, high school experience, race, ethnicity, and more.

Researchers believe the brain consolidates memories, processes emotions, and plans for the future during dream states

Chaos theory—informally known as the butterfly effect—is the reason why weather forecasts are presented with probabilities rather than certainties.

The US Constitution is widely regarded as the longest-standing written national constitution still in force—see how it has influenced rights worldwide.

While the sun's gravity keeps the planets in orbit, their gravity also pulls on the sun, causing it and everything else in the solar system to orbit around a mutual balance point called the barycenter—the true center of the solar system.

While atoms are normally made of protons, neutrons, and electrons, exotic ones have been built with antimatter—alternate versions of normal matter that live for fractions of a second and are about a billion times as rare.

When caught in the mouths of cardinal fish, seed shrimp release glowing, bioluminescent chemicals, which alert predators of the cardinal fish, prompting the shrimp's ejection.

The idea for the Federal Reserve was conceived in secret in 1910—with bankers donning duck hunt gear for disguise while traveling to a remote country club on Georgia's Jekyll Island

Volcanoes 'die' when their supply of magma runs out, if they are shifted away from their underlying magma reservoir, or if they get clogged by collapsing or their magma cooling back into rock.

The word 'jazz' evolved from 'jasm,' 19th-century American slang for 'energy'

Watch contemporary footage covering the US-backed Shah of Iran fleeing the country in the face of the 1979 Iranian Revolution