Facts So Romantic

Stories, fiction included, act as a kind of surrogate life. You can learn from them so seamlessly that you might believe you knew something—about ancient Greece, say—before having gleaned…

This month, the cover of New Scientist ran the headline, “Is the Universe Conscious?” Mathematician and physicist Johannes Kleiner, at the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy…

Now that we’re corralled into our homes and apartments, something seems pre-modern in how our worlds have shrunk. Unlike past quarantines, we’re also connected by digital technology…

 When I worked as a TV reporter covering health and science, I would often be recognized in public places. For the most part, the interactions were brief hellos or compliments. Two periods…

 We called Greg Carr the other day to talk about the spread of the coronavirus in Africa. Carr, who has been featured in Nautilus, is the founder of the Gorongosa Restoration Project,…

On January 5, six days after China officially announced a spate of unusual pneumonia cases, a team of researchers at Shanghai’s Fudan University deposited the full genome sequence of…

Wayne Koff is one of the world’s experts on vaccine development, the president and CEO of the Human Vaccines Project. He possesses a deep understanding of the opportunities and challenges…

Many of us are stuck now, sheltered in our messy dwellings. A daily walk lets me appreciate the urban landscaping; but I can’t stop to smell anything because a blue cotton bandana shields…

This story was updated post-publication to include information from a study published on the preprint server medRxiv on April 17, 2020.With more than half a million cases of COVID-19 in…

In a recent viral news segment on CNN, cars are shown exiting what a narrator says is a church parking lot—dozens of people, including children, had just attended an evening service.…