Ideas | Science Practice
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Chapter one
Legacy
Biology | Psychology
Parents Shouldn’t Spy on Their Kids
Apps that make it easy to invade kids’ privacy are a recipe for arrested development.
Culture | Psychology
The Resulting Fallacy Is Ruining Your Decisions
Are you judging your decisions on their outcomes?
Chapter two
Judgment
Numbers | Economics
The Bitcoin Paradox
Why cryptocurrency will always be political.
Matter | Physics
The Science of Star Wars Weaponry
Just how realistic are lightsabers, blasters, and ion cannons?
Culture | Psychology
Why Your Brain Hates Other People
And how to make it think differently.
Culture | Fiction
Buying Freedom
What happens when you barter a jail break for the wrong person?
Chapter three
Mechanics
Numbers | Artificial Intelligence
Are Algorithms Building the New Infrastructure of Racism?
How we use big data can reinforce our worst biases—or help fix them.
Biology | Animals
The Fish That Took a Century to Name
The unlikely story of Alfred Russel Wallace’s pike.
Culture | Psychology
Our Conflicted Feelings For R2-D2
Lucas’ droids are halfway between human and inhuman, so we can both love and ignore them.
Numbers | Technology
How Darknet Sellers Build Trust
The Amazon for drug dealing is built around user reviews.
Chapter four
Learning
Culture | Sociology
Would Twitter Ruin Bee Democracy?
Simple-majority democracy is used by many animals. But they don’t have social media.
Matter | Physics
The Data That Threatened to Break Physics
What does a rational scientist do with an impossible result?
Culture | Mortality
What We Get Wrong About Dying
A pediatric oncologist describes the lessons of his practice.
Related Facts So Romantic
“Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.” —Jules Verne
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Ideas
The Logic Puzzle You Can Only Solve with Your Brightest Friend
You’ve been caught snooping around a spooky graveyard with your best friend. The caretaker, a bored old man fond of riddles (and not so fond of trespassers), imprisons each of you in…
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Numbers
How Classical Cryptography Will Survive Quantum Computers
Justin Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister, certainly raised the profile of quantum computing a few notches last year, when he gamely—if vaguely1—described it for a press conference.…
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Culture
10 Popular Nautilus Magazine Stories of 2017
What did the unconscious part of the mind say to the conscious part? This isn’t so much the start of a science gag as a perennial scientific mystery—one that the novelist Cormac McCarthy,…
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Culture
Which Comes First, Big Cities or Big Gods?
Warriors among the Kwara’ae, a collection of tribal communities indigenous to the Solomon Islands, sacrificed pigs before battle. The tradition granted the combatants, so the belief went,…
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