Amos Zeeberg
The New Way to Save Money: Playing the Lottery
Chris Goldberg via Flickr Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Lotteries have often been called a tax on the poor and, alternately, a tax on the innumerate. There is something to both claims: Lottery tickets are disproportionately bought by lower-income people, and in aggregate the players win back only […]
What Radar Guns Can’t Tell you About the Speed of Pitches
Paul L Dineen via Flickr Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Baseball is a fiddly sport. There are countless arbitrary-seeming rules and odd traditions. People who are not familiar with the game sometimes find it near-impossible to understand (and, partly as a consequence, near-impossible to watch). But under the […]
How Nuclear Explosions Were Used to Save the Environment
When humans tried to do good with atomic bombs.
New Football Helmets Take a Page From Nuclear-Plant Safety
These photos show the difference between a healthy brain (left) and one with CTE (right). The tau proteins in all the samples were stained and appear brown.BU CTE Center Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . In 2012, Tim Shaw was still living the rarefied, enviable life of an NFL […]
The Minds & Algorithms That Make Hollywood Spectacle
We may not have realized it at the time, but during the 1990s, Hollywood movies were infiltrated by a new presence that outshined even the biggest screen stars: Images created on computers became the main draws for movies like Jurassic Park, Toy Story, The Matrix, and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Since then, […]
Why Galactic Collisions Are So Beautiful
The Antennae Galaxies are in a state of “starburst,” when the gas from the two colliding galaxies crashes together to produce huge numbers of new stars.ESA/Hubble & NASA Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . According to the basic approximation, stars are formed by a stately, gradual process that belies […]
How the Big Wrong Fat Message Got So Widely Accepted
Nutritional advice about eggs, naturally high in cholesterol, has been scrambled over the past 50 years.Jag_cz via Shutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . The practice of nutritional science faces some significant problems, and they are mainly of its own making. For decades, starting in the 1950s, a consensus […]
The Universe, Expanding Symmetrically and Eternally
Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Two months ago, we learned of landmark evidence bolstering the theory of inflation, a period very soon after the Big Bang when the Universe expanded at a terrific rate, stretching out and smoothing its lumps, and making it remarkably consistent on large […]
Your House Is Waiting to Be Turned Into a Projection Screen
The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, illuminated by Obscura Digital’s projectionsObscura Digital Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . The silver screen. Movie screenings. The big and small screens.Ever since 1879, when Eadweard Muybridge used the world’s first movie projector to display a loop of 13 images of […]
Over the Universe—The Best Reactions to the Big Physics News
These swirls in the cosmic microwave background show the effect of primordial gravitational waves.BICEP2 Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Scientists, on the whole, are a circumspect lot. When faced with a microphone or reporter’s notepad, most of them (excepting a vocal minority) hedge and temper their language, adding […]