Brian Gallagher
Taking Another Person’s Perspective Doesn’t Help You Understand Them
To understand someone, we should not imagine their point of view but make the effort to “get” their perspective.
Climate Change Is Making Plants Behave Like Costco Shoppers
Plants have their own form of money: carbon dioxide. For decades, our fossil fuel industry has been artificially inflating their currency. What happens to plants during inflation—when CO2 levels in the atmosphere rise? Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . The same thing that happens if you drop money from […]
Desert Air Will Give Us Water
A partial solution to the problem of punishing droughts may be to snatch water from the air, Dune-style.Photograph by NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center / Flickr Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Last year, after a punishing four-year drought, California lifted emergency water-scarcity measures in all but four counties. […]
Larry David and the Game Theory of Anonymous Donations
What your generosity signals about you.
The Psychological Challenges of Just Getting to Mars
Life outside Earth has its own Hobbesian description: isolated, confined, and extreme—or I.C.E. “Space is the quintessential ICE environment,” according to a new paper, published in American Psychologist. Space includes inhospitable planets like Mars, whose arresting vistas, canyons, and mountains beckon. But only humans sealed inside cumbersome suits, trained to weather such nerve-racking circumstances, can […]
The Case Against Geniuses
Once you’re called a “genius,” what’s left? Super genius? No, getting called a “genius” is the final accolade, the last laudatory label for anyone. At least that’s how several members of Mensa, an organization of those who’ve scored in the 98th percentile on an IQ test, see it. “I don’t look at myself as a […]
Are Suicide Bombings Really Driven by Ideology?
The surprising anthropology of group identity.
Will Robot Surgeons Ever Be Creative?
The idea that a surgical robot could ever substitute for the real thing is “a real stretch,” says Ken Goldberg, a distinguished U.C. Berkeley roboticist and researcher.Photograph by Elnur / Shutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . You die at the beginning of Mass Effect 2. It’s 2183, and […]
How You Can Be a Less Politically Polarizing Person
Partisanship doesn’t just affect moral and perceptual judgments—even cold, quantitative reasoning can’t escape its pull.
This Famous Aging Researcher Doesn’t Want Us to Live Forever
In the Netflix anime series Knights of Sidonia, humankind is marooned in a spaceship 500,000-strong, refugees constantly on the run from shapeshifting aliens who destroyed Earth over 1,000 years ago. Both the patriarchy and poverty have been smashed. Advances in genetic engineering have allowed androgynous individuals to proliferate and asexual reproduction to become commonplace. Everybody […]