Dan Garisto
Why Stem Cells Are Unfair to Their Children
A dividing neural stem cell asymmetrically segregates some cargoes between the two resulting daughter cells—blue shows DNA, red shows cellular cargo.Darcie Moore Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Darcie Moore is an expert on cargo. Not the kind you’d find on a freight train, though—it’s the cargo you’d find […]
A Modest Proposal for Thanksgiving
Or, For Preventing the Annual Repast from Being a Burden on the Earth, and for Making It Beneficial to the Publick.*
This Will Help You Grasp the Sizes of Things in the Universe
Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Caleb Scharf wants to take you on an epic tour. His latest book, The Zoomable Universe, starts from the ends of the observable universe, exploring its biggest structures, like groups of galaxies, and goes all the way down to the Planck length—less […]
Astronomy Has Just Gained a New Sense
Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . There are many stories to tell about GW170817.There are stories of a binary neutron star inspiral, two dead stars locked in a deadly dance that culminated in a collision. There are accounts of a worldwide collaboration of scientists, all working to discover […]
Why Dementia Is a Population-Level Problem
Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Dementia is typically thought of and treated as an individual sickness. Unlike something like measles, dementia is non-transferrable, and can’t be vaccinated against. But Malaz Boustani, a professor of medicine at Indiana University, thinks that the right way to think about dementia […]
Are Gravitational Wave Detections Becoming Normal?
Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . When I heard the news, I emailed my editor with my immediate reaction: “Bummer.” For the fourth time now, humans have directly detected the collision of two black holes. The violent merger occurred over 2 billion years ago, between black holes with […]
This Crystal Mimics Learning and Forgetting
You don’t need a brain to learn. Slime molds, for example, solve mazes and navigate obstacles—all without a single neuron. Information about their environment is somehow stored across their bodies. (Scientists are still a bit hazy on how this works.) Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . But what about […]
Why Cassini Is Ending Its Life with a Kamikaze Plunge
This Friday, NASA’s Cassini probe will run out of fuel and take pictures as it plummets at 75,000 miles per hour through Saturn’s atmosphere. It won’t be crashing—the heat from friction will make Cassini immolate in the sky. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Cassini has had a good […]
What the Rumored Neutron Star Merger Might Teach Us
In a sense, neutron star mergers are the largest hadron colliders ever conceived.Image by NASA Goddard Space Flight Center / Flickr Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . This month, before LIGO, the Laser Interferometer Gravitational Wave Observatory, and its European counterpart Virgo, were going to close down for a […]