Rose Eveleth

Cornelia Kopp via Flickr Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . After five years of practicing meditation, subject number 99003 began to see the lights. “My eyes were closed,” he reported, “[and] there would be what appeared to be a moon-shaped object in my consciousness directly above me, about the […]

Can you match the skulls of Schubert, Haydn, and Beethoven with the musical style of its owner?

Any cup you sip from could provide a sample bearing your DNA. dohtoor via Shutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Almost everywhere you go, you leave a bit of yourself behind—a hair, a fingernail clipping, a bit of skin, a few skin cells from your lips on a […]

In Gallery 919, in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is a giant breathing machine. Its creator, William Kentridge, calls it “the elephant,” after Charles Dickens’s description of factory machines that move “monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.” On the walls surrounding the elephant […]

It’s 2014: Sixty-one years since the discovery of the double-helix structure of DNA. Four hundred seventy one years since Copernicus published the heliocentric model of the universe. And one year since the Higgs Boson was discovered. In 100 years, how will we look back on today’s science? Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in […]

This month Nautilus is tackling the idea of home—what it is, what it means to us, and how we find our way there. Along the way, we’re discovering that home is an essential idea for humans, the subject of countless songs, poems, movies, paintings, novels, and idioms. In English, home is where the heart is. There’s […]

New approaches are helping autistic people understand “neurotypicals”—and vice versa.

We learn as kids that knowledge is power—secret knowledge even more so.

Jorge Louis Borges once described an empire that wanted to build a map. But the maps they had seen before were not precise enough. They had too much compression and approximation. There was too much inexactitude. And so the empire eventually made a map of the empire that was the size of the empire, and […]

A woman walks in to the room. She is wearing a white dress and has a mole over her bright red lips. She could be anybody, but you might have instantly guessed she was Marilyn Monroe. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . For every famous person, there is a […]