Science is a perennial journey to the frontiers of knowledge, where transformations of life and society begin. This month we venture from the quark to the black hole, with plenty of surprises on Earth along the way, to spotlight head-spinning research and experiments.   
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Scientists—to be specific, neuroscientist David Eagleman and cognitive scientist Ann-Sophie Barwich—evoke the poet Emily Dickinson in this mini-issue of Nautilus as they explain how the brain absorbs the world, “As Sponges—Buckets—do.” In the scientists’ words, the brain’s bioelectrical ability to change and adapt, in response to environments in flux, is a marvel.   
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Feeling connected to nature is important. It inspires empathy and a desire to preserve what is being lost. But empathy is not enough. Conservation is about sustaining ourselves in tune with nature. Highlighting the threads of that harmony is where science comes in, and where this issue of Nautilus follows.    
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The darkness is coming after the light. That’s what life during this pandemic feels like. Ultimately it will be science that will quench the virus and restore the light. That’s what science has always done—shown the way out of confusion and despair, illuminated nature, within and without us. This issue follows the light of science at work. But it also exposes its dark side.   
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Scientists can be in love, of course, overcome by its joys, overwhelmed by its pains. But when they put on their lab coats, love and sex are all about the caudate nucleus and dopamine. But the science of love doesn’t shuttle romance to the wilderness. Science is a light on our path to understand ourselves and the world’s fullness. This issue is all about that journey.   
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Risk is at the heart of poker. You might win it all. You might lose it all. But nobody succeeds without taking it. The trick is to understand that internal calculus. Analyze and understand it to the point where the cliff from which you’re jumping feels safe.     
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Could anything be more fundamental in life and science than energy? And be more various and mysterious? Energy may be the term we use most often without quite knowing what it means. So how do you begin to plumb the many meanings of energy?     
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The story is changing. The world has not reopened but there is a sense it can. In this state of hopeful limbo, things don’t look the same as they did three months ago, two weeks ago, one day ago. This mini-issue of Nautilus turns its journalistic and scientific focus on the changing view outside our windows.   
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It’s a time like none other for us for Nautilus, as it is for every publication. What can we do to help you understand what’s happening to us? That’s the question that drives every article we’ve done and are planning to do on the coronavirus pandemic.   
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When it comes to intelligence, the mind is overrated. We explore body intelligence and emotional intelligence, and finer still, cellular intelligence. We peer into the black boxes of artificial intelligence, where the future looks dangerous. The intelligences in the sciences, and of the sciences, are without bounds.    
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The debate over panpsychism has only got hotter in the past few years, not only in Nautilus, of course, but in articles and books. In this mini-issue we head back into the debate with new perspectives on panpsychism, which don’t solve the hard problem, but do inch close to the heart of matter.   
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“Usefulness” may be a utilitarian term but it does the job of capturing what’s remarkable about maps, and what inspires this issue of Nautilus—illuminating the signs and symbols, notably language, that imperfect humans employ to represent reality.   
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The search for extraterrestrial life is a funny thing in science. It’s like a private hobby, best not discussed at work with colleagues, nor with friends at parties. It’s OK now and again to illuminate the search for alien life, an interlude in the symphony of scientific work. And that’s just what we’re offering in this mini-issue of Nautilus.   
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This month’s issue offers multiple perspectives on catalysts in science, from cosmology to medicine, neuroscience to physics. It illuminates the elusive agents of change that spark ever-emergent worlds.       READ ONLINE

This month we are turning our magnifying glasses on atmospheres. With global warming upon us, the time is now for a closer look. Can what we do in our cultural and personal atmospheres change what happens in Earth’s atmosphere?    

Science is a journey into the unseen, the hidden, the unknown. It’s a journey into the human brain to uncover the neural connections that guide our behavior in the dark, outside the light of conscious awareness. Seismic forces, slowly shifting tectonic plates, the earth remaking itself, are happening beneath our feet, and we above want to know how. So many of the answers are out of sight, but in this issue of Nautilus, we’re going into the underworlds to find them.    

We look at how language elevates our spirits and lets them down. We delve into its origins in our animal ancestors and show that while language may distinguish us from our animals, it also links us to them. Language, we show, shapes our thoughts, but also frees them.    READ ONLINE

This month we look at the innate nature of storytelling and why AI will need to learn how to tell stories. But that’s not all: This issue is also about the beautiful power of stories themselves.   

That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind. Yes, 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of Arpanet, a network that linked four computer nodes in 1969, the prototype of today’s Internet, a giant leap for humankind. (That moon landing was pretty significant, too.)     

Nature loves to play. And play is the thing throughout this issue. Indre Viskontas takes us inside the concert hall to explain how musical ensemble tap into brain wells of creativity and empathy that can’t be reached by going it alone. We also look at a dark side of play. Barclay Bram shares his everyday experiences with the app WeChat, which nearly everybody in China uses to connect in play and work and everything in between.      

This month’s theme, “Quandary,” features articles that rebalance the fear that science is out of control, that playing God has set humanity on an inexorable path of destruction. This issue presents new essays, articles, and interviews that crack open quandaries in manifold fields of science.    

Engineers tell us flow describes how fluids or gases behave in relationship to their environment. Flow can be smooth or turbulent. But when it’s turbulent, scientists are baffled about what in the world’s going on. Then again, flow can be a transcendent feeling. It can lift you out of time, make you feel one with the universe.     READ ONLINE

Controlling variables in search of a hypothetical result is one of the most important methods in science. But the concept of variables is not limited to methodology. A variable is a reminder that a shift in perception can spring us from cliché and deepen our knowledge and understanding.      READ ONLINE

There is something beguiling about the possibility that the letters making up our DNA are also used somewhere far away. On the other hand, the lack of any such message may make the stronger point, telling us that the meaning we’re looking for is scattered across a much broader canvas, and ours to discover.    

Among its many peculiarities, the human brain has a habit of not responding in the same way to identical inputs. This may be due to the fact that our eyes and ears are noisy instruments, or because signals move in a stochastic fashion from neuron to neuron. It may also simply be a matter of context.    

Behind the scenes, our world is constantly rebooting. Rebooting is not just frequent, it is structured and varied. We are engineering this kind of granularity not just into computers, but also ourselves.      

The natural world is more relative and fluid than we’d imagined, and our human world is run through with its own mechanisms, many of them our own creation. Physicists talk of many landscapes of physical laws and universes, and our most human characteristics are echoed and copied by both nature and technology.     READ ONLINE

Cognitive distortions like selective attention are how we keep ourselves happy. As we age, we increasingly focus on happy memories, and place more emphasis on emotional regulation than on information accuracy.      READ ONLINE

For something like 5,000 years, astronomy was the analysis of starlight. In the mid 20th century, cosmic rays were added to the mix, and then neutrinos. Two years ago came gravitational waves. Science advances, not just by seeing better, but by inventing whole new categories of seeing.   

For sheer color, you can’t do much better than a black hole event horizon. It swallows everything without a trace, but it also evaporates. It may contain a wall of fire created by disentangling virtual particles. Unless it’s a fuzzball made of fundamental strings, in which case it has “hair” instead of a firewall.    READ ONLINE

Systems can surprise us. Out of neurons comes consciousness. Out of cars, traffic jams. Just as interesting as these emergent properties, but less discussed, are submergent properties, in which the causal arrow points down rather than up. The group changes the individual.     READ ONLINE

The more we learn about coordinates, the more we understand their tendency to melt into each other. Far-flung bits of space can get entangled. At the tiniest scales, space and time dissolve into a complex foam. In the brain, grid cells that mark our location in space also help us demarcate time.

Searching has a cost. It takes time and energy, and distracts us from other opportunities. It is also a quickly growing part of modern life.       READ ONLINE

Connection has an exponential, multiplicative power to create complexity. It’s where the meat of the hardest problems—like consciousness—lies. It can also make problems harder than they first seem to be.   

What interesting stories are out there that involve the self but do not involve people? Complex systems seem to resist the privileged perspective necessary to define a “self.” If nature preaches a deep relativism, is our attachment to the idea of self a human foible?  
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While we sequence the genetic codes that make our cells unique, we build giant cities that look like cells from space. While we take on more personal responsibility, we divine the outlines of what can only be accomplished through groups. We build new kinds of individuality together with the networks that support them.   

The importance of perspective in science cannot be understated and yet often is. From the outside, science can seem like a common noun, a smooth and untextured monolith containing the Truth. But science is a method and not a body of knowledge, and it is practiced by fallible humans.    READ ONLINE

Trust appears to be in decline. Trust in government around the world is on the ebb, and is at historic lows in the U.S. We’re awash in stories of abuse of trust by leaders from all walks of life. The institution of science has a special role to play in the trust wars. Feynman told us, after all, that “science is a way of not trying to fool yourself.”   READ ONLINE

The philosophers knew it first. “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1831. Since then, science has redefined the word.     READ ONLINE

Do monsters have an expiry date? They’re not just dangerous, after all, or evil, or frightening. They challenge our categories. They are perversions of the natural order.     

We like to make the hive personal. While we undermine the hive in stories, we build ever-better versions of it in reality. As our neighborhoods grow denser, public conversations move to social media, and blockchain decentralizes authority, we move closer to discovering whether the personal hive is really a contradiction in term.     

There are the limits that are formally unbeatable: things like the speed of light and quantum indeterminacy. They’re interesting because they describe an unexpected border between the philosophical and technological. And because we are still trying to beat them.     

At each level of complexity in nature, “entirely new properties appear,” wrote Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson in 1972. In other words, we should expect new scientific foundations to emerge from complex systems.     

The absurd has a way of crystallizing our thinking. Satire spurs social change. Extreme coincidences in the fundamental constants of physics challenge us to reconsider our metaphysics. We got where we are with the help of the absurd. Without it, life would be strange indeed.    READ ONLINE

At the borders between chaos and order are seeds for new insights into information, war, physiology, and physics. Structure is not just visible—it’s created, transformed, and destroyed.    READ ONLINE

Consciousness is a hard problem because it is emergent, mixes software and hardware, and is dizzyingly self-referential. It’s harder still because, in a sense, it impossible to study directly.    READ ONLINE

Peel back one balance, and you find another. In this issue, each balance leans against the next: mental against physical, evolutionary against ecological, one infinity against another. The web of balances that make up our world is intricate, full of tiny stable points and unexpected transitions.    READ ONLINE

Problems of power resist solution. As other aspects of our lives have been entirely transformed for the better—the ability to communicate with each other, for example—just a little over a tenth of the world lives in a full democracy, and democratization has stalled or reversed in many parts of the world. Why is power a hard problem? Maybe because it is necessary but dangerous, intimate but foreign—a tangled externality, and possibly the very first one.   READ ONLINE

They say it’s better to be lucky than good. But shouldn’t statistics have put the idea of “being” lucky to bed? Or is luck really all about story, rather than statistics?    READ ONLINE

Where have all the real heroes gone? It’s a refrain you find in articles on our celebrity culture, movie reviews wondering why modern superheroes need to be so flawed, and in our own private conversations.     READ ONLINE

We are more concerned than ever with fakes, maybe because it’s easier than ever to manufacture them. From fake diamonds to fake journals, we inhabit a space created by technology, complexity, and a fracturing of authority, and spend plenty of time making stuff up.    READ ONLINE

Even Mother Nature can seem reluctant to choose, keeping cats both dead and alive, and running up a large multiverse tab. By some accounts, there is no such thing as time, or events, which means that what we experience as choices are just mathematical solutions to distant boundary value problems.    
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Have you seen the videos of the crow solving an eight-stage puzzle? Or of Lee Sedol losing to DeepMind? Learning seems to extend everywhere from the mobile above an infant’s crib to machines to, some argue, evolution and physical law. As we discover and build new learning systems, the biggest lessons may be about how we fit into the new landscape around us.   READ ONLINE

When we think of sports science and technology, the physics of a curveball might come to mind—the hardware. But there is also a high technology, of sorts, in the software of sport. Without it, would we understand sportsmanship, and what it means to love playing more than winning?    READ ONLINE

It’s hard to imagine any signal coming from space that would be of no interest. Our modern definition of noise, as unwanted sound or signal, is a relatively recent one—the word used to mean strife, and nausea. Is the new meaning useful? Or does it encourage us to dismiss what we can’t interpret?                            READ ONLINE

There is a miles-long solitary wave trundling its way across an ocean right now. It will travel for days on end before dissipating its billions of joules of energy. From motes of methane pushed by distant starlight, to words smuggled out of a silent place, our world is full of unseen currents that carry and connect.   READ ONLINE

Aging may be the only universal process. Everything does it: living things, rocks, maybe even protons (we’re not sure yet). Despite that—or because of it—we humans have long dreamed of conquering it.    READ ONLINE

If rules only exist to be broken, then so do boundaries. After all, a boundary is just a rule in space. Boundaries end up facilitating exchanges as much as blocking them, and some of the most productive activities happen in their vicinity.    READ ONLINE

Adaptation is hard—everywhere. Organisms responding to a changing environment may cycle through failed designs, or perish by evolving too slowly. A self-driving car moving down an unfamiliar road will suddenly try to take an imaginary exit. It’s harder to make someone change their mind than it is to tell them they’re right.   READ ONLINE

Opposites attract. Or is it birds of a feather flock together? Our brains could be chaotic storms governed by strange attractors. Or is the chaos ungoverned, and less important than we think? When it comes to attraction, nothing is simple.  READ ONLINE

Try imagining a universe without color, or time. Unusual, but possible to visualize. Now try imagining a universe without space. What does it look like? Without space, we seem not to be able to start. READ ONLINE

Stress is a complicated adversary. It is a silent killer, but a little bit is good for you. Pushing things and people past their usual boundaries has made the world the way it is, and naturally involves the unknown. Would we want it any other way?              READ ONLINE

Science has taken many of our putative identities and melted them together. But we are jealous of our human identities. Those, we’d like to think are different. We’d like to keep them intact and persistent. Given what we know, is that a fool’s errand? READ ONLINE

How things become bigger or smaller reveals a lot about them. How big can a city get and still be a city? What about a classroom? Can a “theory of everything” describe our universe at all possible scales? “How much,” we learn, is often just as important as “why” or “how.”  READ ONLINE

While the near future is a choice, the distant future is an institution. Governments and non-profits produce long-term forecasts by the thousands. Fortunes change hands based on corporate earnings expectations. People have constructed over 10,000 active time capsules. Despite all of this frenetic activity, the future is more often than not a surprise.                 READ ONLINE

While the cosmological version is the most famous, it is far from the only dark matter story in science. There are silent neurons, missing fossils, and nighttime animal migration; death and conception; algorithms both genetic and man-made. Seeing, it turns out, isn’t the only path to believing.                  READ ONLINE

Envy is green, anger is red, and exoplanet artist renderings are usually swirly brown. Purple used to mean royal, until the chemists figured out how to make it cheaply. Blue is usually the last color to be introduced into a language. And for the philosopher? It’s all qualia. READ ONLINE

What could we not know about water? As it turns out, plenty. It covers most of the Earth, but is regularly in short supply. It is intimately involved in the processes of life, but life on other planets may not need it. It is inscrutable and unpredictable, but we try to price it. The debates show no signs of ending.              READ ONLINE

Nature is full of “mistakes,” from improperly copied genes to animals deceiving each other. Even foundational physics has shed some of its air of mathematical inevitability, and wrestles with why we live in a universe that is “right” for life. Is there a “wrong” universe out there? And how does the scientist negotiate this hall of mirrors, and come out clutching the Truth?  READ ONLINE

One dreary Tuesday, Leó Szilárd took a walk. Crossing the street, he realized that nuclear reactions could be maintained by the neutrons they themselves produced. A self-sustaining nuclear reactor became a reality nine years later, and the bomb in another three. This issue, we watch dominoes fall in human lives, across the oceans and under cities. They even crash the stock market. The end result? It’s hard to say—which is kind of the point. READ ONLINE

Slow is good. That’s the message of more than a dozen modern slowness movements, from slow fashion to slow food to slow church, most of which have sprung up in the last 20 years, and most of which point a steady finger at modernity. This issue is full of people chasing slow. Slow living, slow aging, slow science—the idea of slow has a hold on us.                          READ ONLINE

We’re living in the information age. We’ve uncovered vast stores of information in our genes, generated even more, interpreted physical law in terms of information flow—and we’re always on our phones. What is the difference between a fact and information? Does information need a consciousness to interpret it? Old notions of information, and our relationship to it, are being challenged like never before. READ ONLINE

While we sometimes consider creativity a hallmark of being human, it is not only a human trait. Crows can perform experiments and use induction; computers can evolve new algorithms that surprise their human programmers. Is creativity a mechanical and inanimate thing, so human creativity differs only in degree? Or is human creativity different, reflecting something special about us?                           READ ONLINE

Nature is “the phenomena of the physical world collectively … as opposed to humans or human creations,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. There’s us, and there’s our environment. Where the definition separates us from nature, the word itself reminds us how linked we are. Nature emerges not just as a backdrop, but as a character on stage with us, and one who can be remarkably human.  READ ONLINE

Long before David Blaine, there was the mimicry of the tiger moth—it avoids bats by emitting an ultrasonic signature similar to that of a noxious species. Long before that, some physicists say, an alien civilization launched an intricate simulation of reality, which we currently inhabit. Even if that hypothesis is false, don’t we entertain our own illusions every day, from free will to free markets?  READ ONLINE

Genius is a category that is both important and not well understood. Is genius accomplishment or talent? Social construct or hard fact? Derivative of intellect or something else? Restricted to humans? An evolutionary advantage, or a weed?  READ ONLINE

Where do we start? Often, with a bang. Take our modern universe. It didn’t grow slowly and linearly, but was instead a violent departure from what came before. Big Bangs like this aren’t exclusive to cosmology: There are the sudden appearance of language and tool use, the Cambrian explosion in the diversity of life on Earth, and the sharp divergences of economic cycles.  READ ONLINE

Nothingness is a category that stands apart from all others, defying description and tracing the boundaries of our knowledge. Forever trying to banish it and explain it away, we are also endlessly fascinated with it. From virtual particles filling the vacuum, to the invention of zero, to Sartre’s claim that nothingness lies at the heart of being, we’ve been thinking about nothingness for a while.  READ ONLINE

Is turbulence simply the breakdown of order? Or is it, in fact, order by another name? Cosmic winds, the human heartbeat, and financial markets all have it. What commonalities persist among all these examples? Can turbulence be controlled, and should we try?  READ ONLINE

Mutations make us what we are, linking and blurring the harmful and the helpful. Even the most intricate biological mechanisms, with the most important functions, are already slipping into the future to do something else. In this issue, we trace the outlines of a world that is continually abandoning and inventing itself, often with our help, creating and destroying as it goes. READ ONLINE

Symmetry, on first glance a mere detail of arrangement, has unexpected powers, aesthetic, practical—even moral. We find it in physics, families, and the brain. As shorthand, it heightens our powers of observation, helping us recognize faces and calculate particle interactions. As organizing principle, it steers genes and galaxies. Scientists, long ago convinced that it is mixed into the truth of things, flock to it.  READ ONLINE

This issue, we cast our gaze onto the feedback loops that regulate, control, and sometimes destabilize the world around us. We unearth them at every scale of space and time, from ants to continents, seconds to millions of years, human myths to the origins of life. Most surprising of all, we find a world carefully balanced between order and disorder, courtesy of one curious and powerful phenomenon.  READ ONLINE

Where does the story of life and light begin? Maybe with the fact that most life on Earth runs on sunlight, or that starlight may have set the direction in which all of Earth’s biomolecules spiral. But, when most of us cannot see the Milky Way, and glowing screens have shifted our circadian rhythms, have we had too much light, and can we win darkness back?  READ ONLINE

Since the beginning, scientists have been dividing reality into increasingly smaller bits: atoms, quarks, proteins, genes. As the list of parts has multiplied, so have their possible interactions, making the boundaries around scientific disciplines increasingly porous. From polymers to parasites, and genes to galaxies, our world is replete with wheelers and dealers, and hosts more shotgun weddings than Las Vegas.  READ ONLINE

Remember Ben Franklin’s words: “you may delay, but time will not.” On the other hand, some physicists are telling us that time may not exist to begin with. And anyway, since quantum mechanics is challenging causality itself, what impact could your actions possibly have? As we look deeper, time looks more elastic and less defined.  READ ONLINE

They say that home is the place where they have to take you in. Is it? From stellar birth clusters and allergic adaption, to symbiotic evolution and our personal microbiome, Nature has its own definitions of home. And our own ideas are shifting: Our physical homes are under renovation, and what we do at home is changing. Home births, home offices, home schooling … homepages?  READ ONLINE

This issue tackles something we don’t like to think about. But not only is waste everywhere on our land, in our oceans, and even in space—it is also useful. It drives innovation, creates wealth, teaches us about the past, and is a kind of currency in systems from biology to physics.  READ ONLINE

There were hackers long before the denial-of-service attack. Life is a script written in carbon and transmitted faithfully between generations—sometimes. Other times, it is hacked by viruses, stolen by bacteria, or mutated by cosmic rays. Join us as we pull back the curtain on nature’s information wars.  READ ONLINE

Why is “Honey Boo-Boo” a megastar? Fame can seem an empty category. But it also shows up everywhere. Daniel Dennett has described consciousness as the happy spoils of a competition among various representations of reality: “fame in the brain.” Is fame an important natural process, and our obsession with it inevitable?  READ ONLINE

“What are the odds?” This is a surprisingly difficult, and loaded, question. Is the improbable event an indication of some hidden mechanism? Or is it just long odds? In this issue, we explore The Unlikely—from how to predict it, to how to live with what we couldn’t predict.  READ ONLINE

This issue is all about life in motion, from electrons in microchips to proteins in cells to ocean tankers to planets wandering the cosmos. Over and over we are surprised to find that “just getting there” is an integral part of our world, and something that defines it.  READ ONLINE

Uncertainty is baked into our modern world. We explore how everything from quantum particles to humans themselves turn out to be undetermined in ways that upset expectations. Even mathematics itself—the language of logic—includes statements that can be proven to be neither true nor false.  READ ONLINE

What’s the biggest statement science has made about humans and our place in the universe in the past few hundred years? The answer suggested itself immediately: We’ve been told that we just aren’t very important. This was a bit of a surprise. Where was this narrative of mediocrity coming from, and, more importantly, was it true?  READ ONLINE

Behold the humble nautilus. We became interested in it here at Nautilus because, well, we stole its name. But also because (for a mollusk) it represents a remarkable intersection of science, math, myth, and culture. Since that is exactly the kind of intersection we love to write about, we decided to put together a little “teaser” issue all about it.  READ ONLINE