Stress

Issue 31 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Intelligence and Outbreak. It includes contributions from physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, radio producer Steve Paulson, and Gaia hypothesis originator James Lovelock, among others. This issue also features new illustrations by Jorge Colombo.

  To walk the streets of New York and think about all the little black spots on the sidewalks is a little like pondering the stars in the night sky: How many people must have walked this way, deciding at just this moment to spit out their gum? It’s almost beautiful, except that gum attracts […]

Tim Melling/Getty Images The Arctic they grew up in is unrecognizable, but bowhead whales are oddly calm. They appear to be unexpectedly benefitting from the warmer, less icy climate that has emerged over the past decade. Last month, it was announced that the Arctic in 2015 reached the warmest temperatures ever observed, and that it is warming twice as […]

Welcome to sMars: Christiane Heinicke stands on a hillside southwest of the dome. The solar array that powers the habitat is to her right. To her left are the backup hydrogen fuel cells and the solar water heater.Photograph by Christiane Heinicke/Sheyna Gifford, 2015 For 6 crewmembers who have supposedly traveled 150 million miles—and were, beforehand, […]

Bill Clark/Getty Images Rick Grimes is cornered. A walker shuffles toward him, thoughtless yet eager for flesh. Sweat drips through Grimes’ thick beard, grown in the hundreds of fearful days and nights since the dead started to roam the earth. He quickly reaches for his knife—a weapon he never used in his days as a […]

  Liana Finck’s cartoons appear in the New Yorker. Her graphic novel, A Bintel Brief, was published in 2014.

InnervisionArt via Flickr Santa Claus occupies a strange place in Christian belief. On the one hand, only children seem to really believe he exists; on the other, he gets a great deal more attention than many other purported supernatural beings, such as angels or Satan.  Does Santa Claus count as a god of the Christian […]

After watching The Big Short, I felt I had a decent grasp on the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. The film, which is being released across the United States today, is based on the book by Michael Lewis, and describes how a few prescient financiers bet against the debt bubble and made millions. Still, […]

How we broke the world record in high-temperature superconductors.

PathDoc/Shutterstock There’s a New Yorker cartoon that shows a doctor telling the patient lying in bed, “I don’t think you’re getting enough stress.” The cartoon is funny because it plays on the idea that stress is bad—how absurd is it that a doctor would prescribe more of it? Why not just offer the patient poison? […]