Issue_11

41 articles
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    The Quest to Understand—and Mimic—Nature’s Trickiest Colors

    The West Indian Ocean coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae)AlessandroZocc via Shutterstock It was an image in a book of a sparkly blue fish—a West Indian Ocean coelacanth—that inspired German painter Franziska Schenk to begin a project that would occupy much of her adult life. “It was mysterious and beautiful,” she says, “and as a child I had […]
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    Sparkly Mints May Help Explain Puzzling “Earthquake Lights”

    Agriculture inspector Jim Conacher photographed these earthquake lights over Tagish Lake, in Canada’s Yukon Territory, in 1972Jim Conacher For centuries, people have been reporting mysterious lights along the ground and in the sky soon before an earthquake hits. But it wasn’t until 1966 that there was some solid evidence of the lights, when one man […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    Your House Is Waiting to Be Turned Into a Projection Screen

    The Sheikh Zayed Grand Mosque in Abu Dhabi, illuminated by Obscura Digital’s projectionsObscura Digital The silver screen. Movie screenings. The big and small screens. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Ever since 1879, when Eadweard Muybridge used the world’s first movie projector to display a loop of 13 images […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    Future of Fossils: Print Your Own Dinosaur at Home?

    A 3D printout of the Plateosaurus vertebra placed next to the (mislabeled) field jacket that contains the original fossilRene Schilling et al. / Radiology In 1898, the American Museum of Natural History was presented with a golden opportunity along with a challenge almost as significant. Paleontologist Walter Granger had returned from a trip to the […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    Born of Meteor Dust, Unusual Clouds Appear in the Night Sky

    Martin Koitmäe via Flickr If you look to the darkening sky after the end of a long summer day, you might see tendril-like clouds with a blueish tinge that hang at the edge of space. They appear when conditions are right, generally at latitudes close to the North or South Poles, and only when the […]
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    The Health Costs of our Late-Night Light Addiction

    A study at RPI’s Lighting Research Center tested the effects of digital tablets and different colors of light on subjects’ circadian rhythms.Brittany Wood et al. / RPI In the summer of 2012, the American Medical Association (AMA) adopted a new policy stating that nighttime light exposure is hazardous to human health. “The primary human concerns […]

  • Ketcham_HERO

    What the Deer Are Telling Us

    A lesson in home improvement.

  • Kucharski_HERO-CB1

    It’s Alive!

    The Spring 2014 Quarterly has awakened.

  • Kucharski_HERO

    Math’s Beautiful Monsters

    How a destructive idea paved the way for modern math.

  • Earle_HERO

    Voice of the Ocean

    Sylvia Earle addresses the state of our seas.

  • Article Image

    This Animal Hides Using—& Is Kept Up by—Its Own Glowing Head

    The Hawaiian bobtail squid (Euprymna scolopes)Margaret McFall-Ngai Light draws attention. Spotlights tell us what’s important on stage or illuminate an escaping criminal. The glow from a smartphone in a movie theater quickly exposes the impropriety of its owner. Light reveals things hidden in the darkness. Usually. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or […]

  • Berger_HERO

    Ingenious: Edwin C. Krupp

    “Astronomy is almost nothing but the story of light.”
  • Istanbul

    Can You Identify These Cities From Their Light Signatures?

    The light that a city emits is like its glowing fingerprint. From the orderly grid of Manhattan, to the sprawling, snaking streets of Milan, to the bright contrast of Kuwait’s ring-roads, each city leaves its own pattern of tiny glowing dots. See if you can ID these cities based on the way they shine.   […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    To Save Drowning People, Ask Yourself “What Would Light Do?”

    Imagine you’re a lifeguard and you see someone struggling to stay afloat. Being a responsible lifeguard, you want to get to them as quickly as possible. You’re pretty fast when swimming, but even faster running on sand. So what’s the quickest route to get to the swimmer? It may not sound like it, but this […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    The Father of Inflation Clears Up a Big Misunderstanding

    Last week researchers working on the BICEP2 experiment in Antarctica announced that they’d seen solid evidence of gravitational waves that emerged very early in the Universe’s history. This discovery lent support to inflation, a theory of cosmology long popular among physicists but still lacking in direct proof. (To learn more about the recent discovery and […]
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    How to See Quantum Drops of Light

    An illustration of wave interferenceSybille Yates via Shutterstock Though we can see in remarkably low-light conditions, humans aren’t quite sensitive enough to see individual photons—the particles that make up all types of light. In our day-to-day lives, we are so awash with light that its particle nature is just as masked as the atomic nature […]