Issue_17

32 articles
  • VD_BR_illo

    Divorce Rates for Different Groups

    We know when people usually get married. We know who never marries. Finally, it’s time to look at the other side: divorce and remarriage. The chart below shows cumulative rates for different groups of people in the United States, based on 2014 American Community Survey, 1-year estimates.For example, by age 60, among the employed in 2014 who […]
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    How Nuclear Explosions Were Used to Save the Environment

    During the Cold War, the USSR and U.S. had programs to harness the power of nuclear explosions, demonstrated here in the “Baker” test, for peaceful purposes.U.S. DOD via Wikipedia In the late spring of 2010, the world watched, often in real time, a new kind of environmental disaster unfold: An oil rig operating deep under the […]
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    What If the Universe Didn’t Start With the Big Bang?

    Last week, researchers using the Planck spacecraft to study the skies announced that the polarization of light spotted by the BICEP2 experiment could be entirely explained by dust swirling around the Milky Way. This news was a bucket of cold water on the theories of many cosmologists: It meant that BICEP2 might not have been […]
  • Lastword_HERO

    The Last Word with Diane Ackerman

    Magnifying our mutant, turbulent, symmetrical natures.
  • Article Recirculation Lead Image

    The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times

    A lithograph of the massive 1883 eruption of KrakatoaThe eruption of Krakatoa, and subsequent phenomena, 1888; Parker & Coward; via Wikipedia On 27 August 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . It was 10:02 AM local […]
  • Article Image

    Excitement Over Gravity Waves Comes Crashing Down

    The Dark Sector Lab includes the BICEP2 telescope, seen on the left.BICEP Keck Science giveth, and science taketh away. What appeared earlier this year to be a long-sought glimpse of ancient ripples in spacetime now seems to have been schmutz in astronomers’ eyes. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . […]

  • Article Image

    Earth’s Stash of Gold Comes From Colliders Fit for Gods

    Ron Dale via Shutterstock One of science’s greatest feats is having described where we came from—not as individual people, or as a species, or even as a planet, but as stuff, the very material we’re made of. The Big Bang forged all of the basic particles of our lives—electrons and the quarks that make up […]

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    The Unusual Language That Linguists Thought Couldn’t Exist

    In most languages, sounds can be re-arranged into any number of combinations. Not so in Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language.Brian Goodman via Shutterstock Languages, like human bodies, come in a variety of shapes—but only to a point. Just as people don’t sprout multiple heads, languages tend to veer away from certain forms that might spring from […]

  • Ackerman_HERO

    Nature, Pixelated

    With our brains plugged into virtual worlds all day, what is real?

  • Article Image

    MRIs of Careful People Can Predict When Bubbles Will Pop

    r.classen via Shutterstock In the 1630s, Holland was gripped by the world’s only known case of “tulip mania.” The intensely colored flowers were already a luxury item before then, but their prices leaped when tulips with flame patterned petals hit the market, and they continued rocketing to previously incomprehensible levels. The price for a single […]

  • maxmen_HERO_HEAD_2

    Digging Through the World’s Oldest Graveyard

    In Ethiopia, paleontologists are pushing back the clock on humanity’s origins.