Issue_17
32 articles-
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. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join […] -
How Nuclear Explosions Were Used to Save the Environment
When humans tried to do good with atomic bombs. -
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 […] -
The Last Word with Diane Ackerman
Magnifying our mutant, turbulent, symmetrical natures. -
The Sound So Loud That It Circled the Earth Four Times
The 1883 eruption on Krakatoa may be the loudest noise the Earth has ever made.
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Excitement Over Gravity Waves Comes Crashing Down
The Dark Sector Lab includes the BICEP2 telescope, seen on the left.BICEP Keck Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . 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.In […]
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Earth’s Stash of Gold Comes From Colliders Fit for Gods
Ron Dale via Shutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . 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 […]
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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 Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Languages, like human bodies, come in a variety of shapes—but only to a point. Just as people don’t sprout multiple heads, […]
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MRIs of Careful People Can Predict When Bubbles Will Pop
r.classen via Shutterstock Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . 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 […]
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Digging Through the World’s Oldest Graveyard
In Ethiopia, paleontologists are pushing back the clock on humanity’s origins.
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New Football Helmets Take a Page From Nuclear-Plant Safety
These photos show the difference between a healthy brain (left) and one with CTE (right). The tau proteins in all the samples were stained and appear brown.BU CTE Center Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . In 2012, Tim Shaw was still living the rarefied, enviable life of an NFL […] -
How a Zebra Mussel Convinced Me To Get a Vasectomy
“It’s amazing what we let our teachers teach us.” -
The Wild, Secret Life of New York City
Get back to nature, right in your own neighborhood. -
Watching the Birth of a New Breed: the Werewolf Cat
A Lykoi kitten next to its normal-coated brother, who carries just one version of the Lykoi gene. It’s no accident that Lykois are bred with black cats. “If they have black as their base coats, they really have that werewolf look. Other base coats don’t look quite as striking,” he says. “An orange Lykoi cat […] -
The Distant Future, 30 Years On
The Fall 2014 Quarterly looks ahead.