Issue_73
16 articles-
The Neural Similarities Between Remembering and Imagining
The act of recalling something that happened to you looks very much like what happens when you imagine something new.Photograph by HBRH / Shutterstock Imagine a living room. Not yours or your friend’s or one you saw in a home makeover show, but one purely from your imagination—perhaps your ideal living room. You should have […] -
The Quantum Theory That Peels Away the Mystery of Measurement
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Imagine if all our scientific theories and models told us only about averages: if the best weather forecasts could only give you the average daily amount of rain expected over the next month, or if astronomers could only predict the average time between solar eclipses. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log […] -
The Dr. Strange of the American Revolution
Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration, became one of the most preeminent physician-scientists alive, founding American psychiatry. -
We Need Insects More Than They Need Us
Inside the world of plastic-eating worms, dung-rolling beetles, and agricultural ants.. -
Why Our Postwar “Long Peace” Is Fragile
You could be forgiven for balking at the idea that our post-World War II reality represents a “Long Peace.” The phrase, given the prevalence of violent conflict worldwide, sounds more like how Obi-wan Kenobi might describe the period “before the dark times, before the Empire.”And yet, the “Long Peace” has been a long-argued over hypothesis […]
-
What Is the Human Microbiome, Exactly?
Are you an ecosystem? Your mouth, skin, and gut are home to whole communities of microscopic organisms, whose influence on your body ranges from digesting your food to training your immune system and, possibly, impacting your mood and behavior. What are these tiny tenants, and how do they change the way we think about human […]
-
Playing Video Games Makes Us Fully Human
No other media meets our emotional and social needs like electronic games.
-
Our Aversion to A/B Testing on Humans Is Dangerous
Research suggests that people have an irrational aversion to A/B tests, which could limit the extent to which important institutions like hospitals, legislatures, and corporations base their decisions on objective evidence.Photograph by Fernando Cortes / Shutterstock Facebook once teamed up with scientists at Cornell to conduct a now-infamous experiment on emotional contagion. Researchers randomly assigned […]
-
The Case for Eating Jellyfish
A few summers ago, Stefano Piraino was walking along the rocky shoreline on a small island off the coast of Sicily when he spotted a washed up jellyfish. Naturally, he tore a piece off and popped it into his mouth.“After a few days in that state they lose their stinging cells, and the UV radiation […]
-
When We Were the Cosmos
The director of the Griffith Observatory revisits the dawn of astronomy. -
The Spirit of the Inquisition Lives in Science
What a 16th-century scientist can tell us about the fate of a physicist like David Bohm. -
A Close Look at Newborn Planets Reveals Hints of Infant Moons
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Astronomers have spent decades, if not centuries, hoping to see embryonic planets. As of a year ago, the closest they had come was the discovery of gaps, thought to be caused by budding planets, in the spinning disks of gas and dust that surround young stars. But they weren’t […] -
WeChat Is Watching
Living in China with the app that knows everything about me. -
Why It Pays to Play Around
Play is so important that nature invented it long before it invented us.