Issue_73

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 […]

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 […]

Benjamin Rush, a signer of the Declaration, became one of the most preeminent physician-scientists alive, founding American psychiatry.

Inside the world of plastic-eating worms, dung-rolling beetles, and agricultural ants..

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 […]

The director of the Griffith Observatory revisits the dawn of astronomy.

What a 16th-century scientist can tell us about the fate of a physicist like David Bohm.

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 […]

Living in China with the app that knows everything about me.

Play is so important that nature invented it long before it invented us.