For the past five years, Nautilus has asked scientists what they would be if they weren’t a scientist. I can now report what, above all, they want to be. “Film director,” says…

What do the Volkswagen diesel scandal and the European migrant crisis have in common? They’ve both been referred to as the “tip of the iceberg.” The popular expression reflects…

Toward the end of the 18th century, in a wax workshop in Florence, a life-sized, anatomically correct, dissectible goddess of colored wax was created. Artist Clemente Susini took the…

Simen Johan’s photographic series reads like an off-kilter field guide. Giraffes lose their heads in the fog, louche primates debauch with domestic animals, and tapestry-like camouflage…

In 1979, sometime during the barely controlled chaos of the last months of finishing Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, someone in legal affairs had the presence of mind to ask…

At the turn of the 20th century, a color revolution was sweeping across Europe and North America. The invention decades earlier of aniline dyes, synthesized from coal tar, had made…

Adam Magyar’s gone viral. His recent series Stainless, in which video recordings of subway platforms are played out in super-slow-motion, has been rippling across the web. Magyar…

Both poetry and physics have a way of turning our expectations upside down—but direct intersections of the two are rare. This makes William Carlos Williams’ poem “St. Francis…

For many years I ran a field station in Amazonian Peru. The station was a five-hour canoe ride from the nearest road, and every Friday our boat made the long trip upriver carrying…

To see larger versions of these photographs, see the above slideshow.The word “photography” might bring to mind the stark granite of an Ansel Adams photograph, or perhaps the memory…