Let me tell you what it’s like to be an astrobiologist.I painted a white picket fence this summer. No one asked me to. It was a task I’d set myself without realizing what a long-winded…

In the past quarter century, enrollment in college English departments has sunk like the Pequod in Moby Dick. Meanwhile enrollment in science programs has skyrocketed. It’s understandable.…

You’ve been hoaxed.The hoax seems harmless enough. A few thousand AI researchers have claimed that computers can read and write literature. They’ve alleged that algorithms can…

The central university library at Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, is an imposing, towered building known affectionately for being called a “magnificent erection” by, before he…

Chances are, you’re hunkered down at home right now, as I am, worried about COVID-19 and coping by means of Instacart deliveries, Zoom chats, and Netflix movies, while avoiding others…

There was no single job title for those who practiced science prior to 1834. Naturalists, philosophers, and savans tramped around collecting specimens, recorded astral activity, or…

Rafael Campo speaks Nautilus’ language. A professor at Harvard Medical school and Lesley University, and a practicing physician, he has also published a-half dozen volumes of poetry…

Reading medieval literature, it’s hard not to be impressed with how much the characters get done—as when we read about King Harold doing battle in one of the Sagas of the Icelanders,…

The first time I saw a meteor, I’d slipped outside to lie in the grass after everyone else had gone to sleep. The daytime commotion of my cousins’ and siblings’ games and my…

In some ways, Richard Dawkins has been thinking about contingency for most of his life. The book that catapulted him to fame, The Selfish Gene, is about one kind of contingency, which…