We called them fairy rocks. They were just colorful specks of gravel—the kind you might buy for a fish tank—mixed into my preschool’s playground sand pit. But my classmates and…

In the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, a few hours east of San Francisco, are the Moaning Caverns, a cave system that begins, after a narrow, twisting descent of 30-some feet, with…

When we asked Robert Sapolsky what he might like to write about for the Nautilus Turbulence issue, he responded, “adolescence.” We had to laugh because the idea just seemed so…

The women that come to see Deane Aikins, a clinical psychologist at Wayne State University, in Detroit, are searching for a way to leave their traumas behind them. Veterans in their…

In one important way, the recipient of a heart transplant ignores its new organ: Its nervous system usually doesn’t rewire to communicate with it. The 40,000 neurons controlling…

The first thing we asked Michio Kaku when he stopped by Nautilus for an interview was what was a nice theoretical physicist like him doing studying the brain. Of course the outgoing…

You’ve heard it before: Symmetrical faces are more beautiful, healthy, and genetically fit than others. But this story misses some important details. For one thing, the human brain…

What are you doing running through the streets in your underpants?” asks Tyler Durden in the movie Fight Club. “We both use that body.” He is addressing his unnamed doppelganger…

Most of the big steps forward in science are made possible by visualization. Albert Einstein said he visualized the theory of relativity before he worked out the formula. Previous…

Dr. Peter Gruss is the President of the Max Planck Society, one of the largest and most successful scientific research institutions in the world. If you wonder if the Earth is the…