In 1777—after whipping local people for trivial offenses, spreading venereal disease, and clumsily avoiding a plot to kill him—the English explorer James Cook left the shores of…

Many marine biologists identify a gateway drug into their obsession, and for Heather Koldewey, it was the seahorse. Who can blame her? Seahorses seem to have evolved not entirely in…

This past summer, my wife and I ventured to an area near Mount Adams in southwestern Washington state to census bumblebees. We camped there over the weekend as we took part in the…

Humans once lived in harmony with the natural world. Consider timekeeping. Until relatively recently, the human notion of time was based on the natural rhythms of nature. Time was…

The election of Joe Biden is good news for conservation. It won’t be easy to undo the damage done to environmental laws by the Trump administration, but at least the rectification…

Last week, biologist and writer Merlin Sheldrake introduced Nautilus readers to Paul Stamets, a mycologist who preaches that mushrooms can save the world. “Give him an insoluble…

As little as two centuries ago, the northern edge of the island of Borneo, home to Malaysia’s Sarawak state, was covered in a verdant canopy that stretched, uninterrupted, from shore…

Last summer, in the early days of a heat wave that would culminate in the highest temperatures ever recorded in Paris, I biked across the city to meet my friend Romain Graziani. At…

The shelter-in-place orders and the massive drop in human activity in our cities, designed to slow the spread of COVID-19, have given us surprising and unexpected sightings of wildlife…

If there is one thing that the coronavirus pandemic has exposed, it is that there is much that we still don’t know about the world around us. Forget about the trillions—OK, more…