The last customer from the after-bar rush left, leaving a dozen snow-dusted cars scattered across the half-acre lot. These were the folks who’d gotten lucky enough to go home with…

We are all familiar with the concept of insurance. Your home insurance protects you against fires, theft, and flooding. Your car insurance protects against serious accidents—not…

In the summer of 1867 American photographer Carleton Watkins hauled a mammoth wooden camera through the wilderness of Oregon, taking pictures of the mountains. To prepare each negative,…

Your powers of attention: fooled!Attention is, by definition, limited. And that’s usually a good thing. If you’re searching for a lost earring on the floor, you want to ignore…

For millions of refugees, life is nothing if not uncertain. They come to a new world with two purposes: escaping one set of realities, and building a new set. This story is about a…

Perhaps no recorded phrase has been so heavily analyzed, so dredged for missing information, as Neil Armstrong’s words when he took his first step on the Moon. In case you’ve been…

Seven hundred people gathered at the University of California, San Diego, one day this spring to hear the creators of three fictional languages talk about how linguistics has infiltrated…

On May 31, Nautilus organized a live Tweetchat with Neil Harbisson, artist and subject of Sally Davies’ piece “Encounters With the Posthuman,” to talk about his third eye (it…

There is more to the world than meets the human eye, a fact that hit home for the 18th-century astronomer Sir Frederick William Herschel when he discovered infrared light—a wavelength…

One of the last things you’d expect to see at a physics conference is a physicist on stage, in a dapper hat, pounding out a few riffs of the blues on a keyboard. But that’s exactly…