It was gearing day—24 hours in San Diego to gather everything we’d need for our three-week field course in the Sea of Cortez—and Veronica and I had decided to commence our mission…

Shortly after Nautilus launched online, a reader tweeted that “a @NautilusMag print edition would be the fastest money I’ve ever spent.” It’s a message we often heard repeated.…

Last week, we challenged Nautilus readers to name a whole cabinet-full of freaky, weird, and wonderful objects. It was a difficult challenge, but now is the time to end your agonizing…

We humans take a lot for granted. Pizza delivery, email, smartphones, dishwashers. All of this occurs in the background, making our lives simpler. None of it requires any explicit…

Collecting grotesque and marvelous objects was a favorite pastime among genteel Europeans from the early modern period to the Enlightenment. Their curated “wunderkammern,” or “cabinets…

The Sun is one busy celestial body. In addition to giving us light, holding the solar system together, and providing the energy for almost every living thing on Earth, it’s also…

In his essay for “Uncertainty,” the second issue of Nautilus, David Deutsch explains why you can never be entirely sure that a thought is undoubtedly correct. Despite that, he…

Light was thought to travel through aether like waves on a lakeShutterstockYou might know the anecdote. In April 1900, Lord Kelvin, one of the most prominent physicists of the 19th…

In 1972 the Club of Rome, an international think tank, commissioned four scientists to use computers to model the human future. The result was the infamous Limits to Growth that crashed…

That human beings can be mistaken in anything they think or do is a proposition known as fallibilism. Stated abstractly like that, it is seldom contradicted. Yet few people have ever…