Let me tell you a short, fictitious story about a very real Spanish conquistador, Francisco de Orellana. In 1546 he was captured and imprisoned in a small, dank cell. Before long he…

One of science’s most crucial yet underappreciated achievements is the description of the physical universe using mathematics—in particular, using continuous, smooth mathematical…

Our Universe is vast and mostly empty. Even if many of the billions of planets we suspect are out there have life, most of the cosmos is uninhabitable, and those worlds are unreachable…

Not Seeing Stars: Unlike most exoplanets we’ve seen, these four planets orbiting star HR 8799 have been directly spotted, rather than inferred from data about the star. Researchers…

You are standing on a sandy plain lit only by the harsh, cold light of a blue-white spark flashing overhead in steady metronomic bursts. The pinprick of light almost seems like a distant…

In each issue of Nautilus, we shine a spotlight on one “Ingenious” scientist whose work makes us reconsider our world and ourselves. The Ingenious for our first issue, “What…

“The Boyhood of Raleigh”: by John Everett Millais1870. Tate Gallery/WikiPaintingsWe’re all stories in the end. — “The Big Bang,” Doctor Who In 2003, author James Frey…

It’s been just over two decades since astronomers announced the first discoveries of exoplanets—planets orbiting stars other than the sun—and their progress in the intervening…

Click on each date for more information. Sources:3rd century BCE: Eratosthenes measures diameter of Earth http://www.britannica.com/EBchecked/topic/191064/Eratosthenes-of-Cyrenehttp://www.phy6.org/stargaze/Scolumb.htm#q1http://mathdl.maa.org/mathDL/46/?pa=content&sa=viewDocument&nodeId=646&pf=1…

When Copernicus told us that Earth is not the center of the universe, we collectively cried, “Oh, no!,” and have spent the past 470 years fanning ourselves silly, trying to recover…