Arts
187 articles-
He Fast-Forwarded Evolution into the Future
Forty years ago, a paleontologist pictured Earth millions of years from now. His vision is a wake-up call for us today.
-
The Art of Ocean Science
On board a research vessel exploring the oceans, these artists found beauty in science.
-
For This Artist, the Sea Is a Never-Ending Story
At port with Kishan Munroe, an artist from The Bahamas.
-
Fantastic Beasts Brought to Life by the Wind
An artist’s moving tribute to nature’s powerful resource.
-
Your Brain Is Like Beethoven
We survive noise by transforming it into patterns, like composers create music.
-
My Personal Quest to Study Supernovae on Mars
Overcoming sexist naysayers and self-doubt in astrophysics.
-
This NFT Painting Is a Work of Art
Machines are the new descendants of Picasso.
-
The Natural Harmony of Faces
How the golden ratio might contribute to cinema’s hold on us.
-
We’re More of Ourselves When We’re in Tune with Others
Music reminds us why going solo goes against our better nature.
-
Film Contest Gives Young Environmental Activists a Voice
Middle schoolers Annabelle VanderMarck and Piper Lasater won the Nautilus Science Prize in the Redford Center Stories film contest.
-
What Makes Music Universal
Music brings us together to show us how different we are.
-
I Am Not a Machine. Yes You Are.
Debating the impact of machine-created art.
-
Blackout in the Brain Lab
What will happen to the organoids? A work of fiction.
-
Literature Should Be Taught Like Science
This renegade professor says literature is a machine that accelerates the human brain.
-
Why Computers Will Never Write Good Novels
The power of narrative flows only from the human brain.
-
What Merpeople Say About Us
How changing perceptions of mermaids and mermen reveal deeper understandings of myth, religion, science, wonder and capitalism.
-
The App That Offers Cosmic Awe
Like any good version of Powers of Ten, use this app and you can find yourself getting that feeling of cosmic awe—it might take a little attention, but that’s always going to be true.Photograph by RollingCamera / Shutterstock One of the weirdest things about our human experience of the world is how remarkably narrow it […]
-
Los Angeles Is Gone
In an excerpt from his new novel, the author drowns La La Land.
-
3-D Printed Statues in Central Park Shine a Light on Women Scientists
The pop-up sampling is part of a larger exhibit of 120 depictions of women scientists.
-
3-D Printed Statues in Central Park Shine a Light on Women Scientists
A new exhibit in Central Park features six statues of women scientists—the first statues of real women to be found in the park.Courtesy of Lyda Hill Philanthropies’ IF/THEN Initiative Forged in metal or chiseled in stone, statues almost always depict dead men. A recent analysis of 12 major American cities turned up only six physical […]
-
Most of the Mind Can’t Tell Fact from Fiction
Even after you understand how an illusion operates, it continues to fool part of your mind. This is the kind of double knowledge we have when we consume fiction.Photograph by KieferPix / Shutterstock Stories, fiction included, act as a kind of surrogate life. You can learn from them so seamlessly that you might believe you […]
-
How Art Helps Science Advance
Jasmine Sadler on STEAM and problem solving.
-
Only Disconnect! A Pandemic Reading of E.M. Forster
The astonishing relevance of the British writer’s story, “The Machine Stops.”
-
Why Philip Pullman Is Obsessed with Panpsychism
In the first book of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy, The Golden Compass, Lord Asriel (played by James McAvoy in HBO’s adaptation of the book) discovers a mysterious substance, called Dust, that exists everywhere and seems to be implicated in consciousness. For Pullman, Dust is an expression of his fascination with panpsychism, the philosophical idea […]
-
The 5 Most Popular Nautilus Feature Articles in 2019
Readers’ favorite articles explore tree smarts and the end of the gene as we know it.
-
On “Learning the Trees”
Exploring Howard Nemerov’s poem, “Learning the Trees.”
-
I Am Not a Machine. Yes You Are.
Debating the impact of machine-created art.
-
Best Screenplay Goes to the Algorithms
Learning to appreciate the future of literature.
-
Doc Holliday Is Dead But Tuberculosis Is Still Killing Us
In 2002, David M. Morens, now Senior Scientific Advisor at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease, wrote an essay called “At the Deathbed of Consumptive Art.” It featured a photograph he took of Robert Louis Stevenson’s resting place atop Mount Vaea on Upolu, an island in Western Samoa. In 1894, at 44, Stevenson, […]
-
On Observation and Imagination
Exploring Galway Kinnell’s poem, “The Gray Heron.”
-
Most of the Mind Can’t Tell Fact from Fiction
Even after you understand how an illusion operates, it continues to fool part of your mind. This is the kind of double knowledge we have when we consume fiction.Photograph by KieferPix / Shutterstock Stories, fiction included, act as a kind of surrogate life. You can learn from them so seamlessly that you might believe you […]
-
Does Science Diminish Wonder or Augment It?
Two great poems composed over 200 years apart examine the relationship between reason and imagination.
-
Butterfly Wonk Robert Pyle Pens His First Novel 44 Years in the Making
Ecologist Robert Michael Pyle’s imaginative treatment of the nonhuman world—he includes a butterfly and a mountain among his cast of characters—is both a surprise and perhaps a natural result of his artistic development.Counterpoint Press Last year marked a first for 71-year old Robert Michael Pyle, the acclaimed author, naturalist, and ecologist: the publication of his long-awaited first novel, Magdalena […]
-
The Great Silence
A parrot has a question for humans.
-
How to Collapse the Distinction Between Art and Biology
What Xenotext does is cause its audience to reevaluate their ideas of creation, both literary and biological.Illustration by GiroScience / Shutterstock Language,” the Beat writer William S. Burroughs supposedly once exclaimed, “is a virus from outer space.” Burroughs was making a metaphorical extrapolation about the ways in which words, phrases, idioms, sentences, lines, and narratives […]
-
The Science Behind “Blade Runner”’s Voight-Kampff Test
Is a fictional test designed to distinguish between replicants and humans, called the Voight-Kampff test, feasible?Universo Produção / Flickr Rutger Hauer, the Dutch actor who portrayed Roy Batty in the film Blade Runner, passed away recently. To celebrate his iconic role, we are revisiting this piece on the Voight-Kampff test, a device to detect if a […]
-
We’re More of Ourselves When We’re in Tune with Others
Music reminds us why going solo goes against our better nature.
-
Death & Rebirth in Forests
On the Lives of Trees
-
“You’ll Know Her by Her Foot”
An ornithologist reflects on Emily Dickinson’s “You'll know her by her foot.”
-
A Natural, Reviving Violence
A reflection on Marianne Moore’s “The Fish.”
-
The Mushroom’s Small Stature and Subtle Strength
A microbial ecologist reflects on Sylvia Plath’s “Mushrooms.”
-
Welcome to Poetry in Science
A collaboration exploring how poetry and science are intertwined, presented by Poetry in America and Nautilus.
-
Richard Dawkins on Poetry
The evolutionary biologist reads Robert Frost.
-
Einstein Among the Daffodils
A science historian and English professor discuss how physics and poetry mix.
-
How Doctors Use Poetry
A Harvard medical student describes how he is learning to both treat and heal.
-
What Makes Music Special to Us?
Clarifying the differences between what animals and humans hear.
-
Gustav Klimt in the Brain Lab
What is neuroscience doing to art?
-
Echos
What happens when a person is simultaneously lost and found?
-
Butterfly Wonk Robert Pyle Pens His First Novel 44 Years in the Making
Ecologist Robert Michael Pyle’s imaginative treatment of the nonhuman world—he includes a butterfly and a mountain among his cast of characters—is both a surprise and perhaps a natural result of his artistic development.Counterpoint Press The acclaimed author, naturalist, and ecologist Robert Michael Pyle has been investigating the butterfly for about 60 years. In that time […]
-
How Doctors Use Poetry
A Harvard medical student describes how he is learning to both treat and heal.
-
The Heart of Musical Experience Is Expectation
In “Half-Wit,” an episode of House, Gregory House, a brilliant Sherlock Holmes-like doctor (and a decent musician) wheels a piano into a patient’s room. It’s a delightful moment: The patient is a musical savant named Patrick, played by the musician Dave Matthews—a painful muscle contraction in his hand, suffered during a performance, brought him in. […]
-
The Case for Dancing Astrophysics
Cosmology is the story of the fundamental particles, forces, and energies that shape and govern our universe. And that story is one of rhythm and motion.Screengrab via Paul M. Sutter / YouTube For millennia, cosmological and religious systems of thought were intertwined—and usually indistinguishable. European artwork of, say, the arrangements of planets and stars often […]
-
Each Piece of Trashed Plastic Can Find a New Life as Art
Artist Sayaka Ganz converts consumer castoffs into meaningful work. She makes sculptures entirely of second-hand plastics that are in sum much greater than their parts.“Emergence,” 2013 / Sayaka Ganz In one important way, grocery stores were very different during my childhood. Catsup was only packaged in glass bottles. Soda came in either aluminum cans or […]
-
The Cost of Blood
When corporations run the government and any crime can be bought.
-
The Rhythm of Sculpture
How science has informed one sculptor’s view of time.
-
The Spacetime of Fine Art
For the painter Matthew Phillips, past, present, and future meet at the tip of a brush.
-
Making Time Machines From Taxi Meters
A sculptor explains how his art upends time.
-
A New View of Time
Introducing the Nautilus Time Project.
-
The Woman Redeemed by Trees
A story about connection by the National Book Award winner.
-
Why Do So Many Scientists Want to be Filmmakers?
The problem with C.P. Snow’s famous two-cultures hypothesis.
-
Al Gore Does His Best Ralph Waldo Emerson
The former vice president reads the transcendentalist poet—and reminds us of one.
-
Meet Harvard’s Own Poet-Physician
Rafael Campo on finding the humanity in medicine and science.
-
Waiting For the Robot Rembrandt
What needs to happen for artificial intelligence to make fine art.
-
Buying Freedom
What happens when you barter a jail break for the wrong person?
-
Andy Weir Visits the Moon
The best-selling writer of “The Martian” has a new book out, and it’s set closer to home.
-
Why Beauty Is Not Universal
We’re all human—so despite the vagaries of cultural context, might there exist a universal beauty that overrides the where and when? Might there be unchanging features of human nature that condition our creative choices, a timeless melody that guides the improvisations of the everyday? There has been a perpetual quest for such universals, because of […]
-
How Absurd Do You Like Your Art?
fStop Images – Caspar Benson / Getty Images Some art makes a lot of sense. If we look at a painting or a photograph of a gorgeous view, its beauty feels natural. The reason for this is that the kinds of landscapes people tend to like correspond to places that would have been a good […]
-
Where “The Walking Dead” Goes Wrong With Zombies
Rick Grimes is cornered. A walker shuffles toward him, thoughtless yet eager for flesh. Sweat drips through Grimes’ thick beard, grown in the hundreds of fearful days and nights since the dead started to roam the earth. He quickly reaches for his knife—a weapon he never used in his days as a cop—and sinks it […]
-
How Science Makes “Rick and Morty” Great
“Rick and Morty” explores both profound or wacky what-ifs, and more humanistic concerns, like dealing with a divorce or failing high-school. Adult Swim / Turner Broadcasting System The season finale of “Rick and Morty,” the Internet Movie Database’s fourth most-popular TV show of all-time, runs tonight. What started as a graphic parody of Back to […]
-
The Last Invention of Man
How AI might take over the world.
-
The Jazz Pianist Vijay Iyer Played “Remembrance” for Us on 9/11
Iyer analyzes the morphology of jazz with the precision of a scientist.Photograph by Bruno Bollaert / Flickr When we visited Vijay Iyer three years ago, on Sept. 11, at his home in Harlem, the monthly Nautilus theme was Genius. The jazz pianist was glad to talk about the subject and play signature pieces by Thelonious […]
-
Why A.I. Is Just Not Funny
Although A.I. robots can pick up on jokes, they have a lot to learn about telling them.Queen Mary University of London / YouTube In the 2004 film I, Robot, Detective Del Spooner asks an A.I. named Sonny: “Can a robot write a symphony? Can a robot turn a canvas into a beautiful masterpiece?” Sonny responds: […]
-
The Case for Treating Gatsby as a Real Person
If we lean too much on the text itself, or the history surrounding it, and view with suspicion why people read, and what happens when they do, then we threaten to ignore some of the most interesting questions this weird thing called literature poses. It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a reader in possession […]
-
The Typewriter’s Love of the Desert
Reflections on Sam Shepard’s time at the Santa Fe Institute I was first introduced to Sam by our mutual friend Valerie Plame Wilson. Sam had played Valerie’s father in the cinematic adaptation of her book, Fair Game. On the phone inviting Sam to SFI his first question to me was whether there would be sufficient desk […]
-
As the World Collapses
An exclusive glimpse into Jeff VanderMeer’s new apocalyptic novel, “Borne.”
-
New York Under Water
Your future commute to work is on a boat.
-
Defy the Stars
What’s the real difference between man and machine?
-
God Created Consciousness in Fiction
Given his grandeur, pettiness, and complexity, and his capacity for introspection, he’s the major exception to the flatness of ancient characters—God.Illustration by Humphrey King / Flickr Many modern novels do something that the earliest literature sometimes seems incapable of doing—representing the inner life of the individual, in all its complexity. The history of literature has […]
-
This Is What Musical Notes Actually Look Like
A few months ago, I sat poolside with friends in Palm Springs. Amid the quiet desert sublime, we reminisced about all the live music we’ve experienced over the years, just about every big and small act since the mid-80s: Prince, David Bowie, Guns ‘n Roses, Bruce Springsteen, and the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs among the them. […]
-
Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings?
Literature’s evolution has reflected and spurred the growing complexity of society.
-
Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings?
Literature’s evolution has reflected and spurred the growing complexity of society.
-
Drawing Physics
How visualizations deepen our understanding.
-
Science Is Finally Getting Its Close-up
In case you hadn’t noticed, science is enjoying a renaissance on screen. Not science fiction—that’s always been a silver screen staple—but actual scientists doing actual science. As Nautilus explained in December, in “How We Got from Doc Brown to Walter White,” the fictional scientist, in particular on TV, has evolved from the nutty genius to […]
-
Video Games Do Guilt Better Than Any Other Art
The idea that motion pictures can be works of art has been around since the 1920s, and it hasn’t really been disputed since. It’s easy to see why—cinema shares characteristics with theater in terms of acting, direction, music, set design, narrative, and so on. Now we have whole academic departments dedicated to film appreciation, to […]
-
Why an Expert on Black Holes Reads the Bhagavad Gita
These ancient Indian traditions have something to teach modern cosmology.
-
How Art Can Make the Data Pop
A new generation of artists breathes life into cosmological data.
-
The Novelist and Critic Siri Hustvedt Raises an Eyebrow at Science
What separates the sciences from the humanities? What unites them? And how can they each illuminate the nature of mind and self? These were some of the questions on Siri Hustvedt’s mind as she began her new book of essays, A Woman Looking At Men Looking At Women. Hustvedt herself has an omnivorous professional history that […]
-
Will Lovelace and Babbage Save the Economy?
A fictional tale starring the inventors of the first computer.
-
Five Scientists on the Heroes Who Changed Their Lives
Meet the inspiring people—none named Einstein—who helped these scientists find their calling.
-
The Stars Are a Comforting Constant
A poet blends the personal with the cosmic.
-
We’re Still Waiting for Hollywood to Depict a Plausible Alien Ecosystem
You might expect scientists to heap scorn on Hollywood’s depiction of aliens, but they’re generally forgiving. Dirk Schulze-Makuch, an astrobiologist at the Technical University of Berlin, remarks that most science-fiction aliens are either riffs off the weird life we see in Earth’s deep ocean, such as the squid-like creatures of Arrival, or versions of now-extinct […]
-
What Hollywood Doesn’t Get About Aliens
Movies get alien bodies right, but not alien ecosystems.
-
The World’s Most Inspirational Iceberg Isn’t What It Seems
The professional photographer who created a popular poster image takes it apart.
-
Why Do We Get Transported by Stories We Know Aren’t True?
In Jasper Fforde’s lighthearted “Thursday Next” series of books, people can use a “prose portal” to enter the world of a book, to change the plot or kidnap a character. The prose portal is an imaginative metaphor for a familiar experience: feeling taken away by a narrative, sucked into a good book so that we […]
-
Your Study Has Been Retracted
We are retracting your study. I wanted you to know before the announcement. What’s the problem? There are anomalies in your data. Is that bad? Not if you can explain them. Hang on, let me Google “anomalies.” It appears you faked some of the data. I prefer to say we “enhanced” it. What? We are […]
-
Fakes
Fake is a concept on the rise. The percentage of scientific papers retracted for fraud or error increased for three decades starting in the early 1970s. There are seven ’80s movies and series in the Internet Movie Database with the keyword “fake” attached to them. That number rises to 14 in the ’90s, and 52 in […]
-
Ingenious: Richard Dawkins
The evolutionary biologist reads Robert Frost.
-
The Weaker Sister
When we have to evacuate Earth, only the strong will survive.
-
Selection
They say real choices are hard to make. Another way to put that is real choice-making is hard to find. Whether we are choosing a breakfast cereal, politician, or life partner, what seem like free choices often follow from unconscious cues and self-confirming biases. Even Mother Nature can seem reluctant to choose, keeping cats both […]
-
The Parallel Universes of a Woman in Science
In physics and in life, choice and possibility play against each other.
-
The Brief, Mystical Reign of the Wax Cadaver
Early medical models of human anatomy shrouded death in feminine beauty.
-
Sport
At this year’s press conference announcing Memphis Grizzlies guard Mike Conley’s second win of the NBA Sportsmanship Award, the questions from the press were downright nostalgic. “What in today’s game defines sportsmanship?” one reporter asked. “Maybe you don’t see guys do it as much anymore.” Another complained about players’ public behavior. “You don’t see guys […]
-
DJs Are Dropping Beats From Deep Space
Interpreting something from the universe awakens a unique inspiration and curiosity,” says the Swiss electronic musician Lucien Nicolet, who goes by Luciano. He wasn’t waxing mystical. That awakening lead to ALMA Sounds, his latest album, released this month, which features audio derived from one of the world’s biggest astronomy telescopes, the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array […]
-
This Is What Musical Notes Actually Look Like
A few months ago, I sat poolside with friends in Palm Springs. Amid the quiet desert sublime, we reminisced about all the live music we’ve experienced over the years, just about every big and small act since the mid-80s: Prince, David Bowie, Guns ‘n Roses, Bruce Springsteen, and the Yeah Yeahs Yeahs among the them. […]
-
How Noise Makes Music
We use music to make sense of the squawks, creaks, and roars around us.
-
These Nature Photographs Aren’t What They Seem
The visual playfulness of Simen Johan.
-
Art That Exposes the Strange World We Live In
The environmental artist Ned Kahn, a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” awardee, gravitates toward phenomena that lie on the edges of what science can grasp—“things,” he tells me over the phone, “that are inherently complex and difficult to predict, yet at the same time beautiful.” The weather, for example, has, because of its chaotic yet orderly […]
-
Scientists Have No Defense Against Awe
Eileen Pollack, author of The Only Woman in the Room: Why Science Is Still a Boys’ Club, hinted at the complexity of the relationship between science and the soul in a recent essay: “We need scientists who recognize the reality of this illusion we still call the soul and artists who know how intimately […]
-
How Butterfly Genitalia Inspired Nabokov’s Masterpieces
By 1967, Vladimir Nabokov had published 15 novels and novellas and six short story collections. But as he told the Paris Review that year, “It is not improbable that had there been no revolution in Russia, I would have devoted myself entirely to lepidopterology”—the study and classification of butterflies—“and never written any novels at all.” […]
-
These Moving Portraits Offer an Uncanny View of the Human Body
Some time after he completed his first portrait, in 1909, Oskar Kokoschka realized that “in my haste, I painted only four fingers on the hand he lays across his chest.” He was referring to The Trance Player, a painting of his friend, an actor. “Did I forget to paint the fifth?” Kokoschka wondered. “In any […]
-
Is Multilingual Rap Eroding Canada’s French Language?
Recently a Quebec arts foundation required the Francophone rap group Dead Obies to give back an $18,000 grant they’d been awarded to record their newest album. The problem? A word count determined that the group had stirred too much English into their distinctive multilingual lyrics, falling short of the rule that 70 percent of the […]
-
Watch Carl Sagan Discuss Aliens in This Wonderfully Animated Radio Interview
When Carl Sagan, the late astronomer and original Cosmos host, published his first novel, Contact, in 1985, Studs Terkel, the long-time radio broadcaster, asked him a month later to chat with him. Their subject, of course, was aliens, and the question of whether we’d ever establish good relations with them. In their conversation—which Blank on Blank, […]
-
When You Listen to Music, You’re Never Alone
Technology hasn’t diminished the social quality of listening to music.
-
The Man Who Changed How Artists and Scientists Work Together
Richard Loveless believes trans-disciplinary collaborations can inspire creativity and pioneer new ways of thinking. That’s why, in 1991, he became the founding Director of the Institute for Studies in the Arts, a premiere arts research group in the College of Fine Arts at Arizona State University. During his nine-year tenure, he’s funded over 200 projects […]
-
My Family, My Science
One girl’s scientific coming of age.
-
Yoda Is Dead but Star Wars’ Dubious Lessons Live On
We didn’t say “break the Internet” back in 1999, but if we did we could certainly say that science-fiction author David Brin broke the Internet when he wrote in Salon that “Stars Wars belongs to our dark past. A long, tyrannical epoch of fear, illogic, despotism and demagoguery that our ancestors struggled desperately to overcome, […]
-
Whom He May Devour
Saving her planet would ban her from paradise.
-
The Cello Music of the Spheres
Experience mathematical beauty and symmetry in a multimedia work.
-
Warm Fuzzies
If you could bring a loved one back from the dead, should you?
-
The Terrifying Uncertainty in Jeff VanderMeer’s Sci-Fi
How the best-selling author brings his incredibly strange worlds to life.
-
What Do Romantic Aliens See at the End of Their Alien Days?
When it comes to exoplanets, reality is catching up with science fiction. Take Kepler-16b, a Saturn-size planet roughly 200 light-years from Earth that circles not just one star but a pair of stars. Nicknamed Tatooine, after the fictional home planet of Luke and Anakin Skywalker, this world must see sunsets that are twice as breathtaking. […]
-
Fallingwater: A Building That Bonds With Nature and Dances With Time
The water flowing down the stream’s banks sends a soft and consistent murmur through the forest. The flow, however, is far from continuous. At one point the cool water swirls in eddies and gathers in still pools, but then—almost accidentally—it surges forward and slips quickly over the ledge. It crashes loudly, bubbling up in a […]
-
Some Music Is Inherently Bad—But People Can Be Convinced Otherwise
Artistic appreciation is a deeply subjective process, perhaps the most essentially personal thing that humans do. But are there some explanations for why we like what we do? Why, for instance, does a particular song get popular? Some of it has to do with the quality of the music—and by quality, I mean that there’s […]
-
7 Videos That Show the Apex of the Art of Dominoes
If there is one thing that having the Internet in our lives has shown most clearly, it may be that anything you can think of as a hobby is also an obsession to a not-insignificant number of people. And so it is with dominoes. A look around online reveals that there are a lot of […]
-
The Best Little Bar in Manhattan
An experiment in belief versus bourbon.
-
How to Make Art That Withstands the Test of Time
A degraded frame from an old celluloid (aka nitrate) film, the same material used by Naum Gabo in some of his sculptures In the 1930s, Russian-born sculptor Naum Gabo started experimenting with a thin, plastic material called celluloid. Previously used as film for photography or to make cheap jewelry, celluloid in Gabo’s hands became […]
-
6 Pieces of Art That Open Minds—and Get Stuff Done
The modern artist David Hockney once said that “art has to move you and design does not, unless it’s a good design for a bus.” Such a polemic statement implies that there can be no blurring between pure art and usefulness. But an artwork’s function and the viewer’s interaction with it can be an […]
-
Art’s Biggest Wheel Turns Toward Science
Hans-Ulrich ObristTwitter Hans-Ulrich Obrist seems to be everywhere—and it’s not much of an illusion. Widely regarded as the most influential figure in today’s art world, he’s worked with a who’s-who of major artists, from painter Gerhard Richter and sculptor Jeff Koons to performance artist Marina Abramovic and architect Rem Koolhass. From his perch as co-director of […]
-
How I Taught My Computer to Write Its Own Music
I wanted to build the ideal collaborator. Was I ever surprised.
-
How I Taught My Computer to Write Its Own Music
I wanted to build the ideal collaborator. Was I ever surprised.
-
Art + Science = Innovation
The “chapel” area at the Vocal Vibrations exhibitAmy Kraft Upon entering the Vocal Vibrations installation at Le Laboratoire Cambridge, visitors are directed to a room called the chapel, where a haunting vocal composition plays out of nine speakers positioned around the room. After relaxing on a bench to focus on the music, people are led […]
-
How the Obits Became My Muse
The unusual lives of a physicist and an aviator, in verse and song.
-
Rent Arlington Hall’s Brain
The implant would make him a brilliant pianist for 24 hours.
-
Art Can Show Us What’s Wrong With Our Planet
An ice book destined to melt into the Great Miami River in Dayton, Ohio (2012).Basia Irland Earth is on the brink of a mass extinction—the first in 66 million years, and it’s caused primarily by human activity. Scientists first detected this epochal event by calculating diversity in our forests and taking the temperature of our atmosphere, and they now outline steps […]
-
The Necessity of Musical Hallucinations
That song stuck in your head is your brain doing its work.
-
Ingenious: Vijay Iyer
On the science and talent of music.
-
Rhythm’s the Thing
Pianist Vijay Iyer gives us a master class in the science of rhythm.
-
The Book No One Read
Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention.
-
Edgar Allan Poe, Part-Time Cosmologist/Big-Bang Philosopher
A daguerrotype of Poe made several months before his death in 1849 During the waning months of 1847, Edgar Allan Poe sat at his desk with a tortoiseshell cat draped around his shoulders and dreamed the universe into being. Poe believed the book he wrote in that feline-festooned state to be his best work, and […]
-
The Art of Painting
Stanley Kubrick and Johannes Vermeer try to see eye-to-eye.
-
The First Day
One man’s walk to his own cremation.
-
How Technology & Tradition Combine to Make Modern Movies
In Nebraska, Phedon Papamichael used an unusual combination of digital and analog technologies to achieve a distinctive look.FilmNation Entertainment / Paramount Vantage This is part three of a three-part series about the movie industry’s switch to digital cameras and what is lost, and gained, in the process. Part one, on the traditional approach to filming movies […]
-
The Great Lindemann
The light dimmed and the murmur of conversation died away. The curtain opened. Lindemann was standing on the stage. He was plump and had a bald spot made all the more noticeable by the few sparse hairs combed over the nakedness of his skull, and he was wearing black horn-rim spectacles. His suit was gray, […]
-
Ingenious: Cornelia Hesse-Honegger
A life of science and art.
-
An Astrobiologist Asks a Sci-fi Novelist How to Survive the Anthropocene
Kim Stanley Robinson imagines our future.
-
Two-Stroke Toilets
The trouble with time travel.
-
Scientists Create Cybernetic Links Between People—by DJing
DJ Angst kicked off the late-February show at the Root Cellar Lounge in Bloomington, Indiana, keeping in mind that, as the first DJ to play, it was his job to figure out what would lure people to the dance floor. As his name implies, he prefers austere, dark electronic music, but he gathered that […]
-
The Quest to Understand—and Mimic—Nature’s Trickiest Colors
The West Indian Ocean coelacanth (Latimeria chalumnae)AlessandroZocc via Shutterstock It was an image in a book of a sparkly blue fish—a West Indian Ocean coelacanth—that inspired German painter Franziska Schenk to begin a project that would occupy much of her adult life. “It was mysterious and beautiful,” she says, “and as a child I had […]
-
Beacon Bugs
Every 29 years, their light proves disastrous.
-
Where Even Concrete Is Expensive, Artists Must Get Creative
The atmosphere in El Anatsui’s studio is somewhere between a Renaissance artist’s workshop and a recycling plant. The roof is made of thin, uninsulated metal sheets that offer little protection against the hot Nigerian weather. Bags overflowing with bottle tops, bought from local distilleries, are piled all over the floor. Around a dozen young men […]
-
The Ends of Time, in Art and Science
In Gallery 919, in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, there is a giant breathing machine. Its creator, William Kentridge, calls it “the elephant,” after Charles Dickens’s description of factory machines that move “monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness.” On the walls surrounding the elephant […]
-
Magnets
Carried through time, lovers seek their purpose.
-
Living in the Long: Art & Engineering Peers Into Our Future
When was the last time you awoke right at the first peak of day? Or put away your work simply because night was falling? We are less and less tied to rhythms of natural time, living instead in the glow of computers and smartphone screens. Our days and nights roll by, marked as much by […]
-
How Music Hijacks Our Perception of Time
A composer details how music works its magic on our brains.
-
Kellogg’s
The last wholesome fantasy of the middle-school boy.
-
In Science Fiction, We Are Never Home
Where technology leads to exile and yearning.
-
So Human, So Beautiful
I look into the mirror and try to see what another human would see. My beard is months old, scraggly and dirty, my balding head covered with wisps of gray. I take out the scissors and start to clean it up. Thoughts of other people, being with other people, force their way to the surface, […]
-
The Periodic Stranger
When exile becomes home.
-
Big Sky, Big Data: Art Made From Atmospheric Science
Many common air pollutants—ozone, various sulfur oxides, and even some particulate matter among them—are completely invisible to the eye. How interesting, then, that the EPA and other environmental organizations around the world, use color scales to communicate information about air quality. The US Air Quality Index, for instance, starts at green, meaning good air quality, moves […]
-
Up, Up, and Away With Science
Richard Holmes gets high on ballooning.
-
Kellogg’s
The last wholesome fantasy of the middle-school boy.
-
Preserving Yesterday’s Tech to Get a Better Grasp on Today’s
In 2009, more than 47 million computers in the U.S. were ready for “end-of-life management”—so hopelessly outmoded that no reasonable amount of refurbishment could redeem them. Market-driven innovation, thus far hewing to the demanding prediction of Moore’s law, means that every few months, the gadgets in our pockets and on our desktops are pushed closer […]
-
Each Piece of Trashed Plastic Can Find a New Life as Art
In one important way, grocery stores were very different during my childhood. Catsup was only packaged in glass bottles. Soda came in either aluminum cans or glass bottles, and there was no bottled water—no Fuji, Poland Spring, or Evian. Crackers were wrapped in waxed paper. Everything was bagged in paper. Now, some 30 years later, […]
-
Taking the Pulse of the City With Graffiti Artist EKG
Though New Yorkers are currently chasing down the next piece of Banksy street art, graffiti typically blends into the background. If you’re not a tagger, you most likely are not paying attention to the coded messages embedded in the endless stream of stylized names, faces, animals, and jokes that are constantly thrown up then torn […]
-
Science Gets Down With Miles Davis and Bernini
Analyzing music and sculpture in the digital age.
-
Trading Places
If your daughter was a prisoner of a repressive regime, how far would you go to save her?
-
Prime
She had to possess the secret code.
-
In Art Made From the Digital, Its Imperfections Are Revealed
Postcards from Google Earth (one of five images in the collection)Clement Valla A wave of digital art, and its acceptance in the mainstream art world, has been building since computer technologies entered people’s lives over 20 years ago. Just last year, MoMA acquired 14 video games for its collection. Now comes the first-ever auction of […]
-
Literature by the Numbers
Critical reading gets even better when you use your computer.
-
How Much Do You Remember the Old-Fashioned Way, Sans Google?
It began like so many creative endeavors—with a barstool discussion. “Who would be your television dad?” New York artist Amanda Tiller mused. A friend chose Cliff Huxtable, Bill Cosby’s alter ego on The Cosby Show. Later, Tiller thought a lot about Cosby and his famously be-sweatered character: We all know Cliff, a beloved father, doctor, […]
-
Justin Timberlake and the Whoever of Whatever
Fame drags you down.
-
Hardly Never in Vegas
Fat Johnny Little and Salty Salt Sue make a break for the desert.
-
Why People Love to Get Lost in Books
In the huge range of different human cultural inclinations, one of the most widespread is a fondness for stories. We just love to get lost in a good book or movie. When we do, we tend to ignore where we are and become completely absorbed in the story. Psychologists call this “transportation,” and have conducted […]
-
Do Other Animals Make Music, or Just Sounds?
The question in the title of this post involves not one but two enigmas: Artistic merit is an abstract and slippery concept, and assigning intention to the actions of other species is a perpetual challenge. Thus, the question invites various, contradictory answers. Still, I find myself inspired by the activities of other animals, and believe […]
-
Looking at Art Through Different Eyes—Like a Bee
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 of light that lies just outside the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can feel its heat, but we can’t see the light—not without […]
-
Know When to Hold ’Em
The world is your casino. But bettors beware—the house always wins.
-
Know When to Hold ’Em
The world is your casino. But bettors beware—the house always wins.
-
Composing Your Thoughts
Music that upsets expectations is what makes your gray matter sing.
-
Why Pianos, and Monkeys, Can Never Really Play the Blues
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 what University of Illinois professor J. Murray Gibson did at the recent March meeting of the American Physical Society […]
-
What’s Your Story? The Psychological Power of Narrative
We’re all stories in the end. — “The Big Bang,” Doctor Who In 2003, author James Frey published a bestselling autobiographical memoir, A Million Little Pieces, purportedly detailing his struggle to overcome addiction. Nearly three years later, during a riveting appearance on Oprah, he admitted that several supposedly factual details had been embellished or fabricated. All […]
-
Romance, Meaning, Science, and You
Welcome to Nautilus’ blog, “Facts So Romantic”! The name, if you didn’t see the note on the blog’s homepage, refers to a quote from Jules Verne: “Reality provides us with facts so romantic that imagination itself could add nothing to them.” (Verne also helped name the magazine itself; the amazingly hi-tech submarine from 20,000 Leagues […]
-
The Candle Burned
Welcome to the future, where people read no more.
-
The Candle Burned
Welcome to the future, where people read no more.
-
Chambered Nautilus
A metaphor for science.
-
A Vehicle of Wonder
The story that launched generations of scientists