General

Issue 39 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Healthy Communication and Harmony. It includes contributions from biologist Peter Ward, plant neurobiologist Stefano Mancuso, astrophysicist Sarafina El-Badry Nance, and more. This issue also features a new illustration by Zoe Keller.   

Issue 38 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Outsiders and Hidden Truths. It includes contributions from science writer Corey S. Powell, astrophysicist Caleb Scharf, history professor Erika Lorraine Milam, and more. This issue also features a new illustration by Sam Chivers.  

Issue 37 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Mind and Universality. It includes contributions from psychologist Lisa Feldman Barrett, award-winning geobiologist Hope Jahren, zoologist Arik Kershenbaum, and more. This issue also features new illustrations by Jorge Colombo.     

Feeling connected to nature is important. It inspires empathy and a desire to preserve what is being lost. But empathy is not enough. Conservation is about sustaining ourselves in tune with nature. Highlighting the threads of that harmony is where science comes in, and where this issue of Nautilus follows.    

The darkness is coming after the light. That’s what life during this pandemic feels like. Ultimately it will be science that will quench the virus and restore the light. That’s what science has always done—shown the way out of confusion and despair, illuminated nature, within and without us. This issue follows the light of science […]

Scientists can be in love, of course, overcome by its joys, overwhelmed by its pains. But when they put on their lab coats, love and sex are all about the caudate nucleus and dopamine. But the science of love doesn’t shuttle romance to the wilderness. Science is a light on our path to understand ourselves […]

Issue 33 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Love & Sex and The Dark Side. It includes contributions from mathematician and author Aubrey Clayton, astrophysicist Caleb Scharf, and award-winning science journalist Jo Marchant, among others. This issue also features a new illustration by Jonathon Rosen.   

Risk is at the heart of poker. You might win it all. You might lose it all. But nobody succeeds without taking it. The trick is to understand that internal calculus. Analyze and understand it to the point where the cliff from which you’re jumping feels safe.     

Could anything be more fundamental in life and science than energy? And be more various and mysterious? Energy may be the term we use most often without quite knowing what it means. So how do you begin to plumb the many meanings of energy?     

Issue 32 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Reopening, Energy, and Risk. It includes contributions from paleoclimatologist Summer Praetorius, Roomba inventor Joe Jones, and film director Walter Murch, among others. This issue also features a new illustration by Myriam Wares.   

The story is changing. The world has not reopened but there is a sense it can. In this state of hopeful limbo, things don’t look the same as they did three months ago, two weeks ago, one day ago. This mini-issue of Nautilus turns its journalistic and scientific focus on the changing view outside our […]

It’s a time like none other for us for Nautilus, as it is for every publication. What can we do to help you understand what’s happening to us? That’s the question that drives every article we’ve done and are planning to do on the coronavirus pandemic.   

Issue 31 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Intelligence and Outbreak. It includes contributions from physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, radio producer Steve Paulson, and Gaia hypothesis originator James Lovelock, among others. This issue also features new illustrations by Jorge Colombo.

Issue 30 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Aliens, Maps, and Panpsychism. It includes contributions from journalist Corey S. Powell, linguist David Adger, and New York Times bestselling author Annaka Harris, among others. This issue also features a new illustration by Ralph Steadman.

Issue 29 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Underworlds, Atmospheres, and Catalysts. It includes contributions from science and nature journalist Brandon Keim, paleoclimatologist Summer Praetorius, and astrophysicist Martin Rees, among others. This issue also features new illustrations by Jorge Colombo.

When it comes to intelligence, the mind is overrated. We explore body intelligence and emotional intelligence, and finer still, cellular intelligence. We peer into the black boxes of artificial intelligence, where the future looks dangerous. The intelligences in the sciences, and of the sciences, are without bounds.    

The debate over panpsychism has only got hotter in the past few years, not only in Nautilus, of course, but in articles and books. In this mini-issue we head back into the debate with new perspectives on panpsychism, which don’t solve the hard problem, but do inch close to the heart of matter.   

“Usefulness” may be a utilitarian term but it does the job of capturing what’s remarkable about maps, and what inspires this issue of Nautilus—illuminating the signs and symbols, notably language, that imperfect humans employ to represent reality.   

The search for extraterrestrial life is a funny thing in science. It’s like a private hobby, best not discussed at work with colleagues, nor with friends at parties. It’s OK now and again to illuminate the search for alien life, an interlude in the symphony of scientific work. And that’s just what we’re offering in […]

This month’s issue offers multiple perspectives on catalysts in science, from cosmology to medicine, neuroscience to physics. It illuminates the elusive agents of change that spark ever-emergent worlds.      

This month we are turning our magnifying glasses on atmospheres. With global warming upon us, the time is now for a closer look. Can what we do in our cultural and personal atmospheres change what happens in Earth’s atmosphere?    

Issue 28 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Story and Language. It includes contributions from journalist M.R. O’Connor, neuroscientist Robert Burton, award-winning fiction author Ted Chiang, and linguist David Adger, among others. This issue also features new illustrations by K. Cantner.   

Issue 27 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Quandary, Play, and Networks. It includes contributions from neuroscientist Grigori Guitchounts, anthropologist Barclay Bram, and award-winning science writer George Musser. This issue also features original art by K. Cantner.   

Issue 26 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Context, Patterns, Variable, and Flow. This issue includes contributions from journalist Moises Velasquez-Manoff, environmental journalist Heather Hansman, evolutionary biologist David P. Barash, and mathematician John Baez.  

Science is a journey into the unseen, the hidden, the unknown. It’s a journey into the human brain to uncover the neural connections that guide our behavior in the dark, outside the light of conscious awareness. Seismic forces, slowly shifting tectonic plates, the earth remaking itself, are happening beneath our feet, and we above want […]

We look at how language elevates our spirits and lets them down. We delve into its origins in our animal ancestors and show that while language may distinguish us from our animals, it also links us to them. Language, we show, shapes our thoughts, but also frees them.   

Issue 25 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Connections, Systems, Horizons, The Unseen, In Plain Sight, Clockwork, and Reboot. This issue includes contributions by: journalist Justin Nobel, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Richard Powers, cognitive neuroscientist Heather Berlin, and microbial ecologist Miranda Hart.

This month we look at the innate nature of storytelling and why AI will need to learn how to tell stories. But that’s not all: This issue is also about the beautiful power of stories themselves.   

That’s one small step for man. One giant leap for mankind. Yes, 2019 marks the 50th anniversary of Arpanet, a network that linked four computer nodes in 1969, the prototype of today’s Internet, a giant leap for humankind. (That moon landing was pretty significant, too.)     

Nature loves to play. And play is the thing throughout this issue. Indre Viskontas takes us inside the concert hall to explain how musical ensemble tap into brain wells of creativity and empathy that can’t be reached by going it alone. We also look at a dark side of play. Barclay Bram shares his everyday […]

This month’s theme, “Quandary,” features articles that rebalance the fear that science is out of control, that playing God has set humanity on an inexorable path of destruction. This issue presents new essays, articles, and interviews that crack open quandaries in manifold fields of science.    

Engineers tell us flow describes how fluids or gases behave in relationship to their environment. Flow can be smooth or turbulent. But when it’s turbulent, scientists are baffled about what in the world’s going on. Then again, flow can be a transcendent feeling. It can lift you out of time, make you feel one with […]

Controlling variables in search of a hypothetical result is one of the most important methods in science. But the concept of variables is not limited to methodology. A variable is a reminder that a shift in perception can spring us from cliché and deepen our knowledge and understanding.     

There is something beguiling about the possibility that the letters making up our DNA are also used somewhere far away. On the other hand, the lack of any such message may make the stronger point, telling us that the meaning we’re looking for is scattered across a much broader canvas, and ours to discover.    

Among its many peculiarities, the human brain has a habit of not responding in the same way to identical inputs. This may be due to the fact that our eyes and ears are noisy instruments, or because signals move in a stochastic fashion from neuron to neuron. It may also simply be a matter of […]

Behind the scenes, our world is constantly rebooting. Rebooting is not just frequent, it is structured and varied. We are engineering this kind of granularity not just into computers, but also ourselves.      

The natural world is more relative and fluid than we’d imagined, and our human world is run through with its own mechanisms, many of them our own creation. Physicists talk of many landscapes of physical laws and universes, and our most human characteristics are echoed and copied by both nature and technology.    

Cognitive distortions like selective attention are how we keep ourselves happy. As we age, we increasingly focus on happy memories, and place more emphasis on emotional regulation than on information accuracy.     

For something like 5,000 years, astronomy was the analysis of starlight. In the mid 20th century, cosmic rays were added to the mix, and then neutrinos. Two years ago came gravitational waves. Science advances, not just by seeing better, but by inventing whole new categories of seeing.   

For sheer color, you can’t do much better than a black hole event horizon. It swallows everything without a trace, but it also evaporates. It may contain a wall of fire created by disentangling virtual particles. Unless it’s a fuzzball made of fundamental strings, in which case it has “hair” instead of a firewall.   

Systems can surprise us. Out of neurons comes consciousness. Out of cars, traffic jams. Just as interesting as these emergent properties, but less discussed, are submergent properties, in which the causal arrow points down rather than up. The group changes the individual.    

Issue 24 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Perspective, Communities, and Self. This issue includes contributions by: archaeologist and medieval historian Alexander Langlands, Japanese artist Hideki Nakazawa, and psychology professor David P. Barash. This issue also features original artwork from Guilio Bonasera, Daniel Greenfeld, and more.

The more we learn about coordinates, the more we understand their tendency to melt into each other. Far-flung bits of space can get entangled. At the tiniest scales, space and time dissolve into a complex foam. In the brain, grid cells that mark our location in space also help us demarcate time.

Searching has a cost. It takes time and energy, and distracts us from other opportunities. It is also a quickly growing part of modern life.      

Connection has an exponential, multiplicative power to create complexity. It’s where the meat of the hardest problems—like consciousness—lies. It can also make problems harder than they first seem to be.   

The November/December 2017 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on The Unspoken and Trust. This issue includes contributions by: linguist Julie Sedivy, neuroscience professor and author Stuart Firestein, and anthropologist Dorsa Amir. This issue also features original artwork from Michela Buttignol, Rebecca Mock, and more. 

What interesting stories are out there that involve the self but do not involve people? Complex systems seem to resist the privileged perspective necessary to define a “self.” If nature preaches a deep relativism, is our attachment to the idea of self a human foible?  

While we sequence the genetic codes that make our cells unique, we build giant cities that look like cells from space. While we take on more personal responsibility, we divine the outlines of what can only be accomplished through groups. We build new kinds of individuality together with the networks that support them.   

The importance of perspective in science cannot be understated and yet often is. From the outside, science can seem like a common noun, a smooth and untextured monolith containing the Truth. But science is a method and not a body of knowledge, and it is practiced by fallible humans.   

Trust appears to be in decline. Trust in government around the world is on the ebb, and is at historic lows in the U.S. We’re awash in stories of abuse of trust by leaders from all walks of life. The institution of science has a special role to play in the trust wars. Feynman told us, […]

The philosophers knew it first. “Silence is the element in which great things fashion themselves together,” wrote Thomas Carlyle in 1831. Since then, science has redefined the word.    

Do monsters have an expiry date? They’re not just dangerous, after all, or evil, or frightening. They challenge our categories. They are perversions of the natural order.     

The September/October 2017 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on The Hive and Monsters, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: bestselling author and MIT professor Max Tegmark, tropical ecologist Mark Moffett, and journalist Regan Penaluna. In addition, this issue features original artwork […]

We like to make the hive personal. While we undermine the hive in stories, we build ever-better versions of it in reality. As our neighborhoods grow denser, public conversations move to social media, and blockchain decentralizes authority, we move closer to discovering whether the personal hive is really a contradiction in term.     

There are the limits that are formally unbeatable: things like the speed of light and quantum indeterminacy. They’re interesting because they describe an unexpected border between the philosophical and technological. And because we are still trying to beat them.     

At each level of complexity in nature, “entirely new properties appear,” wrote Nobel Laureate Philip Anderson in 1972. In other words, we should expect new scientific foundations to emerge from complex systems.     

The July/August 2017 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Emergence and Limits, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: theoretical physicist Geoffrey West, distinguished psychology professor Lisa Feldman Barrett, and author Jonathan Waldman. In addition, this issue features original artwork from Wenjia Tang, Kati Szilagyi, […]

The May/June 2017 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Chaos and The Absurd, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: neuroendocrinologist and author Robert Sapolsky; award-winning physics writer Amanda Gefter; and comic artists Steven Nadler and Ben Nadler. In addition, this issue features original […]

The March/April 2017 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Balance and Consciousness, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: Prominent physicist Lawrence Krauss, writer Samantha Larson, who at 18 became the youngest person to climb the highest mountain on each continent, award-winning author Philip Ball, […]

The absurd has a way of crystallizing our thinking. Satire spurs social change. Extreme coincidences in the fundamental constants of physics challenge us to reconsider our metaphysics. We got where we are with the help of the absurd. Without it, life would be strange indeed.   

Consciousness is a hard problem because it is emergent, mixes software and hardware, and is dizzyingly self-referential. It’s harder still because, in a sense, it impossible to study directly.   

At the borders between chaos and order are seeds for new insights into information, war, physiology, and physics. Structure is not just visible—it’s created, transformed, and destroyed.   

Colonizing the galaxy is the highest good humanity could achieve.

The science of bacteria in the atmosphere is getting its moment in the sun.

John Charles Martin “Johnny” Nash was a teen when he first started hearing a voice in his head. A born-again Christian, he interpreted this voice as God speaking to him. Once, he walked into the middle of a busy highway because the voice said he should. He was an accomplished chess player and math whiz, […]

Put yourself in the mind of a killer whale. Let’s say you’re the little guy in the picture below. So far, you’ve lived off of a diet of only marine mammals: seals, sea lions, porpoises, even otters on occasion. Your family has taught you how to hunt these animals. You spend hours swimming alongside your […]

A South American legend has it that, centuries ago, a native, suffering from high malarial fever, got lost in the Andes. Thirsty, he drank from a pool of stagnant water. The bitter taste prompted a ghastly realization: The surrounding cinchona trees, whose bark was thought to be poisonous, must have contaminated the water. He thought […]

Buyer’s remorse. It’s that sickening feeling you get when you come home from the store, unwrap your purchase, and start thinking about should-haves and could-haves. A 2014 Psychology and Marketing review identifies some of the reasons that spur this most uncomfortable of consumer emotions: getting new information after purchase, for example, or using the product […]

Even as some describe his campaign as being in “melt-down mode,” political scientists and pundits are still searching for ways to explain the “Trump phenomenon.”1 They attribute his success in the Republican primaries to a host of factors, from the American public’s frustration with establishment politics to their belief that he can provide national and […]

One of my favorite moments from the history of science comes from a man whose name may be hard to improve on: Robert Rathburn Wilson. In 1967, in the midst of the space race with the Soviet Union, he became the first director of the National Accelerator Laboratory (later to be renamed, in honor of […]

Unreliable rewards trap us into addictive cell phone use, but they can also get us out.

The Lebanese-Canadian professor of marketing Gad Saad (both sound like “sad”) can readily defend evolutionary psychology against the charge that it’s a convenient, “just-so story.” (Before diving in, he said, “Forgive me, it’s going to be a bit long-winded, because your question is an important one.”) He founded and developed the field of “evolutionary consumption” […]

As you look closer and closer at the world, you find more and more levels of organization. And at many of those steps, the view is fantastic. From butterfly wings to snowflakes, zooming in on the world around us can reveal incredible symmetries and patterns, and sometimes pure chaos. Seen at a microscopic level, things […]

Think of your favorite animal. Perhaps Harry Potter’s snowy owl comes to mind.  Or, maybe the lion, king of the jungle? If we were to take our thought experiment under water, you might think of the massive whale shark, or the majestic sea turtle. Perhaps not. But I bet I can guess what wouldn’t come […]

[test]

On New Year’s Day, perhaps as a way to celebrate, the National Women’s Political Caucus endorsed Hillary Clinton for President. The NWPC, based in Washington, D.C., is a grassroots organization aiming to increase the presence of women in politics—well under one quarter of our nation’s politicians are women. Paula Willmarth, the NWPC’s Vice President of […]

There is a miles-long solitary wave trundling its way across an ocean right now. It will travel for days on end without changing its shape, before dissipating its billions of joules of energy onto some unseen shore or trench. If you had traveled with it, it would have seemed like the ocean is moving backward, […]

The remarkable science that helped me understand what it means to be a physicist.

The science of bacteria in the atmosphere is getting its moment in the sun.

When I published Life’s Ratchet four years ago, I was focused on how life can create and sustain highly ordered systems in the presence of the surrounding molecular chaos—how molecular ratchets, in other words, “extract order from chaos.” To my surprise, the book generated great interest in the area of aging research. Aging, says Ed […]

In the early 1990s, a few miles west of El Kef, a town in Tunisia, geologists set a small golden spike in between two layers of clay that remains there to this day. They wanted to mark the tiny yet striking layer of iridium—a hard, dense, silvery-white metal—sandwiched in the middle. It was deposited by […]

Our physiological processes become increasingly simple as we age.

The director of the Institute for Advanced Study on the wonders of his childhood attic.

A growing portion of the elderly look and act anything but.

Is there a biochemical reason that extreme weather makes us happy?

Aging may be the only universal process. Everything does it: living things, rocks, maybe even protons (we’re not sure yet). Despite that—or because of it—we humans have long dreamed of conquering it. Even the hero in our oldest known piece of literature, the Epic of Gilgamesh, seeks and fails to find eternal life, “for when the […]

Felice Frankel lives between the lines. Along with being a part-time science photographer, she’s a researcher at the Center for Materials Science and Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. “As a photographer,” Frankel says, “I look for edges.” Her previous career, as a photographer of architecture, taught her how to capture the most striking […]

What I learned trying to keep up with my 4-year-old daughter at the royal game.

The high technology that could help us live through the sun’s inevitable transformation.

Two Mecyclothorax beetles abandon their relatives on the forest floor to climb up a tree. They settle into a moss home, eat, mate, and die. A couple hundred years or so pass until one of the original beetles’ offspring walks back down. But all the close relatives it once had there are already gone. There’s […]

Irvin Yalom, an emeritus professor of psychiatry at Stanford University, dreamt about peering into minds. “A series of distorting prisms block the knowing of the other,” he wrote in Love’s Executioner: And Other Tales of Psychotherapy, in 2012. “Perhaps in some millennium, such union will come to pass—the ultimate antidote for isolation, the ultimate scourge […]

Whenever I fly, I like to talk to the person sitting next to me. Once in a while, I find that we know at least one person in common. If you are like me, perhaps coincidences such as this happen in your life as well. The most unusual coincidence in my life took place when […]

In his Oscar acceptance speech, Leonardo DiCaprio said, “Making The Revenant was about man’s relationship to the natural world.” Perhaps the film’s most gripping illustration of this was when a grizzly bear nearly mauls DiCaprio’s character, an American fur trapper, to death. To be eaten by a predator, after all, may be the most apt […]

Given how hazardous greenhouse gases (GHGs) are to our atmosphere and climate, it is perplexing to find hardly anyone talking about how those gases are measured. Even among those who do, you seldom spot anyone who mentions—amid the small fonts and tables, graphs, and charts—how data is collected in the field. Why? Because the tools […]

When Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote, in The House of the Dead, that “Man is a creature that can get accustomed to anything,” he was talking about the cruelties and deprivations of life in Siberian prison camp. But the human tendency to adapt or “get accustomed” to situations is more profound than even Dostoyevsky may have realized. […]

Emily Temple-Wood has written approximately one Wikipedia article every ten days since she was 12 years old, totaling around 330. The work of the 21-year-old undergraduate, studying molecular biology at Loyola University of Chicago, unabashedly exposes sexism—and in the process, has exposed her to some of it. Temple-Wood’s output has made her the target of […]

Humans have marvelous powers of recognition. No one’s surprised when parents identify their child in a crowd by a glimpse of her face or echo of her voice. But we aren’t unique in this regard. Other creatures have evolved impressive powers of discrimination. Take birds. “Their recognition system is really quite remarkable,” says Mark Hauber, […]

You may like to imagine that your major life choices—where you live, who you marry, what you do for a living—are based on rational weighing of options. In your relationships, for example, you might seek someone that jives with your personality and shares your life interests, beliefs, and Netflix preferences. So the fact that you […]

If rules only exist to be broken, then so do boundaries. After all, a boundary is just a rule in space. And there are no absolute boundaries. Why would there be? The cell membrane needs to keep out biological riffraff, for sure, but also to ingest and excrete. Academic disciplines stultify when their borders become […]

The open nature of the science of classification virtually guarantees fights.

The open nature of the science of classification virtually guarantees fights.

Our veins are swimming with immune cells of many different kinds. Some bear the memory of previous infections, in case we should encounter them again; some are actively fighting invaders; others are merely on the look-out. Counting all of the varieties of cells and what molecules they are producing gives researchers a profile of someone’s […]

One biologist’s love for science got kickstarted by snakes.

Why life is constrained to be about the sizes we see on Earth.

How a steady diet of fertilizers has turned crops into couch potatoes.

Imagine that, for once just for kicks, you decided to play the lottery and, not long after, you saw that the winning numbers were yours. You’re now millions of dollars richer. Do you think you’d be happier? Most of us think so. Now imagine that, instead of winning the lottery, you got into an accident […]

On a late fall morning, Joseph Alexiou fastened his life jacket and stepped into an eight-foot fiberglass boat floating on the Gowanus Canal. A licensed New York City tour guide, and an amateur historian, Alexiou was preparing to take a passenger on an unsanctioned tour of the waterway he’d spent three years researching for his […]

Just last month, Carmen Blandin had a remarkable dream. In it she saw, for the first time, not her old face in the mirror—the one she had for the first 38 years of her life—but the new face she received in a transplant three years ago. “I actually saw me with my new face,” she […]

To Hawaiian speakers, vowels reign supreme. Only eight consonants exist in the language’s 13-letter alphabet, so most of its meaning is derived from oohs and aahs, ohs and eehs. One might say Hawaiian sounds a lot like the sea that surrounds it; the bulk of its words are simple and spare, flowing smoothly from vowel […]

On Saturday afternoon, while I really should have been working on other things, this happened: What’s going on here? It might be obvious if you have a background in biology, but there’s a lot of context, and science, behind that tweet. It all started last Friday, when astrophysicist and popular science personality Neil deGrasse Tyson […]

Can an organism ever become perfectly evolved? In Richard Lenski’s lab at Michigan State University, scientists are trying to see if that’s possible. The idea grew out of the lab’s Long-Term Evolution Experiment, started in 1988, with Escherichia coli; in 2010, they celebrated 50,000 generations (500 occur every 75 days). The lab has 12 populations […]

Before Josh McDermott was a neuroscientist, he was a club DJ in Boston and Minneapolis. He saw first-hand how music could unite people in sound, rhythm, and emotion. “One of the reasons it was so fun to DJ is that, by playing different pieces of music, you can transform the vibe in a roomful of […]

The animals of neuroscience research are an eclectic bunch, and for good reason. Different model organisms—like zebra fish larvae, C. elegans worms, fruit flies, and mice—give researchers the opportunity to answer specific questions. The first two, for example, have transparent bodies, which let scientists easily peer into their brains; the last two have eminently tweakable […]

On a recent Sunday, at my local Italian market, I considered the octopus. To eat the tentacle would be, in a way, like eating a brain—the eight arms of an octopus contain two-thirds of its half billion neurons. Delicious for some, yes—but for others, a jumping off point for the philosophical question of other minds. […]

The Nobel laureate Baruch Blumberg once estimated that malaria has killed half of the people who have ever lived. In 2015 alone, it killed almost half a million people, 70 percent of which were children. Today, about 3.2 billion people are, according to the World Health Organization, at risk of contracting it, most of whom […]

As a child in Maine, I spent a lot of time exploring the tide pools jutting out from Rice Point, the beach where my extended family hosted noisy lobster picnics. Every so often I would unstick a periwinkle (Littorina littorea), a common kind of sea snail, from a rock, let it tumble into my palm, […]

What are the ingredients of a good relationship? Trust? Communication? Compromise? How about a sense of smell? When researchers in the United Kingdom surveyed almost 500 people with anosmia (the loss of sense of smell), more than 50 percent of them reported feeling isolated, and blamed their relationship troubles on their affliction. “I worry I […]

  In 2005, the taxonomist Quentin Wheeler named a trio of newly discovered slime-mold beetles after George W. Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, and Dick Cheney. He believed the names could increase public interest in the discovery and classification of new species, and help combat the quickening pace of extinction. (Species go extinct three times faster than […]

  Love is supposed to make you stupid. We’re used to seeing the lover as a mooning fool, blind to his lover’s faults and the goings-on of the outside world, or even as a person who has lost all sense of rationality or propriety, driven to a kind of madness. There’s science to back this […]

In 1944, John Wheeler received a haunting postcard. It was from his younger brother, Joe, who had written only two words: “Hurry up.” Wheeler was involved with the United States’ atomic weapons effort, and Joe wanted him to finish the bomb so he could come home from fighting in Italy. But by the time Hiroshima […]

  When Eric Klinenberg, an NYU sociologist, was waiting at Penn Station with an armful of groceries, he got a call from a publisher at Penguin. “Hey,” said the publisher, “I have a random question for you: Have you ever heard of a comedian named Aziz Ansari?” “I was like, Yea,” said Klinenberg, “Aziz Ansari […]

Kirk Johnson’s mom gave him 5 minutes at a rest stop. It was enough to find an arrowhead.

A geologist explains that climate change is not just about a global average sea rise.

The do-gooder, MacFarquhar says, “puts the rest of us in a worse position, makes us feel guilty and irritated for the implicit criticism of the way we’re living our lives.” Wikicommons You’re taking a walk and you pass a shallow pond, where you find a drowning child. You would not harm yourself if you saved […]

The shiny silver cloaks athletes now don to keep warm on the sidelines are actually aluminized mylar, which NASA’s Echo I, the agency’s first communications satellite, sported.NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center Getting us into space is NASA’s raison d’etre. But the agency’s innovations don’t always stay inside NASA. They have a tendency to affect fields like […]

The sweet, avian romance of Harold and Maude.

On September 11, 2001 I was living and teaching in Providence, Rhode Island, a town that is on the short flight path between Boston, where terrorists boarded two passenger airliners, and New York, where these planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Center. In the following days, the whole campus seemed […]

From ecstasy to withdrawal, the lover resembles an addict.

In a mere 60 years, we of Earth have gone from launching our first spacecraft, to exploring every planet and major moon in our solar system, to establishing an international, long-lived fleet of robotic spacecraft at the Moon and Mars. What will we do in the next 100 years? With such rapid expansion of capability, […]

  The main elements of the Big Bang model are “easily listed,” says Jim Peebles, the Albert Einstein Professor Emeritus of Science at Princeton. The model holds that the large-scale structure of the cosmos is expanding faster and faster and that, on average, the universe looks close to the same no matter where you look. […]

Hooked on numbers: Pythagoreans celebrate sunrise (1869), a painting by Fyodor Bronnikov (1827–1902).Wikicommons Like most people, my high-school training in mathematics involved next-to-no history, barely touching on the names of a few mathematicians, like Pythagoras, and their theorems. I graduated only vaguely aware that geometry came from ancient Greece and algebra came from the Babylonians. […]

Opposites attract. Or is it birds of a feather flock together? Massive objects draw each other together by exchanging graviton particles. On the other hand, maybe gravity is not quantum, so that gravitons don’t exist. Our brains could be chaotic storms governed by strange attractors. Or is the chaos ungoverned, and less important than we […]

Tim Melling/Getty Images The Arctic they grew up in is unrecognizable, but bowhead whales are oddly calm. They appear to be unexpectedly benefitting from the warmer, less icy climate that has emerged over the past decade. Last month, it was announced that the Arctic in 2015 reached the warmest temperatures ever observed, and that it is warming twice as […]

Welcome to sMars: Christiane Heinicke stands on a hillside southwest of the dome. The solar array that powers the habitat is to her right. To her left are the backup hydrogen fuel cells and the solar water heater.Photograph by Christiane Heinicke/Sheyna Gifford, 2015 For 6 crewmembers who have supposedly traveled 150 million miles—and were, beforehand, […]

Bill Clark/Getty Images 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 […]

  Liana Finck’s cartoons appear in the New Yorker. Her graphic novel, A Bintel Brief, was published in 2014.

InnervisionArt via Flickr Santa Claus occupies a strange place in Christian belief. On the one hand, only children seem to really believe he exists; on the other, he gets a great deal more attention than many other purported supernatural beings, such as angels or Satan.  Does Santa Claus count as a god of the Christian […]

After watching The Big Short, I felt I had a decent grasp on the causes of the 2008 financial crisis. The film, which is being released across the United States today, is based on the book by Michael Lewis, and describes how a few prescient financiers bet against the debt bubble and made millions. Still, […]

Tonight, at 11:48 PM Eastern Time, is the moment of the winter solstice, when the Northern Hemisphere is pointed as far away from the sun as it ever gets. It will be the longest night of the year, and tomorrow will be the day with the fewest hours of sunlight. As most people know, this […]

PathDoc/Shutterstock There’s a New Yorker cartoon that shows a doctor telling the patient lying in bed, “I don’t think you’re getting enough stress.” The cartoon is funny because it plays on the idea that stress is bad—how absurd is it that a doctor would prescribe more of it? Why not just offer the patient poison? […]

Imagine standing up to give a speech in front of a critical audience. As you do your best to wax eloquent, someone in the room uses a clicker to conspicuously count your every stumble, hesitation, um and uh; once you’ve finished, this person loudly announces how many of these blemishes have marred your presentation. This […]

The sheer stress of an environment contributes to obesity and diabetes.

In the fight against insects, plants have evolved an arsenal of ingenious chemical defenses.

Three years of darkness and cold spawned crime, poverty, and a literary masterpiece.

Three years of darkness and cold spawned crime, poverty, and a literary masterpiece.

The 2008 financial crisis taught me about the illusion of control, and how to give it up.

“Nichiren Calming the Storm,” a 19th century painting by Utagawa Kuniyoshi.Hulton Fine Art Collection/Getty Images Ayumi Endo remembers the 2011 earthquake and tsunami with exquisite detail. She ran downstairs to screaming coworkers. The phones in Tokyo had stopped working, and the trains outside stopped running. To kill time, she went to a pub, and saw […]

Siegfried Layda/Getty Images On a chilly day in Toronto, Michael Mesure, executive director of a local bird conservation group, leads me up several flights of stairs in City Hall. We walk down a hallway and there stands a large, white chest—a freezer—with a lid straining to close against its contents. Mesure removes a heavy Rubbermaid […]

Damara Dhanakrishna/EyeEm Earlier this fall, I traveled to central Gujarat and northern Punjab, in India, to meet with rural farmers who were trying new techniques to combat climate change. Sitting under a mango tree, I spoke with 65-year-old Raman Bhai Parmar, who told me about his solar-powered irrigation pump that was whooshing with water, deep […]

Stress is a complicated adversary. It is a silent killer, but a little bit is good for you. You can be stressed without knowing it, or feel more stressed than you are. Genetic and environmental factors combine in obscure ways to predispose some of us to stress, but not others. Stress isn’t so straightforward elsewhere, […]

An investigative reporter chronicles the progression of his own disease.

The “Caricature Generator” is a computer program that takes an image of a person’s face, finds its differences as compared to the “average” male face, and then exaggerates them in a novel rendering of the original portrait. Each face is broken up into 37 lines and 169 points—the differences come when the subject’s points don’t […]

This August, German photographer Kerstin Langenberger posted a photo to Facebook of a frail polar bear, evidently starved, adrift among the disappearing ice. In the photo’s caption, she blamed global warming for the bear’s malnutrition and for the death of many others she’d seen. Articles featuring Langenberger’s commentary and photo followed soon after, with headlines […]

  Exactly four months and 31 days into what was, at that time, still being called “The New Millennium,” CBS aired the first-ever episode of Survivor. Bill Clinton was still in office, the NASDAQ Composite Index had just peaked at 5,048, and the twin towers still stood in New York City. Since then America has […]

Shutterstock/PremiumVector As legend has it, it takes most of the year for a retail business to become profitable. After months of being “in the red,” in November they are finally “in the black.” This phrase has been used in this way since 1922. But why black? Darkness, and the color black, is typically associated with […]

Shutterstock/Rawpixel.com By the year 2020 five separate generations will occupy the workplace: Traditionalists, Baby Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Gen 2020. In just five years, the newest person hired at a company could be working right next to her great grandfather. This half-century age gap is unprecedented. And with Millennials now the biggest proportion of […]

Stress hormones in breast milk may help prepare us for a turbulent world.

Stress hormones in breast milk may help prepare us for a turbulent world.

Can a person who is biologically male really be female? What about someone who is born white but doesn’t feel that way—can she become black? Intelligent adults can disagree passionately on these questions of identity, as evident in the back-and-forth discussion over the recent cases of Caitlyn Jenner, a transgender woman, and Rachel Dolezal, a […]

Exotic ultra-compressed matter can look like pasta, among other things.

Black Beauty: The supermassive black hole at the center of this galaxy, around 11 million light years away toward the constellation Centaurus, is currently classified as a quasar. It is roughly 55 million times more massive than our Sun. Its collimated jets, in blue, surpass the diameter of the entire galaxy, extending up to 13,000 […]

I have two children, and they are a study in contrasts: My son works at a gym designing and building rock-climbing walls; In his spare time, he climbs them. My daughter is a Ph.D. student in immunology; In her spare time, she writes novels. My son is the sort of person you want around in […]

Whether it’s our country or our football team, we need to belong.

The staple fish is having an identity crisis.

Our cultural history is crumbling. Not because of bad education—though one might make that argument—but because of chemistry. Between the late 60s and the late 80s, much of our culture—from the Nixon trials on television to unreleased music from famous artists like the Beatles—was recorded on magnetic tape, and this tape is starting to disintegrate. […]

Oscar-winning editor Walter Murch describes the surprising idiosyncrasies of film scoring.

Samsø runs on renewable energy—and makes money doing it.

Four-year old Simon is lost. His mother was in front of him just a moment ago, standing right there next to the grocery-store pyramid of apples, but now she’s gone. He looks past the lemons, the pears, the bananas, but still can’t see her. “Mom?” he cries, hoping she’ll come to his rescue. “Mom? Mom!” […]

A 21-year-old named Boyan Slat says he can solve one of the greatest ecological disasters of our age: the build-up of vast amounts of plastic in our oceans. The young Dutchman, often photographed in a t-shirt and shorts, says he’s designed a structure that will harvest and recycle much of that waste. Made from a […]

Before the scientific method begins, before the hypothesis is conceived, identity needs to be confronted. Reagents and particles, agents and actors, dependent and independent variables require labeling. Dotted lines are drawn and boundaries established. Getting those identities right helps. But sometimes the greatest progress comes from realizing they’re incomplete. The discovery that light, electricity, and […]

When I was invited to drum in Ghana, I gladly accepted. Then something went wrong.

The psychological power of narrative.

In the United States alone more than 120,000 people are waiting for organ transplants, and many will die before their turns come. What if they didn’t have to wait, because doctors could print out replacement organs on demand? That’s the ultimate goal of bioprinting, a seemingly sci-fi spinoff of the burgeoning industry of 3D printers. […]

The rush for success is driving science into a corner, apart from wider culture.

After my father died, my journey of rediscovery began with the Czech language.

Thirty thousand years ago, a woolly mammoth in Siberia shed a giant virus. It soon became encased in ice and, for tens of thousands of years, the virus slept. As global temperatures warm and the permafrost begins to melt, the virus stirs. It is sucked into the nostril of a researcher where it injects its […]

Most neuroscientists believe that the brain learns by rewiring itself—by changing the strength of connections between brain cells, or neurons. But experimental results published last year, from a lab at Lund University in Sweden, hint that we need to change our approach. They suggest the brain learns in a way more analogous to that of […]

In the span of nearly 5 years, Uber has gone from a limited launch in San Francisco to offering rides in more than 300 cities worldwide. In China alone, despite existing in a legal gray zone, the company claims it arranges 1 million rides per day. That means 35 Chinese people hop into an Uber […]

What do the Volkswagen diesel scandal and the European migrant crisis have in common? They’ve both been referred to as the “tip of the iceberg.” The popular expression reflects the fact that, as impressive as the visible portion of an iceberg is, the vast majority of it (usually about 90%) is underwater. Over the past […]

If life off Earth exists it has probably transitioned to machine intelligence.

The contest between gravity and quantum physics takes a new turn.

The contest between gravity and quantum physics takes a new turn.

The surprising power of Neil Sloane’s Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.

Warriors among the Kwara’ae, a collection of tribal communities indigenous to the Solomon Islands, sacrificed pigs before battle. The tradition granted the combatants, so the belief went, aid from heroic ancestral spirits—like the mighty A’orama, a fierce fighter in Kwara’ae folklore. For every man who prepared to shed blood, a hog met its end.1 Any […]

Vitalism in the age of modern science.

Vitalism in the age of modern science.

From atoms to brains, bigger isn’t always better.

When scale confounds our perceptions, stories can clarify them.

When scale confounds our perceptions, stories can clarify them.

A physicist at the National Institute of Standards and Technology once said, “If somebody sneezed on [the] kilogram standard, all the weights in the world would be instantly wrong.” He was referring to a cylinder, sometimes called Le Grand K, which is housed in a vault in Paris and handled like a priceless gem. The […]

The story of the genetically engineered mouse cosmonaut.

Out in the clear waters near the Great Barrier Reef, a common blanket octopus male swim toward a female. This male need not worry about showing his brightest colors or engaging in a showy battle of strength in hopes of winning the female’s permission to approach. In fact it’s unclear if the female even notices […]

The story of Andy Weir is a strange mix of fact and fiction. There’s the fairy tale success of his book, The Martian, which he self-published on his blog for free, intended for the few thousand fans he’d accumulated over years of hobby writing. Some of those fans wanted an electronic book version, which he made, […]

At small scales, gravity seems to blow up—but not if space becomes 1-D.

Scientists are slowly scaling up quantum effects from atomic to human size.

As nature scales, complexity gives way to universal law.

Robert Boyle, a founding member of the Royal Society, was part of an “invisible college” of natural philosophers and physicians who lived by the motto: “nullius in verba,” or, “nobody’s word for it.” This gang of 17th century intellectual rebels questioned the dominant views of the time and stuck by the principle that truth could […]

There is a classic set of Soviet jokes about how different cultures scale. One Englishmen, it goes, makes a gentleman. Two make a bet, and three a parliament. A single Frenchman, by comparison, makes a lady’s man, two make a duel, and three a Paris commune. These jokes have a kernel of truth (regardless of […]

Over 10 years ago, a digital experiment called Second Life launched, and excitement surged about the idea of interacting in online virtual worlds. Created by Linden Lab, a company founded by Philip Rosedale, the platform gained popularity as people swarmed to participate in a new form of social connection. But, Second Life’s period of rapid […]

We’ve predicted and broken human population limits for centuries.

We’ve predicted and broken human population limits for centuries.

There is no known physics theory that is true at every scale—there may never be.

When Hurricane Sandy destroyed much of the New York and New Jersey coastlines, in October 2012, the looming threat of climate change abruptly became personal for a large portion of the East Coast—specifically Miranda Massie, a former public-interest lawyer. Seeing her city wasted, she realized that there was nowhere for the public to assemble and […]

Could war games replace the real thing?

Consider this scenario: Suppose astronomers had tracked an asteroid, and calculated that it would hit the Earth in 2080, 65 years from now—not with certainty, but with, say, 10 percent probability. Would we relax, saying that this is a problem that can be set aside for 50 years, since people will by then be richer, […]

Harvard’s David Edwards talks to Nautilus about how ideas can change the world.

How “probiotic epidemics” help wildlife—and us—survive.

Fifty years ago, who knew we’d learn to clone genes and find water on Mars?

MacArthur Fellow Danielle Bassett says learning works best when you don’t overthink it.

MacArthur Fellow Danielle Bassett says learning works best when you don’t overthink it.

In the center of the photo, standing amid dry brush and trees, is something’s butt. I have 50-some animals to choose from, and I’m really not sure whose butt it is—maybe a duiker’s, a small, deer-like creature. “If you see an animal, please mark it,” the instructions say, “even if you’re not sure, or have […]

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 into world culture like an asteroid from space. Collapse, calamity, and chaos were the media take-aways from the book, even though the authors tried hard to explain […]

Forty years ago, scientists found alien life. Not on another planet, but on Earth, in the deep sea, in places where plumes of steam and nutrients heated by volcanic activity fed entire ecologies of creatures adapted to harness chemical energy rather than energy from the sun. The discovery redefined life’s biophysical possibilities, and scientists and […]

Economics and conservation are converging to resurrect one of the planet’s greatest parks.

To almost all sports fans, doping in sports is an issue of near-religious importance, says Julian Savulescu. According to the Australian bioethicist and moral philosopher, fans celebrate people of extraordinary physical ability who dedicate themselves to training to perform an athletic feat to perfection—but when they augment their abilities with drugs and enhancers, fans can […]

A look inside NASA’s Ames Research Center.

We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace.

If you think computers have gotten really good at solving problems—like voice recognition, or self-driving cars—then your mind would be blown by what they could do if P = NP. Internet cryptography would come crashing down. Voice and image recognition would become near-perfect. Mathematical proofs would be greatly simplified. The stock market would dramatically change. […]

  Dear Nautilus reader, With your help, we’ve had an amazing first two years: Two National Magazine Awards, a Webby for best science website, and more than a dozen other awards. Nearly 10 million readers through our website. Print subscribers in 40+ countries. What a great start! But it’s just the beginning. There are many […]

While the near future is a choice, the distant future is an institution. Governments and non-profits produce long-term forecasts by the thousands. Fortunes change hands based on corporate earnings expectations. Courts debate wills written decades ago. People have constructed over 10,000 active time capsules. Despite all of this frenetic activity, the future is more often […]

Why ethical objections to interfering with nature are too late.

While biology shows us gender can be fluid, our brains struggle to see it that way.

While biology shows us gender can be fluid, our brains struggle to see it that way.

The wind shifts. The stench of rotten eggs makes it nearly impossible to breathe and the hot fog clouds my view. I hold my breath and close my eyes, imagining the fog growing thicker, crushing me. Then without warning the wind clears and I’m enveloped once again in the cold, dry air. The heat feels […]

The email from a professor offered an unusual spring break adventure: Come spend five days in complete darkness. To Morgan Williams, then a sophomore at Swarthmore College and a psychology major, it sounded like a great way to spend his vacation week. “I’m not really one for going to the beach,” he says. For those […]

Once, while fishing for salmon, I hooked a clam. It fought bravely, and when I finally pulled it from the water I could see that I hadn’t just snagged it, as you might expect, but that it had taken the bait willingly. These are minor points; what matters here is that the clam, so different […]

This classic Facts So Romantic post was originally published in September, 2013. Roughly twice a year, the apparent positions of sun and moon coincide, and a fortunate few observers are treated to a solar eclipse. Watching such an event provides the opportunity to contemplate a strange coincidence: From the surface of Earth, the apparent sizes […]

As an illustrator, I often struggle to decide how far I should push the boundaries of creativity. I’ve noticed that there is a fine line between art that is accessible to my peers and art that is accessible to everyone. And I don’t always know where to draw that line. In a Nautilus post, Jim […]

Exposing the reasons we fail to understand the minds of others.

Five menus for five mythical cities.

How a homemade piece of lab equipment is recreating chemical evolution on early Earth.

How a homemade piece of lab equipment is recreating chemical evolution on early Earth.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal recorded his dreams to prove Freud wrong.

An exclusive look at the dreams Santiago Ramon y Cajal recorded to prove Freud was wrong.

Stephen McGreevy looked nervously at the sky. Outside his camper van in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, angry black clouds gathered on the horizon as 30-mile-per-hour winds whipped across the flat expanse. At his feet, an array of copper wire—hundreds of feet of it—writhed like snakes. As rain beat against the roof, McGreevy hastily gathered the […]

Take a close look at the floor tiles in the scene below. First, focus your attention on the tile directly below the potted plant, in the shadow of the table. Then, look at the tile to the right, outside of the table. Which of these tiles is brighter? The left one? Wrong. In fact, as […]

Every evening as the sun sets, Robb Wolf begins his nightly ritual: While his two daughters play, he slowly dims the lights, just a few lumens every 20 to 30 minutes, until the house, in Reno, Nevada, is dark. The family is asleep before 8 p.m. and awake before dawn, as Wolf imagines our ancestors […]

As the means of creating the color black have changed, so have the subjects it represents.

As the means of creating the color black have changed, so have the subjects it represents.

In the world of modern physics, there is change afoot. Researchers are striving so hard to leap beyond the mostly settled science of the Standard Model that they’re daring to break from one of science’s crucial traditions. In pursuit of a definitive, unifying description of reality, some scientists are arguing that scientific theories may not […]

Tragedy can strike us any time, but that doesn’t mean we can’t make the best of it. When Frank’s dog was struck and killed by a car in front of his house, he grew curious what Fido might taste like. So he cooked him up and ate him for dinner. It was a harmless decision, […]

The mysteries of avian migration at night are being solved with computational power.

Behold this magazine’s logo in glorious living color! Each dot of pigment is a cluster of yeast cells growing on the “canvas” of a Petri dish. This organic painting was created by Michael Shen, who’s currently working on his PhD in the NYU synthetic biology lab run by Jef Boeke*. It’s the latest work in a new […]

It begins with the smallest anomaly. The first exoplanets were the slightest shifts in a star’s light. The Higgs boson was just a bump in the noise. And the Big Bang sprung from a few rapidly moving galaxies that should have been staying put. Great scientific discoveries are born from puny signals that prompt attention. […]

White has a physical purity. White light contains roughly equal amounts of every color in the visual spectrum, and activates all three types of cone cells in our eyes related to color. As a result, we perceive materials that don’t absorb color, and reflect light back to us, as achromatic—white. The union of white and […]

The finding suggests that these galaxies … are very likely enveloped by something very massive.” So reflected Jin Koda, astronomy professor at Stony Brook University, on the discovery this June of more than 800 dark galaxies in the (appropriately named) Coma Cluster. Many are located in a part of the cluster subject to tidal forces […]

In the historical novel The Black Tulip, written by Alexandre Dumas, an honest and decent Dutch tulip fancier is nearly brought to ruin by his quest to breed a purely black flower. More precisely, his misadventure is due to the dastardly schemes of his neighbor, who, frantic with spite and jealousy over the plants, frames […]

Imagine a tropical rainforest and the picture that appears in your mind’s eye is probably filled with green and brown. It’s true that those colors dominate the landscape, but a closer look at some of the jungle’s inhabitants reveals tremendous variation. I just returned from a trip to the Amazon, and here are some of […]

The brilliant compromise between efficiency and ability in your head.

If you’ve never really noticed the wide range of colors that can adorn the domestic cat, you might want to spend some time skimming through the official color charts of the Cat Fanciers Association website. According to the association, which claims to maintain the largest registry of pedigreed cats, cats can come in seal lynx […]

This post originally ran on Facts So Romantic in May, 2013. 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 […]

In each of the past 16 Decembers, Pantone has announced a “color of the year.” The company, famous for its system for standardizing colors around the world, has chosen hues as different as vibrant Fuschia Rose (2001) and understated Sand Dollar (2006) to encapsulate the visual and psychic spirit they believe will prevail during the […]

I sit motionless on the hardwood floor. My legs are crossed in a full lotus position and the back of my hands rest on top of my knees with my pointer fingers pressed slightly against my thumbs. My posture reflects the small Buddha statue in front of me. And together, our shadows dance on the […]

There was a place in Iowa in 1995, tucked away in the dark-green fields of soybeans and corn, where a flooded rock quarry shimmered aquamarine. I stood on its edge one hot summer day with two friends. Like most teenagers, we were drawn to the rebelliousness of it. To get there, we had to trespass […]

I venture to Cuba in search of the world’s smallest bird.

An argument for a new definition of color.

The Grand Prismatic Lake in Yellowstone National Park is rightfully famous for the beautiful colors produced by its unique chemistry. But there are also other places where chemistry and geology combine to create vivid natural colors, in hot springs, rock formations, and even normally monochrome glaciers. Chinoike Jigoku, or Bloody Hell Pond, is one of […]

The confounding consistency of color categories.

Kate Nichols’ nanoparticle paints have changed how she sees color.

Mangroves are sturdy trees. Recognizable by their extensive root systems, these trees can thrive in muddy soil, sand, peat, even coral. They tolerate water much saltier than most other plants and survive flooding during severe storms. It is perhaps their sturdiness that led mangroves to be one of the most significant targets in the Vietnam […]

This classic Facts So Romantic post was originally published in June, 2013. Take a look at a butterfly’s wing, and you can learn a lesson about life. Not that it’s beautiful, or fragile, or too easily appreciated only when it’s fading—though all that is true, and evident in a wing. Look very close, at the […]

You don’t have to look very hard to see that our culture has some pretty powerful associations between colors and feelings. As a recent example, the new Pixar film Inside Out has characters representing emotions, and the color choices for these characters—red for anger, and blue for sadness—feel right. Red, specifically, is one of the […]

An artist struggles to reproduce the iridescence of the natural world.

How the silent screen burst to life with color.

Why does the color we associate with wholesome things like bananas, sunshine, and honeybees—“the color of hope, joy, and optimism,” according to one of the world’s foremost color experts—also signify the creeping presence of illness and death? Not death in the abstract: the dark-cloaked, scythe-brandishing spirit of Victorian art, or the symbolic black vestments worn […]

Unless you’ve been on a media blackout this summer, you likely have heard the story of civil-rights activist Rachel Dolezal, an ethnically white woman who has long presented herself as black. The story provoked curiosity and controversy, prompting some to object that she was clothing herself in a racial identity that was not rightfully hers. […]

The day that conservation biologist Joshua Drew, his two students, and I arrive in the Fijian village of Nagigi, the wind is blowing so hard that the coconut palms are bent sideways. “Trade winds,” we are told. And, “El Nino.” The villagers here also know that climate change is affecting the weather, but their more […]

A mother wonders if we are all born with synesthesia.

Food color does more than guide us—it changes the experience of taste.

California is thirsty. The state is in its fourth year of a drought that is especially severe, by any measure. For instance, an April 1 snowpack measurement, a key indicator of surface-water supplies, was lower than any year on record, going back at least to 1950. Dry statistics aside, you can grasp the scope of […]

In its pursuit of explaining things that previously seemed beyond words, does reason stifle the imagination? Can rationalism coexist with a reverence for mystery? Two great poems with opposing views, composed over 200 years apart—“Lamia” by John Keats and “Water” by Philip Larkin—address these vexed questions through the entangled concepts of water and light. The romantic […]

Welcome to the Nautilus science news quiz! This week, we are testing your knowledge of science and the United States Constitution, ask if you can tell which Benjamin Franklin invention is a fake, and find out how much you know about all those fireworks being set off around the U.S.!

Twice a year, the Pantone corporation holds secret meetings in a European capital to decide on a “Color of the Year”—something that fits the mood of the time. This year, for the first time in three years, Pantone also added a brand new color to its palette: minion yellow, after the Despicable Me character. Of […]

John Horton Conway, a Fellow of the Royal Society who hails from Princeton via Cambridge, England, is notorious for many things—perhaps most for his promiscuous curiosity and his lifelong love affair with playing all manner of games. He’s also celebrated for his Conway groups in mathematical symmetry, for his surreal numbers, and for inventing cellular […]

It’s time again for the weekly Nautilus science news quiz! This week, we test your knowledge of vaccines, fine art, and skinny jeans. Think you know it all? Take the quiz and prove it!

A Viking scientist’s quest to conquer disease.

[QZ-4] Heirloom Portland cornhole, ugh organic shabby chic messenger bag VHS before they sold out farm-to-table locavore fingerstache retro actually. Austin Tumblr 3 wolf moon asymmetrical, bicycle rights Godard master cleanse cornhole mixtape tattooed Echo Park pickled. Sustainable try-hard lumbersexual health goth, Shoreditch bitters 90’s banjo. Readymade YOLO Banksy flannel Vice, locavore Blue Bottle American […]

In the Australian outback, the future of drought has come early.

In the Australian outback, the future of drought has come early.

I look out the windshield of the taxi and see that the road through the tropical forest ends, but our journey does not. We continue on a rutted dirt road, then ford a small stream, and eventually emerge from the thick vegetation at the edge of a vast and empty beach. Here, we wait. A […]

This classic Facts So Romantic post originally ran in August, 2014. The last time my cousin Houman traveled to Lake Urmia was 11 years ago. He and four of his friends piled into his car and drove for roughly 12 hours, snaking west from the capital of Tehran. Iran is shaped like a teapot; its […]

There is an unsolved problem I want to tell you about: The case of the missing Trojans. You might be thinking of the mythical horse with soldiers hidden inside. Or maybe you’re thinking of a sports team. Or a type of computer virus, or, let’s be honest, of the condoms. (Note that I said, “Case […]

The conventional wisdom is all wrong. Countless parents and teachers have gotten it twisted. The BBC and PBS aired bogus explanations. Even textbooks have botched the story. The Earth’s rotation, and the Coriolis effect that results, do not cause water to circle the drain in opposite directions in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres. Well, actually, […]

Think you’ve got what it takes to ace our science news quiz? This week, we want you to tell us why Saharan silver ants are so special, how baboons mimic the political process, and more. Go on, test yourself.  NB. If you are interested in seeing more of Science Friday’s octopus episode, please follow this link.

The surprising performance and physics of the fish kick.

The surprising performance and physics of the fish kick.

Why do so many corpses found in Europe’s peat bogs show signs of violent death?

In the late 1970s, groups of soda marketers descended on the nation’s malls. They gave shoppers two unmarked cups, one filled with Coke and one with Pepsi. Tasters were asked which they preferred. The Pepsi Challenge was a marketing gimmick, but it was based on a classic scientific tool, the blind experiment. If a person […]

Penn and Teller famously skewered the bottled water craze on their myth-busting Showtime series, Bullshit, setting up a hidden-camera sting operation in a fancy New York restaurant. A fake “water sommelier” stopped at each table, offering diners a special selection of high-end bottled water at $7 a pop. The catch: All the bottles were identical, […]

Tinder—in case you’re not active in the young-person dating pool—is a dating application that shows you pictures of other Tinder users in your area. If you are not interested in meeting the person you see, you swipe their picture to the left. If you are interested, you swipe right. If two people right-swipe each other’s […]

Illustration by Jackie Ferrentino Welcome to the weekly Nautilus science news quiz! This week, we test your turtle sex knowledge and ask you to weigh in on a dinosaur’s slim-down. Put your science news knowledge to the test!

There are two kinds of extraterrestrial life with very different implications.

There are two kinds of extraterrestrial life with very different implications.

NASA is scheduled to probe the Jovian moon in 2023.

Survival shows are running amok. The contestants are naked; they’re two out-of-shape guys in the woods; they’re stuck on an island. Despite differences in attire or setting, one thing remains constant: For every survivor, finding potable water is the first order of business. But the challenge doesn’t end there: First they find water; then they […]

If rules only exist to be broken, then so do boundaries. After all, a boundary is just a rule in space. Boundaries end up facilitating exchanges as much as blocking them, and some of the most productive activities happen in their vicinity.   

Aging may be the only universal process. Everything does it: living things, rocks, maybe even protons (we’re not sure yet). Despite that—or because of it—we humans have long dreamed of conquering it.   

It’s hard to imagine any signal coming from space that would be of no interest. Our modern definition of noise, as unwanted sound or signal, is a relatively recent one—the word used to mean strife, and nausea. Is the new meaning useful? Or does it encourage us to dismiss what we can’t interpret?     […]

There is a miles-long solitary wave trundling its way across an ocean right now. It will travel for days on end before dissipating its billions of joules of energy. From motes of methane pushed by distant starlight, to words smuggled out of a silent place, our world is full of unseen currents that carry and […]

When we think of sports science and technology, the physics of a curveball might come to mind—the hardware. But there is also a high technology, of sorts, in the software of sport. Without it, would we understand sportsmanship, and what it means to love playing more than winning?   

Have you seen the videos of the crow solving an eight-stage puzzle? Or of Lee Sedol losing to DeepMind? Learning seems to extend everywhere from the mobile above an infant’s crib to machines to, some argue, evolution and physical law. As we discover and build new learning systems, the biggest lessons may be about how […]

Even Mother Nature can seem reluctant to choose, keeping cats both dead and alive, and running up a large multiverse tab. By some accounts, there is no such thing as time, or events, which means that what we experience as choices are just mathematical solutions to distant boundary value problems.    

We are more concerned than ever with fakes, maybe because it’s easier than ever to manufacture them. From fake diamonds to fake journals, we inhabit a space created by technology, complexity, and a fracturing of authority, and spend plenty of time making stuff up.   

Where have all the real heroes gone? It’s a refrain you find in articles on our celebrity culture, movie reviews wondering why modern superheroes need to be so flawed, and in our own private conversations.    

They say it’s better to be lucky than good. But shouldn’t statistics have put the idea of “being” lucky to bed? Or is luck really all about story, rather than statistics?   

Problems of power resist solution. As other aspects of our lives have been entirely transformed for the better—the ability to communicate with each other, for example—just a little over a tenth of the world lives in a full democracy, and democratization has stalled or reversed in many parts of the world. Why is power a […]

Peel back one balance, and you find another. In this issue, each balance leans against the next: mental against physical, evolutionary against ecological, one infinity against another. The web of balances that make up our world is intricate, full of tiny stable points and unexpected transitions.   

A lot of people don’t like the word “moist.” Several Facebook groups are dedicated to it, one with over 3,000 likes, New Yorker readers overwhelmingly selected it as the word to eliminate from the dictionary, and Jimmy Fallon sarcastically thanked it for being the worst word in the English language. When you ask people why […]

Welcome to the Nautilus Weekly Science News Quiz. Think you are up-to-date with the latest in dinosaur nicknames, endangered fish breeding habits, and more? We’re putting your science news knowledge to the test!

In the swampy center of Florida, 15 miles northwest of Orlando, lies Lake Apopka, a 30,000-acre monument to the transformative power of fish. Apopka may be almost exactly the same size as nearby Disney World, but it’s far from a tourist attraction. For decades the lake served as an agricultural dumping ground for adjacent citrus […]

High-speed cameras capture how bouncing rain spreads crop disease.

High-speed cameras capture how bouncing rain spreads crop disease.

In Tibet, a geologist learns how folk stories may record actual catastrophes.

Apple is famous for its obsessive care for design and manufacturing, and its new, much-hyped watches are no exception. But, ironically, the watch can only be created by introducing errors into exquisitely crafted materials. One familiar material used in Apple’s latest device is silicon, the bedrock of all modern electronics. Engineers first must purify silicon […]

The May/June 2015 Nautilus print magazine combines some of the best content from our issues on Slow, Dominoes, and Error, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations.  This issue includes contributions by: award-winning science journalist Adam Piore; Helen Fisher; author Abby Rabinowitz; pilot and author Jeff Wise; and Adam Marcus and Ivan Oransky. It also features original artwork from John […]

The July/August 2015 Nautilus print magazine combines some of the best content from our issues on Water, Color, and Dark Matter, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: author Peter Moore; journalist Michael Green; best-selling author Tom Vanderbilt; and award-winning author Mark Peplow. Plus, original artwork from Gerard DuBois, Brian Stauffer, JooHee Yoon, Scott […]

The September/October 2015 Nautilus print magazine combines some of the best content from our issues on 2050 and Scaling, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: writer and experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats; radio producer Steve Paulson; award-winning author Philip Ball; and MIT physicist and best-selling author Alan Lightman. In addition, this issue […]

The November/December 2015 Nautilus print magazine combines some of the best content from our issues on Identity and Stress, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: author Gillen D’Arcy Wood; linguist Julie Sedivy; award-winning illustrator and journalist Steve Brodner; and award-winning journalist Chelsea Wald. In addition, this issue features original artwork from Wesley […]

The January/February 2016 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Space and Attraction, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: award-winning author George Musser; biological anthropologist Helen Fisher; best-selling author Tom Vanderbilt; and popular comedian Aziz Ansari. This issue also features original artwork from Tim O’Brian, Rebecca […]

The March/April 2016 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Adaptation and Boundaries, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: award-winning scientist Hope Jahren; prominent biologist Sean B. Carroll; award-winning author Philip Ball; and science journalist Amy Maxmen. Plus, original artwork from Angie Wang, Aad Goudappel, Julia […]

The May/June 2016 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Aging and Currents, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: environmental journalist Jonathan Waldman; photo editor and author Rebecca Horne; best-selling author Tom Vanderbilt; and award-winning journalist Justin Nobel. In addition, the issue […]

The July/August 2016 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Noise and Sport, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: science journalist Sally Davies; best-selling author J.B. MacKinnon; environmental journalist Courtney Humphries; and author Moises Velasquez-Manoff. In addition, the issue features original artwork […]

The September/October 2016 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Learning and Scaling, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: award-winning science writer James Gleick; research scientist Kate Marvel; award-winning author Philip Ball; and best-selling author Tom Vanderbilt. The issue also features original artwork from […]

The November/December 2016 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Fakes and Heroes, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: non-fiction writer Margot Lee Shetterly; neuroendocrinologist and author Robert Sapolsky; award-winning physics writer Amanda Gefter; and radio producer Steve Paulson. The issue also […]

The January/February 2017 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Luck and Power, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: best-selling author Michael Lewis; linguist Julie Sedivy; writer and photographer John Wendle; and author Alan Burdick. The issue also features original artwork from […]

This bitter dispute set the stage for the modern weather forecast.

This bitter dispute set the stage for the modern weather forecast.

A climate scientist asks whether nature can save us from ourselves.

The intricate compatibility of water and life on Earth may not extend to other planets.

Welcome to the Nautilus Weekly Science News Quiz. Can you tell your enzyme activity from your neurons? We’re putting your science news knowledge to the test!

If the Internet has shown me one thing, it’s my own astounding capacity to waste time. The rabbit holes online are deep and rich and usually absolutely fruitless. But I’m fascinated by anything that’s addictive, and my personal black tar heroin is, without doubt, “fail” videos. You know the sort—a 10-minute compilation of six-second clips […]

In 1989, scientists at the United States Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Zoo published a study on migratory songbirds with alarming results. The study relied on 22 years of data from annual surveys of more than 60 neotropical species, birds that breed in North America and overwinter in Central and South America. And […]

“…when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.” –Nietzsche For some people, this quote is very evocative. It feels important, and beautiful. Others feel like it doesn’t mean anything at all, because the idea of a deep hole looking at something is absurd. Many people have both reactions. What are […]

Andrew Wiles thought he had a solution to an age-old puzzle. Until it began to unravel.

Andrew Wiles thought he had a solution to an age-old puzzle. Until it began to unravel.

How Julian Jaynes’ famous 1970s theory is faring in the neuroscience age.

When anthropologist Alyssa Crittenden began studying the Hadza people of Tanzania 10 years ago, she was surprised to see an 8-year-old girl head out to forage for golden kongolobe berries with her 1-year-old niece swaddled snugly on her back. The behavior starkly contrasted Crittenden’s own experience growing up in the United States, where mothers often […]

The private life of the African giant offers a remarkable view on evolution.

The private life of the African giant offers a remarkable view on evolution.

When Italian authorities confirmed that James Gandolfini had just died in Rome of an apparent heart attack in 2013, many reports in American media fronted the fact that Gandolfini’s body would be autopsied, “as required by Italian law.” They emphasized this news for understandable reasons—an autopsy on someone who died in medical care seemed unusual. […]

Depending on whom you ask, coffee is either the next super food or the next public health hazard. Consult the latest news headlines or scientific studies, and you’ll find that coffee “fights heart disease,” reduces the risk of breast cancer, colon cancer, and multiple sclerosis, and “could keep Alzheimer’s at bay.” One recent study by researchers […]

Workers count votes at a polling place in Worcester, Mass.SuperStock via Getty Images Last Thursday the UK’s Conservative Party stomped to an electoral victory that fairly shocked the country. The Tories won a comfortable majority of seats in parliament, enabling them to govern the nation without a coalition partner. That result contrasted sharply with the […]

In an early episode of Daredevil, Netflix’s new series about Marvel Comic’s blind superhero, there’s a telling scene in which the crime-fighting protagonist tends to an injured friend. Although he lost his eyesight in a traffic accident as a boy, Daredevil can nevertheless perceive her wounds. From across his apartment, he senses that a cut […]

One dreary Tuesday, Leó Szilárd took a walk. Crossing the street, he realized that nuclear reactions could be maintained by the neutrons they themselves produced. A self-sustaining nuclear reactor became a reality nine years later, and the bomb in another three. This issue, we watch dominoes fall in human lives, across the oceans and under cities. They […]

Nature is full of “mistakes,” from improperly copied genes to animals deceiving each other. Even foundational physics has shed some of its air of mathematical inevitability, and wrestles with why we live in a universe that is “right” for life. Is there a “wrong” universe out there? And how does the scientist negotiate this hall […]

What could we not know about water? As it turns out, plenty. It covers most of the Earth, but is regularly in short supply. It is intimately involved in the processes of life, but life on other planets may not need it. It is inscrutable and unpredictable, but we try to price it. The debates […]

Envy is green, anger is red, and exoplanet artist renderings are usually swirly brown. Purple used to mean royal, until the chemists figured out how to make it cheaply. Blue is usually the last color to be introduced into a language. And for the philosopher? It’s all qualia.

While the cosmological version is the most famous, it is far from the only dark matter story in science. There are silent neurons, missing fossils, and nighttime animal migration; death and conception; algorithms both genetic and man-made. Seeing, it turns out, isn’t the only path to believing.                 

While the near future is a choice, the distant future is an institution. Governments and non-profits produce long-term forecasts by the thousands. Fortunes change hands based on corporate earnings expectations. People have constructed over 10,000 active time capsules. Despite all of this frenetic activity, the future is more often than not a surprise.     […]

How things become bigger or smaller reveals a lot about them. How big can a city get and still be a city? What about a classroom? Can a “theory of everything” describe our universe at all possible scales? “How much,” we learn, is often just as important as “why” or “how.” 

Science has taken many of our putative identities and melted them together. But we are jealous of our human identities. Those, we’d like to think are different. We’d like to keep them intact and persistent. Given what we know, is that a fool’s errand?

Stress is a complicated adversary. It is a silent killer, but a little bit is good for you. Pushing things and people past their usual boundaries has made the world the way it is, and naturally involves the unknown. Would we want it any other way?             

Try imagining a universe without color, or time. Unusual, but possible to visualize. Now try imagining a universe without space. What does it look like? Without space, we seem not to be able to start. READ ONLINE

Opposites attract. Or is it birds of a feather flock together? Our brains could be chaotic storms governed by strange attractors. Or is the chaos ungoverned, and less important than we think? When it comes to attraction, nothing is simple. 

Adaptation is hard—everywhere. Organisms responding to a changing environment may cycle through failed designs, or perish by evolving too slowly. A self-driving car moving down an unfamiliar road will suddenly try to take an imaginary exit. It’s harder to make someone change their mind than it is to tell them they’re right.  

Yoshitaka Fujii falsified 183 papers before statistics exposed him.

How one psychologist is tackling human biases in science.

How one psychologist is tackling human biases in science.

Making a mistake on a science exam is bad. So is publishing a paper with flawed reasoning. But what about being fallible in the first place? That, says David Deutsch, should be embraced. Deutsch is a Fellow of the Royal Society, a pioneer in quantum computing, and a popular science book author. He is also […]

The March/April 2015 Nautilus print magazine (our seventh print edition) combines some of the best content from our issues on Illusions, Creativity, and Information, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by Swedish author and hoverfly collector Fredrik Sjöberg; Tom Vanderbilt; Robin Marantz Henig; Phil Ball; and Alex Wright. Plus, […]

A still from Prudential’s commercial, showing the largest domino to ever be toppled. The point was to make a spectacle of the power of compound interest.Courtesy of Prudential It’s a clear warm day in early August, and the Harvard psychologist Dan Gilbert is lucky it isn’t windy. Towering right behind him stands a 30-foot tall […]

A still from the television show Defiance, showing a pair of Irathients, an alien race. Their language, Irathient, was created by David J. Peterson and currently stands at a 2,000-word vocabulary.Syfy David J. Peterson is perhaps the most well known linguist in Hollywood. Since 2011, he has created numerous languages for television and films, including […]

After a decade, Peter Woit still thinks string theory is a gory mess.

Sodapix/Getty When philosopher Nicolas Malebranche peered at a fetus floating in a glass jar, in a shop of curiosities in Paris in 1672, he blamed its monstrous shape on the mother. At the time it was believed that a mother could deform her fetus simply by looking at something vivid. Malebranche had heard that this […]

Tommy George and the Agents of SHIELD shot a Nerf ball and erased a whiteboard.

Computers can’t invent, but they’re changing the field anyway.

Many obstacles lie on the path to rational thought.

Many obstacles lie on the path to rational thought.

From our knees to our eyeballs, our bodies are full of hack solutions.

Screen capture of Patty Bullion’s “Pictures and Documents found after the April 27, 2011 Tornadoes” Facebook page. On April 27, 2011 a monstrous EF5 tornado traveled 132 miles across northern Alabama and into southern Tennessee, missing one of the nation’s largest nuclear power plants by less than two miles, and also skirting the grounds of […]

For the philosopher of science Karl Popper, the process of science came down to this equation: PS1 —> TT1 —> EE1 —> PS2. A problem situation (PS) leads to tentative theories (TT), then error elimination (EE), then another set of problems. Much of the work of science lies in the error elimination step, and the […]

As Arctic ice warms and forms dark melt ponds, it absorbs more sunlight, accelerating global warming.Kathryn Hansen, ICESCAPE mission, NASA Besides a few lucky astronauts, the entire human experience is contained within a narrow envelope of gas maintained in a relatively narrow temperature range on a single rock hurtling through the vacuum of space. That […]

Medicine’s latest cure is forgetting you’re sick.

All of the images in this post are borrowed from the amazing Flickr feed of the USGS Bee Inventory and Monitoring Lab. Any day now, the apple trees on my deck will bloom, bringing with them the first honeybees of spring. It’s a moment I’ll greet with mixed feelings. To which bee-lovers everywhere may respond: […]

Ilya Metchnikoff laid the foundation for modern probiotics.

Phillips participates in an aphasia communication workshop in Speechless, a documentary by Guillermo F. Flórez that profiles people with the condition.Guillermo F. Flórez What would you do if you lost your inner monologue? You know, the one where you tell yourself “I don’t want to get up yet,” or “This is one delicious burger.” That’s […]

Sir Partha DasguptaJohn Steele Wealth itself is observable and objective, a measure a value. And something has value if it is desired. But isn’t desire inescapably subjective? If it is, how can economics determine wealth? Almost 250 years after Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations, the answer to this question remains unclear. “These are still […]

In sprawling Florida, one group of geologists is never short on business.

In sprawling Florida, one group of geologists is never short on business.

A complexity theorist explores how science and culture co-evolve.

Why the recent global warming hiatus may have ended.

Imagine that two very similar-looking neighbors undergo a genetic test. The exam shows that the pair’s genetic fingerprints are virtually identical. They feel a flash of shock and excitement. What does this mean? Could they be long-lost twins, separated in a hospital mixup? The Earth and Moon share a similar issue, one that poses a […]

No still image can show the amazing realism of the Call of Duty games—but this can give you an idea.Activision If you’ve seen the latest ads for the video game Call of Duty, they are almost guaranteed to have left an impression. First-person view, blasting through doors, dodging bullets, jumping off buildings with Taylor Kitsch […]

A controversial disease revives the debate about the immune system and mental illness.

Slow is good. That’s the message of more than a dozen modern slowness movements, from slow fashion to slow food to slow church, most of which have sprung up in the last 20 years, and most of which point a steady finger at modernity. This issue is full of people chasing slow. Slow living, slow […]

One dreary Tueseday, Leó Szilárd decided to take a walk past the British Museum in London. He was irritated by Ernest Rutherford’s recent speech dismissing the possibility of practical atomic energy. The day was gray and wet. He was annoyed by a slow traffic light. But the traffic light changed, and, as the story goes, […]

You’re dead meat without special molecules that kill rotten proteins.

A simple mathematical model of a sandpile shows remarkably complex behavior.

Meet the avalanche engineers of the Subzero Laboratory.

As a rule, huge organizations move sluggishly, bogged down in democratic decision-making processes and bureaucratic policies. Ebola, on the other hand, moves fast. People become desperately sick and contagious within a few weeks of infection. By the time international agencies effectively responded to the ongoing Ebola outbreak, it had spiraled out of control in West […]

TK TK

Jupiter is famous for its Great Red Spot, but the stormy planet may also be responsible for keeping the inner solar system calm.NASA/JPL You are special, just like your parents used to tell you. You are a rare flower, a unique snowflake. Just like everyone else. How about our solar system? Is it special? Earth […]

How Adam Magyar slows down in the most impatient places.

The amazing underwater athletes are rewriting the science of the body.

Why the Great Red Spot refuses to die.

Why the Great Red Spot refuses to die.

How counting sunspots unites the past and future of science.

Anxious distillers are trying to make bourbon old before its time.

People want permanent tombstones that also show decay.

People want permanent tombstones that also show decay.

How photographing the world’s oldest living things pushed me outside the boundaries of science.

How photographing the world’s oldest living things pushed me outside the boundaries of science.

How a star explosion may have shaped life on Earth.

How a star explosion may have shaped life on Earth.

A day in the war between the city and its mountains.

A day in the war between the city and its mountains.

Nautilus is proud to announce the launch of Nautilus Prime, our digital subscription service. Free for print subscribers, and a buck or two a month on its own, Nautilus Prime delivers PDFs of each of our print magazines to read on your tablet or desktop; eBooks of each of our issues; and exclusive subscriber-only feature […]

Slow is good. That’s the message of more than a dozen modern slowness movements, from slow fashion to slow food to slow church, most of which have sprung up in the last 20 years, and most of which point a steady finger at modernity. “We do say yes to the accelerated science of the early […]

When Eadweard Muybridge captured the movement of a galloping horse in individual frames in 1878, he managed to settle a long-running debate over how that animal runs—specifically, whether there was any moment when it had all four feet off the ground. His pioneering stop-motion photographs showed how slowing the world down provided a powerful way […]

Suspended animation is becoming a life-saving medical procedure.

I don’t want to surrender to a lottery. But will I regret not playing?

The high speed of society has jammed your internal clock.

The astrophysicist looks at the history of the world’s most famous telescope.

What Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner taught me about being scooped.

The second issue of the Nautilus Quarterly combines some of the best content from our online issues on The Unlikely, Fame, and Secret Codes, with new original contributions from the world’s best thinkers, and gorgeous full-color illustrations. The issue includes contributions by actor, producer, and writer, B.J. Novak; award-winning author Mark Anderson; MIT lecturer Slava Gerovitch; best-selling […]

The sixth issue of the Nautilus Quarterly combines some of the best content from our issues on Nothingness, Big Bangs, and Genius, with new original contributions from the world’s best thinkers and gorgeous full-color illustrations.  This issue includes contributions by geneticist Scott Solomon; Caltech physicist and best-selling author Leonard Mlodinow; MIT physicist and best-selling author Alan Lightman; award-winning journalist and author Carl […]

The third issue of the Nautilus Quarterly combines some of the best online content from our issues on Waste, Home, and Time with original essays and rich, full-color illustrations.  The issue includes contributions by investigative journalist Anna Badkehn; former editor in chief of Discover Corey Powell; MIT physicist Max Tegmark; psychology professor David Barash; theoretical physicist Lee Smolin; and Time’s “Hero […]

The fourth issue of the Nautilus Quarterly features some of the best content from our issues on Mergers & Acquisitions, Light, and Feedback, plus new, original essays and rich, full-color illustrations.  This issue includes contributions by ecologist Nigel Pitman; best-selling novelist Daniel Kehlmann; award-winning author Philip Ball; Columbia University astrophysicist Caleb Scharf; award-winning science writer Ed Yong; and paleontologist and author Neil […]

The fifth issue of the Nautilus Quarterly combines some of the best content from our issues on Symmetry, Mutation, and Turbulence, with new original contributions from the world’s best thinkers and gorgeous full-color illustrations.  The issue includes contributions by science writer Lee Billings; engineering professor Barbara Oakley; journalist and NYU professor Jessica Seigel; author Moises Velasquez-Manoff; and author David Berreby. It also features original […]

The inaugural issue of the Nautilus Quarterly combines some of the best content from our issues on Human Uniqueness, Uncertainty, and In Transit, with new original contributions from the world’s best thinkers and gorgeous full-color illustrations.  The issue includes contributions by Stanford University Primatologist Robert Sapolsky; quantum computing pioneer David Deutsch; best-selling author Tom Vanderbilt; biologist Aaron Hirsh; and best-selling author Jared […]

Behold the humble nautilus. We became interested in it here at Nautilus because, well, we stole its name. But also because (for a mollusk) it represents a remarkable intersection of science, math, myth, and culture. Since that is exactly the kind of intersection we love to write about, we decided to put together a little “teaser” issue all […]

Uncertainty is baked into our modern world. We explore how everything from quantum particles to humans themselves turn out to be undetermined in ways that upset expectations. Even mathematics itself—the language of logic—includes statements that can be proven to be neither true nor false. 

This issue is all about life in motion, from electrons in microchips to proteins in cells to ocean tankers to planets wandering the cosmos. Over and over we are surprised to find that “just getting there” is an integral part of our world, and something that defines it. 

“What are the odds?” This is a surprisingly difficult, and loaded, question. Is the improbable event an indication of some hidden mechanism? Or is it just long odds? In this issue, we explore The Unlikely—from how to predict it, to how to live with what we couldn’t predict. 

Why is “Honey Boo-Boo” a megastar? Fame can seem an empty category. But it also shows up everywhere. Daniel Dennett has described consciousness as the happy spoils of a competition among various representations of reality: “fame in the brain.” Is fame an important natural process, and our obsession with it inevitable? 

There were hackers long before the denial-of-service attack. Life is a script written in carbon and transmitted faithfully between generations—sometimes. Other times, it is hacked by viruses, stolen by bacteria, or mutated by cosmic rays. Join us as we pull back the curtain on nature’s information wars. 

This issue tackles something we don’t like to think about. But not only is waste everywhere on our land, in our oceans, and even in space—it is also useful. It drives innovation, creates wealth, teaches us about the past, and is a kind of currency in systems from biology to physics. 

They say that home is the place where they have to take you in. Is it? From stellar birth clusters and allergic adaption, to symbiotic evolution and our personal microbiome, Nature has its own definitions of home. And our own ideas are shifting: Our physical homes are under renovation, and what we do at home […]

Remember Ben Franklin’s words: “you may delay, but time will not.” On the other hand, some physicists are telling us that time may not exist to begin with. And anyway, since quantum mechanics is challenging causality itself, what impact could your actions possibly have? As we look deeper, time looks more elastic and less defined. 

Since the beginning, scientists have been dividing reality into increasingly smaller bits: atoms, quarks, proteins, genes. As the list of parts has multiplied, so have their possible interactions, making the boundaries around scientific disciplines increasingly porous. From polymers to parasites, and genes to galaxies, our world is replete with wheelers and dealers, and hosts more shotgun […]

Where does the story of life and light begin? Maybe with the fact that most life on Earth runs on sunlight, or that starlight may have set the direction in which all of Earth’s biomolecules spiral. But, when most of us cannot see the Milky Way, and glowing screens have shifted our circadian rhythms, have […]

This issue, we cast our gaze onto the feedback loops that regulate, control, and sometimes destabilize the world around us. We unearth them at every scale of space and time, from ants to continents, seconds to millions of years, human myths to the origins of life. Most surprising of all, we find a world carefully […]

Symmetry, on first glance a mere detail of arrangement, has unexpected powers, aesthetic, practical—even moral. We find it in physics, families, and the brain. As shorthand, it heightens our powers of observation, helping us recognize faces and calculate particle interactions. As organizing principle, it steers genes and galaxies. Scientists, long ago convinced that it is […]

Mutations make us what we are, linking and blurring the harmful and the helpful. Even the most intricate biological mechanisms, with the most important functions, are already slipping into the future to do something else. In this issue, we trace the outlines of a world that is continually abandoning and inventing itself, often with our […]

Is turbulence simply the breakdown of order? Or is it, in fact, order by another name? Cosmic winds, the human heartbeat, and financial markets all have it. What commonalities persist among all these examples? Can turbulence be controlled, and should we try? 

Nothingness is a category that stands apart from all others, defying description and tracing the boundaries of our knowledge. Forever trying to banish it and explain it away, we are also endlessly fascinated with it. From virtual particles filling the vacuum, to the invention of zero, to Sartre’s claim that nothingness lies at the heart […]

Where do we start? Often, with a bang. Take our modern universe. It didn’t grow slowly and linearly, but was instead a violent departure from what came before. Big Bangs like this aren’t exclusive to cosmology: There are the sudden appearance of language and tool use, the Cambrian explosion in the diversity of life on […]

Genius is a category that is both important and not well understood. Is genius accomplishment or talent? Social construct or hard fact? Derivative of intellect or something else? Restricted to humans? An evolutionary advantage, or a weed? 

Long before David Blaine, there was the mimicry of the tiger moth—it avoids bats by emitting an ultrasonic signature similar to that of a noxious species. Long before that, some physicists say, an alien civilization launched an intricate simulation of reality, which we currently inhabit. Even if that hypothesis is false, don’t we entertain our […]

While we sometimes consider creativity a hallmark of being human, it is not only a human trait. Crows can perform experiments and use induction; computers can evolve new algorithms that surprise their human programmers. Is creativity a mechanical and inanimate thing, so human creativity differs only in degree? Or is human creativity different, reflecting something […]

We’re living in the information age. We’ve uncovered vast stores of information in our genes, generated even more, interpreted physical law in terms of information flow—and we’re always on our phones. What is the difference between a fact and information? Does information need a consciousness to interpret it? Old notions of information, and our relationship to it, […]

Nature is “the phenomena of the physical world collectively … as opposed to humans or human creations,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. There’s us, and there’s our environment. Where the definition separates us from nature, the word itself reminds us how linked we are. Nature emerges not just as a backdrop, but as a character on […]

testing character limits in headlines

TESTING THE LENGTH OF HEADLINES

Charles Lindbergh in 1923, four years before his trans-Atlantic flight. A light drizzle greeted Charles Lindbergh as he arrived at Roosevelt Field on May 20, 1927, at a little before three in the morning. Weeks of rain had ensured that the runway at the Long Island airport was in poor condition, soft and strewn with […]

The 2008 animated movie Waltz With Bashir starts with 26 bloodthirsty dogs hurtling down a road, causing havoc and terrorizing nearby people. It turns out to be a dream: Boaz Rein-Buskila keeps seeing that image while sleeping and can’t figure out why. He shares it with his friend, Ari Folman, hoping Folman, the director of […]

It’s hard to argue with the claim that we are living in the information age. We have uncovered vast stores of information in our genes, generated even more ourselves, interpreted physical law in terms of information flow—oh, and we’re always on our phones. Philosophers like Luciano Floridi have gone so far as to claim that […]

The Abduction of Europa (1716), by Jean-Francois de Troy, depicts one of the many Greek myths in which Zeus transforms into an animal.Wikipedia Creativity is an important driver of innovation, and in the arts and industry people work hard to be more creative, sometimes shelling out lots of money for creativity consultants. But is more creativity always better? Is […]

Fundamental theories of nature aren’t allowed to hide information.

Fundamental theories of nature aren’t allowed to hide information.

New theories have mixed perception and knowledge into the hardest of sciences.

In the debate between structure and openness, 19th-century ideas are making a comeback.

I felt the impact of an attack by the terrorist group. So why didn’t my research data?

Walter Pitts rose from the streets to MIT, but couldn’t escape himself.

Love notes and warning messages are buried in Earth’s frozen archive.

Love notes and warning messages are buried in Earth’s frozen archive.

A rendering of Hayabusa2 using its “horn” to gather materials from the crater it will make using an explosive-propelled projectile. In the lower right is MASCOT, a lander that will be left on the surface to carry out ongoing studies.Akihiro Ikeshita / JAXA From mythological tales to the exploration of Mars, humans have hunted the […]

Why the singularity is greatly exaggerated.

Fighting Ebola requires lots of equipment and personnel.Morgana Wingard, USAID     In September 1854, 600 residents of London’s Golden Square died from an infamous outbreak of cholera. It was no coincidence that this occurred in one of London’s poorest neighborhoods. We now know that markers of poverty—higher population densities, decreased nutrition, lack of medical care, […]

Neuroscientist Anjan Chatterjee takes us into the neurology of creativity.

Parkinson’s disease gave her the gift of creativity.

The way to tap your inner Hemingway is not how you think.

The way to tap your inner Hemingway is not how you think.

The way to tap your inner Hemingway is not how you think.

An illustration showing how dirt-filled PodMod containers would drift out of the Mississippi DeltaBradley Cantrell, Charlie Pruitt, Brennan Dedon, Rob Herkes Some people gaze at the Mississippi River and see the majesty of nature: a mighty waterway that carved a path through our continent, draining the vast plains between the Rockies and the Appalachians before […]

The Martian started as a self-published blog, and became a major motion picture.

The Martian started as a self-published blog, and became a major motion picture.

In 2010, IBM asked over 1,000 CEOs and global leaders what they valued most in other leaders. Humility came in eighth and openness fifth. Integrity seems important in a leader—and it was, but not enough to be in first place. That honor went to creativity. The then-CEO of IBM declared that “today, creativity itself has […]

In its mission to explore how science is connected with culture and our lives, Nautilus’ signature tool is a well-told, beautifully illustrated feature story. But not all of the magazine’s message comes in those longform pieces; some of it comes in smaller chunks here on Facts So Romantic. (The name of the blog, by the […]

We have long known that we can catch germs while traveling. Recent years have shown that we can also bring home bed bugs. This holiday season, a PLoS One study informs us that by merely plopping into the seat of a car or airplane, we can unknowingly pick up dust mites—microscopic 8-legged arthropods that eat […]

InnervisionArt via Flickr Santa Claus occupies a strange place in Christian belief. On the one hand, only children seem to really believe he exists; on the other, he gets a great deal more attention than many other purported supernatural beings, such as angels or Satan.  Does Santa Claus count as a god of the Christian […]

On some clear winter mornings, we are treated to one of the highlights of the season: a thin layer of white frost delicately coating surfaces like individual grass blades. But even when a veneer of ice crystals encrusts much of the outdoor landscape, you may notice it missing from certain sites—the grass beneath a pine […]

After a chunk of his brain was removed, guitarist Pat Martino got his groove back.

How silence affects the scientists who study it.

How silence affects the scientists who study it.

My years surveying trees in the Amazon taught me the forest is unknowable.

My years surveying trees in the Amazon taught me the forest is unknowable.

When I traveled south to research fire ants, I discovered a different kind of hive.

spaxiax via Shutterstock   Over his career, Harvard cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has taken on a wide range of research and writing subjects, and his work has provoked big debates in most, if not all, of them. His latest book, The Sense of Style, is about another farflung topic—grammar—and his iconoclastic opinions have, predictably, drawn […]

Engineer Joshua Pearce explains how to feed 7 billion people after a global catastrophe.

Near the end of my long career, I want to save the animal that started it.

A lesson in home improvement.

A lesson in home improvement.

It was the catch that broke the Internet. In a game against the Dallas Cowboys last week, rookie wide receiver for the New York Giants Odell Beckham Jr. launched himself into the air backwards, arm outstretched, and managed to catch a pass using one hand—actually just the tips of a thumb and two fingers—to score […]

Nature,” the Oxford English Dictionary tells us, is “the phenomena of the physical world collectively … as opposed to humans or human creations.” There’s us, and there’s our environment. But the Latin root of the word, nat, meaning “born,” seems to soften the opposition by suggesting a very human beginning. The Chinese translation of “nature” […]

Zvonimir Orec via Shutterstock   Last July, Chris Perry went on an Alaskan cruise with her family to celebrate her parents’ 50th wedding anniversary. When she boarded the massive Norwegian Sun cruise ship, she felt “a little woozy and weird” from the boat’s gentle rocking, she remembers, but the sensation quickly faded. Perry didn’t feel […]

Good solutions to biology’s problems are astonishingly plentiful.

Introducing the Winter 2015 Nautilus Quarterly.

On June 18, a photo of a very handsome man was posted on the Web. It wasn’t intended to “break the Internet” Kardashian-style, but that’s pretty much what happened, if only on a slightly smaller scale. Within 48 hours, the portrait garnered 62,000 “Likes” on Facebook and became an online spectacle. Today the Like count […]

The Borg capture Captain Jean-Luc Picard and turn him into Locutus, all but erasing his previous identity.CBS Captain Picard: “How do we reason with them, let them know that we are not a threat?” Guinan: “You don’t. At least, I’ve never known anyone who did.” With this brief, ominous exchange, the heroes of Star Trek: […]

Paul L Dineen via Flickr Baseball is a fiddly sport. There are countless arbitrary-seeming rules and odd traditions. People who are not familiar with the game sometimes find it near-impossible to understand (and, partly as a consequence, near-impossible to watch). But under the complexity is simplicity: a pitcher throwing a ball and a batter trying […]

  High school biology class. You’re sitting in the back of the room. A ladder-like strip is drawn sideways across the whiteboard. There’s a strange blob seemingly tearing up the ladder from within and a comb-shaped strand sticking out beneath the blob. While looking at your phone and flicking from one social media channel to […]

  If history adheres to timeless long-term trends, Walter Isaacson’s recent book on the digital revolution, The Innovators, could reveal a lot about the future of our digital age. Last week Isaacson, known for his biographies of Steve Jobs and Albert Einstein, spoke about the geniuses behind the last century of innovation at the New-York […]

Don’t be so certain your senses are telling you the truth.

Are the common elements in our dreams the result of basic biology, or something deeper?

Are the common elements in our dreams the result of basic biology, or something deeper?

Is there more to our experience of time than the foibles of memory?

Is there more to our experience of time than the foibles of memory?

Funding drug development for rare cancers can hurt patients.

Funding drug development for rare cancers can hurt patients.

That song stuck in your head is your brain doing its work.

A mathematician is using computers to manufacture award-winning illusions.

A mathematician is using computers to manufacture award-winning illusions.

Want to spin your data? Here’s how.

Want to spin your data? Here’s how.

In a world full of ambiguity, we see what we want to see.

A science historian and English professor discuss how physics and poetry mix.

Master cleanse farm-to-table next level, chillwave flannel Truffaut lo-fi Godard. Mlkshk kale chips squid, gastropub vegan tofu ennui YOLO brunch. Chambray meggings Carles messenger bag. Vegan umami skateboard meh, craft beer Tumblr pork belly try-hard chambray flexitarian. Drinking vinegar XOXO gentrify, gastropub Etsy Echo Park Tumblr jean shorts irony occupy heirloom. Small batch Cosby sweater […]

Pieces of SolaRoad, concrete blocks topped with solar cells, were recently installed in a bike path in Holland.SolaRoad Remember having to stay at home and wait for phone calls? (If you’re below a certain age, you can consult old movies, books, or TV shows—or just trust me on this.) It wasn’t so long ago that […]

Imagine you are a bacterium, roughly 1/1,700,000 of your current size, residing in your own human body’s gut. You live in a diverse community, the “microbiome,” teeming with other bacteria: friendly neighbors who live next door, some ne’erdowells who occasionally vandalize the town, and your neighborhood cops who try to keep everything in check. The […]

The most intelligent two percent of people in the world. These are the people who qualify for membership in Mensa, an exclusive international society open only to people who score at or above the 98th percentile on an IQ or other standardized intelligence test. Mensa’s mission remains the same as when it was founded in […]

Isaac Newton’s diagram of the Philosopher’s Stone, a substance that could supposedly turn base metals into gold. Geniuses, however we define the concept, often evoke particular strong feelings. Many of us develop personal affection for them, defending them from criticism as fiercely as we would friends or family. It’s not enough for them to be […]

“Vniversale descrittione di tvtta la terra conoscivta fin qvi,” a map of the world from 1565. Click through to see the entire amazing map, or download the super-hi-res version. Paolo Forlani Terra incognita. Unknown land. You may be familiar with this Latin phrase, which most notably appears on old maps, sometimes next to images of dragons, […]

Genius seems to be a concept in decline. The MacArthur Foundation, which awards fellowships famously known as “genius grants,” won’t mention the word because, in its own words, “[genius] connotes a singular character of intellectual prowess [whereas] the people we seek to support express many other important qualities.” The Google n-gram for genius shows a […]

If illusions and magic tricks seem passé to you, a throwback to when sawing a swimsuit-clad assistant in half still seemed fresh, think again. Just last year, the best ratings the ABC television network earned for any program in its 9:30 to 11 p.m. time slot were for illusionist David Blaine’s magic special. We are just as […]

During the Cold War, the USSR and U.S. had programs to harness the power of nuclear explosions, demonstrated here in the “Baker” test, for peaceful purposes.U.S. DOD via Wikipedia In the late spring of 2010, the world watched, often in real time, a new kind of environmental disaster unfold: An oil rig operating deep under the […]

“If you stroke the thermostat just like so…”starmanseries via Flickr Have you ever stopped to consider how sex is like a thermostat? Sex may not sit in a beige box on your wall (or it might, no judging) but there are some striking similarities. The common ingredient is feedback. Both sex and your thermostat depend […]

Seven sports that come down to how well your neurons play.

Seven sports that come down to how well your neurons play.

Both geniuses and madmen pay attention to what others ignore.

The president and the physicist teach us a lesson about moral genius.

The city is a big brain that can solve big problems.

Rags, riches, and fame in mathematics.

What if our ancient relatives did “human” better?

Why it’s time to retire the concept of genius.

Genetic engineering will one day create the smartest humans who have ever lived.

Adapting to the urban jungle has made Rocky smarter.

Adapting to the urban jungle has made Rocky smarter.

What the Bard can teach science about language and the limits of the human mind.

Last week, researchers using the Planck spacecraft to study the skies announced that the polarization of light spotted by the BICEP2 experiment could be entirely explained by dust swirling around the Milky Way. This news was a bucket of cold water on the theories of many cosmologists: It meant that BICEP2 might not have been […]

Magnifying our mutant, turbulent, symmetrical natures.

A lithograph of the massive 1883 eruption of KrakatoaThe eruption of Krakatoa, and subsequent phenomena, 1888; Parker & Coward; via Wikipedia On 27 August 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since. It was 10:02 AM local time when the sound emerged from the island of Krakatoa, which sits […]

Ron Dale via Shutterstock One of science’s greatest feats is having described where we came from—not as individual people, or as a species, or even as a planet, but as stuff, the very material we’re made of. The Big Bang forged all of the basic particles of our lives—electrons and the quarks that make up […]

With our brains plugged into virtual worlds all day, what is real?

With our brains plugged into virtual worlds all day, what is real?

Get back to nature, right in your own neighborhood.

The Fall 2014 Quarterly looks ahead.

The building blocks of understanding are memorization and repetition.

Sorry, education reformers, it’s still memorization and repetition we need.

Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention.

Clay sieves used to filter cheese in Poland 7,500 years ago are remarkably similar to ones used in recent times.Salque et al. / Nature Perforated pottery shards sat alongside cattle bones at the Polish dig site. There archaeologists collected fragments from bowls, cooking pots, and flasks and brought them back to the United Kingdom. At […]

The Licorne (“Unicorn”) thermonuclear test; Fangataufa, French Polynesia; 1970CTBTO After most of the world’s nations signed the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty, in 1996,  they set up a new commission to watch out for clandestine explosions. Since then the commission (CTBTO) has wired the world with hundreds of seismometers, infrasound detectors, radionuclide sniffers, and underwater microphones. The […]

From one perspective, the idea that nature is full of sudden starts seems relatively recent. Aristotle’s metaphysics was based on eternal forms, and some 2,000 years later, Newton’s apple had not fallen far from the tree: He believed his equations described an eternal universe, reflecting the mind of God. It would be centuries more before […]

The Expose-R module attaches to the ISS and holds samples in the harsh conditions of space.NASA In the 1800s, scientists imagined that life was brought to Earth by a rock that had been knocked off of a distant, life-filled planet. Now, over 100 years later, we are able to test this idea of “panspermia”—by sending […]

Gamers are giving scientists insights into how people react to a plague.

How a new technology is resurrecting patients from what was once certain death.

Halting a MERS pandemic may hold lessons for the Ebola crisis—until the next outbreak.

In the 1920s, two murderers were defended by science. The infamous case still echoes.

In the 1920s, two murderers were defended by science. The infamous case still echoes.

The Princeton physicist on what’s wrong with inflation theory and his view of the Big Bang.

The origins of language are not what inherited disorders seemed to suggest.

Sacred beliefs likely arose out of prehistoric bonding and rituals.

Sacred beliefs likely arose out of prehistoric bonding and rituals.

Even with its explanatory power, Big Bang theory takes its place in a long line of myths.

Even with its explanatory power, Big Bang theory takes its place in a long line of myths.

Biodiversity JengaMartin Sharman How many animal species do you think go extinct every year? Last week I conducted a highly unscientific polling of around 20 of my Facebook and Google Chat contacts, asking that same question. I’m not trying to brag, but I have some really smart friends, many of them with degrees in biology. […]

The dinosaur long ago renamed “Apatosaurus” is still often called “Brontosaurus.” stevegeer via iStock Over the past few decades, autism and Asperger syndrome have become prominent in the public consciousness, and that prominence has been reflected in popular art and entertainment. Autism, a mental illness characterized by repetitive behaviors and impaired social interactions, was brought […]

Even when applied to a highly reflective surface like aluminum foil, Vantablack renders the entire surface, including creases, all but invisible.Surrey Nanosystems via Wikipedia Color is such a powerful and evocative sensation—one of the first that we learn to describe as children—that we don’t often think about what it really is. In a sense, color […]

In the Mist, a film about a Canary Island forest, opens the archives of Earth’s history.

A flatworm that lives in soil and uses TTX to hunt down much larger earthwormsPeter Ducey Lurking in the soil, even under a most peaceful and well-nurtured garden, is a surprisingly fierce predator: Bipalium adventitium, an invasive flatworm that began appearing in the United States about 100 years ago, likely hitching a ride in potted […]

When the biggest problem with traffic is nothing at all.

An amputation guide for surgeons from 1739The Hagströmer Medico-Historical Library For amputees, it’s adding insult to injury. They’ve already lost pieces of themselves that they thought they could always count on, limbs that they first discovered while waving the chubby things in their cribs. Yet after that life-changing loss comes a new kind of suffering: […]

Galileo is the archetypal paradigm-busting scientist telling truth to hidebound authorities.Felix Parra: Galileo Demonstrating the New Astronomical Theories at the University of Padua, 1873. There’s a common trope in science in which a lone genius stands defiantly against a backward, close-minded establishment. Galileo’s Sun-centric astronomy vs. the Catholic Church; John Harrison’s longitude-revealing watch vs. the bigwigs […]

Michael Lucid photographs samples found during the Multispecies Baseline Initiative (MBI).Ben Goldfarb In 2010, Michael Lucid, a biologist with the Idaho Department of Fish & Game, captured a surprise in a beer-baited gastropod trap—a slug that didn’t genetically resemble any of the ones he’d caught before. On a hunch, Lucid sent the mysterious invertebrate to […]

Still Life with Gastric PeptideMia Brownell My grandfather wasn’t a big farmer, but his small garden in Kentucky was a miracle. There was rhubarb, corn, and peppers a-plenty, but mostly I remember the tomatoes. He bred his own, saving the seeds of the best specimens every year. By the time he was getting well into […]

Imagine looking down through a microscope and seeing a big mass of bacterial cells, writhing in sync, churning in circles. You can almost hear a buzz of activity. The micron-sized organisms migrate across a plate of agar, gobbling up the nutrient-rich media, recalling the frenetic activity of bees in a hive. What you see through […]

We may not have realized it at the time, but during the 1990s, Hollywood movies were infiltrated by a new presence that outshined even the biggest screen stars: Images created on computers became the main draws for movies like Jurassic Park, Toy Story, The Matrix, and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. Since then, […]

Aristotle filled the void with an invisible ether, Torricelli killed it, and Higgs has gone some way to bringing it back. The will to nothingness is the path away from meaning for Nietzsche, but the path toward meaning for the Buddhist. Some formalist approaches to mathematics define zero as a foundational symbol, while Gödel used […]

By the time of this launch of the space shuttle Discovery in 2009, NASA knew well the dangers of lightning to spacecraft. At the launch of Apollo 12, in 1969, they were in the dark.NASA On July 19, Russia launched a satellite designed to study the effects of microgravity on, among other living beings, geckos. […]

We can experience nothingness, but does it actually exist?

A child asks, and war answers.

How the null hypothesis keeps the hairy hominid alive.

How the null hypothesis keeps the hairy hominid alive.

From a childhood hallucination to the halls of theoretical physics.

My queen was a dud, and her replacement had been murdered.

My queen was a dud, and her replacement had been murdered.

The resurrection of glass sponge reefs proves extinction doesn’t have to be eternal.

Your brain needs to forget in order to grow.

Your brain needs to forget in order to grow.

Contrary to popular belief, peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head.

Contrary to popular belief, peace and quiet is all about the noise in your head.

Genetic tests can predict when placebos may be the best medicine.

Astronomers are using new tools in their search for cosmic voids.

How is it possible to get something from nothing?

Is our Universe inhomogeneous, lumpy and uneven on many size scales, like oil droplets in water?via Shutterstock   In the earliest moments after the Big Bang, the Universe was a turbulent mess, a high-temperature stew of quantum fluctuations. As with turbulence in water, the fluctuations acted at every level: If you could imagine observing the […]

The cause of aviation safety has had a terrible week. An Air Algérie flight crashed yesterday in Mali, reportedly killing all 116 on board. The day before, a TransAsia plane went down on the Taiwanese island of Penghu, leading to the deaths of at least 48 people. And, most notoriously, Malaysian Airlines Flight 17 was […]

The International Space Station captured this photo of the Sarychev Volcano erupting on June 12, 2009. Volcanic plumes contain turbulence that extends to a wide range of size scales. NASA “Ladies and gentlemen, the captain has turned on the seat belt sign. Please return to your seats and ensure your seat belts are fastened.” So […]

A single thread of spider silk flexes deforms under impact from a plastic bullet traveling around 400 meters per second, or 900 miles per hour.OxfordSilkGroup Few materials are as fascinating as spider silk. It’s stronger than steel, flexible rather than brittle, and light enough to float on the breeze. And vibrations in webs tell spiders, […]

The chemicals in our everyday lives are, argues immunologist Claudia Miller.

The FloWave tank performing “party tricks” for a gathering of leaders of the UK marine-renewable-energy sector.FloWave Every day on Canada’s Atlantic coast, just northeast of Maine, a gargantuan amount of water rushes through rocky cliffs into and out of the Bay of Fundy. With currents typically reaching speeds of 12 knots, or 20 feet per […]

British soldiers in a WWI trenchAustralian War Memorial Just over 100 years ago, on the 28th of June, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated in Sarajevo. That set into motion a chain of events that, within several weeks, culminated in the European great powers declaring war on each other. The resulting conflict […]

In one sense, turbulence is a typical subject of scientific research. Described by series of coupled differential equations, and verified by precise measurement, it lies on the harder side of the scientific spectrum. But in another sense, its irreducible complexity requires of the scientist a keen intuitive sense. This is amply clear in the history […]

His weather forecasts changed the world. Could his predictions of war?

Most creatures flee storms, but some thrive because of them.

Record-efficiency turbine farms are being inspired by sealife.

Record-efficiency turbine farms are being inspired by sealife.

A journey to the underwater volcanoes where life may have erupted.

A journey to the underwater volcanoes where life may have erupted.

A 2018 mission will send a probe to within 4 million miles of the sun.

Take this quiz and learn the keys to bouncing back.

A pill to dampen memories stirs hope and worry.

What happens to our bodies when the bonds of love are breached.

Neurological evidence for chaos in the nervous system is growing.

These tiny swirls of fluid live, die, reproduce, and spark turbulence.

These tiny swirls of fluid live, die, reproduce, and spark turbulence.

A researcher who works through painting tells her story.

A researcher who works through painting tells her story.

Two Nautilus artists share their creative visions.

The Summer 2014 Quarterly tackles image and object.

Lord Martin Rees tells us about black holes and existential risks.

Join us at noon on Monday, June 9, when editor in chief Michael Segal will host a live video chat with award-winning journalist and NYU professor, Jessica Seigel about her latest Nautilus piece, “America Is Getting the Science of Sun Exposure Wrong.” There are two ways to participate. You can send us your questions before […]

While many genes are famous, one in particular has been prominent recently. In the early 1990s, scientists discovered that single-letter mutations in a gene named BRCA led to a higher risk of breast cancer. On June 1 of this year, a new report in Nature Genetics implicated mutations in the same gene for lung cancer. […]

[INSERT SCRIPT #1] Data source: NASA Earth Observatory and Xeno-Canto While humans appreciate their songs as enjoyable sonic flourishes, birds sing to accomplish some vital goals, like finding mates and asserting claims over their home territory. So it is no surprise that they’re good at figuring out how to tune their songs so they have […]

Scientists have seen the future and it is “grolar bears.”

Scientists have seen the future and it is “grolar bears.”

Nutritional advice about eggs, naturally high in cholesterol, has been scrambled over the past 50 years.Jag_cz via Shutterstock The practice of nutritional science faces some significant problems, and they are mainly of its own making. For decades, starting in the 1950s, a consensus of experts recommended that Americans cut down on fat, cholesterol, and saturated […]

Experiments in evolution are exploring what would happen if we rewound the tape of life.

Neutrinos can flit between states effortlessly, hinting at deep new physics.

Like a set of common chords, the same math appears in diverse fields of physics.

Particle accelerators can make you healthy and wealthy.

The success of the Mormon religion is a study in social adaptation.

The success of the Mormon religion is a study in social adaptation.

Nils Aall Barricelli showed that organisms evolved by symbiosis and cooperation.

The gregarious physicist gets inside our brains.

Take our quiz on nature’s mutant offspring.

Your heart rate speeds up, your breathing quickens. Your muscles tighten. Your stomach ties itself in knots. All of these changes are symptoms of the condition called stress. When animals, including humans, are under acute stress, their bodies respond with a powerful neurochemical chain reaction. Glucose, the fuel for our cells, is released into the […]

As you look closer and closer at the world, you find more and more levels of organization. And at many of those steps, the view is fantastic. From butterfly wings to snowflakes, zooming in on the world around us can reveal incredible symmetries and patterns, and sometimes pure chaos. Seen at a microscopic level, things […]

A Ganado-style Navajo rugNational Park Service For many thousands of years, and across cultures around the world, symmetry has been seen as beautiful. The mirror-image accuracy of the Parthenon is seen also in the Taj Mahal and the geometric patterns of traditional Navajo rugs. We see symmetry in more fluid, modern media, too, like the […]

  Two months ago, we learned of landmark evidence bolstering the theory of inflation, a period very soon after the Big Bang when the Universe expanded at a terrific rate, stretching out and smoothing its lumps, and making it remarkably consistent on large scales. A recent study confirms that, even 13.8 billion years after the […]

On September 13th 2005, Nick Yee died. A few moments later, he came back to life. Then he died again. And he wasn’t the only one. His city was littered with bodies, bones scattered across the floor of the auction house and town square. “It was simply hilarious,” he said, “that everyone was dying and […]

  A black hole is a one-way door to oblivion. According to general relativity, once anything crosses its boundary—the event horizon—it cannot return to the outside. For that particle, the black hole is the entire future. We’ll never actually get a chance to see the particle live out that destiny: Any light the particle emits […]

  In interviews, famous people often say that the key to becoming both happy and successful is to “do what you love.” But mastering a skill, even one that you deeply love, requires a huge amount of drudgery. Any challenging activity—from computer programming to playing a musical instrument to athletics—requires focused and concentrated practice. A […]

Some half a billion years ago, the first animals with bilateral symmetry appeared on Earth. Rather than being shapeless or spherical, they had long axes with a “left” and “right.” Their mouths separated from their anuses, allowing their gut to run down the length of their body. Movements became more directed, and nervous systems more […]

It’s hard to believe it’s been a whole year since the launch of Nautilus. Thankfully, our readers and staff have kept a kind of scrapbook of memories from this year. So, to celebrate our first birthday, here we present some of the ways people have captured their moments with the magazine so far.  If you […]

The Earth is becoming a computer visible across galactic distance.

The Earth is becoming a computer visible across galactic distance.

Mixed-sex animals teach us about our own multifarious nature.

The head of the Max Planck Society discusses the science of creative visualization.

Breakthroughs in science and art begin with an image.

Hallucinating yourself can be both a symptom and a tool.

James Doty just may embody the altruism he studies.

He ushered symmetry into theoretical physics, then vanished without a trace.

Ants show that emergency exits can work better when they’re obstructed.

Ants show that emergency exits can work better when they’re obstructed.