General
43 articles-
Automatic for the Oceans
A rock trio on the rise is raising environmental awareness.
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Join Nautilus Live—Get the Truth About Sun Exposure
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 the […]
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Forest for the Trees—Why We Recognize Faces & Constellations
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 […]
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The Universe, Expanding Symmetrically and Eternally
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 era […]
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“White Holes” Could Exist—But That Doesn’t Mean They Do
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 (which would […]
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Third Data Server From the Sun
The Earth is becoming a computer visible across galactic distance.
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Half Male, Half Female, Total Animal
Mixed-sex animals teach us about our own multifarious nature.
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“We Are Visual Animals, Driven By Images”
The head of the Max Planck Society discusses the science of creative visualization.
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Picasso and Einstein Got the Picture
Breakthroughs in science and art begin with an image.
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How to Learn to Love Your Doppelganger
Hallucinating yourself can be both a symptom and a tool.
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The Disappearing Physicist and His Elusive Particle
He ushered symmetry into theoretical physics, then vanished without a trace.
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Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile
Infinite patterns that never repeat have moved from fantasy to reality.
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Mood Ring—Cell Phones Can Hear Depression in People’s Voices
Three examples of speech from a person with bipolar disorder. The rows show one second each of manic, euthymic (normal), and depressed speech. The colored rectangles show various features extracted from the speech, where color indicates the amplitude of that feature for that speaker. The 10 features measure qualities of the person’s voice like pitch, […]
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When Theft Was Worse Than Murder
Hundreds of years of trial documents reveal our changing attitudes to violent crime.
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The Gaia Hypothesis Is Still Giving Us Feedback
Revisiting James Lovelock’s theory as it approaches 50.
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Building the Perfect Painkiller
Inside the quest to conquer addictive drugs.
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This Iconoclast Injected Life Into Artificial Body Parts
Laura Niklason recognized that synthetic organs can’t grow without mechanical stress.
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Ants Swarm Like Brains Think
A neuroscientist studies ant colonies to understand feedback in the brain.
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Decoding Nature’s Soundtrack
The health of an ecosystem in the Earth’s own words.
