Nautilus Magazine

12/26/2025

Nautilus looks back on some of the most beautiful pieces we published this year.

Many of those selected were accompanied by beautiful original illustrations. Big thanks to our writers and illustrators.

Here are a few.

Stories at link in comments.
illu for We’re All Wild Things, by Katherine Harmon Courage
for Finding Peter Putnam, by .gefter
for Howl, by Kevin Berger
for When Did I Start Getting Cancer? by Alison Spodekillustration for How Animals Understand Death

12/26/2025

As Einstein saw it, this is where science begins: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: His eyes are closed.”

Einstein’s view was an inspiration for “More Than a Feeling,” a Nautilus article this year by Sean B. Carroll, in which the evolutionary biologist portrays a wonderful world of scientists who found their callings in the emotion of awe. That spirit, too, drives our journalism and essays, and as 2025 winds down, we look back at some of the beautiful insights and writing that defined Nautilus this year.

Full list and excerpts at link in comments.

12/26/2025

Dear Nautilus Readers,

As Einstein saw it, this is where science begins: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: His eyes are closed.”

Einstein’s view was an inspiration for “More Than a Feeling,” a Nautilus article this year by Sean B. Carroll, in which the evolutionary biologist portrays a wonderful world of scientists who found their callings in the emotion of awe. That spirit, too, drives our journalism and essays, and as 2025 winds down, we look back at some of the beautiful insights and writing that defined Nautilus this year.

Full list and excerpts at link in comments.

Illustration by Mathias Ball

12/26/2025

Heritage cuisines are highly vulnerable to global warming because their core ingredients are adapted to historical weather conditions. Maize is indigenous to Mexico. The corn in tamales and tortillas was first consumed because it was readily available. As the climate changes, those staples are unlikely to grow where they have in the past, at least without technological interventions that could redouble troubles, such as diverting rivers for irrigation. Shipping customary crops from afar exacts another environmental cost, equally steep, since transportation requires energy, typically in the form of fossil fuels. In other words, the global challenges of food and water insecurity are especially profound in terms of familiar foods and the sense of security they provide.

Tasting Tomorrow: Can we eat local on a warming planet?

12/26/2025

“Given what we know about PFAS toxicity from other studies, these extreme accumulation rates in top predators suggest serious health risks,” said paper co-author Lorenzo Ricolfi, a Ph.D. student who studies PFAS contamination at the University of New South Wales in Australia, in a statement. “This creates a cascading ecological risk: apex predators face disproportionately high exposure even in relatively low-contaminated environments.”

How All Those Forever Chemicals End Up on Your Plate: Apex predators and people may get the highest doses

12/26/2025

After teeny ocean organisms pick up lingering forever chemicals swirling in water, these man-made substances travel up the food chain—from, say, krill, to anchovies, to the tuna that we place in our grocery carts.

These chemicals, also known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS, are used in more than 200 categories of manufactured products. They’re valued for their water-repelling abilities and heat resistance—but they also stick around in soil, air and water across the globe and don’t degrade over time due to their super strong chemical bonds. Scientists have documented PFAS in the environment in regions as remote as Antarctica.

Now, scientists have found that concentrations of some PFAS double on average each time the substances creep up one rung of the food chain, findings reported in Nature Communications. These increases seem to occur when animals absorb the compounds quicker than they can metabolize or expel them.

An international team of scientists analyzed how PFAS moved across more than 100 food webs spanning land and water. Gathering data from 64 studies, they conducted the first meta-analysis of data on PFAS accumulation across food chains around the world. The researchers hoped to clear up inconsistencies in past research, which has pointed to both minor amounts of PFAS accumulating in some food webs and massive build-up in others.

The researchers traced levels of 72 different types of PFAS, and found that increases from one rung of the food chain to the next depend on the substance. For example, F-53B, a chemical used to manufacture some machine parts, showed the highest average increase—around three-fold from prey to predator. F-53B was designed as a less toxic alternative to a substance that’s restricted or banned in many countries. But like several of these new alternatives, its concentration multiplied as it stepped up the food chain at a greater rate than the predecessor.

“Given what we know about PFAS toxicity from other studies, these extreme accumulation rates in top predators suggest serious health risks,” said paper co-author Lorenzo Ricolfi, a Ph.D. student who studies PFAS contamination at the University of New South Wales in Australia, in a statement. “This creates a cascading ecological risk: apex predators face disproportionately high exposure even in relatively low-contaminated environments.”

Scientists have linked PFAS exposure in humans to a whole host of conditions, including liver disease, kidney disease and cancer, but no definitive evidence that it causes these diseases exists yet. Still, PFAS have been detected in blood samples taken from people and animals around the world.

Ricolfi and his co-authors hope this research helps propel changes in policy governing the kinds of PFAS that accumulate most between predator and prey, especially the unregulated chemicals examined in the paper. And with these results, they’re particularly concerned about the newer chemicals brought to market to substitute for banned ones.

“Urgent research into health impacts of these new chemicals is needed before they become as ubiquitous and problematic as the PFAS they’re replacing,” Ricolfi said.

12/26/2025

If you can’t detect subtle hints of chocolate in wine or hazelnut in caviar, don’t fret. We might be able to intensify our tasting abilities with training, researchers suggest. Take sommeliers, for example—they seem to refine their palettes over time through experience, rather than possessing particularly powerful senses from the start.

But can anyone learn to sharpen their taste buds? In a small 2022 study, researchers at Toho University in Japan reported that they helped people boost their ability to identify the four basic tastes—sweetness, saltiness, sourness and bitterness. The team first measured each participants’ taste thresholds, or the lowest concentration of a given taste that they could perceive. Then, they repeatedly exposed them to higher and lower concentrations of these substances to improve their sensitivity, asking them to correctly identify which unlabeled substance they tried until they got them all correct.

Now, some of the same scientists say this protocol can elevate a person’s ability to discern different qualities of sweetness.

With a group of 40 healthy adults, the team began by determining how much glucose, fructose, sucrose, maltose and lactose each person needed in order to taste it. Then, over three consecutive days, participants were repeatedly asked to memorize and correctly identify the different types of sweetness at concentrations lower and higher than this minimum. The training continued until they could accurately guess the mysterious substances at both these higher and lower concentrations. In each case, the individuals were eventually able to learn to taste different gradations of sweetness at smaller doses.

“Even subtle differences within the same taste quality can be discerned through taste training,” the authors wrote in their paper, which was published in Chemical Senses. “This result appears to validate the idiom ‘a discerning palate.’”

The recent study does come with limitations—the sample size was small, for instance, and the researchers didn’t test how participants’ dietary preferences affected their taste sensitivity.

But with more research, this type of training could be used to treat taste disorders, which lack highly effective treatments. It may also help older individuals who develop anorexia as their sense of taste declines, among other aging-related issues that affect food intake.

It might not take years of wine-sniffing to become a flavor expert—a few days of taste boot camp might be enough.

12/26/2025

Negotiation is a useful skill in life. It can help you get a better deal for yourself—whether at work, in the used car lot, or when you’re buying that guitar from the sketchy guy on Craigslist. But Americans, it turns out, may not really enjoy negotiating.

Negotiation expert David Hunsaker says he was strolling through a market in Tel-Aviv, Israel, recently while attending a conference, when he noticed that neither he nor any of his colleagues tried to haggle for a better price. Hunsaker, a professor of management at the Kelley School of Business in Indiana, started to wonder: If even negotiation scholars are reluctant to try to cut a deal, what about the average person? That curiosity inspired a research project.

Hunsaker and his colleagues were not outliers. In a series of five studies with a total of 5,881 American participants, the team found that most people avoided negotiating most of the time—even when that avoidance came with a price. Their findings also suggest that aversion to negotiation among Americans has more to do with fear of conflict or social stigma than with bad money math or laziness.

“Our work focuses on how much individuals are willing to sacrifice, or even pay, to avoid negotiating altogether,” Hunsaker said in a statement. Hunsaker and his co-authors published their results in the journal Negotiation and Conflict Management Research.

In the first study, the researchers asked participants if they had ever passed up a chance to negotiate, and how often they thought they would tend to skip it. On average, people said they failed to negotiate about half the time when they had the opportunity to do so, and women were more likely to avoid negotiating than men.

In a second study, the researchers wanted to learn whether a certain threshold of savings would spur people to negotiate. Participants were asked to imagine buying electronics at different prices: $20, $200, $2,000 and $20,000. Then they were told to calculate how much they would have to save before negotiating seemed worth it. In general, people did not think about this trade-off in fixed dollar amounts, but in percentages: for most people, negotiating was only something they would consider if they could get a discount of roughly 21 to 36 percent.

In a third study, the scientists sought to figure out whether people would pay extra just to avoid negotiating. About half of the respondents said they would pay some amount. When asked more specifically about a $20,000 car purchase, people said they would pay on average around $1,000 extra to avoid negotiating. For a $2,000 car, they would pay closer to $230.

To see if little nudges could change the calculus, the researchers tried two tactics: First, they asked participants to think about their hourly wage, which had no effect. In a separate experiment, they asked participants to consider buying a couch on Craigslist. Half of the participants also were told that negotiating was the norm: That 80 percent of Americans negotiate when purchasing an item on Craigslist. This did have a moderate positive effect on the participants’ reported willingness to haggle.

The study had some limitations. For one, all the participants were from the United States. The researchers chose this country as their point of focus because of its prevailing culture of individualism and self-advocacy, but follow-up work could test whether similar patterns hold in cultures with “different norms around confrontation, hierarchy, and relationship maintenance,” they write.

All the studies were also conducted online, which could have introduced certain biases. And the studies measured only intent to negotiate, as opposed to actual negotiating behavior.

Still, Hunsaker and his colleagues hope the project can serve as a starting point for improved understanding of negotiation and its benefits, including empowering individuals and organizations to “realize more value, equity, and agency in their interactions,” they write in the paper.

Hunsaker also offered some tips for low-conflict negotiation. First, do your research so you know your options ahead of time. Second, leave room for concessions. If you want to pay a certain amount for something, offer a little bit less at first. And finally, focus on relationships, not on victory.

“People that go into negotiation with a winning mindset end up burning bridges or hurting feelings,” said Hunsaker. “The people you most often negotiate with will be repeat customers or longtime clients. If you burn those bridges, you will miss out on deals later,” he said. So listen, and build trust while you haggle.

12/26/2025

In a series of five studies with a total of 5,881 American participants, the team found that most people avoided negotiating most of the time—even when that avoidance came with a price. Their findings also suggest that aversion to negotiation among Americans has more to do with fear of conflict or social stigma than with bad money math or laziness.

Americans Don’t Seem to Enjoy Negotiating: Even when they have to pay more to avoid it

12/26/2025

Farm animals are attacked by a whole slew of pathogens—from the bacteria causing anthrax to the virus causing avian flu. Louis Pasteur derived the first live vaccines for animals in the 1850s, yet we’re still fighting global infections that threaten to take down livestock and spill over to humans. Because farm animals share close quarters, their transmission rates are high, leading to deadly outbreaks. Case in point: the recent uptick of lumpy skin infections in cattle, prompting the French government to deploy its army to help stem the spread with vaccinations.

A new study published yesterday in PNAS collated global disease and vaccination data for the 104 diseases most common in cattle, poultry, and pigs. A collective of researchers from universities and One Health organizations in the United States, France, Switzerland, and Belgium aimed to gather systematic data on global vaccination coverage to expand prevention and control of livestock diseases. They pooled information from the last 20 years’ worth of country-wide reports on vaccination programs and stats from World Animal Health System, a global reference for animal diseases.

Spanning more than 200 countries and territories, the study homed in on the top 11 diseases most targeted by official vaccination programs. The results revealed vaccination shortfalls across the board. In cattle, vaccination rates are 16.64 percent for foot and mouth disease; 33.80 percent for lumpy skin disease; 11.57 percent for anthrax, and 7.93 percent for rabies. In poultry, vaccination coverage is 16.71 percent for infectious bronchitis and 17.62 percent for an extremely contagious disease called Newcastle. And in pigs, the rates are 6.56 percent for classical swine fever, 4.96 percent for anthrax, and 8.08 percent for rabies.

Looking at which countries were most affected by each disease relative to their vaccination rates, they identified places where preventative measures most need bolstering. The weakest links in the global vaccination chain were in India and Argentina for cattle diseases; China and Russia for pigs; and China, Brazil, and Iran for poultry. In China, for example, estimated anthrax cases in pigs for 2025 totaled 118, against a worrying backdrop of only one percent vaccine coverage.

The researchers concluded that current vaccination rates for livestock might not be sufficient to prevent diseases that threaten food security and humans, noting that “global vaccination trends in at-risk regions have remained relatively stagnant over time.” As for solutions, they argued that integrating all the available evidence on disease transmission and vaccination rates in livestock will provide a baseline from which to make improvements toward better global health.

12/26/2025

"My memory has ruled my life,” a singular 34-year-old woman told some researchers a couple of decades ago as they sat chatting in their University of California, Irvine, lab. Known as the human calendar to her friends but nicknamed AJ in later research reports, the woman had written to them in distress. She was looking for help. “I want to know why I remember everything,” she said. AJ told the scientists that she couldn’t turn her memory off, even when she was engaged in other activities that demanded her attention, like talking to a friend. “It’s like a running movie that never stops.”

Previous cases of superior memory had generally involved an individual’s ability to remember and rattle off long lists of meaningless information, such as words or digits, as opposed to personal recollections. So the team of scientists ran AJ through a battery of tests. They found that she was indeed able to effortlessly reel off the details of clear and verifiable memories for numerous dates and that her scores were off the charts on standardized and informal autobiographical memory tasks.

The scientists reported on AJ’s condition, and coined the term “hyperthymesia” to describe it, in Neurocase in 2006. Since that time, researchers have documented at least 100 cases of hyperthymesia in the literature. Almost uniformly, those who have the condition find the memories—which tend to be carefully indexed by date—intrusive, uncontrollable, and distressing.

Learn more at link in comments.

12/26/2025

"My memory has ruled my life,” a singular 34-year-old woman told some researchers a couple of decades ago as they sat chatting in their University of California, Irvine, lab. Known as the human calendar to her friends but nicknamed AJ in later research reports, the woman had written to them in distress. She was looking for help. “I want to know why I remember everything,” she said. AJ told the scientists that she couldn’t turn her memory off, even when she was engaged in other activities that demanded her attention, like talking to a friend. “It’s like a running movie that never stops.”

Previous cases of superior memory had generally involved an individual’s ability to remember and rattle off long lists of meaningless information, such as words or digits, as opposed to personal recollections. So the team of scientists ran AJ through a battery of tests. They found that she was indeed able to effortlessly reel off the details of clear and verifiable memories for numerous dates and that her scores were off the charts on standardized and informal autobiographical memory tasks.

The scientists reported on AJ’s condition, and coined the term “hyperthymesia” to describe it, in Neurocase in 2006. Since that time, researchers have documented at least 100 cases of hyperthymesia in the literature. Almost uniformly, those who have the condition find the memories—which tend to be carefully indexed by date—intrusive, uncontrollable, and distressing.

Why This 17-Year-Old Girl Can’t Forget: Some people have extraordinary powers of mental time travel, able to recall everything