Nautilus Magazine

Nautilus Magazine Science's boldest ideas decoded by the brightest living thinkers and writers. Subscribe to the weekly newsletter: https://nautil.us/newsletter/

Amanda Gefter has lived with Peter Putnam in her head for 12 years now. “I feel like I know him better than the actual p...
07/02/2025

Amanda Gefter has lived with Peter Putnam in her head for 12 years now. “I feel like I know him better than the actual people I know,” she said to me with a peal of laughter, as if confessing a secret that she had kept inside her for so long.

Until Gefter’s article, “Finding Peter Putnam,” was published in Nautilus on June 17, next to nobody had heard of the physicist who worked out the logic of the human mind, an issue critical to physicists puzzling over how the mind shapes the nature of reality. The few scientists who did know and champion Putnam are history’s marquee names: John Archibald Wheeler, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr.

We’re not the only species who can cheer up instantly after a good laugh. Bonobos, some of humans’ closest living relati...
07/02/2025

We’re not the only species who can cheer up instantly after a good laugh. Bonobos, some of humans’ closest living relatives, seem to adopt a brighter outlook after hearing the laughter of other apes. This may drive them to make riskier choices with hopes of more positive outcomes, according to recent research published in Scientific Reports.

Great apes have long been observed giggling during play. Researchers have suggested that laughter in great apes shares an evolutionary history with human laughter, which sounds similar to that of non-human primates. But it wasn’t clear whether these behaviors influenced the emotions and thoughts of non-human primates. For a firmer grasp of ape funny business, scientists conducted what they say is a first-of-its-kind experiment with bonobos.

Author Laura Spinney was dismayed to realize just how many languages once spoken by humans were never recorded and have ...
07/02/2025

Author Laura Spinney was dismayed to realize just how many languages once spoken by humans were never recorded and have been lost to oblivion. Linguists can only piece together our linguistic past up through 10,000 years ago.

Given the dangerous propensity of chatbots to move us toward groupthink, and eventually render the internet more uniform...
07/02/2025

Given the dangerous propensity of chatbots to move us toward groupthink, and eventually render the internet more uniform, the use of chatbot-integrated searches, which serves users chatbot-written answers to Google searches, must be rejected as epistemically dangerous. For these searches deliver generic answers of the same kind to everyone, including answers to questions requiring intellectual depth and sophistication that would naturally require more reflection—reflection the user instead avoids.

Astronomers have long thought that the oldest galaxies in the universe formed a few hundred million years after the Big ...
07/02/2025

Astronomers have long thought that the oldest galaxies in the universe formed a few hundred million years after the Big Bang, which happened 13.8 billion years ago. The but a new massive image of the universe, taken by the James Webb telescope, shows many of these galaxies were already highly-evolved by 13.5 billion years ago—with well-defined structures and older stars—and that some had light spectrums that showed supermassive black holes at their cores.

This suggests the galaxies formed much earlier than expected and so the Big Bang theory will have to be adjusted, says astrophysicist Jeyhan Kartaltepe of the Rochester Institute of Technology. She also hopes the individual James Webb observations in the mosaic image will be used as an online resource by astronomers studying the evolution of galaxies: The sample set of 800,000 galaxies is so large that it includes numerous examples of almost every type of galaxy, at almost every stage of evolution.

The concerted scientific journey into extra dimensions began with Hermann Minkowski, Einstein’s former teacher, who real...
07/02/2025

The concerted scientific journey into extra dimensions began with Hermann Minkowski, Einstein’s former teacher, who realized that “space by itself, and time by itself, have vanished into the merest shadows” and that only a unification of them, spacetime, exists. Spacetime means that the universe truly is four-dimensional, just that one of the dimensions is that of time, rather than an additional one of space. One extra dimension discovered.

But might there be more?

Beginning in the middle of the 20th century, scientists began to speculate that there might indeed be more to the universe. And that speculation was born from an unlikely source: the astounding weakness of gravity.

In the 1970s, as McDonnell Douglas was developing the F-15 Eagle fighter jet, testing revealed to engineers that pilots’...
07/02/2025

In the 1970s, as McDonnell Douglas was developing the F-15 Eagle fighter jet, testing revealed to engineers that pilots’ reactions to warning lights were too slow, especially as the cockpit display increased in complexity.

Testing by the U.S. Air Force had shown that a verbal warning system would be more effective—that a human voice breaking into the cockpit would convey a sense of urgency, as well as offer clear and unambiguous directions at the point of need.

Engineers purportedly chose a female voice for the warnings because they believed it would stand out to male fighter pilots. A young actress was recruited to record a series of words that were integrated into the warning system of the F-15. That actress, Kim Crow, recalls that after one of the test flights, the pilot was asked how everything worked; he said, “It was wonderful, except for that Bitching Betty.” The name stuck.

From the cockpit to consumer tech, synthetic voices in our technology shed light on gender biases.

Benjamin Breen argues in his book "Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedeli...
07/01/2025

Benjamin Breen argues in his book "Tripping on Utopia: Margaret Mead, the Cold War, and the Troubled Birth of Psychedelic Science" that widespread public acceptance of psychedelics in the 1950s could easily have led to their legalization as medicines and integration into mainstream culture. The prohibition and stigma that followed could have been avoided.

What does it even mean for us to know that something is true, and how can chatbots move closer to truth? Plato claimed t...
07/01/2025

What does it even mean for us to know that something is true, and how can chatbots move closer to truth? Plato claimed that knowledge of something requires having “justified true belief.” And while philosophers continue to debate the nature of knowledge, to provide a solid justification for a belief, there needs to be a transparent process for arriving there in the first place.

Unfortunately, AI chatbots present the antithesis of transparency.

By their nature, they are trained on billions of lines of text, making predictions bounded by this training data. So if the data are biased, the predictions made by the algorithm will also be biased—as the adage in computer science goes, “garbage in, garbage out.”

To calculate the impact of increased fire activity on climate change, atmospheric scientist Dargan Frierson and his coll...
07/01/2025

To calculate the impact of increased fire activity on climate change, atmospheric scientist Dargan Frierson and his colleagues leveraged the Global Fire Emissions Database, which catalogs levels of smoke, soot, and CO2 emitted by fires in a given year. They then analyzed the relationship between fire activity, fire-related emissions, and global temperatures between 1997 to 2023 and plugged these variables into existing climate change models.

“Forest fires have an effect on climate in a lot of ways,” says Frierson. These fires release smoke, carbon dioxide, methane, and all sorts of other pollutants—including sometimes toxic substances. Much of this mixture of emissions has a warming effect on the planet, whether by adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere or by darkening the surface of snow and ice, causing it to capture more heat and melt faster.

But the models Frierson and his colleagues ran found that this warming is more than offset by the net cooling effect that the smoke and other aerosols create when they brighten clouds and prevent some of the sun’s heat from ever reaching the surface. This even manages to keep some of the sea ice in the Arctic from melting; as a result, the ice lasts longer and stays thicker deeper into the summer and fall than it otherwise would, which leads to even more cooling in the winter compared to what most other climate models suggest.

As the Siberian permafrost melts, it’s revealing an increasing number of millennia-old woolly mammoth tusks. These ancie...
07/01/2025

As the Siberian permafrost melts, it’s revealing an increasing number of millennia-old woolly mammoth tusks. These ancient tusks might be sating some of the global demand for ivory from endangered African elephants. But not enough. Between poaching and habitat loss, African elephant populations have plummeted in recent decades.

To try to evade the law, some smugglers mix legally traded mammoth ivory with contraband elephant ivory, and it’s difficult to distinguish between these relatives without costly tests—radiocarbon dating and molecular analysis—that can take weeks to yield answers.

So scientists from the University of Hong Kong have proposed a cheaper, speedier solution to keep African elephant tusks out of the trade. By comparing the ratios of certain elements’ isotopes in tusks, law enforcement could easily pinpoint which hulking proboscideans the ivory belonged to, according to results recently published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution.

Humans will be living on the moon in the next century, according to Joseph Silk, an astrophysicist at John's Hopkins."Ri...
07/01/2025

Humans will be living on the moon in the next century, according to Joseph Silk, an astrophysicist at John's Hopkins.

"Right now, we seem very far away from this," says Silk. "But it’s got to happen. We have maybe one or two decades before the moon becomes a competitive place and exploration heats up."

Address

New York, NY

Website

Alerts

Be the first to know and let us send you an email when Nautilus Magazine posts news and promotions. Your email address will not be used for any other purpose, and you can unsubscribe at any time.

Shortcuts

Share

Category

Our Story

Nautilus is a different kind of science media company. We are science, philosophy, and culture connected, offering a new perspective on human uniqueness and our universe—all beautifully illustrated. Each month in our magazine (and every day online at Nautil.us), we explore topics from various scientific disciplines, pairing award-winning journalists with illustrators to create features that are unlike any other science journalism—fascinating, inspired, and innovative. Nautilus publishes online and print long-form features, as well as a blog, Facts So Romantic, a news service, Three Sentence Science, and more. Beautiful, intriguing, and full of wonder—Nautilus is what science journalism should be.