Nautilus Magazine

12/19/2025

Bruce Damer was camped in the Amazon rainforest. The scientist and biochemistry researcher had traveled to this spot in remote Peru in 2013. Inside a wooden maloca—a teepee-shaped structure—and guided by Indigenous shamans, he spent days drinking foul-tasting ayahuasca, a brew of two hallucinogenic Amazonian plants.

One evening, a full moon hung over the rainforest. Amid the sounds of monkeys, grasshoppers, and the shamans’ chants to forest spirits, Damer saw madre ayahuasca. He asked her, “Would you like to do this? How about we join together and travel and try to figure out how we were all born?”

Before he knew it, Damer experienced a vision of himself sling-shotting back through his life, conception, and witnessed “a s***m swimming backward into various ancestors.” He was pulled backward through 4 billion years of evolutionary time until he reached a dense microbial cloud. He burst through the v***r and arrived in a harsh Hadean landscape; a hot, volcanic world with freshwater hot springs filled with a primordial soup under a sky streaked with meteors and chemical haze.

There, he invited the madre to help him become a protocell, a precursor to evolution. In the vision, he watched himself split, merge, dry out, and rehydrate. “My body was this undulating, amphiphilic sac just stretching out in front of me,” Damer said.

This scene is from "The Psychedelic Scientist," a captivating profile of Damer by journalist Mattha Busby in the latest issue of Nautilus. Damer argues psychedelic experiences can not only help people get over personal psychological hurdles but lead to scientific breakthroughs. And Damer has the experience to prove it. Psychedelics, he said, helped him solve one of science's longest and most difficult questions: how life on Earth began.

Busby had been covering the psychedelic renaissance for magazines such as Vice, Rolling Stone, and Wired, when in 2024 a neuroscientist researching psychedelics told the journalist he had to meet Damer and hear his stories. "So, I listened to a podcast by Damer while I was sitting on a beach in Vancouver, a tale about him becoming the first protocell under the influence of ayahuasca," Busby said. "I knew this was a profile for me."

And now, for you.

The Psychedelic Scientist: High on ayahuasca, Bruce Damer saw how life on Earth began. He may very well be right.

12/19/2025

In 1985, an Australian eco-philosopher went canoeing alone in Kakadu National Park. A crocodile rammed her boat, dragged her underwater, and tried repeatedly to drown her.

She survived—but what stayed with her wasn’t only the violence of the attack. It was the sudden realization that, in that moment, she was not exceptional. She was prey.

That experience reshaped how she understood humanity’s place in the natural world. And it opens onto a larger, unsettling body of scientific work that asks a question we rarely consider today: what if humans were shaped at least as much by being hunted as by hunting?

The story begins with one woman’s survival. It widens into a challenge to a long-standing picture of who we think we are.

When We Were Lunch: How being food for other animals has made us into the humans we are today.

12/19/2025

Plenty is known about key compounds in food responsible for nutrition, but they represent only a tiny fraction of the molecular makeup of food—less than 10 percent, estimates David Wishart, a professor of computing and biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Canada, and founder of FooDB–the world’s largest database of the chemical composition of foods.⁠
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The rest is “nutritional dark matter,” a term coined by Albert-László Barabási, a professor of network science and physics at Northeastern University.⁠
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So how exactly does this "nutritional dark matter" affect our health and behavior?⁠

The Dark Matter of Food: Exposing the chemicals that affect our health and behavior.

12/19/2025

Plenty is known about key compounds in food responsible for nutrition, but they represent only a tiny fraction of the molecular makeup of food—less than 10 percent, estimates David Wishart, a professor of computing and biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Canada, and founder of FooDB–the world’s largest database of the chemical composition of foods.⁠
⁠
The rest is “nutritional dark matter,” a term coined by Albert-László Barabási, a professor of network science and physics at Northeastern University.⁠
⁠
So how exactly does this "nutritional dark matter" affect our health and behavior?⁠
⁠
Link in comments.

12/19/2025

Plenty is known about key compounds in food responsible for nutrition, but they represent only a tiny fraction of the molecular makeup of food—less than 10 percent, estimates Wishart. The rest is “nutritional dark matter,” a term coined by Albert-László Barabási, a professor of network science and physics at Northeastern University.

The Dark Matter of Food: Exposing the chemicals that affect our health and behavior.

12/19/2025

A note from Editor at Large, Kevin Berger, on the new issue of Nautilus:⁠
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If I had to compare Nautilus to a restaurant, and that’s not a random thought, as this new issue features a food section, I would call it a favorite neighborhood spot where you feel welcome and comfortable and can always trust the chefs to surprise you with something good.⁠
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That's because the minds at Nautilus are always cooking. I like to think we share a basic ingredient with Bruce Damer, the subject of our profile, “The Psychedelic Scientist.” While high on ayahuasca, Damer had a vision of how life on Earth got started 4 billion years ago in the chemical brew of terrestrial hot springs. ⁠
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That may sound fantastical, but Damer has done the hard science to back up his psychedelic reveries. He works with David Deamer of the University of California, Santa Cruz, an eminent biochemist.⁠
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“Bruce and I are in love with ideas,” Deamer told Nautilus. “We’re in love with the universe and the mysteries around us. Some human minds just love ideas. They’re putting things together and getting new insights. We’re doing psychedelics with our brains.”⁠
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That’s what I mean by Nautilus shares a quality with Damer. We want to spark new insights. Which is how we prepared our food articles.⁠
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"When We Were Lunch" steps back in evolutionary time to reveal how our ancestors were not predators, they were prey. A takeaway from “The Dark Matter of Food,” about a project to uncover the thousands of unknown chemicals in food, is that if we are what we eat, we really need to get to know ourselves better.⁠
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So, you see, the exploratory spirit of Bruce Damer is at the heart of this issue. We didn’t create the magazine on psychedelics. But that gives me an idea for the next issue!⁠
⁠.........⁠
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Join by Dec 31 to get a copy in print. Link in comments.

12/19/2025

Alone in a canoe, Val Plumwood was gliding along a channel in tropical Australia’s Kakadu National Park in 1985 when a huge crocodile rammed her. She paddled to the shore as fast as she could, but the crocodile struck the canoe again and again. A thought flashed through Plumwood’s mind: “I am prey.” She grabbed hold of an overhanging tree, hoping to escape onto land.

“Before my foot even tripped the first branch, I had a blurred, incredulous vision of great toothed jaws bursting from the water,” Plumwood wrote. “Then I was seized between the legs in a red-hot pincer grip and whirled into the suffocating wet darkness.” The crocodile rolled Plumwood underwater, trying to drown her.

“The roll was a centrifuge of boiling blackness that lasted for an eternity, beyond endurance, but when I seemed all but finished, the rolling suddenly stopped. My feet touched bottom, my head broke the surface, and, coughing, I sucked at air, amazed to be alive. The crocodile still had me in its pincer grip between the legs. I had just begun to weep for the prospects of my mangled body when the crocodile pitched me suddenly into a second death roll.”

Plumwood surfaced only to be dunked for the third time by the crocodile. But when the croc rolled her above the water yet again, he briefly loosened his jaws, and she managed to scramble to a muddy bank and claw her way up it. After hours of painful struggle through the bush, a park ranger heard her cries for help and, remarkably, she was rescued.

Plumwood was an eco-philosopher, deeply attuned to the connectedness of human beings with the natural world. Her survival allowed her to give the rest of us one of the most riveting accounts of what it means to be prey.

When We Were Lunch: How being food for other animals has made us into the humans we are today.

12/19/2025

With the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continuing to grab headlines, it’s easy to forget the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is still zipping around Earth, monitoring the stars. First launched in 1990, the telescope has witnessed quite a bit in its 35-year life, and recently, it captured a never-before-seen astronomical event—the aftermath of two cosmic collisions.

An international team of astronomers aimed the HST at Fomalhaut, the brightest star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, surrounded by a dusty cloud and orbited by a potential exoplanet, Fomalhaut b. The particularly bright Fomoalhaut b has puzzled researchers for years as they’ve struggled to determine if it’s an actual exoplanet or just a larger cloud of dust. When they took a peek in 2023, they made a startling discovery. Fomalhaut b had vanished. Instead, they found another bright spot in a different part of the system.

So what happened? The astronomers now believe the disappearing Fomalhaut b was never an exoplanet at all, rather it was a cloud of dust they’re now calling Fomalhaut cs1. The mystifying appearance of the other bright spot, Fomalhaut cs2, is another cloud of cosmic debris. Incredibly, both are the remnants of smashups between small rocky bodies called “planetesimals” (a portmanteau of “planet” and “infinitessimal”). They published their findings today in Science.

“Spotting a new light source in the dust belt around a star was surprising. We did not expect that at all,” co-author Jason Wang, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, said in a statement. “Our primary hypothesis is that we saw two collisions of planetesimals—small rocky objects, like asteroids—over the last two decades.”

It’s an incredibly rare occurrence to observe once, let alone twice, and it suggests the planetesimals zooming through Fomalhaut’s dust cloud are engaged in a game of cosmic billiards.

“Theory suggests that there should be one collision every 100,000 years, or longer. Here, in 20 years, we’ve seen two,” study co-author Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley, said. “If you had a movie of the last 3,000 years, and it was sped up so that every year was a fraction of a second, imagine how many flashes you’d see over that time. Fomalhaut’s planetary system would be sparkling with these collisions.”

Because planetesimals are the building blocks of planets, astronomers believe this new research will help shed light on how planets form. The next step? Get a better picture of Fomhault’s chaotic crash zone using better equipment.

“Due to Hubble’s age, it can no longer collect reliable data of the system,” Wang added. “Fortunately, we now have the JWST. We have an approved JWST program to follow up this planetesimal collision to understand the new circumstellar source and the nature of its two parent planetesimals that collided.”

Whether it’s exoplanets or space telescopes, it’s always out with the old, in with the new.

12/19/2025

There are few things more delightful in life than a giddy, runaway laugh shared with a friend. When the mood strikes, chuckles can become contagious. But sometimes these bouts of hilarity bubble up at just the wrong moment, when social mores call for solemnity and a straight face. Anyone who has found themselves giggling during a funeral, for example, knows how difficult it can be to tone down their tittering.

Recently, a research team at the University of Göttingen decided to investigate what strategies humans can use to keep our laughter under wraps when situations demand seriousness. Some approaches work better than others, they found, but everything works less well when other people around us are guffawing. They published their results in Communications Psychology.

“Hearing another person laugh made it much harder to control laughter,” said co-author Anne Schacht, a Göttingen University psychologist, in a statement. “This just goes to show how strongly our emotional reactions are affected by the presence of others and how deeply humans are social beings.”

The subject of laughter regulation has gotten very little scientific attention, Schacht and her colleagues note, though plenty of research has addressed other types of emotional management, including both negative emotional states such as anger and sadness and positive emotions such as happiness and pride.

To fill this gap, the scientists ran three separate experiments with a total of 121 study participants. The volunteers were asked to listen to 100 jokes read by two men and two women—the readers were asked to recite the jokes in an amused and enthusiastic tone, but not to laugh—and to rely one of three approaches to keep a straight face: distracting themselves with a large busy illustration in which objects were hidden, focusing on keeping their facial expressions under control, and reinterpreting the jokes so that they felt un-funny.

To measure how well these strategies worked, the scientists used a technology called facial electromyography to record tiny muscle movements involved in smiling and laughter invisible to the naked eye. They also created a smile index to quantify combined activity from certain facial muscles. Laughter in particular involves muscles around the mouth, eye, and brow—including the zygomatic major, the orbicularis oculi, and the corrugator supercilii. To see how the volunteers felt about the jokes, they asked them to rate their funniness on a scale of 1 to 5.

In all three experiments, the jokes were the same, but the conditions were a little bit different. In the first experiment, the participants were asked to either reappraise the jokes or control their facial muscles. In the second, they were told to distract themselves with the illustration. In the third, they were asked to use self-suppression exclusively. In the first two, the participants were alone, but in the third, the scientists fed in video laugh tracks.

What the scientists found is that distraction and suppression do the best job of quieting the funny facial muscles, while rethinking the jokes mainly made the participants feel differently about how humorous they were. Suppression also worked less well with the best of the jokes, and did not affect funniness ratings.

But the funniest if least surprising finding was that listening to a laugh track made the jokes feel more hilarious and made it harder for participants to control their own amusement.

All of which is to say, laughter really is contagious.

12/19/2025

Roman soldiers stationed at a fort called Vindolanda in what’s now northern England—not far from the famous Hadrian’s Wall—seem to have run into some pretty severe tummy troubles.

Previously, scientists have dug up evidence of parasites that wreak havoc on the gastrointestinal system at several Roman military settlements, including archeological sites in Austria, Scotland, and Serbia.

Past excavations at Vindolanda have unearthed all sorts of well-preserved items, including wooden tablets that described military activities at the site. Romans lived there between the first and fourth centuries A.D., and troops from all over Europe spent time there. Vindolanda had multiple bath houses over the centuries, and by the third century occupants sourced water from nearby natural springs through an aqueduct. The Romans at Vindolanda also maintained drains and ditches to dispose of water and waste.

This infrastructure makes Vindolanda a prime spot to hunt for parasites, which can spread via food, water, and hands contaminated with human f***s and infect dozens of people at once.

To hunt for traces of these pathogens, a team from Canada and the United Kingdom examined sediment from a sewer drain connected to a latrine block at a third-century bath house. They also studied sediment collected from a ditch from the first century, which was part of the fort’s defenses.

The sediment from both areas contained eggs from parasitic worms called roundworms and whipworms. These infect humans and other animals, and can cause symptoms like diarrhea, pain, anemia, and fever.

They found these eggs in 28 percent of all sediment samples from the sewer drain. In one of these samples, they also identified traces of Giardia duodenalis—marking the first evidence of this parasite in Roman Britain. This ailment, known as giardiasis, is also associated with diarrhea, and can cause dehydration, intense fatigue, and weight loss.

This means that Roman soldiers in the area may have experienced plenty of stomach upset and other nasty symptoms while on duty, according to a new paper published in Parasitology.

“While the Romans were aware of intestinal worms, there was little their doctors could do to clear infection by these parasites or help those experiencing diarrhea, meaning symptoms could persist and worsen,” said paper first author Marissa Ledger, a biological anthropologist at McMaster University in Canada, who worked on the paper while a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge in a statement. “These chronic infections likely weakened soldiers, reducing fitness for duty.”

While the Romans tried to keep things clean at Vindolanda with latrines and a sewer system, “all parasites recovered are spread by ineffective sanitation,” the authors wrote. In these conditions, the soldiers were also potentially vulnerable to other pathogens that spread similarly, like Salmonella and norovirus—which can also make for highly unpleasant trips to the bath house.

Compared with the pathogenic finds from military sites like Vindolanda, previous research has suggested that people in larger Roman Britain urban centers, such as York and London, experienced a wider range of parasites, like meat and fish tapeworms. Such differences hint at the importance of myriad “social, cultural, political, and environmental factors that contribute to transmission on a finer scale,” the authors wrote.

No one said guarding Hadrian’s Wall was easy.

12/19/2025

When you walk into a room of people, do you instantly catch the vibe? Can you quickly scan faces and catch the hidden meaning behind the shape of a brow or the twitch of a smile, feel the undertow of emotion when a conversation shifts? Or do other peoples’ meanings and intentions frequently elude you?

Not everyone is equally good at picking up social cues in a given environment, a skill colloquially known as reading the room. Recently, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Osaka, set out to understand why.

Across three studies, the researchers found that individual differences in the ability to pick up nonverbal cues stem from idiosyncrasies in the way different people gather, weigh, and integrate facial and contextual information from the environment.

Those who are really good at reading social cues, they found, are able to quickly engage in complex calculus, assessing the relative clarity or ambiguity of different cues so that they can give more weight to the ones with the most obvious meaning. Those who are less good at it, however, try to keep it simple and give equal weight to every piece of information they perceive. The scientists published their findings in Nature Communications.

“We don’t know exactly why these differences occur,” said Jefferson Ortega, a psychology Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley and co-author of the study, in a statement. “But the idea is that some people might use this more simplistic integration strategy because it’s less cognitively demanding, or it could also be due to underlying cognitive deficits.”

To do their experiment, Ortega’s team asked 944 volunteers to guess at the mood of a person in a series of videos, including Hollywood movies, documentaries, and home videos gathered from YouTube. The researchers made the backgrounds in some of the recordings blurry, while others had hazy faces and clear context, in order to isolate the influence of different kinds of information people might use to make their assessments. In a third set of videos, the context and faces were both clear.

Ortega and his colleagues expected that most people would use a method of inference known as Bayesian integration, where they weigh the ambiguities in a set of cues. But only 70 percent of the participants did this. The other 30 percent chose to average cues, no matter how clear or ambiguous they were.

“It was very surprising,” Ortega said. “The computational mechanisms—the algorithm that the brain uses to do that—is not well understood. That’s where the motivation came for this paper. It’s just an amazing feat.”

Something you can think about next time you have to quickly read the room.

12/19/2025

Spain is spinning.

In fact, The whole Iberian Peninsula, which includes Portugal, is slowly rotating clockwise, according to new research published in Gondwana Research.

Scientists from Italy and Spain studied the movements of tectonic plates that drift slowly on the face of the Earth—rubbing, and grinding, and colliding, and diving, and separating, and apparently spinning. Specifically, the research team wanted to better understand the features and forces that occur at the interface between the Eurasian plate that underlies most of Europe and Asia and the African plate, which contains most of Africa. Those two plates interact across a vast distance, and one part of that boundary, just south of the Iberian Peninsula, has resisted clear characterization by geologists for many years.

Researchers know that the two massive tectonic plates are moving slowly toward each other—at a pace of less than a quarter inch per year—but the plate interface that underlines Iberia is complex. “Until now we didn’t know exactly what that boundary was like in that environment, and what geodynamic processes are taking place is under discussion,” said co-author Asier Madarieta, a geologist at the University of the Basque Country, in a statement.

So Madarieta and his colleagues combined satellite and earthquake data to get a better picture of the geological stresses deforming and straining the crust overlying the plates near that boundary. And that picture indicated that the Iberian Peninsula was performing a glacially slow, clockwise pirouette.

Here’s how it works. The crust that lies just east of the Straits of Gibraltar is being deformed by the African and Eurasian plates smashing into one another. This alleviates some of the strain that would otherwise deform the Iberian Peninsula crust. But to the west of the Straits of Gibraltar, the peninsular crust is being pushed from the southwest as the two massive plates collide, the team of scientists explained. This induces the rotation.

Aside from inspiring whimsical alliteration, the findings could help pinpoint faults and folds in the crust, the movement of which may spark earthquakes. The methods the scientists used could also be applied to other, poorly-characterized areas of the Earth’s crust to help predict temblors.

As our world turns, it’s comforting to know that scientists are working to better understand the dynamic nature of the ground under our feet.