Nautilus Magazine

06/08/2026

🐋 Cold War Spy Tech Accidentally Became a Whale Observatory

The U.S. Navy spent decades listening to the ocean floor for Soviet submarines, and in doing so, recorded one of the most extraordinary archives of whale communication ever assembled. The Sound Surveillance System, or SOSUS, was a vast network of hydrophones fixed to the ocean floor and wired to secret listening stations around the world. It could identify a submarine's make and model by its acoustic signature. It could also hear whales, though the Navy considered them a nuisance, labeling their calls "biologicals" and training sonar operators to ignore them.

🔬 When Scientists Got Access, Everything Changed

That changed after the Soviet Union collapsed. In 1991, a dual-use initiative championed by Al Gore, Sam Nunn, and Ted Kennedy opened military data to civilian researchers. Bioacoustics scientist Chris Clark at Cornell University was among the first to walk into a SOSUS facility. In a gymnasium-sized room lined with dot-matrix printers spewing acoustic readouts, he spotted a familiar frequency near the bottom of the scale, a blue whale. Walking the rows of machines, he realized the system was tracking the same whale across multiple arrays separated by miles of open ocean.

🌊 Whales Singing Across Entire Oceans

Blue whales produce sounds around 180 decibels, roughly equivalent to a jet engine in air, at frequencies so low they fall beneath the range of human hearing. Their moans repeat with metronomic precision, once every 70 seconds in some oceans, once every 140 seconds in the Indian Ocean. Fin whales pulse at 20 Hz, just below human perception, in rhythms so slow they only make sense when sped up 30 times. Using SOSUS, Clark tracked a single blue whale for 43 days across 2,200 miles of ocean, never losing the signal as the animal looped from northeast of Bermuda to within reach of Cuba and back.

🧠 A Theory Still Waiting for Proof

Biologist Roger Payne first hypothesized in the 1970s that the largest whales could communicate across entire ocean basins. Scientists later noticed that only male blues and fins produce these ultra-low regular calls, and that neither species has known breeding grounds. One possible explanation: females navigate toward distant males by following their songs. A Navy sonar operator in the 1970s detected faint fin whale echoes off Cape Cod that matched sounds recorded simultaneously off the coast of Spain, though that data stayed classified for decades. Whether whales actually listen to and respond to songs from a thousand miles away remains an open question.

💡 Listening to Something We Barely Understand

Clark sometimes steps outside the scientific frame to sit with the experience of what he's hearing. He's consulted musicologists, including a Cornell specialist in Indonesian gamelan who told him the whale songs weren't data, they were a musical and emotional experience. Speed up a blue whale song ten times, shift the pitch to the range of a cello, and what you get is a soft moan arriving every three seconds with unwavering regularity. No human musician could hold that rhythm. These animals are operating on a scale of time and distance that we're only beginning to measure, let alone understand.

06/07/2026

So what is Feynman’s restaurant problem exactly?

"It all starts with a fateful lunch that he was having with his friend Ralph. Ralph was deciding between getting his favorite dish, the ginger chicken, and trying something new, which is this very familiar human sort of dilemma. And Feynman being Feynman turned this into a math problem. If each dish is uniformly distributed between 0 and 100, with 100 being the best, and you’re going to be at this restaurant for n number of nights in a row, how do you decide on which nights you try something new and on which nights you reorder your favorite dish to maximize the total number of points that you’ll earn—a numerical quality score standing in for your dining pleasure.

Feynman was able to provide the mathematical solution to when a dish is good enough that you should just always eat that forever more. And it depends on how many more nights or how many more lunches you’re going to have in that particular restaurant. If you’re going to be eating at this restaurant for decades, you should set a higher bar for how good something needs to be before you’ll never try anything else.

If this is your last time eating there ever, you really should just get your favorite thing, because even in the slim chance that you did find something even better, you wouldn’t really get to cash in on it. You’d only be able to eat it once. Naturally, the threshold for how good something has to be that you’ll stop exploring starts really high, and it gets lower as you work your way through whatever period of time you’re going to be eating at this restaurant."

Solving Feynman’s Formula for Eating Well, Parking Your Car, and Finding a Mate: The 50-year mystery suggests humans may be more rational than we thought

06/07/2026

What happens when you send a team of ecologists, geologists, remote-sensing specialists, and professional tree climbers on a field trip to Taiwan?

They discover the tallest tree in East Asia.

A group nicknamed the “Taiwan Tree Seekers” from institutions in Taiwan conducted an island-wide survey of vegetation for almost a decade. About the size of Maryland, Taiwan is around 60 percent forested, with an estimated 950 million trees clinging to its mountainous slopes and nestled in tropical valleys. After a grueling four-day journey to a site rumored to have giant trees, the Taiwan Tree Seekers realized they needed to harness technology to find the tallest ones.

Remote-sensing experts from National Cheng Kung University brought LiDAR (light detection and ranging) into the mix, transmitting laser pulses from optical sensors during flyovers of the forests. The LiDAR data yielded a 3-D map of the terrain, including tree heights. Still, with distortions in the data because of the steep topography, it took human eyes to ultimately uncover the highest trees. Volunteers were crowd-sourced to examine the 57,065 candidate images for “tallest tree” sorted by an algorithm, followed by visual inspections by LiDAR experts.

In the Taiwan Giant Tree Map, 941 trees that ranked taller than the height of a 20-story building (or 213 feet) became targets for ground truthing. Given their association with montane cloud forest ecosystems, the tallest trees tended to be on steeply inclined slopes at high elevations. High humidity and stable climate are thought to benefit tree growth, such that “these mild, oceanic climates served as crucial forest refugia during post-glacial eras,” wrote the study authors. Most of the tallest-tree candidates were Taiwania fir (T. cryptomerioides), with just a handful of other species.

Additional fieldwork required following a river for 12 miles, hiking precipitously uphill, and then sending professional tree climbers up tree trunks. The winner was a T. cryptomerioides in the Sheshan range in northern Taiwan that boasted a height of 276 feet, or the equivalent of a 25-story building.

It’s no wonder that the Indigenous Rukai peoples of Taiwan consider these giant species to be “the trees that hit the moon.”

06/07/2026

🍽️ The Math Behind Every Menu Decision

A handwritten note from physicist Richard Feynman, scribbled at a Thai restaurant in the late 1970s while watching a friend agonize over what to order, has finally been decoded and tested in a formal scientific study. Researchers Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths spent years puzzling over Feynman's original notes before publishing their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The core question Feynman was solving: if you'll be eating at the same restaurant for a set number of nights, when should you try something new, and when should you stick with your favorite dish to maximize total dining enjoyment?

🧠 The Logic of Exploring vs. Settling

Feynman's math boils down to a threshold. The more meals you have left at a restaurant, the higher the bar a dish needs to clear before you'd stop experimenting. If it's your last visit, order your favorite, because finding something better wouldn't matter. If you're a regular for years, hold out for something exceptional before you commit. The key insight is that how much time remains should drive how adventurous you are, not how much time has already passed.

🔬 What Real People Actually Do

Christian and Griffiths tested Feynman's framework on 2,520 participants and found that humans get surprisingly close to the optimal solution, just not by doing the math. People tend to think in percentages of total meals eaten rather than absolute meals remaining, and they lower their standards linearly over time rather than following the nonlinear curve the math prescribes. Despite that mismatch, participants captured about 90% of the maximum possible value. The shortcut works almost as well as the formula.

💡 One Pattern, Many Decisions

The restaurant problem is one example of a broader category called "explore-exploit" problems, which show up constantly in daily life. Parking, house hunting, and dating all share the same structure: you encounter an option, decide whether to commit or keep looking, and potentially lose what you passed on. Christian's book "Algorithms to Live By," co-written with Griffiths, argues that recognizing which type of problem you're facing matters more than robotically applying any formula to it. He and his wife now literally ask each other "explore or exploit?" when choosing where to eat.

⏳ The Cliffhanger Nobody Resolved

One detail from the original lunch remains unsolved. Nobody knows what Feynman's friend Ralph Leighton actually ordered that day. He was deciding between the ginger chicken he loved and whatever the special was. Feynman worked out a mathematical framework for the decision while Leighton apparently just sat there deciding. Christian says they're going to have to ask him.

06/07/2026

What has four wings and can’t fly? Jian changmaensis, a newly described species of feathered dinosaur recently discovered in China.

But according to paleontologists, just because J. changmaensis wasn’t capable of powered flight doesn’t mean it wasn’t a fearsome predator. In fact, its relatively larger size and ability to glide made it the scourge of the skies (or treetops) 120 million years ago.

The specimen was discovered in the Xiagou Formation in China, a fossil-rich area littered with the remains of birds that lived alongside J. changmaensis. Many of the bones unearthed there had been pulverized into pellets similar to those owls leave behind, which hinted at a larger predator. Now, paleontologists believe they’ve found it in J. changmaensis.

“It’s the only dinosaur found at this site that wasn’t a bird, it was a carnivore, and it was much bigger than everything else that we’ve found there,” Jingmai O’Connor of Chicago’s Field Museum and author of a study describing the dinosaur said in a statement.

Per their analysis, J. changmaensis was a microraptor (related to the famed velociraptors of Jurassic Park), suggesting it would have had feathers on both its forelimbs and hind legs. But while microraptors tended to be as small as crows, J. changmaensis was on the larger side.

“Jian is one of the biggest microraptor specimens that has ever been found,” O’Connor said. “The piece of its upper arm bone that we have is about four inches long, so the entire dinosaur probably had something like a four-foot wingspan, around the size of a barn owl.”

Judging by the pellets it left behind, that impressive four-winged silhouette was likely the last thing many of the birds living in the area ever saw.

06/07/2026

Construction workers digging near Regensburg, Germany unearthed something interesting back in 2020: an eight-foot-long tusk from a woolly mammoth. Archaeologists from the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments soon descended on the site to excavate. They uncovered more than 70 additional bones. According to their analysis, recently published in the Journal of Archaeological Science, the animal had been butchered.

After hauling the bones back to the Bavarian State Collections of Natural History, a team of 14 scientists from various disciplines got to work examining them. “The mammoth’s tusk and bones were exceptionally well-preserved due to their millennia-long conservation in the wet soil environment,” study author Christoph Steinmann said in a statement.

Radiocarbon dating revealed the mammoth died between 27,000 and 25,000 years ago, but there was no indication of whether its demise was the result of natural causes or if it was hunted. What happened after the mammoth’s death was a little clearer. The research team found distinct cut marks made by humans, particularly along the ribs. In fact, one of them seems to have been used as a makeshift cutting board.

Pollen spores discovered alongside the remains paint a picture of its prehistoric ecosystem. The region where the mammoth was found was once part of the Mammoth Steppe—a vast grassland dotted with dwarf shrubs but otherwise treeless. The biome was once so extensive it wrapped around the globe, stretching from Portugal through Asia all the way to Wisconsin.

While prehistoric humans and mammoths both thrived on the steppe, researchers say it was odd to find evidence of humans living so far north at that time. “There is virtually no evidence of human activity in this region from that peak period of the Ice Age,” study co-author Andreas Maier of the University of Cologne explained. “Due to climate change, hunter-gatherer communities in Europe retreated southward and eastward.”

06/07/2026

In the 1950s, after having endured relentless attacks by German U-boats during World War II, the U.S. Navy devoted considerable resources to detecting and tracking submarines at long range. Chief in this Cold War-era effort was the Office of Naval Research’s creation of the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), a complex array of hydrophones fixed on the ocean floor and connected by cables to secret listening stations set up along coasts all over the world.

Through SOSUS, the Navy was able to hear a lot of things: what kind of submarines were out there, how many propellers they had, whether they were conventional or nuclear, and sometimes even the exact make and model number.

But they also heard many other sounds—noises that were of less interest to them. Deep booms, grunts, howls, squeals, clicks, moans. Often, they heard monotonously repeating ultra-low-frequency tones that didn’t come from any machine they could find in their secret catalogs. What, they wondered, could be making them?

Eventually, the Navy realized the source of these mysterious calls was not any machine but whales. They kept this knowledge classified for many years. As far as the Navy was concerned, these sounds were all just “biologicals,” naturally occurring noises of no strategic import. Seamen were trained to identify them so they wouldn’t get alarmed and think that a secret enemy sound was booming across the distant seas. No one outside the Pentagon got to listen to most of these recordings until decades later, when the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed, and the Cold War ended.

Once scientists got hold of them, they were able to hear all sorts of things, which could be located with great precision.

https://nautil.us/the-cold-wars-accidental-whale-observatory-1281682

06/07/2026

At a Thai restaurant in the late 1970s, physicist Richard Feynman watched his friend Ralph Leighton waffle over whether to order his usual ginger chicken or try something new. Feynman, known for his elegant solutions to complex problems, turned the moment of indecision into a math problem, scribbling out a solution on a piece of scratch paper—but never published on the subject.

Leighton, though, hung on to the handwritten notes for the next several decades. Then in the early aughts, physicist Michael Gottlieb, who maintains the Feynman Lectures on Physics website, tried to reconstruct what Feynman had written based on the recollections of Leighton, generating significant buzz in the physics community about what the notes actually meant—and whether the math was right.

When long-time collaborators Brian Christian and Tom Griffiths, who study human decision-making, got wind of the story, they decided to investigate for themselves. They got their hands on a copy of Feynman’s original notes and set out to decipher them. Griffith took them home, and after puzzling over them one night, he had a moment of insight: Feynman’s equations suggested that the more time you have to experiment at a particular restaurant, measured in meals, the more likely you are to experiment. Christian and Griffiths then set out to test whether Feynman’s solution holds up, both mathematically and in human behavior. Their study of 2,520 participants largely confirmed that the math works out in real life—with some important caveats. They recently published the findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nautilus spoke with Christian, a researcher at the Center for Human Compatible AI at the University of California, Berkeley—and also a nonfiction author, poet, and programmer—about how Feynman’s restaurant problem works, what it says about human rationality, and how he uses it in his own life.

https://nautil.us/solving-feynmans-formula-for-eating-well-parking-your-car-and-finding-a-mate-1281700

06/07/2026

She’s known as the “Mother of Hubble” to many of those at NASA who worked with her in the 20th century. Nancy Grace Roman was not only a pioneering astronomer who helped humanity understand the types and motions of the countless stars that dot our universe. She was also the first female executive at NASA, where she served as Chief of Astronomy in the 1960s and ’70s.

And now, after seminal contributions to planning the Hubble Space Telescope, which still delivers eyepopping insight into the cosmos, Roman is being immortalized in the naming of Hubble’s successor, the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope.

Learn about this trailblazer: https://nautil.us/who-was-nancy-grace-roman-1281718

06/07/2026

🚀 A New Telescope, A Long-Overdue Honor

NASA is preparing to launch a $4 billion space telescope this September, and the name on it belongs to a woman who spent decades making such a mission possible. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, currently being readied at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, will succeed the Hubble Space Telescope with a field of view at least 100 times larger and the ability to block starlight to observe exoplanets and planet-forming disks directly.

⭐ From Middle School Dream to NASA First

Roman decided she wanted to study astronomy before she even finished middle school. Born in 1925 to a geophysicist father and a music teacher mother, she pursued that ambition through Swarthmore College in the early 1940s, then earned her Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1946. Her research at Wisconsin's Yerkes Observatory produced some of the most-cited scientific papers of 1950, and she later expanded her expertise into radio astronomy before joining NASA in 1959.

👩‍🔬 Breaking Ground at NASA

Roman became the first woman to hold an executive position at NASA, serving as Chief of Astronomy in the Office of Space Science through the 1960s and '70s. That role gave her authority over a portfolio that included astronomical satellites studying cosmic X-rays and gamma-rays, and experiments tied to the Gemini and Apollo programs. She went on to lead NASA's airborne astronomy program, which grew from telescopes mounted to jets into the Hubble Space Telescope itself.

🔭 What the Roman Telescope Will Do

The telescope named after her is built to see the universe at a scale Hubble never could. It will capture wide, panoramic images that let astronomers study dark energy, dark matter, and distant galaxies far faster than current technology allows. Its starlight-blocking instrument opens the door to direct observation of worlds orbiting other stars.