Nautilus is a different kind of science magazine. We are science, philosophy, and culture connected, offering a new perspective on human uniqueness and our universe—all beautifully illustrated. Each month, we explore a single topic 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, and a news service, Three Sentence Science. Beautiful, intriguing, and full of wonder—Nautilus is what science journalism should be.
"The human genome contains billions of pieces of information and around 22,000 genes, but not all of it is, strictly speaking, human."
The human genome contains billions of pieces of information and around 22,000 genes, but not all of it is, strictly speaking, human. Eight percent of our DNA consists of remnants...
"Did language meet some need? No. The other five thousand plus mammals among us do fine without it."
Cormac McCarthy is best known to the world as a writer of novels. These include Blood Meridian, All the Pretty Horses, No Country…
Readers’ favorite 2019 posts from our blog, Facts So Romantic, explore a Dutch cure for stress and memories you can inject.
The Simple Dutch Cure for StressJohn Loo / FlickrSince reading this November post, by Alice Fleerackers, I haven’t been able to…
In this round-up of readers’ favorite articles from 2019, we explore tree smarts and the end of the gene as we know it.
What Impossible Meant to FeynmanWhen you are a young physics professor at Caltech, giving a lecture about a new type of matter you…
"If we want to make Scrabble scoring more indicative of skill, we’ve been looking at the wrong part of the game for years."
You can find Lynda Woods Cleary playing Scrabble every Tuesday at a Panera in Princeton, NJ. Cleary, a 68-year-old retired financial…
"It wasn’t bread that motivated our ancestors to start grain farming. It was beer. Man, they say, chose pints over pastry."
The domestication of wild grains has played a major role in human evolution, facilitating the transition from a hunter-gatherer lifestyle…
"The holographic connection between the black hole’s interior and exterior supports an old hunch that considering the two together should somehow resolve the information paradox."
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Calculations involving a higher dimension are guiding physicists…
Another new week of stories is live on Nautilus! Be sure to check them out!
Nautilus is a different kind of science magazine. We deliver big-picture science by reporting on a single monthly topic from multiple perspectives. Read a new chapter in the story every Thursday.
"Rather than tear us apart, the rising tide of solo dwellers is creating, sustaining, and perhaps even strengthening, the ties that bind us."
When Dan Scheffey turned 50, he threw himself a party. About 100 people packed into his Manhattan apartment, which occupies the third…
"Does the brain respond similarly to the stimulus of novelty, surprise, or the simple desire to avoid boredom?"
An amusing anecdote involving Darwin epitomizes the power of curiosity in creative people. When Darwin arrived at Cambridge in 1828,…
"Would they finally detect the delicate, shadowy structures surrounding galaxies that cosmologists had long been searching for?"
Like countless so-crazy-it-just-might-work schemes, this one began with a gripe session. In the fall of 2011, Roberto Abraham and…
"If DNA is printed sheet music, RNA-induced epigenetic mechanisms are like improvisational cuts and arrangements that might conduct learning and memory."
If a headless worm can regrow a memory, then where is the memory stored? And, if a memory can regenerate, could you transfer it?Photograph…
From our friends at Narratively, an inside look at the struggle to save the most southerly songbird in the world from an invasive species of rats:
A team of ambitious ecologists is trying to rid these freezing South Atlantic islands of vermin to save their rarest bird. But are they attempting the impossible?
"This made the prediction inspired and breathtakingly cheeky, as if he had described the age of the dinosaurs from a wishbone."
There was little expectation that anything important would occur at the 1933 meeting of the American Physical Society, which began…
"For a moment, it seemed that the claustrum was indeed what Crick suspected: the hub of consciousness."
In 1976, Francis Crick arrived at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California, overlooking a Pacific Shangri-La with cotton candy skies…
“It’s possible we received genes from Neanderthals that enabled us to move out of Africa and into cooler climates.”
Hybridization, it turns out, plays a pivotal role in how life forms evolve. The tree of life may never look the same.Photograph by…
"Physics wouldn’t be physics if it did not continually question itself."
Physics is often baffling, but one principle seems rock-solid: the law of conservation of energy. The world contains this thing called…
"Why would we not expect another civilization to have sent things into interstellar space?"
Avi Loeb doesn’t need to be a muckraker. As the head of the astronomy department at Harvard University, he sits in one of the most…
"We can have hopes, dreams, and aspirations for humankind. But we are machines, just like computers are machines."
I’m trying to explain to Arthur I. Miller why artworks generated by computers don’t quite do it for me. There’s no human being…
"Much of what is said aloud would be published and made part of the Web. An unfathomable mass of expertise, opinion, wit, and culture—now lost—would be as accessible as any article or comment thread is today."
We are going to start recording and automatically transcribing most of what we say. Instead of evaporating into memory, words spoken…
What should be done with the buffalo? An inside look, from our friends at Narratively:
They’re one of the last wild buffalo herds in the U.S. but every year hundreds are shot or slaughtered. A group of camera-toting activists wants to make sure the world sees.
Why would you count hawks? A morning spent with a devout birder, from our friends at Narratively:
Greg Hanisek’s decades-old ritual defines his life, even as the birds and those who track them slowly disappear.
"The most promising idea of all has come from an entirely unexpected direction."
In the mid-1990s, I studied mathematics. I wasn’t really sure just what I wanted to do with my life, but I was awed by the power…
We’re proud to announce the launch of our newest channel: "Biology + Beyond" with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. CSHL is a leader in quantitative biology, analyzing the data of genomes is a daily journey of discovery. Breakthrough insights into epigenetics, how genes are activated or deactivated by the environment and previously unknown chemical processes in DNA, have become a signature of the Lab.
The secrets of human evolution, hiding in DNA, have been uncovered by the Lab's explorers, revealing, to the world's fascination, more and more branches on the human tree. We'd love to hear your feedback on this exciting new channel!
http://cshl.nautil.us/
We’re proud to announce the launch of our newest channel: "Biology + Beyond" with Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. CSHL is a leader in quantitative biology, analyzing the data of genomes is a daily journey of discovery. Breakthrough insights into epigenetics, how genes are activated or deactivated by the environment and previously unknown chemical processes in DNA, have become a signature of the Lab.
The secrets of human evolution, hiding in DNA, have been uncovered by the Lab's explorers, revealing, to the world's fascination, more and more branches on the human tree. We'd love to hear your feedback on this exciting new channel!
http://cshl.nautil.us/
"We wanted to show that computers can be profoundly creative, can do things that humans can’t."
On a warm day in April 2013, I was sitting in a friend’s kitchen in Paris, trying to engineer serendipity. I was trying to get my…
"Much of the art computers are creating transcends the merely weird to encompass works that we might consider pleasing and that many artists judge as acceptable."
Ross Goodwin has had an extraordinary career. After playing about with computers as a child, he studied economics, then became a speech…
“I have been wondering how many Eunice Footes are out there to be discovered.”
Human-induced climate change may seem a purely modern phenomenon. Even in ancient Greece, however, people understood that human activities…
"Human-caused climate change, and the disasters it brings, are here."
Water rushes into Venice’s city council chamber just minutes after the local government rejects measures to combat climate change.…
"A relatively small change in atmospheric pressure can stop an astronaut’s blood from boiling."
The plan for an artificial Martian magnetosphere may sound “fanciful,” but researchers say that emerging research is starting…
"Worldwide, 1.5 million people died from tuberculosis last year."
During the Romantic era, as science was beginning to understand tuberculosis, though not yet its etiology, it “was left to the arts,”…
"In many cities, neon signs still outshine all the stars in the sky."
The 20 words defined in this lexicon reflect the ways in which light irradiates the atmosphere, the universe, and our perception of…
“What we’re doing is not okay. The climate scientists have measured that salvage logging actually accelerates the emissions of carbon from the soil.”
Everyone knows forests are alive, but Suzanne Simard, who studies complex, symbiotic networks, helps us see that life anew. Even dying,…
Why should we spend time and resources identifying all the plants in the rainforest? From our friends at Narratively:
“Plant collection” may not sound perilous, but while scaling boulders and dodging snakes, I learned just how much these intrepid explorers risk to help understand our world.
"Even with a lead time of 18 months, the neural network was able to see El Niño events coming."
Thanks to advances in machine learning over the last two decades, it’s no longer in question whether humans can beat computers at…
"The media enthusiasm is sending the wrong impression, making it sound like any old problem can be solved with a neural network."
Can AI teach itself the laws of physics? Will classical computers soon be replaced by deep neural networks? Sure looks like it, if…
"Despite their minuscule mass, so many neutrinos were born during the Big Bang that their collective gravity influenced how all the matter in the universe clumped together into stars and galaxies."
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.The KATRIN experiment is closing in on the mass of the neutrino,…
"The role of the creative imagination is underplayed in thinking through the relationship between urban futures and climate change."
In Kim Stanley Robinson’s 2017 science-fiction novel New York 2140, the city of the future has become a vertical super-Venice, after…
"If we don’t understand how Jupiter works in our own solar system, how can we figure out how Jupiters around other suns work?"
Philip Marcus, you might say, is obsessed with the solar system’s most famous storm. The computational physicist and professor…
"Back in the lab, she finds something even she isn’t ready to believe."
Real life starts in graduate school. Some mornings in West Lafayette, Patricia Westerford’s luck scares her. Forestry school: Purdue…
How different, really, are rankings in baboon society from teenage human society? A firsthand account from our friends at Narratively:
The world of mean girls and cliques was a startling change from working alongside my primatologist parents. Fortunately, I’d learned a bit about navigating vicious social structures.
"On impact, the asteroid vaporized, an enormous fireball erupted out into space, and rock particles were launched as far as halfway to the moon."
“Understanding how we decipher a great historical event written in the book of rocksmay be as interesting as the event itself.”—Walter…
"How can we enjoy the other seasons when we haven’t previously experienced winter in all its asperity?"
Winter is changing its character. Since the beginning of the 21st century, glaciers have been melting at record speed. In Central…
"Peatlands are drying up and decaying more and more quickly as planet temperatures rise."
In his poems about strange bodies buried in the bogs of Northern Europe, the late Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney describes peatlands…
"For a child raised in a panpsychist worldview, hugging a tree could be as natural as stroking a cat."
Since 1980, the temperature of the planet has risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius, resulting in unprecedented melting of the Greenland ice…
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Clean meat is anatomically identical to animal flesh—because that’s precisely what it is—but without any drugs, animal suffering, or the need for large expanses of land and water. So if we can create a delicious, juicy, sizzling burger that is a win-win across the board, why wouldn’t we embrace it as the future of food?
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In our latest "Ingenious" we spoke to the linguist Julie Sedivy about the power and limitations of language. In the following interview, Sedivy explains how language both enraptures and deceives. She explains why Donald Trump’s language shrinks the world into gross simplicities. Our discussion delves into what makes good fiction and bad writing. Throughout, in her words and insights, Sedivy reveals what makes her a true language expert. Watch the entire interview here: http://nautil.us/issue/47/consciousness/ingenious-julie-sedivy
Will a rat sink or swim? Your mental health may be riding on the answer. That story, plus ethical dealings with aliens, climate change, and a test to see if animals are self-aware. http://nautil.us
Consciousness is a hard problem because it is emergent, mixes software and hardware, and is dizzyingly self-referential. It’s harder still because, in a sense, it impossible to study directly. We can measure how some living (or even inanimate) thing interacts with the world. We can learn to recognize intelligence and reflexivity in that behavior. But how can we tell what it is like to be that thing? Christof Koch, one of today’s leading thinkers on consciousness, describes it as “physics from the inside.” It’s a different category of question than we’re used to, and one that has a growing set of intersections with other sciences. It is even a short distance from some common laments. Why don’t we understand each other, or even ourselves? This issue is full of discovery, re-discovery and argument by analogy. Because that’s a good place to start. Welcome to “Consciousness.” http://nautil.us
Do we all share a certain set of given emotions—anger, joy, sadness, envy? Lisa Feldman Barrett doesn't think so. The neuroscientist explains her theory of constructed emotion. Watch the full interview here: http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/ingenious-lisa-feldman-barrett
Do you think you can read emotions like joy or anger in another person’s face and actions, because joy and anger are universal emotions and we all know what they look like? Well, if so, says neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett, you are winging it, guessing at best. Emotions like happiness and despair are not baked into our brains, waiting to be triggered by experiences in the world. So what are emotions? In this month's Ingenious, we spoke to Barrett about her theory of "constructed emotion." Watch the full interview here: http://nautil.us/issue/46/balance/ingenious-lisa-feldman-barrett
When you look down from a high place, do you ever fight the urge to jump? That story, plus the first woman to attend MIT, the origin of emotions, New York City’s noise addiction, and why you should work less, all this week at Nautilus. http://nautil.us
If you want to find out who someone really is, give them power. That story, plus cooperative evolution, dark energy, extraordinary female scientists, and why storms make us happy, all this week on Nautilus. http://nautil.us
How close are we to a Grand Unified Theory of physics? Physicist and bestselling author Lawrence Krauss brings us up to date. That story, plus a fifth force of nature, what art can teach us about physics, and whether immortality is realistic all this week on Nautilus.
How is pleasure related to fear? That story, plus how aging changes the genetic lottery, the multiverse as VR, and the thin line between genius and madman, all this week on Nautilus. http://nautil.us
A glacier’s mass balance is the difference between how much snow and ice it accumulates, and what it loses to melting. A negative mass balance will, given enough time, skew other balances. As less sunlight is reflected by the shrinking glacier’s bright ice, more is absorbed by the dark ocean, pushing temperatures up. Warmer temperatures increase the amount of human-produced carbon dioxide stored in the atmosphere, which speeds ocean acidification and the dissolving of deep-water carbon deposits. These deposits make oceans more alkaline, balancing out their acidification. Peel back one balance, and you find another. In this issue, each balance leans against the next: mental against physical, evolutionary against ecological, one infinity against another. The web of balances that make up our world is intricate, full of tiny stable points and unexpected transitions. That can make it inscrutable. But, as living participants, we can still tell when it is broken. This February saw over 3,000 record high temperatures across the United States, compared to 30-odd record lows, the most lopsided ratio in history. This January was 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century global average. Which brings to mind another balance—a moral one. Welcome to “Balance.” http://nautil.us
"What makes someone a pedophile or struggle with sexual impulses if not their brain? And, if the locus is in their brain, then what makes their responsibility any more or less than someone who has a tumor? A hundred years from now we may be able to talk about brain function in a deterministic way, even if there’s not such a clear obvious organic issue." Carl Erik Fisher weighs in on the complicated intersection of neuroscience and justice. Watch the full interview here: http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/ingenious-carl-erik-fisher
The idea of mindfulness has permeated our zeitgeist. We are exhorted to be "mindful" at every turn—mindful about work, mindful in our relationships, mindful in our diet. Is the concept all it's cracked up to be? The meditating psychologist Carl Erik Fisher weighs in. Watch the whole interview here: http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/ingenious-carl-erik-fisher
The reactions to Carl Fisher’s Nautilus essay, “Against Willpower,” ranged from the appreciative to the sorely defensive. Why should we be asked to give up the idea of willpower? Aren’t we just giving ourselves and others permission to fail? Is this a political idea in disguise? In this month's "Ingenious," we gave Fisher a chance to respond in depth, and explain some of the nuances of his relationship with "willpower." Watch the full interview here: http://nautil.us/issue/45/power/ingenious-carl-erik-fisher
A man in Ohio is about to break open the oldest quarantine in mathematics. That story, plus isolated scientists, addiction, and the dark side, all this week on Nautilus. http://nautil.us
This week at Nautilus, magnetic leaders, computer models of atheism, water wars, the Stanford Prison Experiment, all the single ladies, and more. http://nautil.us
"When you think back to your career what do you remember? You remember the headwinds you faced. You don’t remember all the tailwinds that were pushing you along." We spoke to our latest ingenious, Robert Frank, about the invisible role luck plays in all of our lives. Watch the entire interview here: http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/ingenious-robert-h-frank
“To imagine that everybody does best by being purely selfish is a socially moronic posture to bring to the study of human behavior,” economist Robert Frank says. The American Dream needs a rewrite, he believes, and with it comes wider personal and social perspectives, ones that might guarantee a more equitable and just land. “If we acknowledge luck, the experimental evidence is really quite clear that we become much more inclined to pay forward for the common good, to contribute things that will benefit not just us but the community at large.” In our latest "Ingenious," we spoke to Frank about the invisible hand of luck in our lives and economy: http://nautil.us/issue/44/luck/ingenious-robert-h-frank
What is the moral boundary between using genetics to prevent disease, and using it to enhance ability? Siddhartha Mukherjee, the author of "The Gene: An Intimate History," weighs in. http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/ingenious-siddhartha-mukherjee
Watch out exclusive interview with Siddhartha Mukherjee, the Pulitzer Prize winning author of "The Gene: An Intimate History," as he discusses the most profound effects that genetics will have on our culture as its technology rapidly advances.
We spoke to the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of "The Gene: An Intimate History," about the powerful role genetics is poised to play in the future of human culture and medicine. Watch the full interview on our website.
If there's a true hero of the ocean, it's Sylvia A. Earle, who has spent a lifetime passionately defending the life in the waters. As President Barack Obama said of her, "I am in awe of how much she has done for ocean conservation." Watch our video interview with her here: http://nautil.us/issue/43/heroes/voice-of-the-ocean-rp
New on Nautilus Cosmos: A video interview with Harvard astronomer Lisa Kaltenegger about a career spent looking for life among the stars. Watch the full interview here: http://cosmos.nautil.us/video/70/this-woman-knows-the-weather-forecast-on-other-planets
The year was 1962, and it seemed like cell biologist Leonard Hayflick had made a mistake. After all, for 60 years it had been known that human cells were immortal, capable of dividing forever if they were cultivated in the right medium under the right conditions. But some of Hayflick’s cells were not dividing. Maybe his sample had been contaminated, or there was a problem with the way he’d prepared the cells. A few weeks passed, however, and not only did his finding remain the same, but a pattern emerged: The cells would double around 50 times, then stop dividing. Today, we take it for granted that human cells multiply a finite number of times. They stop at the aptly-named Hayflick Limit, when their telomeres—the protective caps at the ends of our chromosomes—get too short. But at the time, the scientific community deemed Hayflick’s discoveries—that normal cells are mortal, that they have memory and an internal counting mechanism, that cancer cells are uniquely immortal—preposterous. It would take nearly a decade of criticism and skepticism before his ideas were accepted as fact. Today, as a storied expert in the field of aging, Hayflick is still dispelling misconceptions. This month, we spoke to him in our latest "Ingenious." Watch the complete interview here: http://nautil.us/issue/42/fakes/ingenious-leonard-hayflick
If you think you're unique for being lactose intolerant, well, think again. In fact, 2/3 of people develop lactose intolerance as adults—along with all other mammal species. So how and why did that other 1/3 develop? What is the evolutionary advantage of lactose tolerance? Follow human geneticist Spencer Wells, director of the Genographic Project of the National Geographic Society, as he tracks down the biological and cultural history of humans' ability to digest lactose, in this fascinating video: http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/why-most-of-us-shouldnt-drink-milk
Has tusklessness among Mozambique's elephants become a distinct genetic advantage? http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/how-an-elephant-loses-its-tusks
Joyce Poole can tell you exactly why she loves elephants: They share many of our best characteristics, and avoid many of our worst. They are familiar, social, and intelligent, like us, but also mysterious and foreign—and, occasionally, terrifying. In our newest "Spark of Science," the elephant researcher tells us her story: http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/spark-of-science-joyce-poole
Watch our mini documentary on the tuskless elephants of Gongorosa National Park. http://nautil.us/issue/41/selection/how-an-elephant-loses-its-tusks
Is the study of engineering in crisis? Richard K. Miller, the president of Olin College, weighs in. http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/ingenious-richard-k-miller
Imagine you were a violin student. In the first year, you would be asked to take a year-long course in the physics of vibrations of strings. In the second year, you’d take a year-long course in the theory of music. In the third year, you would take a course on orchestration. And in the fourth year, if you are still here, you would be given a real violin and asked to play a scale. Then you'd have a degree in music. As crazy as it may sound, this is the format of engineering education today. At Olin College, President Richard K. Miller is trying to change that. Watch our video interview with this month's "Ingenious." http://nautil.us/issue/40/learning/ingenious-richard-k-miller
Freeman Dyson once told Lawrence Krauss that "“There’s no way we’re ever going to measure gravitons”—the supposed quantum particles underlying gravitational forces—“because there’s no terrestrial experiment that could ever measure a single graviton.” In consequence, “There’s no way that we’ll know whether gravity is a quantum theory.” On this point, the two preeminent scientists disagreed. http://go.nautil.us/gravitons
Watch the former physics pioneer Fotini Markopoulou explain her unorthodox approach to quantum gravity, one of the biggest questions in physics. http://nautil.us/issue/38/noise/this-physics-pioneer-walked-away-from-it-all
Is the importance of the Nobel Prize in science essentially overblown and overrated? The science historian Nathaniel Comfort weights in. http://go.nautil.us/nobel
We love athletes who break records, but are critical when they dope. Are we moral hypocrites? Two philosophers go head-to-head in a video debate, in our latest "Ingenious."
What is the key problem in quantum gravity? Fotini Markopoulou, the pioneer physicist turned tech entrepreneur, explains it to us. Watch the full, exclusive interview here: http://go.nautil.us/second_act
"Design is possibly the most ubiquitous thing that humans do. It’s a very human thing. We make things. We envision things. It’s about how we understand our lives, what we want from our lives." Watch our exclusive interview with the pioneer physicist turned tech entrepreneur, Fotini Markopoulou: http://go.nautil.us/second_act
"If you really want to press me on when I decided to become a physicist, I have an almost embarrassing story of walking through the wrong door." Watch the whole interview here: http://go.nautil.us/second_act
Quantum theory and general relativity don't play well together. Watch pioneer physicist Fotini Markpoloulou explain the disconnect in our exclusive interview.
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