The Strangeness of Black Holes - Issue 68: Context - Nautilus
An Introduction to the Black Hole InstituteFittingly, the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) was founded 100 years after Karl Schwarzschild…
An Introduction to the Black Hole InstituteFittingly, the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) was founded 100 years after Karl Schwarzschild…
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Jellyfish didn’t need novel genes to take an evolutionary…
Before Corrine’s husband abandoned her in Berlin, he liked to say that her name reminded him of the word “corrupt.” But ending…
A few years ago a student walked into the office of Cesar A. Hidalgo, director of the Collective Learning group at the MIT Media Lab.…
The first pieces of the brain’s “inner GPS” started coming to light in 1970. In the laboratories of University College London,…
Though space may be the quintessential I.C.E. environment, Musk appears to be aiming to make trips to Mars—aspirationally scheduled…
Scientists look around the universe and see amazing structure. There are objects and processes of fantastic complexity. Every action…
Rosalinda Roberts had gotten used to seeing weird shapes in the brain. Over three decades of looking at brain tissue under an electron…
When it comes to using computers to steal money, few can come close to matching the success of Russian hacker Evgeniy Bogachev. The…
The problem is loads of wrong predictions from theoretical physicists.Photograph by Inga Nielsen / ShutterstockNothing is moving in…
Every physician remembers their first bad case. Mine went like this. One morning, a man came into our emergency department with back…
Of the important global crops, the banana is the most genetically uniform. A single cluster of nearly identical genotypes, the Cavendish…
Reading medieval literature, it’s hard not to be impressed with how much the characters get done—as when we read about King Harold…
George Chapline believes that the Event Horizon Telescope will offer evidence that black holes are really dark energy stars. NASAWhat…
An Alphabet subsidiary is planning to build a futuristic neighborhood, not out of concrete and steel, but wood—and wood is looking…
Poets often think of time as a river, a free-flowing stream that carries us from the radiant morning of birth to the golden twilight…
When Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario, asked Scott Routley to imagine playing a game of tennis,…
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.Evolution may have coopted an ancient metabolic mechanism to…
The author of The Martian and Artemis argues that the moon’s ice caps (blue) don’t change how he would design his fictional…
Was it a chance encounter when you met that special someone or was there some deeper reason for it? What about that strange dream…
A whole lot of books on the brain are published these days and you can read yourself into a coma trying to make sense of their various…
Jerry Mitrovica has been overturning accepted wisdom for decades. A solid Earth geophysicist at Harvard, he studies the internal structure…
Eric Lundgren, the 33-year-old, fedora-wearing CEO of a major electronic waste recycling plant in Los Angeles, could be called both…
When I approach Sofiya Campbell, she regards me and my exuberant smile carefully. It’s only after we shake hands formally that,…
Alex Honnold has his own verb. “To honnold”—usually written as “honnolding”—is to stand in some high, precarious place…
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree,” John Basinger said aloud to himself, as he walked on a treadmill.…
An 86-year-old patient arrives with a grisly foot injury.1 It’s badly infected—not a surprise, given his chronic untreated Type…
Artist’s conception of a hot Eyeball planet. The permanent day side is sun-baked and dry. The permanent night side is covered with…
I can’t count the number of times I pulled out my phone just for the feeling of unlocking the screen and swiping through applications,…
The very notion of what in the ancient world defines the human being in contrast to all other living things is simple: upright posture.…