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…
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Jellyfish Genome Hints That Complexity Isn’t Genetically Complex - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Jellyfish didn’t need novel genes to take an evolutionary…
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Echos - Issue 68: Context - Nautilus
Before Corrine’s husband abandoned her in Berlin, he liked to say that her name reminded him of the word “corrupt.” But ending…
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How We’ll Forget John Lennon - Issue 68: Context - Nautilus
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.…
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The Surprising Relativism of the Brain’s GPS - Issue 67: Reboot - Nautilus
The first pieces of the brain’s “inner GPS” started coming to light in 1970. In the laboratories of University College London,…
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The Psychological Challenges of Just Getting to Mars - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus
Though space may be the quintessential I.C.E. environment, Musk appears to be aiming to make trips to Mars—aspirationally scheduled…
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Chaos Makes the Multiverse Unnecessary - Issue 66: Clockwork - Nautilus
Scientists look around the universe and see amazing structure. There are objects and processes of fantastic complexity. Every action…
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Are There Bacteria in Your Brain? - Issue 66: Clockwork - Nautilus
Rosalinda Roberts had gotten used to seeing weird shapes in the brain. Over three decades of looking at brain tissue under an electron…
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The $100 Million Bot Heist - Issue 66: Clockwork - Nautilus
When it comes to using computers to steal money, few can come close to matching the success of Russian hacker Evgeniy Bogachev. The…
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The Present Phase of Stagnation in the Foundations of Physics Is Not Normal - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus
The problem is loads of wrong predictions from theoretical physicists.Photograph by Inga Nielsen / ShutterstockNothing is moving in…
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An Rx for Doctors - Issue 66: Clockwork - Nautilus
Every physician remembers their first bad case. Mine went like this. One morning, a man came into our emergency department with back…
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What’s Wrong with Bananas
Of the important global crops, the banana is the most genetically uniform. A single cluster of nearly identical genotypes, the Cavendish…
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Why Doesn’t Ancient Fiction Talk About Feelings? - Issue 65: In Plain Sight - Nautilus
Reading medieval literature, it’s hard not to be impressed with how much the characters get done—as when we read about King Harold…
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Are Black Holes Actually Dark Energy Stars? - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus
George Chapline believes that the Event Horizon Telescope will offer evidence that black holes are really dark energy stars. NASAWhat…
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The Case for Making Cities Out of Wood - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus
An Alphabet subsidiary is planning to build a futuristic neighborhood, not out of concrete and steel, but wood—and wood is looking…
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Is It Time to Get Rid of Time? - Issue 64: The Unseen - Nautilus
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…
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The Ethics of Consciousness Hunting - Issue 64: The Unseen - Nautilus
When Adrian Owen, a neuroscientist at the University of Western Ontario, asked Scott Routley to imagine playing a game of tennis,…
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How Insulin Helped Create Ant Societies - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.Evolution may have coopted an ancient metabolic mechanism to…
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Lunar Ice: Exciting to Me, But Not to My Characters - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus
The author of The Martian and Artemis argues that the moon’s ice caps (blue) don’t change how he would design his fictional…
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Kolmogorov Complexity and Our Search for Meaning - Issue 63: Horizons - Nautilus
Was it a chance encounter when you met that special someone or was there some deeper reason for it? What about that strange dream…
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This Man Says the Mind Has No Depths - Issue 62: Systems - Nautilus
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…
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Why Our Intuition About Sea-Level Rise Is Wrong - Issue 62: Systems - Nautilus
Jerry Mitrovica has been overturning accepted wisdom for decades. A solid Earth geophysicist at Harvard, he studies the internal structure…
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Is This Man the Elon Musk of E-Waste? - Issue 62: Systems - Nautilus
Eric Lundgren, the 33-year-old, fedora-wearing CEO of a major electronic waste recycling plant in Los Angeles, could be called both…
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What a Russian Smile Means
When I approach Sofiya Campbell, she regards me and my exuberant smile carefully. It’s only after we shake hands formally that,…
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The Strange Brain of the World’s Greatest Solo Climber - Issue 61: Coordinates - Nautilus
Alex Honnold has his own verb. “To honnold”—usually written as “honnolding”—is to stand in some high, precarious place…
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This Man Memorized a 60,000-Word Poem Using Deep Encoding - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus
Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit of that forbidden tree,” John Basinger said aloud to himself, as he walked on a treadmill.…
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Why New Antibiotics Are So Hard to Find - Issue 60: Searches - Nautilus
An 86-year-old patient arrives with a grisly foot injury.1 It’s badly infected—not a surprise, given his chronic untreated Type…
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Forget “Earth-Like”—We’ll First Find Aliens on Eyeball Planets - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus
Artist’s conception of a hot Eyeball planet. The permanent day side is sun-baked and dry. The permanent night side is covered with…
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Dear iPhone—It Was Just Physical, and Now It’s Over - Facts So Romantic - Nautilus
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,…
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How Posture Makes Us Human
The very notion of what in the ancient world defines the human being in contrast to all other living things is simple: upright posture.…
