Nautilus4 min read
How Does Blood Splatter in Space?
Humans are increasingly pushing into space: NASA’s Artemis program plans to return astronauts to the moon and establish a permanent orbiting lab in the next few years, and private companies like Blue Origin and Space X plan to ferry tourists beyond E
Nautilus7 min read
The Plight of Japan’s Ama Divers
On the last day of fishing season, Ayami Nakata starts her morning by lighting a small fire in her hut beside the harbor. The temperature outside hovers around freezing, and as Nakata warms, she changes into a wetsuit; gathers her facemask, chisel, a
Nautilus2 min read
The Speediest Creatures on Earth
In any given drop of pond water, you may find a surprising spectacle: some of the tiniest creatures on Earth contorting and twisting at lightning speed, like miniature break dancers. These ciliated protists—single-celled organisms that get around and
Nautilus4 min read
Why We Search for Silver Linings
Pollyanna, Eleanor Porter’s buoyant novel from 1913, tapped into something deeply rooted in the human psyche. In the story, the eponymous protagonist is tragically orphaned and sent to live with a grumpy aunt, but nonetheless maintains such an optimi
Nautilus5 min read
The End of the Dark Universe?
Please excuse me for being excited, but this hasn’t happened for more than four decades: Physicists have found a new approach to solving a problem which is almost a century old—how to combine quantum physics with gravity. The new idea comes from John
Nautilus3 min read
The Quiet Comeback of the Tortoises
Like other cold-blooded reptiles, giant tortoises use the environment around them to regulate their body temperature. On Isabela Island—the largest in Ecuador’s Galápagos archipelago—Alcedo giant tortoises (Chelonoidis vandenburghi) dig basins to cap
Nautilus5 min read
What’s In a Fish’s Name?
Along the Pacific Northwest coast of North America, a single fish has many names: ulchen, yshuh, uthlecan. These all describe the shimmering silver Thaleichthys pacificus, a coastline-dwelling smelt who migrate up rivers to spawn. The names are all v
Nautilus10 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
How AI Can Save the Zebras
Tanya Berger-Wolf didn’t expect to become an environmentalist. After falling in love with math at 5 years old, she started a doctorate in computer science in her early 20s, attracting attention for her cutting-edge theoretical research. But just as s
Nautilus4 min read
A Jig For The Blues
Some of us are always the first ones on the dance floor, while others have to be dragged from the periphery. But dancing is a very human thing to do: Paintings from some 10,000 years ago found in caves in Bulgaria and India suggest that some of our o
Nautilus4 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
How Quickly Do Large Language Models Learn Unexpected Skills?
Two years ago, in a project called the Beyond the Imitation Game benchmark, or BIG-bench, 450 researchers compiled a list of 204 tasks designed to test the capabilities of large language models, which power chatbots like ChatGPT. On most tasks, perfo
Nautilus4 min read
The Dissent Hidden in an Iconic Scientific Image
1 The artist who drew the earliest “March of Progress” image disagreed with it My book, Monkey to Man: The Evolution of the March of Progress Image, tells the story of an iconic image: the “March of Progress,” which depicts evolution as an ascent fro
Nautilus5 min read
How Illegal Fishing Ships Hide
Earlier this year, Bjorn Bergman noticed something odd about a fishing ship off the coast of Mauritania. Like other large ships in those heavily fished waters, this trawler broadcasted Automatic Identification System (AIS) radio signals. AIS informat
Nautilus6 min readIntelligence (AI) & Semantics
The Pitfalls of AI Health Coaches
You’re dragging a bit as you get out of bed, but you’re roused by the greeting of your AI health coach: “Ready for a healthy, happy day?” it chirps from your smartwatch. “I’ve been noticing a trend,” it continues, unbidden. Not again, you think. “Sin
Nautilus3 min read
African Glaciers Will Vanish In Our Lifetimes
Tanzania’s Mount Kilimanjaro is the highest peak on the African continent at 19,340 feet above sea level. Rising from dense rainforests through shrubby moorlands and sparse alpine desert, the summit of Kilimanjaro has been covered in ice for nearly 1
Nautilus3 min read
The Boy Who Was King of Vanilla
Vanilla has a secret and a story to tell. Most every bean that is sold has been pollinated by human hands, in a deft gesture using a toothpick or a needle. And that method was discovered by an enslaved 12-year-old Black boy named Edmond Albius in 184
Nautilus2 min read
A Knockout Issue
Science elucidates the ways of nature. And those ways are marvelous and strange and surprising. Spooky, too. Although “spooky” may not be the right word for the annihilation of Earth. In our cover story, “Here to Save the Day,” Christian Köberl, a pr
Nautilus3 min read
Humpback Whales Caught Humping
Two photographers in Maui, out on a boat, spotted a pair of humpback whales in January 2022. They cut the engine and drifted, as the whales approached their boat and began to circle, just 15 feet or so below the surface. Dipping their cameras a foot
Nautilus4 min read
Evolution Is Going According to God’s Plan
When Samuel T. Wilkinson arrived at John Hopkins Medical School, in the late aughts, it was a bit of a culture shock. As a devout Mormon who had spent his undergraduate years at Brigham Young University, he found the secularism of his new fellow stud
Nautilus3 min read
Could Modified Gravity Kill Planet Nine?
For eight years, astronomers have hunted for a mysterious “Planet Nine” on the edges of our solar system. Although no one’s ever seen it, they’ve deduced its presence from observations of unusual clustering among asteroids found in the Kuiper Belt, a
Nautilus5 min read
Why Artists Should View The World Through The Eyes Of A Tourist
This article is part of series of Nautilus interviews with artists, you can read the rest here. As a photographer and an illustrator, Jorge Colombo is a careful observer. Colombo used to spend his days walking the streets of New York City, taking in
Nautilus5 min read
Let’s Get Granular
A mysterious form of matter is hiding in plain sight—in cereal boxes and sand dunes, and concrete mixers and volcanic slopes. It can flow like a liquid, fracture like a solid, and organize itself spontaneously in ways that defy physical theory and ma
Nautilus3 min read
The Power of Regret
One of the primary motivators of human behavior is avoiding regret. Before the legendary behavioral economists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky formalized prospect theory and loss aversion, they believed that regret avoidance was at the root of the h
Nautilus5 min read
Science Is the New Nuclear Deterrent
1 Nuclear weapons research aids basic physics and astronomy research—and vice versa No matter what you’re investigating—the inside of a nuclear weapon, the interior of a giant planet, the core of a star, or the flow from a supernova—physics is physic
Nautilus7 min read
When Calamity Comes at a Crawl
Soft sheets of gray rain swept across the steep hills of Astoria, Oregon, on the last Saturday of January 2024, the mizzle a comforting patter on the roof. It was one of the few days Adrienne Fabrique was able to sleep in, a respite from the constant
Nautilus2 min read
Inside an Exploded Star
Cassiopeia A is one of the most thoroughly studied supernovas in the cosmos. It spans 10 light-years across, or 60 trillion miles. Over the years, numerous ground observatories and telescopes have assembled pictures of the remnants of this exploded s
Nautilus5 min read
What Your Brain Is Doing When You’re Not Doing Anything
Whenever you’re actively performing a task—say, lifting weights at the gym or taking a hard exam—the parts of your brain required to carry it out become “active” when neurons step up their electrical activity. But is your brain active even when you’r
Nautilus4 min read
Why Women Wake Up More During Surgery
Every day about 60,000 people have surgery under general anesthesia in the United States. Often casually compared to falling into a deep sleep, going under is in fact wildly different from your everyday nocturnal slumber. Not only does a person lose
Nautilus4 min read
ChatGPT Is Funnier Than You
There are three fundamental rules of humor. Unfortunately, no one can remember what they are. We can probably blame the Greek philosopher Aristotle for this because he apparently wrote an entire book on laughter, which was then lost. His mistake was
Nautilus5 min read
People Who Can’t Picture Sound in Their Minds
Jessie Donaldson has played the flute for 26 years. One of her favorite pieces to play is “Romance No. 2” by Beethoven, a sweet and stately composition for flute, oboes, bassoons, horns, and violin. But mentally rehearsing the flute part is tricky fo
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