Nautilus
A magazine on science, culture, and philosophy for the intellectually curious
Publisher5 stories / week
How the Western Diet Has Derailed Our Evolution
For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research,…
Galaxy Simulations Offer a New Solution to the Fermi Paradox
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Astronomers claim in a new paper that star motions should make…
Here’s How We’ll Know an AI Is Conscious
Zombies are supposed to be capable of asking any question about the nature of experience. It’s worth wondering, though, how a person…
How the Universe Remembers Information
It was one of the great missed connections of physics. In 1965 a particle theorist derived a formula for the collision of elementary…
The Math That Takes Newton Into the Quantum World
In my 50s, too old to become a real expert, I have finally fallen in love with algebraic geometry. As the name suggests, this is the…
How Our Universe Could Emerge as a Hologram
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Physicists have devised a holographic model of “de Sitter…
The Case for Being Skeptical of Moral Outrage
If, as the research shows, our moral outrage is highly sensitive to actions but not consequences, we might want to treat feelings…
Why We Should Think Twice About Colonizing Space
There are lots of reasons why colonizing space seems compelling. The popular astronomer Neil deGrasse Tyson argues that it would stimulate…
Why Misinformation Is About Who You Trust, Not What You Think
I can’t see them. Therefore they’re not real.” From which century was this quote drawn? Not a medieval one. The utterance emerged…
The Case For Leaving City Rats Alone
Kaylee Byers crouches in a patch of urban blackberries early one morning this June, to check a live trap in one of Vancouver’s poorest…
How to Get Close to a Black Hole
An Introduction to the Black Hole InstituteFittingly, the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) was founded 100 years after Karl Schwarzschild…
Modern Media Is a DoS Attack on Your Free Will
It’s not that James Williams, a doctoral candidate at the Oxford Internet Institute’s Digital Ethics Lab (motto: “Every Bit…
New Evidence for the Geometry of Thought
The brain may represent concepts in the same way that it represents space and your location, by using the same neural circuitry for…
Impossible Cookware and Other Triumphs of the Penrose Tile
In 1974, Roger Penrose, a British mathematician, created a revolutionary set of tiles that could be used to cover an infinite plane…
How Supermassive Black Holes Were Discovered
An Introduction to the Black Hole InstituteFittingly, the Black Hole Initiative (BHI) was founded 100 years after Karl Schwarzschild…
How Animal Rescuers Are Burning Out Their Empathy
No one likes to hear about the freezers full of euthanized animals. It’s an uncomfortable reality, but often animal rescue workers…
Patterns - Issue 69: Patterns
What makes up DNA? Besides instructions for manufacturing proteins, that is. In the early days of genetic sequencing, some scientists…
Gustav Klimt in the Brain Lab
The neuroscientist was in the art gallery and there were many things to learn. So Eric Kandel excitedly guided me through the bright…
The Last Invention of Man
The Omega Team was the soul of the company. Whereas the rest of the enterprise brought in the money to keep things going, by various…
Why Doing Good Makes It Easier to Be Bad
Oscar Wilde, the famed Irish essayist and playwright, had a gift, among other things, for counterintuitive aphorisms. In “The Soul…
What Does Any of This Have To Do with Physics?
Have you ever been happy?” My girlfriend asked me that question, after work over drinks at some shiny Manhattan bar, after another…
Understanding the Brain with the Help of Artificial Intelligence
How does consciousness arise? Researchers suspect that the answer to this question lies in the connections between neurons. Unfortunately, however, little is known about the wiring of the brain.…