Nautilus
A magazine on science, culture, and philosophy for the intellectually curious
Publisher1 story / day
The Romantic Venus We Never Knew
On the day that I was born—winter solstice, 1959—a headline in Life magazine proclaimed “Target Venus: There May be Life There!”…
What Ancient Romans Used Instead of Toilet Paper
Our ancient Roman would simply wipe him- or herself, rinse the tersorium in whatever was available (running water and/or a bucket…
The Self Is Other People
“We’re constantly bouncing off other people and looking at other people as a mirror of us. Our very sense of who we are is intertwined…
The Deepest Uncertainty
Georg Cantor died in 1918 in a sanatorium in Halle, Germany. A pre-eminent mathematician, he had laid the foundation for the theory…
Yes, Determinists, There Is Free Will
It’s not just in politics where otherwise smart people consistently talk past one another. People debating whether humans have free…
Evolution Is Really Not That Into Sex
What is sex for? When I regularly queried students at the beginning of my course in evolutionary biology, most responded that it was…
The English Word That Hasn’t Changed in Sound or Meaning in 8,000…
The word lox was one of the clues that eventually led linguists to discover who the Proto-Indo-Europeans were, and where they lived.Photograph…
What Chinese Medicine Has to Teach Us About New Mothers
Pregnancy, labor and delivery, and the postpartum period put women in peril, giving rise to precautions that gave them a sense of…
What Impossible Meant to Feynman
Impossible! The word resonated throughout the large lecture hall. I had just finished describing a revolutionary concept for a new…
Tantalizing Creatures with Male and Female Genes
As they often do after a rainstorm, butterflies had gathered around puddles on Pigeon Mountain in northwest Georgia. Nets in hand,…
Are Animal Experiments Justified?
The rat sat still in the middle of her cage, moving only in response to my touch, and even then only as if in slow-motion. My subject,…
Only Street Dogs Are Real Dogs
What is a dog? Many people often think of dogs as kennel club creations. The purebred dog is man’s best friend, not the street dog.…
Dark Matter Gets a Reprieve in New Analysis
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.A strange glow coming from the Milky Way’s center was thought…
The “Emodiversity” of Star Wars
What the hyper-rational Vulcan Spock represents, psychologist Igor Grossman said, is “uniform emotional down-regulation,” whereas…
Read the Lost Dream Journal of the Man Who Discovered Neurons
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish histologist and anatomist known today as the father of modern neuroscience, was also a committed…
The Mystery of Human Uniqueness
If you dropped a dozen human toddlers on a beautiful Polynesian island with shelter and enough to eat, but no computers, no cell phones,…
The Case for Professors of Stupidity
Bertrand Russell’s quip prefigured the scientific discovery of a cognitive bias—the Dunning–Kruger effect—that has been so…
Human Exceptionalism Stifles Progress
Last November Chinese scientist He Jiankui announced the birth of twin babies whose germline he claimed to have altered to reduce…
Quandary - Issue 72: Quandary
Not long ago I was in a catacomb, listening to the Creature from Frankenstein bemoan his loneliness. I was at the Green-Wood Cemetery…
The Philosopher Who Says We Should Play God
Australian bioethicist Julian Savulescu has a knack for provocation. Take human cloning. He says most of us would readily accept it…
Why Water Is Weird - Facts So Romantic
It’s striking that water can illustrate and elucidate a martial arts philosophy while also being, to this day, the “least understood…
The Problem with the Way Scientists Study Reason
Psychologists studying reasoning extensively rely on logic and philosophy, and neglect psychology’s more natural ally: biology.…
In the Flow on Half Dome
We reached Thank God Ledge on the Regular Northwest Face, of Yosemite’s iconic Half Dome climb, by mid-afternoon. This 40-foot horizontal…
Nurture Alone Can’t Explain Male Aggression
A young bank teller is shot dead during a robbery. The robber flees in a stolen van and is chased down the motorway by a convoy of…
