NAUTILUS

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our “Outbreak” issue in April, 20...

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our “Energy” issue in June, 2020....

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our “Intelligence” issue in March...

All drugs and treatments have side effects, but vaccines in general have the fewest.Illustration by eamesBot / ShutterstockIn the late 1650’...

I remember my grandfather commenting—wry amusement tinged with grim resignation—that what made him finally feel old was seeing his children...

The Chinese artist Xu Bing has long experimented to stunning effect with the limits of the written form. Last year I visited the Centre del...

Some evolutionary biologists say that after we pass reproductive age, nature, like a cat who’s been fed, is done with us. The bodily systems...

A conjunction is a good time to reflect on our cosmic heritage, and on the long shadows cast by the gas giants.Illustration by SN VFX / Shut...

The 19th-century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared his progress in solving a problem to that of a mountain climber “compelled to retr...

The air was warm as the skies grew dark over Diego Garcia. As the nearly full moon reached its highest point, a green sea turtle scuttled he...

“I have lately been especially attending to Geograph. Distrib, & most splendid sport it is,—a grand game of chess with the world for a Board...

What’s intriguing about anonymous giving, and other behaviors apparently designed to obscure good traits and acts, like modesty, is that it’...

When people entertain transporting to the past, 19th-century Berlin, say, they don’t often imagine a dramatic shift in smellscape. The inhab...

I have been wanting to do this since I was 5 years old,” Apple CEO Tim Cook proclaimed to a packed San Francisco auditorium on March 9, 2015...

Safe, effective, and available vaccines are the best long-term solution to the coronavirus pandemic.1 So it’s welcome news that two vaccines...

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.A team in Paris has made the most precise measurement yet of the fine-str...

Arguably the best prescription to improve the situation facing women in science is for there to be more women in science.Oleg Golovnev / Shu...

The Man Who Loved PhysicsBy Alan Lightman Several years ago, I attended a Buddhist retreat in which I was introduced to the idea of the “ret...

Imagine that someone asked you to come up with a sequence of five words. In any other year, some idiosyncratic combination would likely come...

The one law of physics that virtually all scientists believe will never be found to be wrong is the second law of thermodynamics. Despite th...

The 2020 Nobel Prize in Physics went to three researchers who confirmed that Einstein’s general relativity predicts black holes, and establi...

It’s easy to name science and math geniuses. I can just flip open my old book from the 1960s, which lists “100 Great Scientists”; it contain...

Scientists have now produced apparently effective vaccines at sufficient scale to vaccinate most vulnerable populations in the United States...

What Einstein said was nearly as scathing as any contemporary critique of religion you might hear from Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, or Chris...

Chess offers a unique opportunity. It could perhaps be the ultimate window through which we might see how our mental powers shift during our...