NAUTILUS

We were all very tired. My crew and I had been tracking nautiluses off tiny Ndrova Island in Papua New Guinea for close to a week. Every day...

It turned out that, yes, the participants’ brains revealed they were doing a kind of “neural replay” of the game they had been manipulated t...

Epidemics have a way of making one wonder about death. To put it plainly, in the raw form it takes as it first rises from our hearts: Why? W...

Researching my upcoming book on film, Suddenly Something Clicked, I was struck by something that had not occurred to me in 50 years of film...

As I write this at the end of July, 79 wildfires are burning across 12 states in the U.S. In Oregon, a mammoth fire has engulfed some 400,00...

Panpsychists look at the many rungs on the complexity ladder of nature and see no obvious line between mind and no-mind.Illustration by Yurc...

Stable cultural forms do not have to result from close replication; they can emerge continuously out of subtle changes.Illustration by Vecto...

We all live in two worlds: a world outside of ourselves containing things that others can also see and hear and touch, and a world inside co...

One of my favorite walkways in the world spans a beautiful fig in the village of Falealupo on the island of Savai’i, Samoa, formerly Western...

Japanese cuisine is so varied and refined that it’s hard to happen upon something unpleasant to the palate. My personal procedure in Japan i...

It’s now fashionable, when something has you mildly obsessed, to say that it is “living rent-free in your head.” Well, in my case, that some...

When musicians have chemistry, we can feel it. There’s something special among them that’s missing when they perform alone. Anyone who’s hea...

In 2018, a German newspaper asked me if I would be interested in having a conversation with the philosopher Emanuele Coccia, who had just wr...

As abstract as it is, physics enriches your life.Image via Sabine Hossenfelder / YouTubeScience without the gobbledygook.” That’s the name,...

There’s a silent epidemic slowly brewing around the globe. It hasn’t claimed as many lives as COVID-19, but if it gets out of control, it wi...

There’s an old belief that truth will always overcome error. Alas, history tells us something different. Without someone to fight for it, to...

My father, a neurologist, once had a patient who was tormented, in the most visceral sense, by a poem. Philip was 12 years old and a student...

Blaise Pascal was a renowned French polymath of the 17th century, scientist, philosopher, mathematician, inventor, and later in life a theol...

If you look at every ape protein, they have every bone we have, every muscle we have, the same type of hair, and on and on. They’re just bet...

In our evolving understanding of dinosaurs, Tyrannosaurus rex has acquired a new persona in recent decades. It’s always been the imperious,...

Everything became imbued with a sense of vitality and life and vividness. If I picked up a pebble from the beach, it would move. It would gl...

On the dark night of March 13, 1781, William Herschel settled down in his garden observatory in Bath, England, for a routine night of observ...

What are the interventions that are supposed to make us happier? What doesn’t work? And if something does work, how much good does it do?Pix...

The deep sea is a part of our planet unlike any other. Accounting for over 95 percent of Earth’s living space, it is cold, dark, and under e...

We’re not the man we used to be. Over the last 20 years, genomics, ancient DNA, and paleoanthropology have joined forces to completely overh...