NAUTILUS

It seemed inevitable that Elon Musk would eventually get into a Twitter war over whether Mars can be terraformed. When you’re on Twitter, he...

Julian Barbour’s obsession with time began on Oct. 18, 1963. The 26-year-old Cambridge graduate in mathematics was on a train to the Bavaria...

Imagine you’re a scientist, sitting in the cold dark belly of a ship above an ocean abyss. Your eyes are fixed on a panel of screens as a re...

Last year, my first in medical school at Columbia University, I used a bone saw to slice through the top half of a cadaver’s skull, revealin...

In a polarized nation, victimhood is a badge of honor. It gives people strength. “The victim has become among the most important identity po...

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.The thorny thought experiment has been turned into a real experiment — on...

Many marine biologists identify a gateway drug into their obsession, and for Heather Koldewey, it was the seahorse. Who can blame her? Seaho...

In his Theaetetus, Plato remarks to Socrates: “This pathos is proper to the philosopher: It is the thaumazein. And philosophy has no other p...

My friend Robert Burton, a neurologist and author, wanted to share a song with me last year, and sent me a link to an NPR Tiny Desk Concert....

Disgust may not be a straightforward extension of the immune system’s aversion to harmful substances, but rather “a psychological nebula, la...

I grew up in a small village in a very rural part of England. It was a landscape capped with the huge skies of a low-lying coastal zone. Gen...

In 1913, 26-year-old Russian biologist Nikolai Vavilov went to the John Innes Horticultural Institute to study at the feet of legendary gene...

In 2001, Seth MacFarlane was the 27-year-old executive producer and creator of the not-yet-hit animated show Family Guy. Having broken into...

It might surprise you to find out how little evidence there is to support the idea that boosting students’ “grit”—their propensity to tenaci...

Like most American high school students, I was required to take Chemistry and English. Chemistry thrilled only by way of the absurdity of al...

It all started with an odd pile of shells: a pile that, upon closer inspection, fell apart like a flower losing its petals, introducing a bu...

Slightly ovoid in shape and somewhat blurred at the edges, the black splotches were scattered across a mottled gray background, looking much...

Robert Burioni is a virologist at the San Raffaele University in Milan, Italy, and a serious scientist. But in 2016, something happened that...

There exists a social hierarchy within science that strikes people who are not mixed up in it as ridiculous. It goes like this: Mathematicia...

I’m trying to explain to Arthur I. Miller why artworks generated by computers don’t quite do it for me. There’s no human being behind them....

Eleven years ago, I sat down across from a man named Edward Espe Brown. I had returned home to Texas from a four-month stay at the Tassajara...

One autumn afternoon in the bowels of UC Berkeley’s Li Ka Shing Center, I was looking at my brain. I had just spent 10 minutes inside the 3...

Zombies are supposed to be capable of asking any question about the nature of experience. It’s worth wondering, though, how a person or mach...

My father, Sloan Wilson, wrote novels that would help define 1950s America. I loved and admired him, but the prospect of following in the fo...

Time travel has been a beloved science-fiction idea at least since H.G. Wells wrote The Time Machine in 1895. The concept continues to fasci...