NAUTILUS

When the power goes out, the two young scientists are plunged into pitch blackness. After exclamations and fumbling they turn their phone li...

I could stridently insist that natural selection is the only way that complex life can evolve, but that’s not strictly true. We can already...

Nobel laureate Frank Wilczek’s new book, Fundamentals: Ten Keys to Reality, is both a way of thinking about the abundance that characterizes...

There are many ways to think about alien, extraterrestrial life forms. Science-fiction writers do it all the time. Scientists, more interest...

“There is light at the end of the tunnel,” Wayne Koff, President and CEO of the Human Vaccines Project, an organization that promotes vaccin...

This piece was produced in cooperation with the Nib.Maki Naro is an award-winning feral cartoonist and science communicator. You can reliabl...

“It’s really hard to define what’s special about neurons,” says Tufts molecular biologist Michael Levin. “Almost all cells do the things neu...

We’ve all been there. Stuck in our own heads, fixated on a two-minute conversation from three days ago. We replay it over and over. I should...

You know what the plot of a show called CSI: Chicxulub would be? Finding out what killed the dinosaurs, of course. There’s now no question t...

It’s a bit of a bummer that dreams are as fascinating as they are hard and expensive to study. Famed psychologists like Sigmund Freud and Ca...

Habits: You two were arguing, I just kept walking. Felt like the right thing to do.Photograph by evrymmnt / ShutterstockINT. HOME OFFICE—DAY...

The small wonders of the natural world impressed Amanda Phingbodhipakkiya early. As a girl, growing up in Atlanta, she was encouraged by her...

As economic inequality increased in many wealthy nations in recent years, a debate has developed around the question of whether inequality i...

When we first meet L3, Lando Calrissian’s droid co-pilot in the 2018 film Solo: A Star Wars Story, she’s railing against a brutal droid-on-d...

When he was a boy, Mark Solms obsessed over big existential questions. What happens when I die? What makes me who I am? He went on to study...

The 21st century is a time of great scientific discovery. Cars are driving themselves. Vaccines against deadly new viruses are created in le...

Everyone seems to be talking about the problems with physics: Peter Woit’s book Not Even Wrong, Lee Smolin’s The Trouble With Physics, and S...

In the past quarter century, enrollment in college English departments has sunk like the Pequod in Moby Dick. Meanwhile enrollment in scienc...

Suppose aliens existed, and imagine that some of them had been watching our planet for its entire four and a half billion years. What would...

Your brain has been altered, neurologically rewired as you acquired a particular skill. This renovation has left you with a specialized area...

Not since World War II has there been as great a threat to mental health as the current COVID-19 pandemic, according to Aiden James. The cha...

Carl Hart is a neuroscientist and Ziff Professor of Psychology at Columbia University—he was the first tenured African-American professor of...

To shield one’s pet hypothesis of an alien object by suggesting that it is not being taken seriously because of a flaw in how we do science...

It’s encouraging to know that merely paying attention to the details of your environment can make you a little more rational.Illustration by...

This essay first appeared in our “Home” issue way back in 2013. But somehow feels so timely today.Halfway through director Alfonso Cuarón’...