NAUTILUS

You’ve been hoaxed.The hoax seems harmless enough. A few thousand AI researchers have claimed that computers can read and write literature....

On a trip to Warsaw, Poland, in 2019, Richard Freund confronted the history of resistance against the Nazis at a Holiday Inn. Freund, an arc...

An old dog, it turns out, can teach humans new tricks. “In recent years the dog has grown to be one of the most important animals for resear...

It’s 2050 and you’re due for your monthly physical exam. Times have changed, so you no longer have to endure an orifices check, a needle in...

One of the kids in my house feels bad for people named Karen. He announced it at the dinner table. “They’re not all annoying, or racist, or...

Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog.Since they can’t prod actual universes as they inflate and bump into each...

This article first appeared online in our “Symmetry” issue in May, 2014.On an evening in January A.D. 532, pandemonium broke out in the Con...

Relief coursed through me last week when I learned my 2-year-old daughter’s daycare provider got her first dose of the Pfizer vaccine. It le...

Under a coral ledge, a day octopus and a brown-marbled grouper meet. The grouper was there first, as if waiting, and they emerge together; t...

At a moment when vaccines promise to end the coronavirus pandemic, emerging new variants threaten to accelerate it. The astonishingly fast d...

A rocket powered by kerosene and liquid oxygen and carrying a scientific observatory blasted off into space at 10:49 p.m., March 6, 2009 (by...

The central university library at Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, is an imposing, towered building known affectionately for being called a...

This past summer, my wife and I ventured to an area near Mount Adams in southwestern Washington state to census bumblebees. We camped there...

Tulpamancers imagine talking to the tulpa, sometimes for more than an hour a day, and eventually, perhaps after several months, the tulpa wi...

On Jan. 1, 2021, five long years after the vote for what’s become known as Brexit, and numerous marches before and after that national decis...

Without a doubt, the biggest questions about dreaming are all variants on this question: Why do we dream? We began studying dreaming in the...

2020 was a bad year for just about everything—except horror. Horror films were wildly popular on streaming platforms over the past year, and...

An artistic rendering of the quarks and gluons that make up a proton.Illustration by D. Dominguez / CERNIn a recent experiment done at the M...

Humans once lived in harmony with the natural world. Consider timekeeping. Until relatively recently, the human notion of time was based on...

When a Weddell seal, native to Antarctica, plummets 400 meters beneath the ice on one of its hour-long dives, an ensemble of adaptations com...

In 1991 two hikers in the Italian Alps stumbled on a mummified body buried in the ice. The Iceman, it turned out, died more than 5,000 years...

About half of all stars seem to have “super-Earth” planets on orbits closer to their stars than Mercury is to the Sun, but we don’t.Illustra...

Theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, who probably is the smartest person on her block, has fun in her latest video skewering the scien...

Happy Holidays. This week we are reprinting our top stories of 2020. This article first appeared online in our Facts So Romantic blog in May...

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