Nautilus

Sometimes it seems surprising that science functions at all. In 2005, medical science was shaken by a paper with the provocative title “Why most published research findings are false.”1 Written by John Ioannidis, a professor of medicine at Stanford U

Released in July 2016, Pokémon Go is a location-based, augmented-reality game for mobile devices, typically played on mobile phones; players use the device’s GPS and camera to capture, battle, and train virtual creatures (“Pokémon”) who appear on the

One afternoon in February 2000, after a long day’s drilling, Bruce Koci and I sat together on the sand in the volcanic crater on the 19,000-foot summit of Kilimanjaro. As we leaned against our packs and watched the sun set, he reminisced about his ca

Most humans can be placed into three major categories of tasters—nontasters, tasters, and supertasters, roughly in the ratio of 25 percent: 50 percent: 25 percent. There is also a small percentage (less than 1 percent) of humanity categorized in a su

You’re sitting here, reading this article. Maybe it’s a hard copy, or an e-book on a tablet computer or e-reader. It doesn’t matter. Whatever you’re reading it on, we can be reasonably sure it’s made of some kind of stuff: paper, card, plastic, perha

Space is a cold and barren place. Nothing can exist there, nothing!” Ludwig Von Drake, an obscure uncle of Donald Duck and a professor of astronomy, is sitting on a high stool in his observatory. When he sees that he is being filmed, he falls off and

Julian Jaynes was living out of a couple of suitcases in a Princeton dorm in the early 1970s. He must have been an odd sight there among the undergraduates, some of whom knew him as a lecturer who taught psychology, holding forth in a deep baritone v

During July’s heat wave, as the Larsen C iceberg began its ocean journey, an ice cream “support session” convened in Manhattan. A classroom of high school teachers were shakin’ it like a Polaroid picture, investigating how a vigorous agitation of ice

Outside of gothic works of fiction set in Transylvania, we rarely read of enduring friendships that have been initiated by a bite. But that is exactly how nature writers Sy Montgomery and Elizabeth Marshall Thomas—the two extraordinary, quirky, and i

An iconic sentence, this. But how did it ever make its way into the world? At 71 words, it is composed of eight separate clauses, each anchored by its own verb, nested within one another in various arrangements. The main clause (a decent respect to t

Here’s something you probably didn’t do this morning: Look in the mirror and ask, am I a jerk? It seems like a reasonable question. There are, presumably, genuine jerks in the world. And many of those jerks, presumably, have a pretty high moral opini

World building is the best part of writing,” Andy Weir tells me. The software engineer turned writer is getting his practice in. In his 2011 novel The Martian, he built a Mars base, complete with carefully calculated Earth-Mars rocket schedules and c

Michael J. Ryan, a professor of zoology, didn’t call his forthcoming book, Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Frog Sex* (*But Were Afraid to Ask), but he sure could have. For 40 years, Ryan has studied the tiny tungara frog, mostly on the tro

The evolution of sexual beauty is an ongoing experiment in every species, including our own. Variation in courtship traits arise and are judged by choosers who quickly relegate most of them to the dustbin of history. But new attempts at beauty that p

Sheryl Sorby, a professor of engineering education at Ohio State University, was used to getting A’s. For as long as she could remember, she found academics a breeze. She excelled in math and science in particular, but “I never thought there was a su

The science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein once wrote, “Each generation thinks it invented sex.” He was presumably referring to the pride each generation takes in defining its own sexual practices and ethics. But his comment hit the mark in another s

There’s a weird way in which a hedge fund is a confluence of everything. There’s the money of course—Two Sigma, located in lower Manhattan, manages over $50 billion, an amount that has grown 600 percent in 6 years and is roughly the size of the econo

The soccer match hadn’t even started when the cops showed up. On the streets of Marseille, France, the officers—helmeted, shields in hands, batons on belts—charged through a crowd to break up a thicket of English and Russian fans who were hurling bot

Robert Musil, in his Man Without Qualities, wrote that a Soul is “That which crawls away and hides whenever someone mentions algebra.” According to his friend, Elias Canetti, Musil “felt at home and seemed natural among scientists,” as distinct from

We’ve all heard it before: There’s no time like the present. Broadly speaking, of course, it means to “seize the opportunity right now,” or maybe in my case, to avoid procrastinating. From a psychological perspective, this makes a lot of sense. As hu