Nautilus

In his poems about strange bodies buried in the bogs of Northern Europe, the late Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney describes peatlands filled with “drowned-mouse fibres dried up and the whole limp, soggy cluster … Of weed leaf and turf mould.” Such is th

Since 1980, the temperature of the planet has risen by 0.8 degrees Celsius, resulting in unprecedented melting of the Greenland ice sheet and the acidification of oceans. In 2015, 175 million more people were exposed to heat waves compared with the a

In September 2019, Greta Thunberg, the Swedish teenage activist, excoriated world leaders for their ongoing failure to address the climate crisis. “You have stolen my dreams and my childhood with your empty words,” she said at one point during her sp

Philip Marcus, you might say, is obsessed with the solar system’s most famous storm. The computational physicist and professor in the mechanical engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley, has been probing Jupiter’s Great Red Sp

Built upon the slopes of Mount Ingino in Umbria, the ancient town of Gubbio boasts many well-preserved structures that document its glorious history. Founded by the Etruscans between the second and first centuries B.C., its Roman theater, Consuls Pal

Winter is changing its character. Since the beginning of the 21st century, glaciers have been melting at record speed. In Central Asia, they’ve lost approximately one quarter of their volume over the past 50 years. An ice grotto in Switzerland that i

Thanks to advances in machine learning over the last two decades, it’s no longer in question whether humans can beat computers at games like chess; we’d have about as much chance winning a bench-press contest against a forklift. But ask the current c

Can AI teach itself the laws of physics? Will classical computers soon be replaced by deep neural networks? Sure looks like it, if you’ve been following the news, which lately has been filled with headlines like, “A neural net solves the three-body p

The 20 words defined in this lexicon reflect the ways in which light irradiates the atmosphere, the universe, and our perception of the world. Because no single system—scientific, religious, philosophical, or cultural—can possibly encompass every mea

In February 1987, Neil Gehrels, a young researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, boarded a military plane bound for the Australian Outback. Gehrels carried some peculiar cargo: a polyethylene space balloon and a set of radiation detectors he

Water rushes into Venice’s city council chamber just minutes after the local government rejects measures to combat climate change. Wildfires consume eastern Australia as fire danger soars past “severe” and “extreme” to “catastrophic” in parts of New

Human-induced climate change may seem a purely modern phenomenon. Even in ancient Greece, however, people understood that human activities can change climate. Later the early United States was a lab for observing this as its settlers altered nature.