Nautilus

This article from our 2013 issue, “In Transit,” offers a timely look at how an animal virus from one place can infect people across the world. Sometime in 2004, a pig was trucked with a herd of others to Sheung Shui Slaughterhouse, Hong Kong’s larges

The hint of a headache at your temples, an itch at the back of your throat, a fever so slight you barely feel it. You know that it’s probably nothing, but, still, part of you wonders: Could it be? In this new reality where quarantine is a daily reali

Celebrated playwright Terrence McNally passed away on March 24. As told to The New York Times by his husband Tom Kirdahy, the cause of death was “complications of the coronavirus.” McNally, 81, died on the battlefield of his body. He was a lung cance

Needing to clear my head, I went down to the Penobscot River. There they were, swimming with the mergansers, following an early pulse of river herring to the mouth of Kenduskeag stream: two harbor seals, raising sleek round heads for a few long breat

Life right now, for someone who studies respiratory virus infections, can be hectic and alarming. Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunology as well as molecular, cellular, and development biology at the Yale School of Medicine, hasn’t had a weekend or

I’m no stranger to forced isolation. For the better part of my 20s, I served as a nuclear submarine officer running secret missions for the United States Navy. I deployed across the vast Pacific Ocean with a hundred other sailors on the USS Connectic

Can we leap beyond flattening the curve and eliminate COVID-19 as a public health threat—not years from now but weeks? “It’s a war we should fight to win,” declared Harvey V. Fineberg, former Dean of the Harvard School of Public Health, in the New En

Early in the morning on April 5, 2020, an article appeared on the website Medium with the title “Covid-19 had us all fooled, but now we might have finally found its secret.” The article claimed that the pathology of COVID-19 was completely different

This article from our 2013 issue, “Fame,” offers a look at the way information—whether it’s true or not—spreads across the Internet. On April 11, 2012, Zeddie Little appeared on Good Morning America, wearing the radiant, slightly perplexed smile of o

My mother-in-law, Carol, lives alone. It was her 75th birthday the other day. Normally, I send flowers. Normally, she spends some part of the day with the family members who live nearby and not across the country as my husband, Mark, and I do. And no

Like most of us, Adam Tooze is stuck at home. The British-born economic historian and Columbia University professor of history had been on leave this school year to write a book about climate change. But now he’s studying a different global problem.

The marquee on my closed neighborhood movie theater reads, “See you on the other side.” I like reading it every day as I pass by on my walk. It causes me to envision life after the coronavirus pandemic. Which is awfully hard to envision now. But it’s

In the summer of 1956, a small group of mathematicians and computer scientists gathered at Dartmouth College to embark on the grand project of designing intelligent machines. The ultimate goal, as they saw it, was to build machines rivaling human int

What is this pandemic doing to our minds? Polls repeatedly show it’s having an adverse effect on our mental health. Physical distancing, for some, means social isolation, which has long been shown to encourage depression. Previous disasters have been

On January 5, six days after China officially announced a spate of unusual pneumonia cases, a team of researchers at Shanghai’s Fudan University deposited the full genome sequence of the causal virus, SARS-CoV-2, into Genbank. A little more than thre

Plants are intelligent beings with profound wisdom to impart—if only we know how to listen. And Monica Gagliano knows how to listen. The evolutionary ecologist has done groundbreaking experiments suggesting plants have the capacity to learn, remember

In the COVID-19 pandemic, numerous models are being used to predict the future. But as helpful as they are, they cannot make sense of themselves. They rely on epidemiologists and other modelers to interpret them. Trouble is, making predictions in a p

There’s an old belief that truth will always overcome error. Alas, history tells us something different. Without someone to fight for it, to put error on the defensive, truth may languish. It may even be lost, at least for some time. No one understoo

You probably know my robot. I’ve been inventing autonomous machines for over 30 years and one of them, Roomba from iRobot, is quite popular. During my career, I’ve learned a lot about what makes robots valuable, and formed some strong opinions about

We all want to get back to our lives—go out for a drink, see a movie, hug our parents and grandparents, and bring our cities back to life. When will the virus be under control? And how do we measure that? Much of the media coverage of COVID-19 talks

If there is one thing that the coronavirus pandemic has exposed, it is that there is much that we still don’t know about the world around us. Forget about the trillions—OK, more than trillions—of galaxies in the universe that we’ll never explore. Jus

The two men in the coach were both 28 years old, born within a few months of each other in 1571. Frederik was Danish and Johannes was German, and for different reasons they now found themselves jostled together, in early June of 1600, traveling from

We called Greg Carr the other day to talk about the spread of the coronavirus in Africa. Carr, who has been featured in Nautilus, is the founder of the Gorongosa Restoration Project, a partnership with the Mozambique government to revive Gorongosa Na