The science historian talks to Nautilus.

On a damp, foggy January morning in 1793, Louis XVI, besieged monarch of France, stood before a guillotine. To some 20,000 of his angry subjects, Louis declared: “I die innocent of all the pretended crimes laid to my charge. I forgive all those who have had any hand in my misfortunes, and I pray that […]

A few years ago, molecular biologists Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier, along with a team of researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, were the first to file a patent for CRISPR-Cas9. It’s a DNA-editing technology adapted from the prokaryote immune system. Cas9 is a protein that can seek out and “cut” targeted gene strands […]

What the existence of zombies would do to our philosophy of mind.

In 1868, on a hot, midsummer day, 28-year-old Mary Lynch was admitted to the Philadelphia Almshouse and Hospital, the city hospital for the poor, better known as “Old Blockley.” Lynch had tuberculosis, which was soon to be compounded by the parasitic infection trichinosis. She didn’t recover, dying in Ward 27 the following year, weighing just […]

Now that we’re nearly into the second week of our “Currents” issue, I thought it’d be fitting to recall our interview with Lisa Kaltenegger, an astronomer at Cornell University and the director of its Carl Sagan Institute. Before Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar came out, in 2014, Kaltenegger sat down with Nautilus to discuss her work, and she rhapsodized about the physics and […]