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Are your neurons thrown off by this photo? Shutterstock Most of us have an uneasy love/hate relationship with celebrity culture. No matter how much we try to pretend we’re above it all, celebrities somehow seep into our consciousness, whether it’s Miley Cyrus’s cringe-inducing twerking at the VMAs, or our enduring affection for the ensemble cast […]

Jonah Berger says his goal is nothing less than entirely upending the premise of The Tipping Point, the book that launched both the ongoing trend of big-think pop-science books and Malcolm Gladwell’s career as a famous and well-paid corporate guru. In classes he taught at Wharton, Berger told students that “Fifty percent of The Tipping […]

The year was 1986. It was my first week at my first real job in science after finishing undergraduate work. I just had recently been hired as a scientific programmer at NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Sciences (GISS) in upper Manhattan, and was still so new that I wasn’t sure where the bathrooms were. Earlier […]

This past July the Duchess of Cambridge gave birth to a baby boy. An international press corps was parked in front of the entrance of the hospital for over four weeks before that. The UK’s Daily Mail interviewed a woman who’d flown in from New Zealand to camp out in front of Buckingham Palace awaiting the […]

Roughly twice a year, the apparent positions of Sun and Moon coincide, and a fortunate few observers are treated to a solar eclipse. Watching such an event provides the opportunity to contemplate a strange coincidence: From the surface of Earth, the apparent sizes of the Sun and Moon in the sky are nearly equal. The […]

The Himba bushmen who inhabit the Namibian grasslands—a 1,200-mile-long swath of land running from Angola into South Africa—have come up with different stories over the years to explain the unusual circular bare patches, called “fairy circles,” dotted throughout the grassy expanse. These reddish-hued circles, sometimes several feet in diameter, are dubbed “footprints of the gods,” […]

On January 26, 1972, a Yugoslavian passenger plane flying 33,000 feet above then-Czechoslovakia exploded, ripped apart, and plummeted into the ground, killing 27 of the 28 passengers and crew. Vesna Vulovic, a flight attendant, was the only one to survive the crash. Vulovic holds the Guinness World Record for surviving the highest fall without a […]

Earlier this month there was a rare announcement, promoted widely by the press: a new mammal species had been discovered, the first carnivorous mammal identified in the Americas for 35 years. But the olinguito, as the raccoon-like carnivore is now known, was not spotted for its surprising looks or remarkable behaviors that set it apart […]

We recently asked you to share your most unlikely stories—the kinds of things that make you scratch your head and think, “What are the chances?” Here’s one of our favorite stories submitted by readers so far, submitted by a Nautilus reader who wishes to remain anonymous. (We’ll call him “Mateo.”) Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free […]