Browsing: Digital_post

While the cosmological version is the most famous, it is far from the only dark matter story in science. There are silent neurons, missing fossils, and nighttime animal migration; death and conception; algorithms both genetic and man-made. Seeing, it turns out, isn’t the only path to believing.

Envy is green, anger is red, and exoplanet artist renderings are usually swirly brown. Purple used to mean royal, until the chemists figured out how to make it cheaply. Blue is usually the last color to be introduced into a language. And for the philosopher? It’s all qualia.

What could we not know about water? As it turns out, plenty. It covers most of the Earth, but is regularly in short supply. It is intimately involved in the processes of life, but life on other planets may not need it. It is inscrutable and unpredictable, but we try to price it. The debates […]

Nature is full of “mistakes,” from improperly copied genes to animals deceiving each other. Even foundational physics has shed some of its air of mathematical inevitability, and wrestles with why we live in a universe that is “right” for life. Is there a “wrong” universe out there? And how does the scientist negotiate this hall […]

One dreary Tuesday, Leó Szilárd took a walk. Crossing the street, he realized that nuclear reactions could be maintained by the neutrons they themselves produced. A self-sustaining nuclear reactor became a reality nine years later, and the bomb in another three. This issue, we watch dominoes fall in human lives, across the oceans and under cities. They […]

The March/April 2015 Nautilus print magazine (our seventh print edition) combines some of the best content from our issues on Illusions, Creativity, and Information, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by Swedish author and hoverfly collector Fredrik Sjöberg; Tom Vanderbilt; Robin Marantz Henig; Phil Ball; and Alex Wright. Plus, […]

Slow is good. That’s the message of more than a dozen modern slowness movements, from slow fashion to slow food to slow church, most of which have sprung up in the last 20 years, and most of which point a steady finger at modernity. This issue is full of people chasing slow. Slow living, slow […]

The fifth issue of the Nautilus Quarterly combines some of the best content from our issues on Symmetry, Mutation, and Turbulence, with new original contributions from the world’s best thinkers and gorgeous full-color illustrations.  The issue includes contributions by science writer Lee Billings; engineering professor Barbara Oakley; journalist and NYU professor Jessica Seigel; author Moises Velasquez-Manoff; and author David Berreby. It also features original […]

The fourth issue of the Nautilus Quarterly features some of the best content from our issues on Mergers & Acquisitions, Light, and Feedback, plus new, original essays and rich, full-color illustrations.  This issue includes contributions by ecologist Nigel Pitman; best-selling novelist Daniel Kehlmann; award-winning author Philip Ball; Columbia University astrophysicist Caleb Scharf; award-winning science writer Ed Yong; and paleontologist and author Neil […]

The third issue of the Nautilus Quarterly combines some of the best online content from our issues on Waste, Home, and Time with original essays and rich, full-color illustrations.  The issue includes contributions by investigative journalist Anna Badkehn; former editor in chief of Discover Corey Powell; MIT physicist Max Tegmark; psychology professor David Barash; theoretical physicist Lee Smolin; and Time’s “Hero […]