Few experiences on the road are more perplexing than phantom traffic jams. Most of us have experienced one: The vehicle ahead of you… | Continue reading
Early in the morning on Sept. 11, 1995, the cruise liner the Queen Elizabeth 2, on its way from Southampton to New York, was being… | Continue reading
How remarkable, I thought, that science is fulfilling, in some sense, that ancient aspiration to decipher some measure of our personal… | Continue reading
It began like any normal pregame in the woods. Naked, alone, hungover, a sweaty sleeping bag in the back of a dusty pickup truck,… | Continue reading
Many people cheat on taxes—no mystery there. But many people don’t, even if they wouldn’t be caught—now, that’s weird. Or… | Continue reading
Artist Sayaka Ganz converts consumer castoffs into meaningful work. She makes sculptures entirely of second-hand plastics that are… | Continue reading
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.Researchers explore a loophole that extracts useful energy… | Continue reading
David Pizarro and his colleagues argue that emotional expression functions as a signal to others that you’ve incorporated feelings… | Continue reading
Some dark, clear nights, when the blazing stars cast shadows down on Mauna Kea, Hawaii, the astronomer Olivier Guyon steps away from… | Continue reading
English adapts to the needs of people speaking it more than it shapes those people’s ideas or ideals.Photograph by kimberrywood… | Continue reading
“How many kingdoms know us not!”—Blaise Pascal, Thoughts (1670) One summer’s day in 1950, the great Italian-American physicist… | Continue reading
Was it a chance encounter when you met that special someone or was there some deeper reason for it? What about that strange dream… | Continue reading
The $10,000 First Prize will include the opportunity to publish the winning article in Nautilus, a leading online and print magazine… | Continue reading
After a few years of driving, you are able to hold conversations while navigating a busy city. How is this possible without unconscious… | Continue reading
The size of things in our universe runs all the way from the tiny 10-19 meter scale that characterizes quark interactions, to the… | Continue reading
A whole lot of books on the brain are published these days and you can read yourself into a coma trying to make sense of their various… | Continue reading
No doubt if you had the special ability to see beyond the color spectrum, it would benefit not just yourself, but your family and… | Continue reading
The squeak in my mom’s voice seemed strange, but not worrisome. When we spoke on the phone, she sounded like she had inhaled helium.… | Continue reading
One day in March 2010, Isak McCune started clearing his throat with a forceful, violent sound. The New Hampshire toddler was 3, with… | Continue reading
The great French mathematician and physicist Henri Poincaré (1854–1912) took a particular interest in the origins of his own astonishing… | Continue reading
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine‘s Abstractions blog.In the hunt for new fundamental particles, physicists have… | Continue reading
It was nearly midnight aboard the research vessel Atlantis. The ship was about a thousand miles west of Costa Rica, where she’d… | Continue reading
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, a Spanish histologist and anatomist known today as the father of modern neuroscience, was also a committed… | Continue reading
My conclusion is that in a colonized universe the probability of the annihilation of the human race could actually rise rather than… | Continue reading
Watching Peter Woit lecture on quantum mechanics to a class at Columbia University—speaking softly, tapping out equations on a blackboard—it’s… | Continue reading
Inside the South London offices of Doppel, a wearable technology start-up, sandwiched into a single room on a floor between a Swedish… | Continue reading
Lev Landau, a Nobelist and one of the fathers of a great school of Soviet physics, had a logarithmic scale for ranking theorists,… | Continue reading
Burnham confronts his own luck and the feeling of having unearned respect in his work directly, as if he’s intuited what the authors… | Continue reading
If you see a car along that road,” Tyler Nordgren warned me, “don’t look at the headlights. It’ll ruin your night vision for… | Continue reading
By the time Donald Johnson got the call to come to the crime scene, the victim had been dead for hours. A first responder opened the… | Continue reading
Jerry Mitrovica has been overturning accepted wisdom for decades. A solid Earth geophysicist at Harvard, he studies the internal structure… | Continue reading
Also in Sociology Why We Keep Playing the Lottery By Adam Piore To grasp how unlikely it was for Gloria C. MacKenzie,… | Continue reading
Three baseball umpires are talking about how they play the game. The first says, “I call ’em as they are.” The second, “I… | Continue reading
The challenge that the multiverse poses for the idea of an all-good, all-powerful God is often focused on fine-tuning. If there are… | Continue reading
Your heart rate speeds up, your breathing quickens. Your muscles tighten. Your stomach ties itself in knots. All of these changes… | Continue reading
Sports fans aren’t typically in the mood for academic research in the minutes before a big game. But Paul Bernhardt, an aspiring… | Continue reading
You know the star players’ names of this World Cup: Brazilian forward Neymar, United States goalkeeper Tim Howard, Argentinian forward… | Continue reading
What this World Cup reveals isn’t that the stats were wrong—far from it, they were insightfully calculated—but rather that we… | Continue reading
When the Dutch arrived in New York Harbor in 1609, Staten Island—or Staaten Eylandt, as they named it—was a wild wonderland, woodland… | Continue reading
Eric Lundgren, the 33-year-old, fedora-wearing CEO of a major electronic waste recycling plant in Los Angeles, could be called both… | Continue reading
Remember domino theory? One country going Communist was supposed to topple the next, and then the next, and the next. The metaphor… | Continue reading
Despite having a standard model of an AGN—a supermassive black hole surrounded by an accretion disk with jets streaming out in opposite… | Continue reading
Here is the predicament that most of us seem to be in. We are not virtuous people. We simply do not have characters that are good… | Continue reading
As a cosmologist, some of the questions I hear most frequently after a lecture include: What lies beyond our universe? What is our… | Continue reading
One survey of 2,000 people found that if you have only one hangover a month, it adds up to two years of total sick time over the course… | Continue reading
In February 1987, Neil Gehrels, a young researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, boarded a military plane bound for the… | Continue reading
Chicago-bound motorists passing mile marker 121 on Interstate-88 through Aurora, Illinois, on Sept. 30, 2011, at 3:00 p.m. likely… | Continue reading
The notion that our choices are driven by our own personal thoughts and opinions seems so obvious that it is not even worth mentioning,”… | Continue reading