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
To understand someone, we should not imagine their point of view but make the effort to “get” their perspective.Pixabay / Public… | Continue reading
“To imagine a language is to imagine a form of life.” —Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (1953)1 Jeremy England… | Continue reading
Excuse me, but what’s the time?” I’m guessing that you, like me, are guilty of having asked this question, as if it were obvious… | Continue reading
In 1950, with the Cold War in full swing, Soviet journalists were looking desperately for something to help them fill their anti-American… | Continue reading
It turns out that, even in a highly coordinated hive, antisocial individuals persist.“Wanderer above the sea of fog,” by Caspar… | Continue reading
In his free time, Sven Laumer serves as a referee for Bavaria’s highest amateur football league. A few years ago, he noticed several… | Continue reading
For the microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, that career-defining moment—the discovery that changed the trajectory of his research,… | Continue reading
1. Unshaven and one bit shortTo death and taxes, Benjamin Franklin’s binary list of life’s certainties, add the expectation that… | Continue reading
This article introduces Nautilus’ month-long exploration of the science and art of time.When Lee Smolin’s book Time Reborn was… | Continue reading
This article is part of Nautilus’ month-long exploration of the science and art of time. Read the introduction here. I recently… | Continue reading
When I approach Sofiya Campbell, she regards me and my exuberant smile carefully. It’s only after we shake hands formally that,… | Continue reading
In 1996, Yale economist William D. Nordhaus calculated that the average citizen of Babylon would have had to work a total of 41 hours… | Continue reading
This might be one of the most remote places on earth, little accessible by road, but its peace is routinely broken by the oldest,… | Continue reading
In case you haven’t heard, doomsday is coming—more droughts, floods, famine, class warfare, entitled children, and, brace yourself:… | Continue reading
When it comes to artificial intelligence, we may all be suffering from the fallacy of availability: thinking that creating intelligence… | Continue reading
A city’s pace of life was indeed “significantly related” to the physical, social, and psychological well-being of its inhabitants.Photograph… | Continue reading
In Ithaca, New York, a virtual machine in a laboratory at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology sits in the night, humming. The machine’s… | Continue reading
The Earth may not be flat, but the web certainly is. “There is no ‘top’ to the World-Wide Web,” declared a 1992 foundational… | Continue reading
The lack of willingness to view human cognition and behavior as within the purview of evolutionary processes has prevented evolution… | Continue reading
It was the most ambitious social experiment ever conducted by the United States Department of Housing and Urban Development. And one… | Continue reading
This article is part of Nautilus’ month-long exploration of the science and art of time. Read the introduction here. Growing up… | Continue reading
On August 27, 1883, the Earth let out a noise louder than any it has made since. It was 10:02 a.m. local time when the sound emerged… | Continue reading
After the fall of the Berlin Wall, East German citizens were offered the chance to read the files kept on them by the Stasi, the much-feared… | Continue reading
A partial solution to the problem of punishing droughts may be to snatch water from the air, Dune-style.Photograph by NASA’s… | Continue reading
Silicon Valley has a term for startups that reach the $1 billion valuation mark: unicorns. The term is instructive. It suggests not… | Continue reading
Over the ages our teeth and our tongue have become ever more crowded by the shrinking of the human jaw. Not only is this an aesthetic… | Continue reading
What’s intriguing about anonymous giving, and other behaviors apparently designed to obscure good traits and acts, like modesty,… | Continue reading
Princeton’s Palmer Field, 1951. An autumn classic matching the unbeaten Tigers, with star tailback Dick Kazmaier—a gifted passer,… | Continue reading
Nothing focuses the mind like a moment of peril. John Hockenberry, the heavily-decorated journalist and commentator, had one of those… | Continue reading
This article is part of Nautilus’ month-long exploration of the science and art of time. Read the introduction here. Don’t look… | Continue reading
In April of 2000, the journal Anesthesia & Analgesia published a letter to its editor from Peter Kranke and two colleagues that… | Continue reading
This article is part of Nautilus’ month-long exploration of the science and art of time. Read the introduction here.How is composing… | Continue reading
The camera doesn’t often linger on all the severed heads in Game of Thrones. But if it did, might we see some sign of awareness—at… | Continue reading
Early in their training, many physics students come across the idea of spherical cows. Cows in the real world—even at their most… | Continue reading
The novelist William Golding suggested to James Lovelock that he name his now-famous hypothesis after the Greek goddess of the Earth,… | Continue reading
Silicon Valley has a term for startups that reach the $1 billion valuation mark: unicorns. The term is instructive. It suggests not… | Continue reading
On a warm day in April 2013, I was sitting in a friend’s kitchen in Paris, trying to engineer serendipity. I was trying to get my… | Continue reading
David Pizarro and his colleagues argue that emotional expression functions as a signal to others that you’ve incorporated feelings… | Continue reading
Sometime between November 11 and 18, 1915, Albert Einstein began a brief calculation. In 14 numbered steps he analyzed the orbit of… | Continue reading
Over the ages our teeth and our tongue have become ever more crowded by the shrinking of the human jaw. Not only is this an aesthetic… | Continue reading
In A History of Reading, the Canadian novelist and essayist Alberto Manguel describes a remarkable transformation of human consciousness,… | Continue reading
Whenever you say anything about your daily life, a scale is implied. Try it out. “I’m too busy” only works for an assumed time… | Continue reading
Human skin books are the rare artifacts that prove that the practice of making leather goods from human skin is more than just a ghoulish… | Continue reading
My wife Ingrid and I had been in Aburi, Ghana for just over a week when our host, Kwame Obeng, informed me that I’d be joining the… | Continue reading
In 2008, John Porter, a Washington, D.C. lawyer and former Republican member of Congress, stood in front of a group of scientists… | Continue reading
“Even in principle, one cannot demand an alibi of an electron!”Hermann Weyl, The Theory of Groups and Quantum Mechanics (1950)… | Continue reading
Silicon Valley has a term for startups that reach the $1 billion valuation mark: unicorns. The term is instructive. It suggests not… | Continue reading