General

A rock trio on the rise is raising environmental awareness.

Join us at noon on Monday, June 9, when editor in chief Michael Segal will host a live video chat with award-winning journalist and NYU professor, Jessica Seigel about her latest Nautilus piece, “America Is Getting the Science of Sun Exposure Wrong.” There are two ways to participate. You can send us your questions before […]

A Ganado-style Navajo rugNational Park Service For many thousands of years, and across cultures around the world, symmetry has been seen as beautiful. The mirror-image accuracy of the Parthenon is seen also in the Taj Mahal and the geometric patterns of traditional Navajo rugs. We see symmetry in more fluid, modern media, too, like the […]

  Two months ago, we learned of landmark evidence bolstering the theory of inflation, a period very soon after the Big Bang when the Universe expanded at a terrific rate, stretching out and smoothing its lumps, and making it remarkably consistent on large scales. A recent study confirms that, even 13.8 billion years after the […]

  A black hole is a one-way door to oblivion. According to general relativity, once anything crosses its boundary—the event horizon—it cannot return to the outside. For that particle, the black hole is the entire future. We’ll never actually get a chance to see the particle live out that destiny: Any light the particle emits […]

The Earth is becoming a computer visible across galactic distance.

The Earth is becoming a computer visible across galactic distance.

Mixed-sex animals teach us about our own multifarious nature.

The head of the Max Planck Society discusses the science of creative visualization.

Breakthroughs in science and art begin with an image.

Three examples of speech from a person with bipolar disorder. The rows show one second each of manic, euthymic (normal), and depressed speech. The colored rectangles show various features extracted from the speech, where color indicates the amplitude of that feature for that speaker. The 10 features measure qualities of the person’s voice like pitch, […]

When speakers and microphones began to appear onstage together in the 1920s, they brought with them an unwelcome guest. Place your pickup too close to your speakers, and an ear-rending screech takes the stage. Moving it further away helps, but is no guarantee of safety. It was the public’s introduction to feedback: Directing output into […]

Hundreds of years of trial documents reveal our changing attitudes to violent crime.

Revisiting James Lovelock’s theory as it approaches 50.

Inside the quest to conquer addictive drugs.