Pure Science

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When Albert Einstein was 10, his tutor, a medical student named Max Talmey, would often join the family for lunch. Talmey gave the boy books on popular science and math to study, and it wasn’t long before he realized Einstein was...

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In 2022, Carla Crossman was analyzing the genes of southern right whales when she came across something unexpected. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Decades earlier, in 1989, researchers had used...

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The secret to the formation of planets may lie in ordinary static electricity—the same phenomenon that can make your hair stand on end or give you an electric shock after walking across a carpet. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free...

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A 7.7 magnitude earthquake struck central Myanmar on Friday afternoon local time near the country’s second-largest city, Mandalay. The quake caused extensive damage across Myanmar and also toppled a skyscraper under construction in...

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Last year, NASA lofted a massive balloon over Antarctica, carrying beneath it a 5,000-pound telescope. Known as GUSTO, it will help astronomers understand the story of star formation in the universe. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free...

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From inside a package about the size of a shoebox mounted to a ship’s deck, a set of highly stabilized heat-sensing cameras scan the ocean’s surface. Suddenly, against the misty waves far in the distance, they spot a small puff of white....

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It’s July, a sweaty month in Florida’s most aggressive season, and Rick O’Connor steps into the cold clear water at the kayak and paddleboard launch at Big Lagoon State Park near the coastal city of Pensacola. He steadies his board....

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After 30 hours on a stormy sea aboard a Portuguese Navy ship, we finally made it to our destination in the middle of the ocean. Here, 124 miles or so off the coast of Lisbon, lies the tallest mountain in western Europe, only it’s...

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Created by the Nautilus marketing team Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . This article is part of series of Nautilus interviews with artists, you can read the rest here. Science and art are two...

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Author Jack Lohmann started thinking about phosphorus when he learned the story of Nauru, the world’s smallest island nation, which lies between Australia and Hawaii. In 1899, a geologist named Albert Ellis discovered a strange rock...

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In January 2019, my team and I climbed to the top of an Antarctic peak to hunt for fossils of one of the first fish to walk on land. Our goal was to study the rocky summits of the mountains that protrude through the ice in this region....

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Biologist Alex Jordan was working in the Mediterranean Sea in Corsica, France, testing the abilities of different species of fish to solve complex underwater puzzles, when an annoying problem kept creeping up: Other fish would seemingly...

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One moment a flounder lies hidden in the sandy bottom of the ocean, the next it vanishes in the bloody frenzy of a shark’s dinner. The shark didn’t see or hear the fish; it pinpointed it from the infinitesimal electrical signals of the...

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A small dusky brown horse high-steps through the snow. A dusting of powder accents his coat like sifted sugar. I crouch in the saddle in a thick snowsuit, gathering the reins as we trek into a blinding white wilderness about 30 minutes...

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Hundreds and hundreds were the truths and they were all beautiful. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . —Sherwood Anderson Joanna was the perfect height to be a princess, but she was employed as a...

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In a shallow lagoon a couple of clicks from the Hawaiian coast, a humpback whale (Megaptera novaeangliae) gives birth. The one-ton baby slips from her gigantic girth and is soon nudged up to the surface of the water to take a first breath....

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Human body mass is at least 30 percent muscle, but most of us do not realize how much all this brawny tissue does to help us thrive. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . “The biggest misunderstandings...

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In movies and TV shows, the ancient megalodon, or megatooth shark, has taken on a near-mythic status. The extinct creature lived 15 million years ago and was likely the largest carnivore ever to exist. This apex predator is thought to have...

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Elephants rarely get cancer. This fact has captivated scientists for decades. And, it turns out, elephants are not alone in the animal kingdom in having built-in cancer resistance. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in ...

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Winter and spring 2023 were very warm in much of the eastern United States, causing springtime biological activity to start much earlier than it had in decades. The blooming of the iconic cherry trees of the mid-Atlantic region started on...

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It’s impossible to know exactly when each of the five mutations happened. When, deep in my marrow, one thing after another went awry, and divided my life. Like all people who have been ill, my life is split into Before and After. The...

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Venus is known as Earth’s twin. It’s about the same size as Earth, with similar gravity, and some 30 miles above the surface of the planet, the atmosphere is more Earthlike than anywhere else in the solar system. Some have even proposed...

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The leafy seadragon lives up to its name: Its long sinuous back and tail are graced by a mane of frilly fins that resemble the leafy seagrass meadows where it likes to hang out. Spotted in the cooler reefs off the coast of Raid Bay, South...

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1 Human Healers Have Learned From Animals For Thousands of Years Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . When I first started studying how monarch butterflies use toxic plants as medicine, a lot of...

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The drama and spectacle of a rocket launch commands attention. Flame and dust erupt beneath the fuselage. The roar of the engines fills the air for miles. The very Earth shakes. And, during a nocturnal launch, it’s as if a new star were...

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Issue 60 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our January and February 2025 online issues. Our cover story is a deep dive into wolf reintroduction in the American Northwest—and what we did to...

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To be rational is to have the ability to reason, perhaps in a variety of ways, and to use the results of such reasoning in the execution of one’s goals. For a long time, the received view was—incredibly—that animals possessed no such...

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In the search for extraterrestrial life, planets take all the glory. We yearn to see worlds that mirror our own. The idea that Earth-like planets are out there, potentially playing host to thriving forms of alien life, is attractive. But...

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When I work, my desk faces a wall decorated with a collection of cherished curios: postcards from my favorite trips, historical paintings, antique maps, inspirational quotes, and—my favorite—a postcard with a painting of Sigmund Freud’s...

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Throughout the ages, the industry and cooperative spirit of the humble ant have been praised as virtuous, even holy. “Go to the ant, thou sluggard,” King Solomon exhorts his egotistical, layabout son in Proverbs 6. “Consider her ways, and...

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Created by the Nautilus marketing team Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . This article is part of series of Nautilus interviews with artists, you can read the rest here. Artist Katherine Streeter...

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In everyday life, we all take for granted a certain conception of our selves. I think of myself, first, as an entity that endures from one moment to the next; despite all the changes life inevitably brings, I remain the same person over...

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In my feature article, “Howl,” you meet wolf biologist Diane Boyd. Her decades of tracking and studying wolves in the Northern Rocky Mountains have convinced her that wolves starting to come down from Canada in the 1980s would have...

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Tree-rings are like time machines. They tell ancient stories about the Earth and its climate, marking wet years, dry years, and periods of growth. Artist Tiffany Shlain and her husband, roboticist Ken Goldberg, decided they would make a...

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Diane Boyd walked along the North Fork of the Flathead River. It was a clear blue summer day, and the wolf biologist relished being in this Rocky Mountain valley in northwestern Montana. She set foot here 45 years ago to track the first...

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In what looks like a still from a film noir, two male stag beetles clash against a shadowy dropback, deep in the oak forests of Russia’s Voronezh region. Their pitched battle for dominance, and for the chance to win over a nearby mate,...

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This article originally appeared in  Knowable Magazine. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . When you think of venomous animals, caterpillars probably aren’t the first thing that comes...

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Air is fundamental to human existence. But for most of history, humans have not fully understood the nature of this essential substance: that it is also a habitat teeming with invisible life. With every breath, we may take into our own...

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An elusive Andean bear emerges from the shadowy undergrowth of Colombia’s highland rainforests. Eyes narrowed with intense focus and an inky black paw outstretched, the massive ursid—nicknamed Nariz de Calavera (Skull Nose)—appears ready...

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Since the COVID-19 pandemic, few scientific questions have received as much public attention as the origin of the deadly virus: people or nature.  It was the subject of journalists’ investigations and government hearings and academic...

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William Brahms spent years researching final utterances of the dying for his anthology of last words, Last Words of Notable People, which was published in 2010. But when he was at the bedside of his dying mother, he realized he had never...

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I once tried to make myself deaf,” is the title line of an anonymous Reddit post from January. In it, the poster described her experience with a condition known as misophonia, which causes people to have intense emotional reactions to...

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It’s not easy to walk up a hill with your arms crossed, but Viktoria Cherichansky is trying. Many of the other women—all recent widows from Ukraine—are clumped into groups of two or three, but Cherichansky, 42, walks alone. She looks like...

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From a whale watching boat near Valdes Peninsula in Argentina, marine biologist Maria Piotto observed a mother-calf pair of southern right whales. As the calf splashed around in the water playfully, a kelp gull hovered overhead and...

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Migratory songbirds may talk to one another more than we thought as they wing through the night. Each fall, hundreds of millions of birds from dozens of species co-migrate, some of them making dangerous journeys across continents. Come...

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The toddler squirms around in her mom’s lap as I walk into the exam room. The reason for the appointment: “Fatigue for two weeks.” Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . In medicine, “fatigue” has...

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Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . The post When Is a Species Lost Forever? appeared first on Nautilus.

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On a nearly cloudless day in 2023, a helium balloon the size of a United States football stadium lifted off from an airport in New Zealand. It quickly rose 110,000 feet above the Earth, ascending into the stratosphere, a layer of the...

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For photographer and author Robert Dash, food is more than a simple pleasure or a source of nutrients. It’s an inspiration and the main character in an important story he wants to tell about the planet. In his recent book, Food Planet...

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Veterinarian-turned-shark-expert Eric Clua knows how rare it is for a shark to attack a human. While dogs kill some 30,000 people annually, only 100 shark attacks are documented worldwide each year, and fewer than 15 percent of these are...