1 Gravity is fun! The word gravity, derived by Newton from the Latin gravitas, conveys both weight and deadly seriousness. But gravity can be the opposite of that. As I researched my book during the sleep-deprived days of the pandemic, flashbacks to the role gravity had played in some of my most memorable moments kept popping into my mind: swinging in hammocks in the Amazon, learning to fly over Niagara Falls, or simply letting myself go in the arms of loved ones. It slowly became clear to me why my colleagues and I had dedicated so much effort to uncovering our theory of “massive gravity.” Na ..read more

When George Washington was a young man, he was far from the level-headed statesman depicted in paintings and books from the Revolutionary War era. Born in 1732 into a second-tier Virginia family, Washington was drawn to a military career as a way to propel himself upward—with ambition that bordered on the lunatic. By 20, he was a colonial militia leader, described as “temperamental, vain, thin-skinned, petulant, and awkward.” He was emotionally needy and prone to making mistakes.  Those errors caused an international uproar when Washington, acting without orders, tracked down and attacked ..read more

Lydia Becker sat down at her desk in the British village of Altham, a view of fields unfurling outside of her window. Surrounded by her notes and papers, the 36-year-old carefully wrote a short letter to the most eminent and controversial scientist of the day, Charles Darwin.  It was May 18, 1863, and on a thin piece of paper, she humbly presented herself in a clear sloping hand and enclosed local flowers she had been examining, Lychnis dioica. These were not just any country lane blossoms, their vivid magenta petals common enough. With her keen eye, Becker had noticed something unusual a ..read more

Issue 54 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our January and February 2024 online issues. It includes contributions from bestselling author Tom Vanderbilt,  theoretical physicist Sabine Hossenfelder, journalist Mark MacNamara, evolutionary biologist David P. Barash, and more.  This issue also features a new illustration by Mark Belan. The post Print Edition 54 appeared first on Nautilus ..read more

Famous rapper Snoop Dogg is well known for his love of the herb: He once indicated that he inhales around five to 10 blunts per day—extreme even among chronic cannabis users. But the habit doesn’t seem to interfere with his business acumen: Snoop has sold 35 million albums across the globe and has collaborated extensively with numerous other successful celebrities, including domestic doyenne Martha Stewart. He’s hardly alone in his cannabis hobby. In Canada, where I live and work, about 9 percent of residents use cannabis three or more times per week. With increasing social acceptance, legaliz ..read more

In the 1970s, when a young filmmaker named Steven Spielberg was researching a new movie based on a novel about sharks, he returned to his alma mater, California State University Long Beach. The lab at Cal State Long Beach was one of the first places in the United States to study sharks in a rigorous way. Spielberg was developing a character who was a shark researcher, so he sent an art director to campus. There, the art director found the office of Donald Nelson, the unflappable biologist, spear fisherman, and shark fanatic who founded the lab in 1966. Nelson’s office was an art director’s dre ..read more

The history of astronomy has hinged on radical ideas that transformed our understanding of the cosmos and our place in it. The most obvious of these may be  the discovery in the 16th century that the Earth and other planets orbit the sun. An unpopular idea when it was first proposed, today it is so fundamental to basic astronomy it is practically taken for granted. But our most brilliant scientists have also floated some wild ideas that were not only unpopular at the time—they also turned out to be incredibly wrong. Some of these wrong ideas led to other important discoveries, however, th ..read more

On a Wednesday in February 1938, Guy Stewart Callendar—a rangy, soft-spoken steam engineer, who had turned 40 just the week before—stood before a group of leading scientists, members of the United Kingdom’s Royal Meteorological Society. He had a bold idea to share: Humans’ burning of fuel was making the planet warmer. By Callendar’s calculations, over the past half century, humanity had added 150 billion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, raising the average global temperature about 0.03 degrees Celsius per decade—a trend, he noted, that could accelerate. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experien ..read more

Jules Evans was 17 years old when he had his first unpleasant run-in with psychedelic drugs. Caught up in the heady rave culture that gripped ’90s London, he took some acid at a club one night and followed a herd of unknown faces to an afterparty. There, he found himself pursued by a single thought, which followed him like a hunter’s sights: He was behaving badly, and everyone in the room couldn’t stop talking about him. A few months later, he started to experience bouts of panic and social anxiety, neither of which he’d ever felt before. “I was very worried that I’d damaged my brain, and that ..read more

In the fall of 2020, I installed a municipal clock in Anchorage, Alaska. Although my clock was digital, it soon deviated from other timekeeping devices. Within a matter of days, the clock was hours ahead of the smartphones in people’s pockets. People figured something was awry. But the clock wasn’t defective. It was just unconventionally regulated: I calibrated the flow of time to coincide with the flow of glacial rivers. Impacted by climate change, the rivers were flowing faster than in the past. Or from the perspective of the rivers, everything else was happening more slowly. Nautilus Member ..read more