Tag: Nautilus

The history of the chili pepper is entwined with the history of Chinese Communism and the fiery temperament of the Sichuanese people, but why?

The days of the long, sinuous, multi-clause sentence might be numbered.

This week, we’re sharing stories from John Woodrow Cox, Danielle McNally, Matt Richtel and Andrew Jacobs, Michelle Dean, and John Knight.

When a queen bee dies, both her subjects and her beekeeper need to process the loss.

This week we’re sharing stories by Jason Fagone, Betty Ann Adam, Christian H. Cooper, Clarissa Wei, and Robert Kolker.

The emerging science of epigenetics argues that poverty can change our genetic expression.

Scientists are taking a second look at the effect of cooperation on evolution.

How willpower — and its absence — turned from a moral and religious concept to a controversial scientific one.

Matthew Berger explores the evolution and the history of salmon aquaculture for Nautilus.

Revel in all the feels with these 14 (get it?) essays and interviews.

The container’s efficiency has proven to be an irresistible economic force. Last year the world’s container ports moved 560 million 20-foot containers—nearly 1.5 billion tons of cargo altogether. Though commodities like petroleum, steel ore, and coal still move in specially designed bulk cargo ships, more than 90 percent of the rest—everything from clothes to cars […]

Six stories about bets, luck, and playing the odds.

In Nautilus, Tim Folger writes about how scientist are still debating whether organic and inorganic materials found on Martian meteorite ALH84001 contain evidence that life existed on Mars before it existed on Earth. If it did, then life could have spread to Earth from meteorites, which could make human beings ─ and other Earthly life ─ […]

73-year-old ocean explorer Bob Ballard discovered the wreck of the Titanic 30 years ago, and he hasn’t stopped exploring the ocean floor since. In a recent piece for Popular Mechanics, Ryan D’Agostino profiled Ballard and the research aboard his ship Nautilus (a 211-foot former East German research vessel that carries seventeen crew and thirty-one scientists and operations specialists). But what […]

As the Japanese children’s book author Tarō Gomi once wrote: everyone poops. But we don’t talk about this openly or often enough. In fact, talking and reading about shit might make you want to hold your nose — but it’ll also open your eyes. Here are eight pieces about shit, from a DIY mixture a woman used to treat her life-threatening infection, to prehistoric poo that brings us one step closer to understanding the origins of life after the dinosaur age.

Let me take the most likely one: the nuclear winter case. Say two countries that both have access to nuclear weapons get very angry at each other, and then retaliate, destroying most of the major cities in the opposite country. The vast bulk of humanity would survive, eventually. Say maybe we lost 5 percent of […]

At Nautilus, science reporter Zach Zorich examines the following question: If the world began again, would life as we know it exist? In science and evolution, this is a discussion of convergence vs. contingency. Scientists like Richard Lenski, an evolutionary biologist at Michigan State University, are conducting experiments in the lab to test out their […]