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Arts

- Art and Science in a Grain of Sand

- The Nautilus Summer Reading List

- Lefties Aren’t as Creative as We Thought

ARTS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Art and Science in a Grain of Sand

Filmmaker Mark Levinson on the kinship between disciplines

By Sidney Perkowitz    July 7, 2025

Science and art are, in many ways, parallel forms of inquiry: They arise from the human imagination, profoundly shape our understanding of the universe, involve experimentation, and rely on manipulating Earthly materials. These commonalities are the focus of writer and director Mark Levinson’s award-winning 2024 documentary The Universe in a Grain of Sand. Though the title comes from the poetry of William Blake, who believed that scientific reductionism destroys imagination and meaning, Levinson’s film places science and art in conversation with one another, both conceptually and visually. Each vignette effortlessly illuminates the next.

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In one segment, for example, a voice-over tells us that the prime scientific idea underlying our digital age is that every type of information can be fully expressed by discrete units, such as zeroes and ones. Meanwhile, the screen fills with colored dots arranged in apparently random blocks. But as the camera pulls away, the dots merge to reveal that they form Georges Seurat’s famous pointillist painting of Parisians enjoying a beautiful park, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte. The echoes are unmistakable. The many scientists and artists who parade through the film also offer their perspectives on what science and art share, and the value of that sharing. MIT neuroscientist Sarah Schwettmann, for example, finds that the underlying questions motivating both fields “concern the fundamental nature of the human relationship to the world.”

For me, a script was a theory of the universe, the human universe rather than the physical one.

Levinson himself has deep personal knowledge of both science and art: He earned a Ph.D. in theoretical particle physics at the University of California, Berkeley in 1983, then radically changed direction to work in film. He filmed his first documentary Particle Fever at CERN just as the Higgs boson was being discovered there. This bit of serendipity, and Levinson’s fine cinematic eye and ear for physicists and physics, brought the film wide recognition and awards.

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I spoke with Levinson about the kinship between science and art, the importance of materials to both disciplines, and the ways in which human progress marches toward a unification of man, nature, and machine.

What made you choose film as your artistic medium?

What I got interested in about film was not as a medium to explain science. Eastern European cinema was my entry! I saw these incredibly complex, serious, and brilliant Polish, Russian, and Hungarian films produced under restrictive political conditions. I wanted to make films about the complexity of modern life. My first film was a fictional story about former Russian dissident artists and how they made art. [This film was called Prisoner of Time.]

So you shifted from a primarily scientific mindset to a cinematic and artistic one. How did that go?

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As a graduate student in theoretical physics I was sitting in a room with a pencil and paper, trying to come up with theories of the universe. Then I started writing a script and I was still sitting in a room with a pencil and paper. For me, a script was a theory of the universe, the human universe rather than the physical one. And then you go out and shoot the film, which is like doing an experiment. Manifestly it seems like it’s this unbelievable change, but it didn’t feel like it when I was in it.

Your first idea for Grain of Sand was to show art and science through films that experiment with the medium itself in a scientific way, but you ended up with a more expansive view of science and art in the film, across disciplines. How did that come about?

I initially thought of experimental film because I knew that some early film pioneers manipulated “materials”—a germane theme of the film—and their work appears in my film. But I have also been struck by the interesting concurrence of the move to more abstraction in both art and physics in the same era, the early 1900s. Another factor was my familiarity with Andy Goldsworthy’s land art, and its resonance with the film. His line that he’s “trying to understand the stone” was gold for me! But during the editing of the film, I kept introducing the art earlier and earlier, to try to make it more expansive!

I would love for people to see science and technology not as threatening and alien.

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Instead of simply explaining how science and art work or how they echo one another, your film seems to want to just show the disciplines in action close up, and let viewers draw their own connections. Is that a fair summary?

Yes! The film, in a sense, was an experiment in showing art and science instead of explicitly explaining them.

The title The Universe in a Grain of Sand metaphorically evokes science at the tiny scales of neurons and digital chips. The film notes also that sand is the natural source of silicon, the semiconductor in those chips. Does the metaphor describe art-making, too?

In making the film I had this sudden realization: We don’t really think of all the high-tech things around us as connected to nature. But they are nature and that became a very strong thematic element of the film. But it also resonated for me with the idea that artists work with materials that are based on nature and understanding the properties of nature. “Sand” for me is representative of Earth.

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What do you hope that general viewers, scientists, and artists take away from your film?

I would love for people to see science and technology not as threatening and alien, but as a reflection of our fundamental desire to understand the world around us. I would like people to see our progression as in some sense a unifying of nature, humans, and machines. I’d like artists to see the beauty of science. I’d like people (especially scientists) who may have dismissed art to perhaps come to see it in a new light, as presenting a different, but useful perspective.

Sidney Perkowitz

Posted on July 7, 2025

Sidney Perkowitz, Candler Professor of Physics Emeritus, Emory University, is the author of Empire of Light: A History of Discovery in Science and Art and other writings about science in art and culture.

ARTS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Nautilus Summer Reading List

10 of our favorite recent books

By Nautilus Editors    July 3, 2025

An extraordinary vacation is one that opens the mind. When turning the corner in a new place brings a shift in perspective that sparks surprise and delight—and, if you’re lucky, even wonder. At Nautilus, we find that great books can do the same thing. In recent months, we’ve read dozens, and it’s our pleasure to bring some of our favorites to you.

In their pages, we’ve journeyed to the poles of the planet with renowned evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin, sat alongside monks with author Pico Iyer, and taken flight with starlings across history. Novelist Nnedi Okorafor has transplanted us into the mind of an author who tries to write a new kind of story—one which causes the lines between fiction and reality to blur; and we unearthed a 1970 book by a curious physician who fleshes out the strange land of our own anatomy.

Happily, it’s easier to pack more books into a season than vacations—and they make some of the best traveling companions. We hope you enjoy the new perspectives as you turn the many corners of these pages.

1.  Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life by Agnes Callard

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc.

Read an interview with Open Socrates author Agnes Callard.

2. Food Planet Future: The Art of Turning Food and Climate Perils Into Possibilities by Robert Dash

Papadakis

Read an interview with Food Planet Future author Robert Dash, and see some of the intriguing images from the book.

3. The Body Has a Head by Gustav Eckstein

The National Book Foundation

Read a review of The Body Has a Head—“the most absolutely wild book I have ever read about the human body and mind,” according to editor at large Kevin Berger.

4. No Less Strange or Wonderful: Essays in Curosity by Kendra Greene

Tin House

Read an excerpt from No Less Strange or Wonderful about an unexpected encounter with a theme park character and the meaning of truth.

5. Aflame: Learning from Silence by Pico Iyer

Penguin Random House

Read an interview with Aflame author Pico Iyer.

6. How That Robot Made Me Feel by Ericka Johnson

The MIT Press

Read an excerpt from How That Robot Made Me Feel, about when the author got a robot cat for her rabbit.

7. So Very Small: How Humans Discovered the Microcosmos, Defeated Germs and May Still Lose the War Against Infectious Disease by Thomas Levenson

Penguin Random House

Read the “3 Greatest Revelations” author Thomas Levenson experienced while writing So Very Small.

8. Death of the Author: A Novel by Nnedi Okorafor

HarperCollins Publishers

A story within a story that will have you questioning the nature of storytelling itself—and will leave you thinking about what it truly means to be human.

9. Ends of the Earth: Journeys to the Polar Regions in Search of Life, the Cosmos, and Our Future by Neil Shubin

Penguin Random House

Read an essay by evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin about why the budget cuts for Antarctic research spell disaster.

10. Starlings: The Curious Odyssey of a Most Hated Bird by Mike Stark

The University of Nebraska Press

Read an excerpt from Starlings, about one of the United States’ most despised birds.

Lead image: Solarisys / Shutterstock

Nautilus Editors

Posted on July 3, 2025

ARTS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Lefties Aren’t as Creative as We Thought

In fact, righties may have the edge, contrary to popular belief

By Kristen French    July 3, 2025

The pantheon of artists and musicians is littered with lefties: Vincent van Gogh, Jimi Hendrix, Emily Dickinson, David Bowie, Lady Gaga, to name just a few. In the popular imagination, left-handedness and creative genius have long been linked. In the scientific literature, too.

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This is partly because the right hemisphere of the brain, which lights up with neural activity during creative thinking in neuroimaging studies, tends to be dominant in left-handed individuals. Standard tests of creative problem solving and novel idea generation—convergent and divergent thinking—also seem to favor the left-handed, according to many studies.

But recently, scientists from Cornell University and The Chinese University of Hong Kong reviewed a large body of scientific literature and found that this link between the lefties and creativity is likely a myth. The researchers sorted through 1,000 relevant studies published since 1900, ultimately identifying 17 papers of sufficient rigor involving 10,000 participants, and found that left-handed people are no better at creative thinking than right-handed people. In fact, they found that right-handed people may even have a slight advantage.

“Creativity is hard to define, like any other psychological construct,” writes Daniel Casasanto, in an email. “But we analyzed data from the [three] tests that have been used the most often for the psychological measurement of creativity, for decades. We found that, by this gold standard, lefties are not more creative.” Casasanto pointed out that while a couple of older small-sample size studies had suggested a creativity advantage among the lefthanded, when the studies were aggregated, the pattern disappeared.

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To determine whether lefties dominate creative professions, despite this relative disadvantage, the researchers reviewed another 19 studies. They found that while lefties are over-represented in the visual arts, creative writing, and music, the pattern did not hold in other creative professions, including architecture, physics, and mathematics. Instead, right-handers were found to be over-represented in professions thought to demand the most creativity, according to United States Department of Labor criteria, taken as a whole.

“Most of the professions that you’d think of as parade cases of ‘creative professions’ do not show an overrepresentation of lefties,” writes Casasanto. But “you can fool yourself into thinking there’s a pattern if you focus on the few ‘creative’ professions where lefties are overrepresented.”

If you’re a rightie, perhaps it’s time to give some extra attention to your muse.

Lead image: Brazhyk / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on July 3, 2025

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus.

Astronomy

- Behold These Hidden Galaxies

- Our Busy Universe

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Behold These Hidden Galaxies

Up to 100 tiny orphan galaxies may lurk in the shadows of our own Milky Way

By Bob Grant    July 11, 2025

Our cosmic neighborhood may be teeming with hidden galaxies. And if new simulations that suggest the existence of such features are borne out by actual observations, we may better understand how our universe is built and how galaxies form in the first place.

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A team led by cosmologists at Durham University in the United Kingdom have proposed the locations of 80 to 100 small, faint orphan galaxies that have thus far evaded both detection by telescopes and previous attempts to use cosmological simulations to pinpoint them. But the researchers used the highest-resolution supercomputer, paired with new mathematical modeling approaches, to predict that these star clusters may be hiding near our own Milky Way.

GALACTIC PEEK-A-BOO: In this simulated image, the Milky Way sits in the center with subhalos of dark matter surrounding it. Some of these subhalos may host a satellite galaxy that could be observable. The newly predicted Milky Way orphan satellite galaxies are marked with an ‘x’ symbol. Image by The Aquarius simulation, the Virgo Consortium/Dr Mark Lovell.

The orphan galaxies have proven so hard to find because, if they exist, they are exceedingly dim and tiny, formed in the centers of globs of dark matter that cosmologists call halos. Something called the Lambda Cold Dark Matter (LCDM) theory—also known as the standard model of cosmology—predicts that such galaxies have been orbiting larger galaxies, such as the Milky Way, since shortly after the universe was born. As time wore on, the orphan galaxies would have lost much of their dark matter and stellar mass, making them low-mass and dim, lurking in the cosmic shadows of their larger galactic neighbors.

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If newly activated telescopes and cameras, such as the instruments housed at the Vera C. Rubin Observatory, can catch glimpses of these dwarf, orphan galaxies for the first time, astronomers could plug some holes in the LCDM theory left by the inability to detect them.

“We know the Milky Way has some 60 confirmed companion satellite galaxies, but we think there should be dozens more of these faint galaxies orbiting around the Milky Way at close distances,” says lead researcher Isabel Santos-Santos, a Durham University physicist, in a statement. “If our predictions are right, it adds more weight to the Lambda Cold Dark Matter theory of the formation and evolution of structure in the Universe.”

Santos-Santos and her colleagues are presenting their findings and the above image at the Royal Astronomical Society’s National Astronomy Meeting being held at Durham University today.

Lead image: The Aquarius simulation, the Virgo Consortium/Dr Mark Lovell.

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Bob Grant

Posted on July 11, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Our Busy Universe

A sliver of space from the Vera Rubin Observatory

By Katherine Harmon Courage    July 8, 2025

Our universe contains multitudes. And the newly operational Vera C. Rubin Observatory is capturing more details of these multitudes for us to behold—and learn from. One revelation is an in-depth look at a portion of the Virgo Cluster, a group of galaxies some 54 light-years away in the constellation of Virgo.

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The cluster has more than a thousand galaxies—some suggest as many as 2,000 or more—and this image shows just a small segment of it. Even so, the field of view contains three galaxies that are mid-merge, two spiral galaxies, and a smattering of stars closer to home, in our own home galaxy of the Milky Way.

Released last month, with the observatory’s first batch of images, this fresh portrait of one corner of the cosmos will help astronomers better understand the varied evolutionary paths and fates of galaxies, including our own.

Lead image: NSF–DOE Vera C. Rubin Observatory

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Katherine Harmon Courage

Posted on July 8, 2025

Katherine Harmon Courage is the executive editor at Nautilus.

Environment

- How Waves Shape the Planet

- What Deep Time Can Tell Us About Coral Reefs

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Waves Shape the Planet

Ocean swells are critical to the cycle of life

By Skylar Knight & Krista Langlois    July 10, 2025    Photo by Sandra Bartocha

When wind blows across the ocean’s surface, it forms a wave. A single wave can travel thousands of miles before breaking on land; for example, some waves generated off the coast of New Zealand roll all the way to the West Coast of North America, taking up to two weeks to reach their final destination. And while small waves can move as slowly as 5 miles per hour, tsunamis in the middle of the Pacific Ocean reach speeds of 600 miles per hour.

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As they move across the planet, waves transport nutrients, plankton, and other building blocks of marine life. They also carry larger animals, including baby sea turtles, who use waves to orient themselves perpendicular to the shore as they push out to sea after hatching on beaches. People, too, use waves to navigate. Some Pacific Islanders are reviving a traditional practice called wave piloting, in which navigators chart a course in part by feeling the waves beneath their boat.

Waves also impact life on land, tossing sediment onto shore that eventually becomes beaches and dunes where shorebirds and other wildlife find refuge. In Germany, where photographer Sandra Bartocha made this long-exposure image at sunrise, waves deposit up to 13 feet of sand per year in some locations and erode up to 8 feet or more per year in others. Whether waves give or take, their impact on the world’s oceans is, shall we say, unwavering.

Bartocha’s image won the Art of Nature award in the California Academy of Sciences’ BigPicture Photography Competition, now in its 12th year.

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This story originally appeared in bioGraphic, an independent magazine about nature and regeneration powered by the California Academy of Sciences.

Sandra Bartocha is a German freelance photographer and author specializing in natural landscapes, forests, and plants as well as abstract work.

Skylar Knight

Posted on July 10, 2025

Skylar Knight is a freelance writer and science communicator focused on nature, wildlife, and conservation. He has a Master’s degree in science communication from Imperial College London and has produced content for film, radio, and print.

Krista Langlois

Posted on July 10, 2025

A longtime freelance journalist and contributing editor, Krista Langlois is now a senior features editor at bioGraphic. From her home in southwest Colorado, she writes about the intersection of people and nature for publications like Adventure Journal, The Atlantic, Hakai, National Geographic News, Outside, and Smithsonian.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Deep Time Can Tell Us About Coral Reefs

Lisa Gardiner on the 3 greatest revelations she had while writing Reefs of Time

By Lisa S. Gardiner    July 8, 2025

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I used to look at coral fossils and think, how great things must have been for these creatures back before humans began stirring up trouble for the planet, like extreme heat and pollution. But as I looked back into deep time, I realized that they had faced down formidable challenges before. The Ice Age was one such challenge.

For the past 800,000 years, glacial-interglacial cycles have flip-flopped about every 100,000 years, which had an enormous effect on sea level. During interglacial periods, like today, ice sheets and glaciers are small, more water is in the ocean, and sea level is high. During glacial periods, water is trapped in ice, so sea level is low. Water also expands when warmed and contracts when cooled, amplifying the highs and lows.

These topsy-turvy sea levels were hard on reefs. When sea level fell, shallow water reefs were exposed to the air, and when sea level rose, reefs were plunged into deep water, sometimes so deep that corals’ symbiotic algae no longer had enough sunlight for photosynthesis. Stuck to the seafloor, mature corals that were either too deep or too exposed couldn’t evacuate. They died. But here’s the good news: Their offspring could escape. Corals start their lives as larvae floating in the ocean, and those larvae can settle down in new locations. Over generations, corals moved as sea level changed and new reefs popped up where conditions were right.

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TROUBLED WATERS: Author Lisa S. Gardiner takes comfort in the knowledge that coral reefs survived calamity long before humans arrived on the scene. Photo by J. La Plante.

Glacial periods posed the greatest challenge for coral reefs because there were far fewer spaces where corals could survive. About 20,000 years ago, at the height of the last glacial period, sea level was 420 feet lower than it is today and corals had about 90 percent less habitat because of the shape of the seafloor. But, as far as we know, all but two coral species survived. In theory, reef life survived in refugia, pockets of safety where species shelter in place during difficult times.

The problems corals contend with today, like overheating oceans and slurries of nutrient-laden water washed off coasts, are very different ones. But it is heartening to know that corals’ adaptations helped them persist. Some of those adaptations may help them survive into the future.

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People have been inventing technology to help us explore underwater for centuries, but it wasn’t until the 1950s that scuba diving really took off. Scuba equipment became increasingly available in the ’50s and ’60s and courses were organized to train new divers. With scuba, scientists were able to describe reef ecosystems in more detail than ever before.

While diving into reefs today almost certainly means visiting an ecosystem marked by change, most scientists believed until fairly recently that reefs were healthy when they first started eyeing them up close with scuba gear. The truth is though that they were suffering from human impacts long before we met them underwater.

Some conservationists are experimenting with probiotics to keep colonies healthy when the heat is on.

Reefs near populated coasts were most vulnerable by the time divers arrived. Overfishing and overharvesting of turtles in Caribbean colonies hundreds of years ago started to deplete reefs of species that play important roles in the health of these ecosystems. In areas where coastal cities and agriculture expanded, nutrients from sewage and fertilizers polluted the waters around reefs. Where deforestation caused erosion, sediment poured into the ocean and rained down on corals. In the Florida Keys, evidence suggests that entire reefs may have disappeared before scuba became widespread.

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Early divers couldn’t see what was no longer there. Thankfully, other pieces of evidence from the past, like fossils and historical records, can help us figure out what healthy reefs looked like before we saw them through the looking glass of our scuba masks.

A coral’s microbiome includes an enormous diversity of bacteria, archaea, fungi, and even viruses. Exactly how microbiomes support coral health isn’t yet well understood, but what we do know is that a healthy microbiome can help corals survive times of stress. When the microbiome is disrupted, corals become more vulnerable to disease.

Looking to microbiomes as a possible source of coral resilience, researchers have found multiple microbes that help protect corals against heat stress. They have also identified microbes that just take up space in corals. But that can be helpful too if, by taking up space, they make it harder for harmful microbes to make a home there. In the Caribbean, researchers have found that elkhorn and staghorn corals were less likely to be affected by disease when they had high levels of a certain bacterium in their microbiome, possibly because it blocks access for harmful microbes.

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The coral microbiome itself can be disrupted by heat stress, however. Corals that are resilient to heat tend to be able to maintain a stable microbiome, but the microbiomes of less resilient corals shift in hot water—helpful microbes decline and pathogens rise.

Some conservationists are experimenting with probiotics to keep colonies healthy when the heat is on. Others argue that it is too early for these measures, because we don’t yet know enough about which microbes are beneficial and whether it is even feasible to treat corals at a large scale.

Either way, microbes will likely be important partners for coral species long into the future.

Lead photo by Warren Baverstock / Ocean Image Bank

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Lisa S. Gardiner

Posted on July 8, 2025

Lisa S. Gardiner is a writer, geoscientist, and educator whose work has appeared in Scientific American, The Atlantic, bioGraphic, and other publications. Her second nonfiction book, Reefs of Time: What Fossils Reveal about Coral Survival, was published in June 2025.

Health

- Longevity Might Be All In Your Head

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Longevity Might Be All In Your Head

The biological age of your organs could predict your health—and death

By Kristen French    July 9, 2025

Age is just a number, they say. But being young at heart might be less important than being “young” in other places.

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Chronological age and biological age are known to diverge over our lifetimes, as our genetics and the way we live can influence how much damage our cells accumulate. A new type of experimental blood test is now zeroing in on the biological age of different organs in our bodies. And it’s not the heart, liver, or lungs that seems to hold the biggest predictive power over our lifespans, but the brain—the seat of our thoughts, actions, and emotions.

“The brain is the gatekeeper of longevity,” said Tony Wyss-Coray, a Stanford University neurology professor and author of a new study in Nature.

Wyss-Coray and colleagues studied blood samples and medical reports spanning 17 years for nearly 45,000 individuals aged 40 to 70. The researchers tallied the relative concentrations of 3,000 different proteins in the individuals’ blood that relay the health and functioning of various organs. Then they created a machine learning model that could predict chronological age based on the protein signatures and calculated the age gap for each individual, creating a relative biological age rating for each of the different organs and organ systems. The algorithm was then able to predict future health, organ by organ.

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People with an “extremely aged” brain relative to their same-aged peers, based on the protein profiles, were nearly twice as likely to die in a 15-year period. But people with an extremely youthful brain relative to same-aged peers—at the opposite end of the scale in terms of protein profiles—reduced a person’s risk of dying by 40 percent over that same period. One of the proteins that had the strongest weight in this brain aging profile was neurofilament light chain—a biomarker that can signal degeneration in axons in the brain and is often measured in clinical trials of Alzheimer’s disease.

Wyss-Coray hopes this type of blood screen could also provide information about the risks for more than a dozen diseases—from Alzheimer’s to liver disease to osteoarthritis—based on biological organ ages. “Today, you go to the doctor because something aches, and they take a look to see what’s broken,” he said. But this organ-aging approach may help focus future research on longevity where it matters most in the body. “We’re trying to shift from sick care to health care.”

Lead image: N Universe / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on July 9, 2025

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus.

History

- How to Make the Bread That Fueled the Pyramids

- A Hymn Lost for a Millennium

- Monumental Burial Mounds Rewrite Ancient History

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How to Make the Bread That Fueled the Pyramids

And the beer that gave rise to civilizations, too.

By Sam Kean    July 9, 2025

From the most wretched servant to the most exalted prince, people in ancient Egypt ate bread and drank beer with every meal. These staples were so vital to their diet that, in Egyptian hieroglyphs, the combined symbols for bread and beer actually meant meal or sustenance.

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During pyramid construction, bakeries the size of football fields stood near the worker villages. Every morning, battalions of men and women would grind up bushels of emmer—the main grain eaten in Egypt—into flour on stone hand mills called querns. Still more bakers mixed and kneaded the dough, probably with their feet. To bake the bread, rather than waste time making thousands of mud ovens, crews used conical clay molds. They’d dig holes in the ground, fill them with glowing embers, drop the molds in upside-down, plop some dough in, then cap each mold with a second one and heap hot ash over the top. The endless rows of these devices made the lot behind the baking huts look like giant egg cartons.

Timing was critical. The glowing embers had to be ready the same time the dough was, and the bread had to finish just as the construction crews and other laborers were lining up for meals. Given the immense scale, there was a factory feel to the operation, and bakers doubled as foreman, equally concerned with workflow and worker training as with flour quality or seasoning.

To learn the ins and outs of Egyptian bread, I made a trip to Los Angeles to visit Seamus Blackley, a computer programmer and self-described “gastro-Egyptologist.” He’s been obsessed with Egypt ever since seeing his first mummy on Scooby-Doo as a child. Today, he’s a graying redhead with bright blue eyes and a ponytail. Among the many fascinating lines on his résumé, he invented the Xbox gaming system in a previous life.

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It’s hard to overemphasize how delicious this bread is.

Blackley’s first foray into heirloom food involved medieval European bread. “My challenge to myself was to be as good at making bread as the average 12-year-old in the 12th century,” he says. Egyptian bread was a logical next step, although at first he largely improvised.

“I made this bread with supposedly ancient yeast, and a lot of people asked questions” on Twitter about its authenticity, he recalls. “They basically said, You’re full of shit—including my wife. I wanted to be not so full‑of‑shit.” So he reached out to an Egyptologist and a microbiologist for guidance, and recruited some colleagues. (“I employ a lot of people who are chemists and such, so I have a nerd army I can call on.”) Eventually, he hopped a plane to Egypt to collect yeast from ancient pottery, using sterile swabs and other microbiology equipment to gather samples. Friends also made him replicas of the conical bread molds, using representative clay. Finally, Blackley built a pharaonic-era firepit in his backyard to bake with; he even sourced acacia wood from Arizona for kindling, similar to what Egyptians used. It took a year of practice, he says, to “make bread that doesn’t suck.”

Archaeologists have documented roughly 40 different types of bread from Egypt’s 5,000-year history, everything from biscuits to baguettes to pitas. Some bakers even made loaves in fancy shapes: flowers, phalluses, fruit, obelisks, birds, cattle, crocodiles, gazelles, fish. (“Those breads would kill on The Great British Bake Off,” Blackley says.) For everyday meals, though, most people ate the conical bread. In his office, Blackley shows me his replica mold. It’s scorched black and much heftier than I expect—15 inches across and probably 20 pounds.

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As a treat, Blackley has also baked a loaf for me to sample. It’s a foot wide and sand-colored with a springy crust. It consists of just a handful of ingredients—salt, yeast, coriander, emmer flour—and its blunted shape reminds me of NASA space capsules from the 1960s.

Blackley apologizes for not making toppings for the bread, like leeks in beef tallow, which he says was an Egyptian favorite. He needn’t have worried: It’s hard to overemphasize how delicious this bread is. It’s spongy and chewy and has a scrumptious sourdough tang, with the coriander sneaking in late to tickle the tongue. It would draw raves in any New York or Paris bistro. And mind you, I’m eating a two-day-old loaf warmed up in the company microwave; fresh out of the mold, it would have been orgasmic. Blackley notes that bakers in ancient Egypt had strong incentives to cook well. “Have you been to Giza and seen the pyramids? The blocks are a hell of a lot bigger than you’d think in the pictures. Bread was the primary currency used to pay those guys, and also their food. You wouldn’t want to give the guys who could move those blocks a bad meal.”

Beyond bread, Egyptian laborers were paid in beer as well—about 1⅓ gallons daily, roughly 10 pints, which they happily sucked down given that temperatures on the hot sands could reach 130 degrees Fahrenheit. (One scholar estimated that it took 231 million gallons of beer to build the largest pyramid.) Even children drank beer, largely because the alcohol killed microbes and rendered it more sanitary than the water in rivers (a.k.a. their sewers). Egyptian doctors also prescribed beer as medicine to remedy coughs, constipation, swollen eyes, and upset stomachs.

Based on residues in ancient pots, amber or mahogany beers were probably the most common in Egypt, although records do list other varieties, such as celery, dark, date, iron, and sweet. As with bread, the Egyptians mostly brewed with emmer grains (along with some barley), which would have made their beers wheatier and creamier than modern varieties. The Egyptians did filter their beer, but it still would have had husks of depleted grains floating in it, so some people likely drank through reed straws to avoid a mouthful of chaff with their morning quaff. Egyptian beer also lacked hops, so it wouldn’t have had the bitter undertones of modern brews. Instead, it probably leaned more sour, in part due to the fruit flies that swarmed their open vats and introduced bacteria that convert alcohol into vinegar. (Other microbes that produce sour tastes might have wafted in as well.) Some scholars have described Egyptian beer as alcoholic porridge, or a “sour barley milkshake.”

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Its blunted shape reminds me of NASA space capsules from the 1960s.

Eager to sample this beer, I dug up a recipe online and began brewing a gallon myself. All beer starts with malted grains, grains that have been germinated and dried. Brewers today dump these directly into hot water. But some scholars believe that ancient Egyptians performed another step first: forming the grains into crude “offering loaves” and gently baking them at a low temperature; only then did they crumble the loaves into water, usually while reciting prayers. This created a symbolic connection between bread and beer, with one transforming into the other.

Admittedly, my offering loaves don’t look very appetizing: less like bread than birdseed patty-caked together with wet sand. But they smell delicious coming out of the oven. I say my prayers, crumble them into a pot of water, and simmer them. This gives the enzymes in the grains a chance to break down the long-chain starch molecules inside into simple sugars. After two hours, I’m left with a pale white liquid, which turns brown when I add cardamom, cumin, rosemary, coriander, and cinnamon. (Scholars don’t know what exactly the Egyptians used to flavor beer, but all these spices were available to them.) After a hard boil, I try a sip, and coo with delight. It tastes like sugary oatmeal runoff. I decant this into a milk jug, then measure the ABV with a device called a refractometer—around 2.3 percent, probably typical for beer then. To start the fermentation, I add a packet of yeast. Ancient brewers either added the yeasty foam from a previous batch as a starter, or else relied on wind-blown yeast or yeast from the skins of fruits they added for flavor.

After a week fermenting in my spare bathroom, the beer looks like muddy apple cider, with a quarter-inch of sludge on the bottom. I sniff it, and the rush of bubbles instantly clears my sinuses. Then I sip. All I can taste at first is a smack of sour, a pow right in the kisser. Eventually, a little citrus emerges, but sadly, none of the other spices come through—no rosemary, no cardamon, nothing. Still, those spices might be adding flavor, even if I don’t taste it. David Falk, an Egyptologist and amateur beer-maker whose recipe I’m following, compares beer spices to the vanilla in ice cream. Falk once made a batch of ice cream without vanilla, which we normally don’t think of as a dynamic taste—quite the opposite. But Falk says he immediately noticed its absence; the frozen sugar milk just tasted blah without it. The same goes for beer, he tells me: “You need something in there to offset the blandness.” Hidden flavors still contribute to taste.

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In all, the description of Egyptian beer as a “sour barley milkshake” didn’t ring true to me. Mine tasted closer to Kombucha—a perfect thirst-quencher after a hot day piling up pyramid stones in the sun.

Historically, people have made alcoholic beverages from pretty much anything they could get their hands on: bananas, tree sap, corn, cactuses, rice, pumpkins, even horse milk. But grain-based beer played an outsized role in the human saga, to the point that some archaeologists believe it fueled the rise of the first complex civilizations in history.

This argument starts with the fact that both beer and bread require grain. Traditionally, archaeologists assumed that people started gathering wild grains to make bread, and that beer was a happy byproduct. But to other archaeologists, that idea doesn’t make sense—mostly because making bread was a gigantic pain in the rear. Imagine you’re a hungry lad or lass 10,000 years ago. You could easily gather some nuts or roots for dinner, or hunt some game and fill your belly that way. What you probably wouldn’t do is spend a few hours hunched over in the hot sun picking tiny grains off stalks while bugs eat you alive—especially because you then need to spend several more hours grinding that grain into flour—followed by still more time building a mud oven to actually bake the flour into bread. I mean, I love bread, dearly, but does all that effort seem worth a few dinner rolls?

All I can taste at first is a smack of sour, a pow right in the kisser.

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Beer, on the other hand, would have been worth the squeeze. Beer gets you buzzed. It’s fun! It also enhances social bonding and was frequently linked to religious festivals in prehistory. Beer-making is far less tedious, too, since you don’t need to grind flour. Just warm some half-cracked grains in a pot of water, dump in some spices, and presto.

As for linking beer to the rise of civilization, people probably started making beer initially from wild grains for seasonal religious ceremonies. Over time, in order to worship more regularly, they began cultivating favorable varieties of grain in certain areas. As this work developed into dedicated farming, they began to settle down near their plots, and given the heavy investment of labor, they began eating the grains as well. Over time, as farming techniques became more sophisticated, food surpluses became common, allowing for population growth and the development of cities—plus the division of labor that cities require, including specialized roles like artisan, priest, scribe, warrior, and merchant. (For the first time, people had professions.) From there, it was only a modest step to complex civilizations like Egypt. All that glory and grandeur from a little thirst.

It’s worth noting that not every archaeologist accepts this proposed sequence of events. Indeed, some of the more genteel types find it horrifying—all the art and poetry and stirring architecture of the world’s great cultures springing from plebes swilling pints. Regardless, the spread of farming in general was inarguably linked with the rise of civilizations, and Egypt’s growth in particular would have been unthinkable without vast grain farms for bread and beer. Again, people consumed both at every meal and often got their wages paid in them. Tombs were also crammed with beer pots and bread loaves for the hereafter. Ancient Egyptians couldn’t imagine life or death without them.

Excerpted from the book Dinner With King Tut by Sam Kean. Copyright © 2025 Available from Little, Brown and Company, a division of Hachette Book Group Inc., New York, NY, USA. All rights reserved.

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Lead image: matrioshka / Shutterstock

Sam Kean

Posted on July 9, 2025

Sam Kean is an American writer. He has written for The New York Times Magazine, Mental Floss, Slate, Psychology Today, and The New Scientist. He has also published six books which discuss scientific discoveries in a narrative style, including Dinner with King Tut: How Rogue Archaeologists Are Re-creating the Sights, Sounds, Smells, and Tastes of Lost Civilizations.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Hymn Lost for a Millennium

AI helped piece together clay fragments to tell a new story of Babylon

By Molly Glick    July 7, 2025

“Wealth and splendor—what befit mankind—

Are bestowed, multiplied, and regally granted.”

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You’ve just read the lines of a hymn lost to history for a millennium, praising the ancient metropolis of Babylon. This 250-line text was recently rediscovered after researchers pieced together more than 30 fragments of clay tablets inscribed as early as the seventh century B.C. They combined these cuneiform texts with the help of artificial intelligence—a task they say would’ve taken decades otherwise, according to a study published in the latest installment of the journal IRAQ.

Babylon was established around 2000 B.C., and it was once among the world’s largest and wealthiest cities. Today, the ruins of Babylon sit some 50 miles from the Iraqi capital of Baghdad. Remains, writings, and unearthed artifacts have long painted a picture of Babylon in its heyday—a bustling, carefully arranged Mesopotamian city filled with grand temples and a towering structure that likely inspired the myth of the Tower of Babel.

Now, the rediscovered hymn—which was likely widely circulated and memorized by schoolchildren—offers new insights into ancient Babylonian culture. For example, the hymn provides a valuable peek into the role of some Babylonian women as priestesses and their duties, including wet-nursing. And the hymn reveals that Babylonians “respect the foreigners who live among them,” referring to priests from other regions.

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The text also touches on the flora of the region, including mentioning fields that “burgeon with herbs and flowers” and meadows that “in brilliant bloom, sprout barley.”

“This is all the more spectacular as surviving Mesopotamian literature is sparing in its descriptions of natural phenomena,” said study author Enrique Jiménez, a Babylonian literature researcher at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, in a statement.

Jiménez and his co-author Anmar A. Fadhil of the University of Baghdad are currently harnessing AI to comb through and stitch together hundreds of cuneiform tables from the Sippar Library, located in what is now Baghdad Province—aiming to ensure that these ancient works aren’t lost to time.

Lead image: Altitude Visual / Shutterstock

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Molly Glick

Posted on July 7, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Monumental Burial Mounds Rewrite Ancient History

The colossal structures, built by hunter-gatherers, are way older than archaeologists had thought possible

By Bob Grant    July 4, 2025

Ancient works of impressive architecture inspire awe the world over. The Great Pyramid of Giza. The Parthenon in Athens. Machu Picchu in Peru. But archaeologists had previously assumed that it took a complex society, with institutionalized inequality, to give birth to such massive works.

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Now, researchers working at a site called Kaillachuro in the Titicaca Basin of the Peruvian Andes have determined that monumental burial mounds were built by egalitarian hunter-gatherer groups over the course of centuries. The Andean architects started constructing the mounds about 5,300 years ago and continued to build upon existing burial sites for more than 2,000 years, which challenges the conventional wisdom that structures of this scale only arose from civilizations with social hierarchy and controlled labor forces.

Scientists used radiocarbon dating to analyze remains in the series of nine low-lying mounds, which were unearthed by an archaeologist in 1995, and published their findings in a recent issue of the journal Antiquity.

“Most researchers in the Andes argue that monumental architecture is a product of elites, intentionally constructed as a space of centralized power,” said the study’s corresponding author Luis Flores-Blanco, a postdoctoral researcher at Arizona State University, in a statement. “We propose that monumentality can emerge from hunter-gatherer groups without institutionalized inequality.”

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The mounds also push the timeline for such works in the Andean highlands back significantly—archaeologists previously thought that such works didn’t appear in that region until 1,500 years later. Starting with rudimentary burial pits in the ground, the mounds took shape over the centuries as their builders constructed increasingly elaborate memorials to their deceased ancestors.

“Kaillachuro is an extraordinary find because it shows that mounds were used in ritual contexts for over 2,000 years—though not necessarily continuously,” Flores-Blanco added.

The authors of the paper suggest that such building practices—centered on memorial rituals—created visible reminders of the dead and may have given rise to socioeconomic transformations that paved the way for more complex societies.

Lead images courtesy of Cambridge University Press

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Bob Grant

Posted on July 4, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

Neuroscience

- Does Anybody Really Know What Time Is?

- Is It Cake? How Our Brain Deciphers Materials

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Does Anybody Really Know What Time Is?

Yes, your brain does. It created it.

By Dan Falk    July 8, 2025

I’ve been fascinated by time for as long as I can remember. In my undergraduate physics classes, time always lurked in the background—it was the “t” that the professors sprinkled into their equations—but it was never quite clear what time actually was. Years later, I wrote a book about time, but even with chapters on Newton and Einstein, and a solid dose of philosophy, something was missing.

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For starters, we know clocks and watches work, but how do we tell time? If you’re watching network TV and a commercial break begins, you know you have time to use the bathroom or perhaps make a sandwich—in fact, you can probably arrange to be back in front of the TV just as the ads are ending. What makes you so good at judging these intervals of time?

I figured that Dean Buonomano, being a neuroscientist, might have some of the answers. Buonomano is known for developing the idea that the key mechanism is not a single clock-like structure in the brain but rather networks of neurons working together, known as “neural dynamics.”

But as Buonomano sees it, the brain does much more than keep track of time; in fact, it might be said to create it. It’s thanks to our brains that we feel time’s “flow,” even though nothing in physics points to such a flow out there in the world. Perhaps even more crucially, the brain allows us to engage in “mental time travel”—the ability to recall past events and imagine future happenings. This capability, he argues, was essential in shaping humanity’s path from the African savannah to today’s globe-spanning civilization.

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Buonomano, an affable 60-year-old, is a professor in the departments of neurobiology and psychology at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he heads the Buonomano Lab. His most recent book is Your Brain is a Time Machine: The Neuroscience and Physics of Time. I recently caught up with Buonomano via videoconference.

FUTURE SHOCK: Neuroscientist Dean Buonomano says early humans’ first awareness of passing time must have been traumatic. They “must have looked in the future and said, ‘oh shit, I’m going to die.’” Photo courtesy of Dean Buonomano.

You and I have both written books about time—but you’re a neuroscientist and I’m not, so I thought we could start with the brain. Even when I’m in a room with no clocks, I have what seems like a reasonable awareness of how much time has passed. How does the brain do it? I imagine it’s not as simple as having a little clock in the brain. What’s going on?

The brain has fundamentally different mechanisms to tell time on different timescales. You have a circadian clock; that’s what guides you when you’re hungry, tells you when you go to bed, when to get up. But that clock doesn’t have a second hand; it cannot “tell time.” It’s not going to help you determine the tempo of a song that you’re listening to. So that clock is independent of the other clocks. We also have other clocks, other timers, that guide our ability to have this conversation.

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We know that many of these forms of timing rely on what’s called a “neural population clock”—that’s a circuit of neurons where one neuron can contact and excite another neuron, and another, and another. You can imagine them as falling dominoes. If you have a long line of dominoes, you could use that as a clock, because you could mark time based on which domino is currently falling. So that’s how the brain tells time on the scale of milliseconds, using what we call “neural dynamics.” Neurons make up a dynamical system, and they create spatio-temporal patterns of activity, and we use those spatio-temporal patterns of activity to tell time.

Although we don’t have a little clock in our brains, maybe we have something like a timer of sorts?

I think the more accurate way to put it is, your whole brain is a timer. You don’t have one little clock; you have your entire brain. You don’t have a centralized timer. All neurons, in effect, can contribute to timing on an as-needed basis.

You mentioned our body’s circadian clocks. Can you give a quick explainer of that?

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Absolutely. The circadian clock is probably the timer in the brain that we know most about. It’s basically a biochemical oscillator. It works as a negative feedback loop in which you generate proteins which inhibit the generation of more proteins—and by design, that period is around 24 hours. And you don’t need a brain to have a circadian clock. Plants have circadian clocks, and bacteria have circadian clocks. So, it’s the most primitive of our clocks, and in many ways the most important, because it’s entrained by the rotation of the Earth.

So how does my brain’s sense of time relate to clock time—time as measured by our clocks and watches?

We have to calibrate our internal clocks, our internal timers, with external “objective” time. If your circadian clock is off, or out of phase, with external time, then you have jet lag. On shorter time scales, everything we’re doing is sort of calibrating our ability to tell time and match it with the objective world. If you’re a musician, you have your internal dynamics that’s driving your ability to generate or produce a musical piece—but you also have a metronome, right? And that metronome serves as a calibration. Thousands of years ago, we didn’t have those external clocks. If you were trying to catch an object in mid-flight or throw a spear at a moving object—those are all timing problems, and you have to time your motor responses in accordance with the laws of physics and the external world.

Although Hollywood-style time travel remains a fiction, we do have something called mental time travel. What is that?

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Mental time travel refers to the ability to relive things that have happened in the past and to simulate or imagine different future scenarios. Mental time travel is one of the most fundamental or defining cognitive abilities that humans developed. It’s what really allowed us to get where we are. You think of something as simple as agriculture—one of the most important technological advances we ever had. It’s a simple idea, right? Planting a seed and then reaping the benefits of that in terms of assuring the presence of food in the future. But that simple idea really eluded all other animals, and eluded early humans for millions of years. And why is that? I think it’s because it involves mental time travel. Without that ability, it’s hard to say, “Well, I’m going to plant this seed today in order to reap the benefits months or years into the future.” So, this connecting the causal dots between cause and effect over long periods of time is something most animals are largely incapable of.

The accurate way to put it is that your whole brain is a timer.

Why do we think this capability is unique to humans?

It’s certainly unique in terms of the degree that we can do it. There’s some debate whether other animals can do it. Now, other animals do future-oriented actions; a squirrel will store food, a beaver will build a dam, and birds will build nests. But by most accounts, those are innate behaviors. Animals don’t seem to be aware of why they’re doing it. That’s how evolution works; it creates innate behaviors so that you can do future-oriented things without having to understand why you’re doing them.

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Mind you, although this ability to engage in mental time travel and to see the future had to be incredibly powerful, it was also incredibly traumatic. Some early humans must have looked in the future and said, “oh shit, I’m going to die.” They saw that they’re mortal. This cognitive ability to engage in mental time travel might have initiated or triggered the need for supernatural beliefs like religion. Supernatural beliefs may have developed in part to cope with our ability to engage in mental time travel and to see that we’re mortal. And what better way to do that, than to believe that there’s life after death?

I’m wondering if the development of language was related to the capacity for mental time travel?

I agree that mental time travel and language have to be intertwined. To prepare for the future, we need linguistic abilities and language and symbols to plan ahead and to quantify time as it passes. I think those things co-evolved.

It’s also interesting that when we talk about time, in many cultures, we use spatial metaphors. People have argued that we had [neural] circuits in place to deal with space—left, right, north, south—essential for tracking animals as they migrate over long distances. And then those circuits for space were co-opted or transformed, and allowed us to mentally travel through time. We have the past, we have the present, we have the future. And when you and I talk about time, we often use spatial metaphors. We say, “it was a long day,” or “I’m looking forward to seeing you,” or “In hindsight, that was not my best idea.” So, that’s one of the tools we use to engage in mental time travel, and it goes precisely toward your point of the relationship between mental time travel and language.

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Interestingly, we also use them the other way around, using time to describe space. We’ll say things like “The shopping mall is 10 minutes away.”

That’s a good example, but there’s not many of those. I think we spatialize time much more than we temporalize space.

One very basic thing about our experience of time is that it seems to flow: The future becomes the present, the present disappears into the past. But that flow is rather slippery. Is there anything out there in the physical world that corresponds to that flow? Or could it be a creation of the mind?

Time sits at the center of a perfect storm of unsolved scientific mysteries involving free will, consciousness, and the unification of relativity and quantum mechanics. There’s two views.

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One is called presentism; that’s the intuitive view—the view that only the present is real, and the past is no longer real and the future is not yet real. And that we can take actions in the present and modify or change or shape the future. That’s certainly been the dominant view throughout history. Now in modern physics, going back to Einstein, that view began to change.

Now there’s a tension between neuroscience and physics, with many physicists and philosophers saying that the laws of physics suggest that the presentist view is wrong, and that the correct view is eternalism, also called the “block universe” view. In that view, “now” is to time as “here” is to space. We have no problem saying we both exist in space, even though we’re far apart; you’re in Toronto and I’m in LA. Under eternalism, the same thing is true of time. There would be other “versions” of you in the past or in the future that all coexist.

Perception of time is evolution’s way of allowing us to understand change.

I think the most intuitive way for people to understand this notion—that all of time is laid out in this way—is through the concept of time travel, that is, the Hollywood version of time travel. Under presentism, time travel is 100 percent impossible, because you cannot travel to moments that don’t exist. So all our favorite time travel movies, whether it’s The Terminator or Predestination, are non-starters.

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So, this is a bit of a roundabout answer, but under eternalism, our subjective sense of the flow of time is hard to explain, and some physicists and philosophers view it as an illusion. In other words, since time isn’t flowing in the normal sense [in the physical world], then it must be an illusion imposed by the brain. And this is what causes this tension between neuroscience and physics.

Sticking with the difference between time and space for a moment: They really do feel quite different, don’t they? After all, I have some control over my position in space—I can move one foot to the east or one foot to the west, no problem. We don’t have that freedom for moving through time.

I think that’s one of the reasons that some philosophers and physicists embrace eternalism. The laws of physics don’t tell us that there’s anything special about the present moment. Also, the laws of physics are generally time-reversible. You can run Newton’s laws or Einstein’s laws forward or backward, to predict the future or retrodict the past. And then, with relativity theory, we’ve proven that there is no absolute “now.” If I was traveling in a different reference frame at a very high speed, it doesn’t make sense for me to ask, “What is Dan doing now?” because our clocks are ticking at different rates. Some people have taken that to say, well, maybe there is no now; maybe all moments are already “out there.”

But your point about being able to move in space but not in time certainly is important, and it raises this question of the arrow of time. And physics has answers to that. One of those answers relates to the fact that everything seems to be “flowing” in the forward direction, and that’s due to the second law of thermodynamics [which says that entropy, roughly the amount of disorder of a system, is always increasing], together with the fact that the universe had to start in a very low-entropy regime. So you need those two things, working in conjunction, to explain the arrow of time. But the laws of physics don’t prove one view or the other; they don’t require either eternalism or presentism. These are just interpretations.

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I’m trying to picture this “block universe” suggested by the eternalist view. If past, present, and future are all laid out like a block, how can our present actions affect the future? Isn’t the future already “fixed” in some sense?

That’s exactly right. Under the eternalist view, there is no free will. Things have already been, in a sense, predetermined, because they have in a sense already happened. So there is essentially very little place for what most people would call free will.

Neuroscience is the only field in which the thing being studied is doing the studying.

So eternalism challenges our intuitions—but presentism is pretty weird, too. We remember the past, we imagine the future—but it’s hard to pin down just what it is that makes the present moment more real than all those other moments.

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We have to be aware that what we call “the present” is really a window of integration. So now we’re talking about psychology, neuroscience. When you’re hearing me speak, there’s a delay there [due to the finite speed of sound], and your brain sort of integrates this delay. And if we were talking in person, your eyes would receive visual information from my lips moving before your ears heard the sound waves generated by my lips moving. So, your brain is integrating; there’s no single instantaneous present. There’s what we call a temporal window of integration, and then the brain creates this narrative in which all of these things are happening simultaneously. There’s some flexibility there; if you’re in the cheap seats at the symphony, and someone bangs the cymbals together, you see it, but the sound is delayed. But if you’re in the expensive seats up close, then the delay is much less. The notion of the present, as far as the brain is concerned, is flexible and adaptive. But I don’t think it’s mysterious in the sense that eternalism is.

We might still wonder where our impression of time’s “flow” comes from.

We evolved to have a sense that the past is no longer real, the present is real, and the future is not yet real, because it’s adaptive. But why is it adaptive? Because it’s real. It’s adaptive because that’s how the universe actually works. The argument is not that everything that we perceive has a one-to-one correspondence to the real world, but most of the time it does. Color is a good example: Color doesn’t really exist in physics, but there’s an approximation of color in terms of the wavelength of light. The brain’s hack, evolution’s hack, was to allow us to create little spectrometers. Our conscious perception of time was evolution’s way to allow us to understand how things are changing in the external world, how time is indeed flowing. And it’s adaptive because it does capture a real property of the physical world.

At the end of the day, do our brains impose some limitations on our ability to answer these deep questions?

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I certainly think they do. I don’t see how it could be otherwise. Our brains are a product of evolution, and evolution selected the cognitive architecture of our brains to survive in a world in which we really don’t live in anymore. It was in a world in which we struggled to survive and to find food and to protect ourselves and to find shelter and to reproduce. We don’t inhabit that world anymore.

I think any information-processing device has its limitations, and in the case of the human brain, those limitations are crystal clear. For example, quantum mechanics. Clearly, the brain didn’t evolve to have correct cognitive architecture to understand whether a photon is a wave or a particle. And the whole debate about different interpretations of quantum mechanics is really a neuroscience debate, because it’s really about the limitations of the human brain. But I think we have to be aware that the limitations of the human brain flow over into other fields, and time is one of those fields. Neuroscience is a unique field in that it’s the only field of all of science in which the thing being studied is doing the studying. And that’s not a good setup, because there’s room for biases and limitations.

But let me say one thing about how to deal with these limitations. I think one of the most powerful tools ever invented to overcome the brain’s limitations is mathematics. Because once you can describe things in a set of equations, it doesn’t matter if we understand them, right? You can just put those equations in a computer, and the computer can spit out what will happen in the future, or what may happen in the future, or what happened in the past.

Mathematics allows us to go beyond the brain’s inherent limitations. That’s why physics has been as powerful as it is. We basically have this ability to describe everything that’s happening on our planet, short of living inside a particle collider or living beside a black hole, with an incredible degree of precision. Mathematics is what allows us to do that. That’s what the struggle between presentism and eternalism is really about: interpreting mathematics. That’s where we have to be more cognizant of the limitations of the human brain.

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Lead image: fran_kie / Shutterstock

Dan Falk

Posted on July 8, 2025

Dan Falk is a Toronto-based science journalist whose books include The Science of Shakespeare and In Search of Time. He co-hosts a podcast called BookLab, which reviews popular science books. Find him on BlueSky at @danfalk.bsky.social.

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Is It Cake? How Our Brain Deciphers Materials

Neuroscientists are discovering how this basic ability, essential to our survival, works

By Dale Markowitz    July 3, 2025

One of the greatest questions of the modern age is: Is it cake? As in: Is it an espresso machine, or cake? Paint can, or cake? Air fryer, or …? Millions of viewers have watched rapt as TikTok  bakers slice or bite into inedible-looking objects with fluffy, frosting-filled innards … or have tuned into Is It Cake?, the aptly named Netflix show. Why? As a form of entertainment, this kind of visual trick is hardly new. For centuries, artists have delighted in fooling us into thinking one material is another. From Michelangelo’s marble David, with his sinewy, soft-looking flesh, to Giovanni Strazza’s Veiled Virgin, draped in a marble veil that appears gossamer thin. What makes these illusions so mesmerizing? Maybe it’s because these classic works of art and these modern social media ruses test our ability to use an underappreciated skill that’s been essential to our species’ survival: identifying what stuff is made of.

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Over the past century, neuroscience has made great strides in understanding how the brain visually identifies objects—like mugs, trees, and faces. But the question of how we recognize what those objects are made of (smooth porcelain, rough bark, soft flesh) has been overlooked until relatively recently. “Our world contains both things and stuff, but things tend to get the attention,” wrote Edward H. Adelson, an MIT neuroscientist whose provocative 2001 paper, “On Seeing Stuff: The Perception of Materials by Humans and Machines,” spurred a flurry of material perception research.1

“Yet materials are just as important as objects are,” he wrote. “Our world involves steel and glass, paper and plastic, food and drink, leather and lace, ice and snow, not to mention blood sweat and tears.”

It’s strange that the field of material perception is so new, considering how essential the ability to decipher what things are made of is. “When we look around our world, everything is made of materials,” says Alexandra Schmid, a postdoc at the National Institutes of Health’s National Institute of Mental Health. “And we need that information to know how to interact with that world.” Recognizing what an object is made of tells us—as it told our ancestors—how we can interact with it: Can we squeeze it? Eat it? Touch it without getting burned or scratched? Pick it up? (And if so, using how much force?) Material perception helps us spot the glimmer of potentially potable water, and sort firm, fresh-looking fruit from wrinkled, rotten ones. Humans, like chimpanzees, use material properties like hardness to determine if a rock is a suitable weapon or tool. And brains that are optimally tuned to making these sorts of decisions efficiently and accurately are essential to survival and reproductive success, especially as our evolutionary predecessors navigated the travails of early human history.

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Even when we’re not seeing a material, our minds can fill in the blank of what it should look like.

Since Adelson’s provocative paper two decades ago, the study of material perception has exploded. Recent studies have investigated how we categorize specific materials, such as wood or metal, as well as isolated material properties, including hardness, color, or elasticity. Dozens of papers exclusively tackle our perception of “gloss.” Yet despite the neuroscientific progress studying how our brains make sense of this narrow band of materials and properties, until recently, researchers didn’t have the foggiest sense of the span or range of materials humans perceive.

Now, a paper recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences proposes a sweeping, generalized approach to understanding material perception.2 Most prior research has focused on testing specific material qualities that scientists predetermined to be important to perception—such as shininess, hardness, or color. Schmidt and her coauthors of the PNAS paper took a different approach: letting patterns emerge naturally from behavioral data. Using methods borrowed from machine learning, they were able to uncover 36 fundamental dimensions that our brains consider to understand materials.

NOT CAKE: Sculptors have delighted for centuries in making art that fools our brains into thinking marble is anything but. Credit: Shhewitt / Wikimedia Commons.

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“We wanted to take a bottom-up approach,” says Martin Hebart, a researcher at Justus Liebig University Giessen who coauthored the paper. “To get a bigger picture and figure out what things we should actually be caring about and studying.”

The team began by collecting a dataset of 600 images of 200 different materials—for example, brick, velvet, sandpaper, plastic. Next, they presented thousands of participants with sets of three images and asked them to rate which of two images was most similar to the third (reference) image. After collecting nearly 2 million ratings, they used a technique borrowed from machine learning to derive 36 “core dimensions of material perception.” These are essentially the cognitive axes humans use to sort materials. For example, we use the “mineral” dimension to sort images by how rough, rocky, hard, or otherwise mineral-y they appear. Other dimensions rate objects by how fabric-y or how metallic they look. Some dimensions matched categories that previous experimenters had investigated, such as texture and color. Others—such as “crystalline,” “small,” and “spongy”—were novel. In theory, these 36 dimensions can now help researchers understand what the human brain is keying off of when it decides that a rock looks more similar to a mirror than to, say, a fluffy blanket.

“Their paper is really taking us a lot further toward understanding how we actually recognize things,” says Robert Kentridge, a professor at Durham University who was not involved with the study. “It really gets you thinking about the different ways of working out how vision works, how we end up with higher-order representations.”

Scientists are only beginning to understand how the human brain identifies materials. It’s a seemingly simple task, undergirded by complex computations that happens in the blink of an eye. Consider a soap bubble—its shiny surface mirrors whatever environment it’s in. Visually, it can look entirely different from one setting to another. Yet our brains have no difficulty identifying it as the same glossy, filmy object each time. Despite the dramatic change in appearance, we perceive consistency. How?

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Recognizing what an object is made of tells us how we can interact with it: Can we squeeze it? Eat it?

At first, researchers hypothesized that the brain might have dedicated regions for detecting specific material qualities, such as glossiness. They proposed that neural circuits might be solving an “inverse optics problem”—inferring the physical properties of a surface by analyzing the patterns of light hitting the retina. However, that approach turned out to be computationally intractable. Now, the field has come to view material perception as a gestalt process—one that taps a diverse range of neural circuitry. Rather than relying on a single, specialized “material recognizing” region, our brains draw on a network of systems that integrate low-level visual features with higher-order knowledge—such as context, memory, touch, and real-world experience—to determine what something is made of. “We’re seeing a distributed network, definitely,” Schmidt tells me. “There is no ‘stuff’ area. It’s all over the place.”

In a 2021 NeuroImage paper, Schmid and collaborators wanted to see what would happen in the brain when we detected material motion—such as cloth flapping or jelly wobbling—but without any visual surface texture.3 To test this, they created what she calls “dynamic dot materials,” animations of black dots on gray backgrounds that simulated material motion. When study participants viewed just these moving dots, they were able to guess what material they represented, such as jelly or liquid. What’s more, scans of their brains showed activation across visual pathways, somatosensory areas, and even motor regions. “It was surprising, because we saw activations in regions that were not historically thought to process motion … including areas that were thought to process texture of objects and patterns,” Schmid says.

All of this implies that even when we’re not seeing a material, our minds can, to some extent, fill in the blank of what it should look like and how it should behave. The brain “identifies the object as a cloth flapping in the wind, infers the object’s weight under gravity, and anticipates how it would feel to reach out and touch the material,” the authors of the study write. The brain doesn’t just see materials; it experiences them across multiple sensory dimensions.

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All of these recent investigations are revealing how deeply we seem to be wired—and in complex, surprising ways—to recognize what stuff is made of. Which maybe explains why we’re so fascinated by illusions that challenge this ability. A glitch in our material perception systems could ruin our ability to interact appropriately and productively with the world. Hence the enduring question: Is it cake?

References

1. Adelson, E.H. On seeing stuff: The perception of materials by humans and machines. Proceedings of SPIE—The International Society for Optical Engineering 4299 (2001).

2. Schmidt, F., Hebart, M.N., Schmid, A.C., & Fleming, R.W. Core dimensions of human material perception. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences e2417202122 (2025).

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3. Schmid, A.C., Boyaci, H., & Doerschner, K. Dynamic dot displays reveal material motion network in the human brain. NeuroImage 117688 (2021).

Lead image: ciciliana / Shutterstock

Dale Markowitz

Posted on July 3, 2025

Dale Markowitz is a writer and software engineer based in Austin, Texas.

Psychology

- Is the State of the World Causing You Pain?

- Cheese Might Haunt Our Dreams

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Is the State of the World Causing You Pain?

There’s a German word for that feeling

By Tim Brinkhof    July 10, 2025

These days, many people struggle to keep up with the state of the world without being overcome by a sense of despair that’s as profound as it is difficult to describe. Unless you happen to speak German.

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The German language, a popular saying goes, has a word for everything. There’s Schadenfreude and Zeitgeist, of course. But it’s perhaps time we get more acquainted with Weltschmerz, a word which literally translates to “world pain.”

Coined by the German writer Johann Paul Richter in his 1823 novel Selina, Weltschmerz has been used by scholars to signify a unique type of sorrow that is linked not to personal hardship but the hardship of others; not to one’s own misfortune, but the misfortune of the world at large. It pervades certain works of literature and philosophy, from Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther to Arthur Schopenhauer’s World as Will and Representation and was characterized by one critic as “abnormal sensitiveness … to the moral and physical evils and misery of existence.”

It may have been birthed more than two centuries ago, but Weltschmerz seems to be increasingly rearing its head in blog posts, YouTube videos, and self-help books that discuss how social media, global warming, political unrest, and other fixtures of 21st-century life are eating away at our collective mental health. This imposing word neatly encapsulates the mix of sadness, hopelessness, fear, distrust, and rage that many of us feel while doomscrolling our way through seemingly endless supplies of disturbing and disheartening headlines.

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Weltschmerz literally translates to “world pain.”

Whether Weltschmerz is indeed a particularly strong element of our current Zeitgeist or a feature of the individual human condition is difficult to say, largely because research on the specific psychological phenomenon remains all but unexplored by science.

To study Weltschmerz, of course, you first have to properly define it. This is easier said than done. The German poet Heinrich Heine, who died in 1856, described it as rumination on the “transience of life on Earth,” framing it as an existential issue. Ralph Ellison, who referenced Weltschmerz in his 1952 novel The Invisible Man, appears to have connected it to generational trauma, in this case as a Black person in America. The Cambridge Dictionary defines Weltschmerz as a “feeling of sadness and lack of hope about the state of the world.” Merriam-Webster, as “depression or apathy caused by comparison of the actual state of the world with an ideal state.”

These diverging, at times contradictory interpretations call the precise nature of Weltschmerz into question. Does it stem from—and take the shape of—pessimism or optimism? Nihilism or idealism? Apathy or care?

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The most obvious risk factor for flare ups of Weltschmerz is exposure to the suffering of others. Research has long shown that people who interact with traumatized individuals—including emergency medical services personnel and family members of the terminally ill—are at risk of experiencing psychological distress themselves. More recent studies indicate that this distress, sometimes referred to as vicarious or secondary trauma, can develop even without direct contact, including through social media imbibing and news consumption. This suggests Weltschmerz is more common today than it was in the past, when dispiriting news of world events were not delivered directly to our pockets 24/7.

Another possible risk factor is the way people construct their sense of self. According to Marc Williams, a clinical psychologist and an honorary senior lecturer at Cardiff University in Wales, the emotional impact of events we experience has less to do with the event itself than the meaning and weight we attribute to it. “What feels impersonal to one person may feel deeply personal to another,” he says. In previous centuries, people’s inner circles were limited to their families and towns. Today, thanks to factors like nationalism, mass migration, and technology, our in-groups—and, by extension, sense of self—readily transcend borders, languages, and cultures. And as our identities expand, so does our concern for those with whom we identify. And it can even extend beyond the human, Williams says. “For climate anxiety, for example, research has found associations with higher levels of nature connectedness, or identification with the natural world.”

I’D WERTHER NOT: Weltschmerz  has run as a trope through literature and philosophy for more than two centuries. This state of being has tormented protagonists from the unnamed hero of Ralph Ellison’s The Invisible Man  to Wolfgang von Goethe’s poor Werther, pictured here. Credit: Laganrat / Wikimedia Commons.

Identity, then, opens the door to another potential risk factor: affective empathy. Whereas cognitive empathy refers to the ability to understand someone else’s thought processes, affective empathy is the capacity to feel another’s emotions. Affective empathy helps us form and maintain relationships, but excessive or unregulated empathy can lead to what Williams describes as “emotional overload, the psychological burden of continually feeling others’ pain”—a burden which increases susceptibility to psychological distress, psychiatric disorders, and perhaps Weltschmerz.

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One final factor is cognitive dissonance, defined in one literature review as frustration that arises when “people are confronted with facts that contradict their beliefs, values, and ideas.” Though not always emphasized in equal measure, disjunction between personal expectations and perceived reality is a recurring theme in literary and philosophical Weltschmerz discourse. Miles Groth, an existential therapist, expert on continental European philosophy, and professor emeritus in psychology at Wagner College in New York City, suggests that the idea of Weltschmerz arose at a very specific time: when “religious feelings that suffering is inevitable disappeared from the West.”

Indeed, where people from the devoutly Christian Europe of the Middle Ages are thought to have accepted and found comfort in the fact that everything—including evil—was part of God’s divine plan, those born in later centuries tended to operate according to a different set of expectations. Where faith gave way to science, the evils of pain, suffering, and injustice came to be regarded as avoidable, unnecessary, and by extension intolerable.

In this sense, Weltschmerz could be framed as an expression of the shattered assumptions theory. Formulated by social psychologist Ronnie Janoff-Bulman in her 1992 book Shattered Assumptions: Towards a New Psychology of Trauma, this theory proposes that certain experiences are traumatizing in large part because they dismantle our most basic assumptions about existence. Even getting this information third-hand, for example by doomscrolling, might spark a similar reaction. A 2024 study in Iran and the United States found that social media exposure to “meaning-threatening” stimuli, such as famines and genocides, can cause existential anxiety as well as misanthropy: mistrust and hatred of humanity and even oneself. While existential anxiety matches Heine’s definition of Weltschmerz (preoccupation with the ostensible shortcomings of existence), misanthropy evokes Weltschmerz as expressed in the work of Schopenhauer, whose pessimistic attitude toward human civilization led him to prefer a life of asceticism and solitude.

As for Weltschmerz’s clinical applications, it’s possible that the condition is merely a symptom of other, better defined and more extensively researched psychiatric conditions. After all, Heinrich Heine, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Nikolaus Lenau, German poets whose unwaveringly melancholic oeuvres form the bedrock for both literary and philosophical inquiries into Weltschmerz, all had complicated medical histories, having retrospectively received diagnoses for either severe depression or schizophrenia.

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Thomas Pyszczynski, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs and one of the founding fathers of terror management theory (which posits fear of death as a key motivator of behavior and mental well-being), is collecting data on people experiencing “psychological distress” in response to Donald Trump’s political career. He suggests that his study subjects may not be feeling what constitutes Weltschmerz but rather a “subclinical form of PTSD” that “could reach clinical significance in some people.”

Aaron Fisher, an associate professor of psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, cautions against classifying Weltschmerz as a distinct psychological phenomenon, arguing that, in both clinical and research settings, the focus should be on the way we respond to stimuli, not the stimuli themselves; on the output, not the input. So, he said, stressors “need not be classified as ‘world’ vs. ‘community’ vs. ‘self,’” and making too big of an effort to do so yields “diminishing returns.”

Weltschmerz is more common today than it was in the past.

Williams, by contrast, does propose that Weltschmerz can be distinguished from other psychiatric conditions. While clinical levels of depression and anxiety can be debilitating, Weltschmerz need not result in functional impairment. “It can be a deeply felt experience without meeting the criteria for a mental health problem,” he says. Something like climate anxiety encompasses a broad range of emotions and relates not only to “inner suffering but also moral distress,” making it difficult to categorize as a psychological condition.

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The mental discomfort produced by Weltschmerz needn’t be paralyzing—and actually might in many cases serve as a source of motivation. Williams notes that a recent study he was involved in found that climate anxiety was associated with high levels of “intention to engage in pro-environmental behaviors.” The same can be said about anxiety regarding political events, with one 2023 study finding that people who reported “more politics-related negative emotions” also “reported greater motivation to act on political causes by doing things such as volunteering or donating money to political campaigns.”

Whether activism can be used to treat Weltschmerz depends on the situation. In some cases, joining other people in working toward achieving a common goal can indeed provide a welcome feeling of purpose and community, improving our mental health. In others, lack of progress toward achieving such goals—especially lofty ones like ending global poverty or convincing governments and corporations to work together to mitigate global warming—can actually have the opposite effect: reducing our sense of agency and fueling the very despair we wish to keep at bay.

On the flipside, Weltschmerz can also be treated by retreating from the outside world. This remedy was one used by Schopenhauer, who, convinced that the problems plaguing the world were both endemic and unsolvable, spent much of his adult life in self-imposed isolation from society. Today, Schopenhauer’s preferred treatment plan survives in the form of both physical and especially digital detoxes. But while research shows that taking a break from the doomscroll-inducing algorithms of social media platforms has noticeable psychological benefits, the strategy is ethically thorny. By deleting TikTok and turning off the evening news, we’re turning a blind eye to suffering in ways that those less fortunate than us cannot.

In clinical practice, the most effective treatments for Weltschmerz balance engagement with disengagement, a middle ground between taking action where possible and recognizing what is and isn’t beyond our individual control. As Cynthia Shaw, a clinical therapist specializing in existential anxiety and founder of Authentically Living Psychological Services in New York City, explains:

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“One of the hardest parts is walking the line between validation and paralysis. You can’t reassure someone that everything will be fine, because they’re right, some things aren’t OK,” she says when I asked her about how people can best manage Weltschmerz-related distress without compromising on their moral values. “And yet, staying in a perpetual state of despair isn’t sustainable either. So, the goal in therapy isn’t to ‘fix’ the world, nor the person. It’s not about not caring. It’s about figuring out how to care differently.”

Lead image: Valazarus-Studio / Shutterstock

Tim Brinkhof

Posted on July 10, 2025

Tim Brinkhof is a Dutch-born, Atlanta-based journalist who reports on culture, history, and science. He studied at New York University and has written for Vox, Slate, Esquire, Village Voice, and more.

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Cheese Might Haunt Our Dreams

Centuries-old wisdom may ring true on food-fueled nightmares

By Molly Glick    July 2, 2025

Ebenezer Scrooge might have been onto something about cheese and nightmares. In Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, the grump attributed his ghost sighting, in part, to a “a crumb of cheese” that upset his stomach and deranged his thoughts. It turns out he isn’t alone in such thinking.

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A new survey of more than 1,000 undergraduate students at MacEwan University in Canada found that the students commonly attributed sweets and dairy products to bad dreams. The findings were recently reported in Frontiers in Psychology.

After crunching the data, the team found that people with food allergies and lactose intolerance reported higher scores on an assessment known as a Nightmare Disorder Index than those without them. And among lactose-intolerant participants, gastrointestinal distress may exacerbate nightmares.

But what comes first, the diet-induced discomforts or the nighttime demons? Research has found that physiological phenomena such as pain can impact dreams. A stomachache or gas, for instance, can lead to disrupted sleep, which is commonly coupled with nightmares. The new paper echoes findings from past research, but it’s the largest study of its kind yet to connect food and bad dreams.

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We aren’t all doomed to cheese-induced terrors, though. The scientists suggest adopting a diet that’s low on “foods that cause gastric distress,” especially for those with lactose intolerance. They also point to the connection between the gut microbiome and the central nervous system, which indicates that our meals can influence our mental well-being—and thus perhaps also our nightly visions.

Lead image by Tasnuva Elahi; with images by Sunbeam_ks and Nadiinko / Shutterstock

Molly Glick

Posted on July 2, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Technology

- Gaming Cancer

TECHNOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Gaming Cancer

How community science games could help cure disease

By Jeff Yoshimi    July 2, 2025

Consider a gamer playing a game. Maybe one of them is in a room near you right now. You hear periodic outbursts of anger and joy. They’ve been at it for hours. These games might be easy to pick up, but they sure aren’t easy to win. As Atari founder Nolan Bushnell said, “The best games are easy to learn and difficult to master.”

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What is it about humans that keeps us glued to a game console for hours on end? One answer is evolutionary: We’re natural problem solvers. This same drive continues to benefit us today. Scientists, for instance, spend years mastering their fields—writing tedious grant proposals, culturing cells for hours, and enduring decades of training. Their persistence leads to better medicine, better technology, a better world.

Games exploit this evolved tendency: They appeal to the ancient circuitry in us that strives to figure things out. Game designers create a virtual embodiment of some kind of problem-solving situation—escaping an enemy, defeating an opponent, making it to the next level, unlocking a skill—and they make it easy and intuitive to start playing. They lure you in with easy wins and progress. But over time, it gets harder and harder, and in the end, to win, you must thread a narrow path through action space, doing just the right things, in the right order, to achieve your goal.

These remarkable parallels can be put to good and surprising use, helping us to solve some of medicine’s most stubborn problems, such as cancer. Thousands of scientists worldwide are working diligently to make progress in the treatment of cancer. What sequence of actions will lead to a better way to block that channel? How can that cell type be detected in early stages? How can that tumor be targeted without harming healthy cells nearby? What treatment will work to eradicate the tumor without making it resistant to the treatment? Scientists, like game players, must thread an incredibly narrow path through action space, but the variables are more numerous, the stakes are higher, and it’s not even known if there is any path at all.

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Games appeal to the ancient circuitry in us that strives to figure things out.

Community science games are not like standard games, where the designers know how the game players’ goals can be achieved. But that’s okay. The creators of chess could not have dreamed of all the innovations the game would inspire. The designers of Pac-Man and Donkey Kong didn’t even know what the highest possible scores were. So long as the game has clear success conditions, everything else stays the same. We can create games where players attempt to solve problems that have never been solved, utilizing a defined set of tools to engineer something that has never been engineered before.

Consider the following challenge: Build a Lego bridge using a fixed set of pieces to support a large weight. A success condition has been defined, but it’s unclear whether success is achievable. This challenge has actually been tried: In an episode of the TV show Lego Masters, teams were tasked with building bridges that could hold 1,000 pounds.

The idea is to explicitly place an unsolved problem related to a common concern within the context of a challenge or a game. In fact, there is a long history of games and competitions for public good. Modern canning and jarring techniques originated in part from a reward offered during the French Revolutionary Wars to anyone who could devise a cheap way of preserving large quantities of food. In 1714, British Parliament passed “An Act for providing a Public Reward for such Person or Persons as shall discover the Longitude at Sea,” establishing prizes with payouts tied to improvements in accuracy. The rewards were paid out for over 100 years, and the results had a lasting impact on precision timekeeping.

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In our era, we have computers, and this has taken the old idea of a game for good or a “serious game” and completely transformed it. The entire domain of modern science is available in game-like interfaces within seconds to anyone interested. The games involve community members solving problems related to almost every area of science, from identifying celestial bodies (there are only so many human astronomers, and AI has its limits) to transcribing ancient texts to finding new ways to engineer quantum computers.

Drug discovery is one especially popular focus for community science games. We have Eterna, Foldit, and Nanocrafter. All three gamify the process of engineering the kinds of molecules that run our bodies. Each game has slightly different mechanics. Foldit is a bonsai-like game where you pull and twist the folds of a protein and see your score rise and fall.

Eterna is a more Sudoku-like discrete game, where an RNA strand is shown as a colored string of beads. Players change the colors and again, watch a score go up and down as they try to create an RNA molecule that does specific things, like fold in one way in the presence of one molecule but in another way in its absence. Nanocrafter, now defunct, was more of an abstracted puzzle game, in which strands of DNA snapped together like puzzle pieces in a sequence of slowed-down chemical reactions, and the objective was to set up a pathway that terminated in a specific sequence of DNA.

Eterna and Foldit are notable because they have led to actual scientific discoveries that are now in use. An Eterna challenge (the “OpenVaccine Challenge”) from a few years ago asked game players to help design RNA molecules for COVID-19 vaccines that do not require ultra-cold storage, allowing for easier storage and transport, which is especially crucial in developing parts of the world. Although attribution is tricky, the challenge was a success; Covid vaccines today are more stable at room temperature than they were before.

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There’s no reason we can’t take this further, with any open problem, including cancer research. Think of it this way: Cancer isn’t just one problem, but a giant tree of interconnected problems. Many of these problems could, at least in principle, be turned into a gamified open challenge. There are thousands of problems relating to cancer and there are thousands of approaches to game design and genres of game, so the potential is vast. In addition, we have all the powerful tools and techniques of game design at our disposal, tools that didn’t exist at this scale even a decade ago.

I should be clear: It’s not obvious that this strategy will generally allow gamers to solve problems that professional scientists have not been able to solve (though that could happen, as in the example of cold-storing viruses). But if they fail at that mission, they could still succeed in other ways. These games teach players about biology and how the body works—knowledge that could help them make more informed decisions about their health or advocate more effectively for others. Why not slip a little education in? Unusual embodiment of scientific problems in games could also get scientists and others to think about existing problems in new ways.

It’s an empowering thought: Cancer is a terrible foe, but we can fight it in concrete ways. Even without a background in biology, you might have skills in art or design, or just be really good at games. That’s enough to contribute. You could build new games that get us a little closer to a cure, and make people a little smarter along the way.

This article is an excerpt from Gaming Cancer, reprinted with permission from MIT Press Reader.

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Lead image: PERFECT_VECTORS / Shutterstock

Jeff Yoshimi

Posted on July 2, 2025

Jeff Yoshimi is a professor and a founding faculty member in the Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences and the Department of Philosophy at the University of California, Merced. His research areas include neural networks, dynamical systems theory, philosophy of cognitive science, and visualization of complex processes. He is the author of Gaming Cancer.

Zoology

- Is the Show Finally Over for These Whales and Dolphins?

- The Inner Worlds of Reptiles

- Leap of Faith

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Is the Show Finally Over for These Whales and Dolphins?

They were bred to entertain in a now-shuttered marine park. Now they need to be rescued.

By Syris Valentine    July 11, 2025

Over the past six months, algae has spread bloom by bloom across the crumbling tanks of a now-closed marine park called Marineland Antibes on the French Riviera, polluting the waters where more than a dozen marine creatures remain stranded. Two orcas—mother and son—and 12 dolphins, who once leapt for eager audiences, now circle the pools aimlessly, kept alive only by the care of a skeleton crew.

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The animals seem doomed by a law intended to save them. The park, which originally opened in the 1970s, was shuttered in January due to new laws passed in France that ban marine mammal captivity and live performances.

Marineland Antibes management reportedly says that the algae in the tanks develops each spring and is regularly removed by brushing, but recent videos shot by drone suggest that no one is taking care of the cleaning.

They may not survive if they don’t find a new home before the year is out.

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One video of the 24-year-old mom orca, that humans named Wikie, and her 11-year-old Keijo, gliding through the dirty abandoned pools, began making the rounds online in mid-May, shared by a Canadian marine conservation group called Tide Breakers, whose mission is to free cetaceans from captivity around the world. A more recent video, filmed in July, also shared by the advocacy group, shows workers attempting to patch the crumbling tanks, potentially polluting them even more, not far from where the animals swim.

Similar laws and closures to the one in France have taken effect around the world in recent years—in Europe, India, South Korea, South America, pushed through by marine conservationists and animal rights activists. These changes are driven by a growing understanding of the intelligence and social needs of marine mammals—and the devastating consequences that can result from their captivity. Over a decade has passed since the influential 2013 documentary Blackfish—which tells the story of a SeaWorld orca named Tilikum—brought the plight of these captive creatures to the world.

Since Marineland Antibes closed, almost all of its 4,000 animals—of 150 different species, including sea lions, turtles, and fish—have been relocated. But the two orcas and the dozen bottlenose dolphins remain. The new French law gave parks until December 2026 to find new homes for their animals.

A series of negotiations with sanctuaries and marine zoos around the world, including ones in Spain, Japan, and Canada have fallen through, either because of space restrictions, loose animal welfare standards, or time delays. Wikie and Keijo as well as 10 of the 12 dolphins were reportedly born in captivity and so cannot be released into the wild.

At first, the park aimed to sell the animals to captive dolphin parks in other countries, but various marine conservationists have been working to ensure that they are transferred to sanctuaries instead. One of those advocates is renowned Canadian-American whaling activist Paul Watson, an early pioneer at Greenpeace and founder of marine conservationist group Sea Shepherd. (Watson has worked for 50 years fighting whaling on the high seas and recently spent 150 days in a Danish jail on charges related to interference with a Japanese whaling ship.)

Wikie and Keijo as well as 10 of the 12 dolphins were born in captivity and so cannot be released into the wild.

One plan for the stranded animals involves a sanctuary on a small island in Greece that has not yet been built. This plan is backed by Sea Shepherd France and a number of other conservation groups, including the Jane Goodall Institute, and an informal group of oceanographers, mariners, artists, and entrepreneurs who call themselves the Justice League of the Ocean.

In a proposal submitted to the French Minister of Ecology on March 28 and shared with Nautilus, the Greek non-profit the Archipelagos Institute of Marine Conservation, laid out its plan to establish the Aegean Marine Life Sanctuary in Vroulia Bay on the northeast tip of Lipsi, which lies 20 miles off the western coast of Turkey. The sanctuary, which has been in the works for six years, would take up to another year to construct, according to the proposal, and would consist of three pens that cover a combined 64,000 square feet of surface area with a maximum depth of 160 feet or more. But that’s just enough room for a maximum of seven dolphins, according to the proposal, which still leaves five dolphins and both orcas stuck drifting in limbo, potentially awaiting euthanasia.

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This rescue plan has already faced a number of roadblocks along the way, says Jeremy McKane, a member of the Justice League of the Ocean and an internationally recognized underwater artist and ocean activist. First, removing the animals from France was held up by permitting requirements there, so McKane started “dialing for action,” he says. Those phone calls eventually led him to speak with the famed marine biologist Sylvia Earle just days before she was scheduled to meet with President Emmanuel Macron. After Earle brought the rescue plan to the French premier, he agreed to help make it happen.

“That’s only 50 percent of the problem, though,” McKane says. Though they now reportedly have the support of the French government, the funds to move the animals out of France, and the endorsement of the mayor of Lipsi, they still need the approval of the Greek government.

For now, the project is stuck in the same limbo as the creatures at the marine park: circling, marking time. And even if it is approved, some creatures will be left behind, victims of a law of unintended consequences.

Lead image: Qaifuldin / Shutterstock

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Syris Valentine

Posted on July 11, 2025

Syris Valentine is an essayist and freelance journalist with a focus on climate and social justice. Outside of his newsletter “Just Progress,” his work has appeared in The Atlantic, Scientific American, Grist, and elsewhere.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Inner Worlds of Reptiles

Tortoises were found to have feelings, pointing to other overlooked animal minds

By Molly Glick    July 10, 2025

Tortoises have feelings, too: Researchers have provided the first solid evidence that these long-lived reptiles experience moods, a crucial aspect of sentience. This finding adds new complexity to our understanding of these creatures’ inner lives.

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Over the past few decades, scientists have highlighted reptiles’ intelligence—such as speedy learning and long-term memory in lizards and tortoises. But it wasn’t clear whether they have subjective moods that aren’t tethered to a specific event or object. So far, moodiness has been documented in animals such as dogs, rats, and dolphins.

For a peek into reptile moods, scientists gave red-footed tortoises cognitive bias tests—these reveal how subjects’ moods influence their response to ambiguity. This test is often applied to birds and mammals, some of which have been found to harbor moods, but it was initially designed for use in human subjects.

The team, from the University of Lincoln in the United Kingdom, trained the tortoises to associate food bowls in certain locations of a room with either a food reward, or no food reward at all. Then, they presented the tortoises with bowls at intermediate locations. They classified the creatures as optimistic if they were relatively quick-moving toward a perceived reward in an ambiguous bowl, while those classed as pessimistic were more sluggish.

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The researchers also measured anxious behavior in reaction to changes in their surroundings. They added a novel object, such as a beaded drink coaster, and varied the textures and colors in the wall and floor coverings of their enclosures. Overall, the optimistic tortoises tended to act less anxiously among these unknowns. The opposite was generally true for more pessimistic tortoises, as reported in Animal Cognition.

These results make sense, because emotions and moods probably evolved to help animals dodge dangers and obtain valuable resources. And shifts in mood could help explain why critters exhibit changes in memory and learning. All in all, the team suggests that we might be overlooking many animals’ inner workings: “If reptiles, a group that diverged from mammals and birds hundreds of millions of years ago, can experience moods, it suggests that affective states may be more widespread in the animal kingdom than previously believed.”

Lead image: Seregraff / Shutterstock

Molly Glick

Posted on July 10, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Leap of Faith

Lemur mothers are bold mountaineers when hunting for food

By Skylar Knight & Krista Langlois    July 3, 2025    Photo by Zhou Donglin

Lemurs are remarkably lithe creatures. With long tails providing balance and powerful, slender limbs outfitted with opposable thumbs and toes, they move with ease through the craggy limestone spires of western Madagascar’s Tsingy de Bemaraha National Park. Still, leaping over a 100-foot ravine with a baby clinging to your back seems like a daring choice.

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To capture this scene, photographer Zhou Donglin had to do some mountaineering of her own. Setting out before sunrise, Donglin spent an hour scrambling to the top of a rocky peak, praying that the elusive brown lemurs (Eulemur fulvus) would show. After a day of disappointingly distant sightings, Donglin finally found some luck as a small troop descended through a forest of stone, glowing gold in the late evening light.

The photo was the grand prize winner in the California Academy of Sciences’ BigPicture Photography Competition, now in its 12th year.

In November, when this photo was taken, animals and plants in Tsingy de Bemaraha are nearing the end of a long dry season. After months of minimal rainfall, brown lemurs shift their diets from various fruits to the watery leaves of low-growing plants. This change comes at a vulnerable time for female lemurs, mere weeks after they’ve given birth.

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With their babies still nursing and unable to travel on their own, the mothers must strike out in search of sufficient water and nutrients—even if that quest requires a bold leap or two along the way.

This story is adapted from an article that appeared in bioGraphic, an independent magazine about nature and regeneration powered by the California Academy of Sciences.

Skylar Knight

Posted on July 3, 2025

Skylar Knight is a freelance writer and science communicator focused on nature, wildlife, and conservation. He has a Master’s degree in science communication from Imperial College London and has produced content for film, radio, and print.

Krista Langlois

Posted on July 3, 2025

A longtime freelance journalist and contributing editor, Krista Langlois is now a senior features editor at bioGraphic. From her home in southwest Colorado, she writes about the intersection of people and nature for publications like Adventure Journal, The Atlantic, Hakai, National Geographic News, Outside, and Smithsonian.

Table of Contents

Nautilus: 2025 Jul 11

Arts

Art and Science in a Grain of Sand

The Nautilus Summer Reading List

Lefties Aren’t as Creative as We Thought

Astronomy

Behold These Hidden Galaxies

Our Busy Universe

Environment

How Waves Shape the Planet

What Deep Time Can Tell Us About Coral Reefs

Health

Longevity Might Be All In Your Head

History

How to Make the Bread That Fueled the Pyramids

A Hymn Lost for a Millennium

Monumental Burial Mounds Rewrite Ancient History

Neuroscience

Does Anybody Really Know What Time Is?

Is It Cake? How Our Brain Deciphers Materials

Psychology

Is the State of the World Causing You Pain?

Cheese Might Haunt Our Dreams

Technology

Gaming Cancer

Zoology

Is the Show Finally Over for These Whales and Dolphins?

The Inner Worlds of Reptiles

Leap of Faith