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Anthropology

- This Inca Building was the Original Boom Box

- How Scavenging Made Us Human

ANTHROPOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

This Inca Building was the Original Boom Box

A 600-year-old temple was likely designed to amplify drum beats and music

By Kristen French    October 24, 2025

Imagine the sound that a boom box the size of a gymnasium might produce, the rumble and clang of its music echoing through the mountain tops.

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Some 600 years ago, the Incan order of Tupac Yupanqui built a hall out of stone high in the Peruvian Andes, in a town named Huaytará, perched about 10,000 feet above sea level. Unlike most other Inca buildings, though, which generally have enclosed floor plans, this one was totally open at one end. That feature, researchers now say, was likely meant to amplify low frequency sounds, such as drumbeats used to announce the beginning or end of a battle, injecting music into the ancient world.

“Many people look at Inca architecture and are impressed with the stonework, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg,” said Stella Nair, a UCLA associate professor of art history whose expertise is Indigenous arts and architecture of the Americas, in a statement. “They were also concerned with the ephemeral, temporary and impermanent, and sound was one of those things.”

The opening at one end of the 30-foot long temple would have concentrated sound produced inside the hall and projected it into the environment more efficiently and with greater clarity and reach than an enclosed space, said Nair. Her research suggests this feature was not just an aesthetic whim or a sign that the building was unfinished, but a feat of acoustic engineering. Because the temple has only three walls, it earned the name carpa uasi in the Indigenous Quechua language, which translates as “tent house” in English. The building is believed to have served as a temple for worshipping the sun or a palace.

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Ironically, Nair says, the temple most likely survived because Spanish colonizers ordered the construction of a Catholic church on top of it, a common practice during the 16th century. The three-sided layout would have made the temple far less stable architecturally, but the temple still stands today as the foundation for the Church of San Juan Bautista, the main tourist attraction in Huaytará.

To sound out the building’s sonic properties, Nair is working with a team of acoustic experts led by Stanford University music professor Jonathan Berger. Together, the researchers expect to produce a model for how sound would have traveled through and outside the building. For her research, Nair took photographs and measurements of the building and made drawings. She will use those drawings in combination with AI modeling to try to get a sense of the shape of the original roof, which was removed when the church walls were built.

Nair says her finding suggests that the ritual and social role of sound should be reconsidered in other pre-Columbian Andean architecture. Her research is part of a growing field of study known as archaeoacoustics, that aims to add the critical layer of sound to historical interpretation.

Whatever these acoustic archaeologists learn, it could tell us a lot about the kind of music that rang through the valleys and mountains where cultures thrived centuries ago.

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Lead photo: Stella Nair

Kristen French

Posted on October 24, 2025

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing features and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, and New York Magazine. She has a masters degree in science journalism from Columbia University.

ANTHROPOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Scavenging Made Us Human

Our early ancestors were more like vultures than we might like to think

By Kristen French    October 23, 2025

Vultures, hyenas, and other scavengers tend to have less than stellar reputations. Because they are attracted to the smells of decaying flesh they are often associated with death. If you see vultures circling, you can probably assume that some creature is nearing its end or has just departed. And they’re freeloaders: They don’t work for their lunch as much as the hunters of the animal kingdom do, they just steal the spoils. So, while scavengers are essential to a functioning planet, helping to clean up nature’s messes and to protect against the spread of disease, they also tend to inspire disgust.

It might come as a surprise, then, to learn that early humans may have relied heavily on scavenging, even after they had the tools to hunt. This is the finding of a sweeping study by a team of Spanish paleontologists, archaeologists, and ecologists, who reviewed theoretical work as well as experimental observations in the field of carrion ecology. Their finding upends conventional wisdom on the subject, which held that for early human ancestors, the risks of eating already dead animals would have outweighed the benefits. The study was published in the Journal of Human Evolution.

“When large terrestrial and marine mammals die, they provide tons of easily accessible food, enabling many scavenger species to coexist and feed at the same time,” said Ana Mateos, a researcher in paleophysiology and human ecology at the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana in Spain and the lead author of the study, in a statement.

Earlier scholars thought scavenging was too unpredictable, and already-dead animals too scarce, for it to be a frequent approach to finding food for ancient humans. And the risks—of attack from a lingering predator or of catching a disease from the rotting meat—would have been too great.

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But the new research suggests that carrion may have been a more dependable resource than previously thought, especially when plant food sources were scarce. The scientists also suggest that humans are, in fact, well adapted to scavenge: They have defenses that could protect against disease from carrion, such as a particularly acidic stomach to help kill off potential pathogens. And when humans learned to use fire to cook, that would have added another layer of protection. They also had the language and social skills to coordinate with one another to find carrion in the wild and bring it back home for dinner.

Evidence of early human meat-eating has been surfacing since the 1960s, when archaeologists began finding stone tools and butchered animal bones dating from more than 2 million years ago at numerous African sites. That set off a debate among scholars about where the meat came from: whether our ancestors scavenged or hunted, or both, and when each practice might have evolved.

Until now, the consensus had generally been that as soon as humans began to hunt, they abandoned carrion as a source of meat. That line of thinking, which posited that humans evolved in a straight line from scavenger to hunter to farmer, may have partly developed because scavengers have historically been seen as marginal or primitive creatures. But this view of scavengers has more recently been debunked.

The new work suggests that scavenging persisted among humans long after hunting emerged. So while it has long been argued that “eating meat made us human,” says Mateos, an equally true statement might be that “scavenging made us human.”

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Lead image: AnnstasAg / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on October 23, 2025

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing features and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, and New York Magazine. She has a masters degree in science journalism from Columbia University.

Arts

- In Awe of Tiny Things

ARTS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

In Awe of Tiny Things

Artist and filmmaker Michael Benson on dung beetles, diatoms, and the human drive to explore

By Katie Neith    October 17, 2025    Images by Michael Benson

One of the earliest influences for artist, writer, and filmmaker Michael Benson, he says, was the sci-fi epic 2001: A Space Odyssey. Beyond stirring childhood wonder, he says the movie impressed upon his 6-year-old brain that grand subjects such as our role in the universe and our seemingly inexorable need to explore are worthy topics for art, not “just” science or philosophy. Later, it sparked questions for Benson about humanity’s place in space and time, themes he has been exploring through his work for the last quarter century.

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“My game for quite a while now has been to use scientific research methodologies and technologies to investigate the phenomenal world, not as a scientist, but as an artist and an image maker,” says Benson. His latest book, Nanocosmos, zooms in on minuscule specimens including single-celled organisms like radiolarians and diatoms, as well as insects, microscopic flowers, and snowflakes to highlight the intricacies of the natural world at the microscopic level. In a nod to our planet’s place in a much larger cosmic world, he also includes micrographs of lunar samples gathered during the Apollo program. The book features 300 highly detailed images constructed from scanning electron microscope scans made over the course of six years at the Canadian Museum of Nature. Nanocosmos is both a journey into infinitesimal landscapes on Earth and a meditation on how humans visually explore and represent the physical world.

If you massage the bridge of your nose, you are touching a piece of the solar system.

In earlier projects, Benson focused on the universe that surrounds us through exploration of the solar system and deep space phenomena before pointing the lens back at Earth to examine the complex microscopic worlds at our fingertips. He staged a series of large-scale shows of planetary landscape photography  around the world and has also produced films, and authored books, including Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece. With director Terrence Malick, Benson worked on visual effects for the film Tree of Life, crafting sequences which drew in part from his first two books, Beyond (2003) and Far Out (2009).

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I recently spoke with Benson about the magic of photography, the intrigue of dung beetles, and humans’ attempts to visualize the universe.

What is the origin story of this book?

It’s interesting that you use the term origin story, because one of the key sections of the book is an investigation of various single-celled aquatic organisms. There is a kind of synchronicity between the origin of life and the origin story of the book, which attempts to show some of the complexity and fascination of single-celled organisms, latter day evolutionary descendants of the origin story of life on Earth. And a larger origin story for me is my personal fascination with the specific quality of photography and micrography and how it allows the mechanically created image to be used as a tool for personally directed investigations of phenomenal reality.

Acrosphaera spinosa fasciculopora radiolarian, Equatorial Pacific;

Circa 1830 x. 120 microns wide, 0.12 of a millimeter.

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How did you choose your subjects for the book?

Some of it was just spontaneous. I talk a little bit in the book about how ludicrous it was that I was blundering around in the tropics or on the Adriatic coast with my tweezers and my ethanol vials searching for what intrigued me, while my family was swimming at the beach. Or, in the Caribbean, just looking in rain forests for micro flowers and little things that might jump out. But on the other hand, I had a good idea that radiolarians and diatoms and dinoflagellates would be fascinating. There was plenty of evidence of that, reaching back to German marine biologist Ernst Haeckel in the 19th century.

A lot of your previous work looked at planets and other objects in the universe. How did you go from the vastness of space down to the very tiniest bits of life on our planet?

Well, this will sound pretentious probably but taken together I view all the books I’ve done for Abrams Books as a kind of gesamtkunstwerk, which is a German word that means comprehensive artwork that has many facets and synthesizes many genres. Like them, Nanocosmos is also an investigation of space, it’s just at another scale. Because, you know, if you massage the bridge of your nose, you are touching a piece of the solar system. And so all these fantastic subjects that I was privileged to look at are part of the solar system. It’s part of this larger phenomenon of spacetime and this miracle of how we are here in the first place to observe it.

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Clathrosphaera arachnoides radiolarian, equatorial Pacific;

Circa 700 x. 300 microns wide, 0.3 millimeter.

Did any of the specimens you imaged surprise you?

If I were to choose one subject that really blew my mind in a way that I didn’t expect, it would be the dung beetles. They roll these gigantic spheres of dung, sometimes for more than a quarter mile, and bury them. They’re so perfectly built to push something way bigger than themselves around. They look like the most extraordinary, powerful, living manifestations of the need to move weight around. Not only that, but they’re so beautiful. The fact that these bulldozers can take off and fly is just a miracle. In general, insects are just so dazzling in the microscope.

Do you have a sense of why so many patterns and shapes tend to repeat themselves throughout nature and what that might say about the world around us?

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I’m not sure I entirely agree, by which I mean, nothing else on Earth really looks like a radiolarian, with its polygonal silica shell, irregular polygons perforated by radiating spines. Nothing at a larger scale that I’ve ever seen looks anything like that. And the same really holds true for dinoflagellates and diatoms. They are very specific solutions to their own ecological niche. But there can be a very mathematical kind of geometrical sense of connection to larger principles when you look at them.

Onthophagus francoisgenieri dung beetle, Madang Baltabang, Madana, Papua New Guinea;

Circa 36.6 x. About 6 millimeters wide.

How does Nanocosmos build on past projects?

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Nanocosmos is a continuation of looking at how we use images to understand the universe. I mean, there’s a symbiotic relationship between representation and understanding. Photography has always been alchemical in a certain way. It’s a form of magic in which physical materials, like chemicals and photographic emulsions, can be used to record other physical materials and chemical reactions, by which I mean the larger physical world. As human beings, we’re a way in which the universe looks at itself. It’s not surprising that we’ve produced more powerful technologies enabling us to do that better, more deeply, with greater magnification. My other books cover such things from the solar system to the Big Bang into the history of human attempts to visualize the universe in graphic form. Nanocosmos links right up with those.

What was the process for making the images in your book?

With a lot of the interplanetary material, the pixel count of the raw images taken from the spacecraft wasn’t that high. So they had to be tiled and composited to produce higher resolutions. When I finally had access to a scanning electron microscope, and I had practically unlimited resolutions available, I overshot the mark, and I did a lot of scanning. All of that resulted in a mountain of work later where I had to assemble final composite images. There are also a whole series of images where you see insects and plants together but they’re not as natural as they may look in the sense that they were put in ethanol, then dried in something called a critical point dryer, which is a way of exchanging liquids for gas at high pressure with minimal damage to the subject. If I didn’t smash the subject, then there was another delicate operation, which is mounting the subject on a little sample stub, and putting it in a sputter coater, which coats the samples, and they end up looking like jewelry because they’re coated in platinum or gold. Then you put it in the vacuum chamber of the microscope, and there’s a whole new set of things to learn and issues when it comes to imaging the subject. It’s a labor of love.

What do you hope people will take away from this work?

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I don’t want to prescribe anything. But I’ll be satisfied if people come away with a sense of amazement at the complexity of the forms that nature can produce at these extraordinarily tiny scales. And if that helps foster an appreciation of this biosphere that produced us, which we are not treating with the respect that it deserves, I will be satisfied. Perhaps it can contribute to a sense that we really should do a better job at fostering our environment.

Lead image: View from tip down leading wing of Erythemis simplicicollis dragonfly, Gatineau Park, Quebec. Circa 106 x. Wing is about 3 millimeters wide.

Katie Neith

Posted on October 17, 2025

Katie Neith is a science writer and editor based in Los Angeles.

Astronomy

- A Crisper Look at a Cosmic Creepy Crawler

- What Happens in Space Matters on Earth

- Can We Beam Away Our Space Junk Problem?

- This Spiritual Eclipse Calendar Might Still Work

- The Dark Side of Putting Mirrors in Space

- Why Have We Never Sampled an Interstellar Comet?

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Crisper Look at a Cosmic Creepy Crawler

Illuminating new details of the Red Spider Nebula have emerged

By Molly Glick    October 28, 2025

This eerie space scene, appropriately named the Red Spider Nebula, some 3,000 light-years from Earth, was captured in unprecedented detail by the James Webb Space Telescope and recently released online. Planetary nebulae like the Red Spider emerge when some stars near their demise. These nebulae are composed of the outer layers of gas discarded by dying stars, which release ultraviolet light from their sizzling cores that have been laid bare. This gives planetary nebulae their signature glow.

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Such a stunning sight is only temporary—on the broader cosmic scale, that is, surviving for merely tens of thousands of years. “The planetary nebula phase of a star’s life is as fleeting as it is beautiful,” a recent statement notes.

The image was captured by JWST’s super sensitive near-infrared camera, which gathers light invisible to the naked eye and can glimpse the faint glow of some of the farthest and oldest objects detected in our universe. At the center of this nebular portrait, we see the nebula’s dying star—which has a surface temperature up to 50 times hotter than the sun.

The Hubble image of the Red Spider Nebula, which was released in 2001. Credit: ESA/Hubble & NASA, G. Mellema (Leiden University, the Netherlands)

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The Hubble Space Telescope team released an image of the Red Spider Nebula in 2001, which was captured in shorter, optical wavelengths—but now, infrared imaging provides a much crisper look at this creepy crawler. For instance, the dying star looks more blue and faint in the Hubble image, compared to the fiery red appearance in the JWST shot, and you can make out “a shroud of hot dust surrounding the central star.”

Now, scientists can also see the spider’s entire “legs,” or the lobes of the nebula, a finding recently reported in The Astrophysical Journal. These bubble-like appendages span about 3 light-years, blown up by gas from the nebula’s center over millennia.

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Lead image: ESA/Webb, NASA & CSA, J. H. Kastner (Rochester Institute of Technology)

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Molly Glick

Posted on October 28, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Happens in Space Matters on Earth

Dagomar Degroot’s three greatest revelations while writing Ripples on a Cosmic Ocean

By Dagomar DeGroot    October 28, 2025

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It’s often assumed that Earth is somehow separate from the rest of the universe. Yet changes in environments across the solar system have profoundly influenced the history of humanity.

Beginning in the 14th century, the sun’s activity repeatedly slumped for decades at a time. When these slumps coincided with clusters of volcanic eruptions, waves of cooling, and some places drying, swept across the Earth. The consequences included harvest failures that destabilized some of the era’s greatest empires. People around the world started to suspect that climate could change—centuries before the onset of human-caused global warming.

In the 19th century, the expanding use of electricity allowed another kind of solar activity to influence human affairs: violent flares and plasma ejections caused by immense disturbances in the sun’s magnetic field. In the 20th century, radio waves created by these flares repeatedly jammed military radar, nearly sparking a nuclear war. Currents generated by solar plasma also brought down electrical grids and disabled satellites.

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Changes in planetary environments have also influenced history, often in surprising ways. Nineteenth-century astronomers misinterpreted dust storms on Mars, for example, as evidence of a world-straddling alien civilization. This “discovery” of alien life was a popular sensation—especially when the Martians repeatedly appeared to send a signal to Earth. Then, during the Apollo moon landing program, trailblazing women at NASA created a global network of astronomers that uncovered evidence for eruptions on the moon. These eruptions seemed to endanger astronauts. But they also promised to provide fuel for a new era of interplanetary exploration.

Some believe that space exploration distracts us from more urgent issues on Earth. But, in fact, astronomers and other space scientists discovered many of today’s urgent threats to human existence.

The ozone layer, for example, is a veil of gas in the stratosphere that protects life on Earth from deadly solar radiation. In the 1970s, studies of chemical reactions in the atmosphere of Venus helped establish that chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) gases then widely used in refrigerators and spray cans had opened an expanding hole in the ozone layer. Nations agreed to ban CFCs in the following decade. Had they not acted, the hole would have spread until it covered the Earth, devastating ecosystems and imperiling human survival.

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Space exploration helped reveal another, equally serious threat at about the same time. In 1971, the Mariner 9 spacecraft arrived at Mars just as an immense dust storm encircled the planet. By studying the effects of suspended dust on Martian temperatures, scientists came to suspect that soot launched into Earth’s atmosphere during a nuclear war would also cool our planet. Eventually, they found that nuclear war would lower global temperatures to such an extent that it could be impossible for the remnants of humanity to recover. In the 1980s, the discovery of this potential “nuclear winter” motivated American and Soviet leaders to reduce Cold War tensions and work towards arms control agreements.

Scientists, corporations, and governments have treated cosmic environments as though they lack innate value and can be transformed at will. Today, we are entering a new space age marked by a scramble for resources and territory across the solar system. We need a cosmic environmentalism that both focuses space exploitation on the needs of Earth and preserves environments on other worlds.

At the dawn of the space age in the 1950s, Soviet and American officials developed plans to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon. The flash, they thought, would overawe global audiences—and irradiate part of the moon. Their plans turned out to be impractical, but both the Soviet and American militaries did explode nuclear bombs in outer space, briefly creating radiation belts that disabled satellites.

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At the same time, they failed to adequately sterilize spacecraft sent to the moon and perhaps to other worlds, allowing bacteria from Earth to reach new planetary environments. Scientists meanwhile developed plans to transform the climates of Mars and Venus, by for example deliberately introducing microorganisms that could thrive in hostile environments. Both planets would grow more habitable for human settlers, but toxic for any lifeforms that had evolved there.

The multiplication and growth of space companies and agencies with revolutionary technologies seems to be creating a new space age distinguished by the exploitation of cosmic environments. There are plans to melt ice at the moon’s south pole, settle Mars, and even mine asteroids. But despite claims to the contrary, we have not found any Planet B in the solar system—no place that matches Earth’s web of life.

What, then, should the new space age look like? I believe it should focus on altering the lifeless environments around Earth in ways that could help to ease humanity’s burden on the environments on Earth. Solar power stations in space, for example, could be built out of lunar material. They could beam limitless clean energy to Earth, slowing the pace of global warming. If that warming starts to spiral out of control, a swarm of tiny spacecraft—or even a redirected asteroid—could reduce a small share of incoming solar radiation, cooling the Earth.

Environmental changes in outer space have shaped history. It’s time we consider how to make some changes ourselves to safeguard the future.

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Lead image: Stockbym / Shutterstock

Dagomar DeGroot

Posted on October 28, 2025

Dagomar Degroot is Associate Professor of Environmental History at Georgetown University. A contributor to the Washington Post, Nature, and Aeon, he is the author of The Frigid Golden Age: Climate Change, the Little Ice Age, and the Dutch Republic, 1560–1720, named one of the ten best history books of 2018 by the Financial Times. His most recent book is Ripples on a Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Can We Beam Away Our Space Junk Problem?

A plan to use ions to clear out the crowded low Earth orbit

By Bob Grant    October 27, 2025

Humanity’s space junk is accumulating rapidly. Low Earth orbit is now exceedingly crowded with satellites, which must constantly navigate a minefield of debris from past rocket launches, discarded hardware, and previous collisions. Sometimes, sizable chunks of this detritus even crash back to the ground. Various companies have been working on ways to clean up the mess we’ve made in situ. But a new effort seeks to determine the feasibility of moving some of that junk out of harm’s way, without even touching it.

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The ALBATOR project proposes using beams of charged electrons, or ions, to shove space junk around from a distance, without the need to come into physical contact with the objects that are careening around the planet at some 17,500 miles per hour.

“By avoiding the risks inherent in capture or docking, the [ALBATOR] project aims to provide a safer and more versatile solution to one of the greatest challenges facing space sustainability: the proliferation of debris in Earth’s orbit,” officials from NorthStar, one of the companies collaborating in the effort—which is a collaboration of academic and industry scientists funded by the European Commission, said in a statement. The effort aims to test the concept and construct a demonstration of the technology, which would use a plasma-based ion beam system for the touchless space junk repositioning.

Unclear in all of this is just where it might be best to push all that space junk to.

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Some previously suggested removal systems that involve contact with the debris have proposed “de-orbiting” it, or bringing it safely back down to Earth. Large pieces can also be maneuvered out of the way of intersecting satellites or the International Space Station on a case-by-case basis.

Whatever the direction, it’s clear that the rapidly mounting problem of space junk must be addressed sometime soon. With new fleets of satellites launching into orbit every week (and sometimes multiple times a week), the space above Earth is only becoming more crowded—and dangerous.

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Lead image: ALBATOR

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Bob Grant

Posted on October 27, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

This Spiritual Eclipse Calendar Might Still Work

The remarkable accuracy behind the Maya people’s eclipse forecasts may have emerged from an astrological calendar system that could still hold true

By Molly Glick    October 27, 2025

One’s fate is linked with the date of their birth, according to an ancient astrological calendar created by the Indigenous Maya people that is still followed by some communities. This calendar enabled the Maya to predict eclipses for nearly a millennium, according to new research, illuminating a mystery that has long puzzled scientists.

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Researchers took a close look at the Dresden Codex, a Maya bark paper book dating back to the 11th or 12th century—among the oldest surviving books from the Americas—for clues. It included a table detailing 405 lunar months, which scientists previously thought was solely for eclipse prediction. But the exact workings behind the table have remained murky.

Now, researchers from the University at Albany and SUNY Plattsburgh suggest that this table emerged from a lunar calendar that corresponded with the Maya’s 260-day astrological calendar, according to a paper published in the journal Science Advances. After crunching the numbers, the researchers demonstrated that the table’s 405-month cycle—containing 11,960 days—corresponds with 46 cycles of the 260-day calendar, allowing the Maya people to follow when rituals coincided with eclipses.

By around 500 BC, Maya calendar specialists known as daykeepers connected their ritual calendar with their observations of the moon. Then, around 453 AD, they may have experienced enough passes through the 405-month cycle to glean the patterns behind solar and lunar eclipses.

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But how were the Maya eclipse predictions so spot-on? To get things right for 700 years, authors John Justeson and Justin Lowry note, the Maya relied on overlapping tables. Once they reached the end of a cycle, instead of simply starting a new one, they reset the count at precise intervals—223 and 358 lunar months before the conclusion of the previous table.

The researchers compared the Maya lunar table with natural eclipse cycles, which are associated with the time it takes for the Earth, sun, and moon to dance into a nearly straight line. They found that resetting their table at such intervals allowed the Maya to accurately predict every eclipse that occurred between the years 350 and 1150 AD because the method was able to “correct for small astronomical errors that accumulate over time,” according to a statement.

This spirituality-infused technique might still hold strong, according to the paper, and the calendar system could be maintained to work “indefinitely.”

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Lead image: Linear77 / Wikimedia Commons.

Molly Glick

Posted on October 27, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Dark Side of Putting Mirrors in Space

On-demand sunlight could be a shady undertaking

By Molly Glick    October 23, 2025

Should sunlight be delivered on demand, no matter the time of day?

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One company is toying with this godlike act. Reflect Orbital recently applied for a federal license to trial this concept in April 2026. During this test, an orbiting satellite will unfurl a 60-by-60-foot mirror and aim sunlight to specific sites on Earth. The goal is to launch a constellation of some 4,000 of these massive mirrors by 2030, expanding the world’s access to solar energy and increasing availability during peak-use hours in the morning and night.

The company says the constellation could also boost crop yield and illuminate rescue efforts, defense operations, and entire cities. Reflect Orbital even claims customers could eventually “order sunlight to your exact coordinates at any time.”

But these beams could interfere with telescopes’ views—and astronomers are already dealing with surging light pollution around the world and up in space. Most astronomers say the constellation would affect their work, according to an August survey from the American Astronomical Society.

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This would “be like having the full moon up every night, and that will be devastating to astronomy,” Siegfried Eggl, co-lead of the International Astronomical Union’s Center for the Protection of the Dark and Quiet Sky, told Gizmodo. In response to such criticisms, Reflect Orbital told Bloomberg that it aims to steer clear of observatories and will share its satellite positions with scientists. Those who study the night skies have already had issues with visual pollution from the increasingly crowded low-orbit melee of Starlink and other prolific satellite initiatives.

These harms wouldn’t stop in space, of course. Light pollution messes with the day-night cycle that has regulated Earthly creatures for billions of years. And from our planet, these thousands of extra-reflective satellites could resemble rapidly traveling stars—so migratory birds and other animals, who look to the stars for navigation, might get lost.

It’s also possible that the many mirrors involved may not be enough. The planned constellation of a few thousand satellites might only offer a few minutes of light in a given spot. The company would need thousands more to stretch that to an hour, astronomers Michael J. I. Brown and Matthew Kenworthy noted for The Conversation.

“The cost that this incurs not only on astronomy, but on the entire civilization—plus the ecological impacts—are, in my personal view, not worth the effort,” Eggl said to Gizmodo. Perhaps this proposal is just the latest reflection of humanity’s long quest to bend the rules of the cosmos.

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Lead image: Jacob W. Frank / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on October 23, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Why Have We Never Sampled an Interstellar Comet?

A cosmic coincidence could give us an unprecedented look at a visitor from another solar system. If all goes well.

By Molly Glick    October 23, 2025

Soon, scientists could take an unprecedented peek at a celebrity visitor from another solar system—the comet 3I/ATLAS. This interstellar sojourner has attracted plenty of fanfare since it was first spotted in July. Soon, a NASA space probe may whizz through parts of the comet’s tail.

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This chance meeting could make space history, offering the first sample of an interstellar object—filling a crucial cosmic gap. “We have virtually no data on the interior of interstellar comets and the star systems that formed them,” Samuel Grant, a postdoctoral researcher at the Finnish Meteorological Institute, told Space.com.

Grant crunched the numbers and estimated that NASA’s Europa Clipper “will potentially be immersed” in the comet’s ion tail between October 30 and November 6, according to a recently published pre-print article that has not yet received peer review. Comets act as “act as time capsules,” Grant said, holding onto material from their births billions of years ago—and so many light-years away.

So far, it has been difficult to obtain such a sample because interstellar objects like 3I/ATLAS are rarely observed. It’s only the third to be discovered by scientists, in addition to ‘Oumuamua and 2I/Borisov, all findings from within the past decade. But we may encounter more in the coming years: Astronomers think that at least dozens of interstellar objects may always be passing through our solar system, and around eight might be taking permanent residence.

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Sampling 3I/ATLAS could be quite the doozy. The Europa Clipper, which is on its way toward its namesake, one of Jupiter’s 95 moons, has some tools that could do the job. But it may face some headwinds. Specifically from the sun: The intense solar winds carrying ions from the comet’s tail may not flow toward the probe, for instance, and it may be hard to differentiate them from ions originating in the sun. There’s also the ongoing U.S. government shutdown, which may prevent scientists from turning on the probe’s instruments needed for this sampling at the crucial moment.

Grant and co-author Geraint H. Jones, a project scientist at the European Space Agency, aren’t part of the Europa Clipper team—so it’s not up to them whether the probe takes advantage of this timing. But their computer code program used to predict this cosmic coincidence, called Tailcatcher, could be used to pinpoint future sampling opportunities. And in 2029, the European Space Agency will kick off the Comet Interceptor mission, which will prioritize these illuminating encounters.

Lead image: NASA, ESA, David Jewitt (UCLA); Image Processing: Joseph DePasquale (STScI)

Molly Glick

Posted on October 23, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Communication

- More Than a Feeling

COMMUNICATION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

More Than a Feeling

How awe and wonder transform science and you

By Sean B. Carroll    October 17, 2025    Illustration by Tara Anand

And the Oscar goes to …”

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A lifelong biologist, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine myself strapped into a tuxedo at the Academy Awards, heart racing, about to hear whether a film I worked on would win a coveted gold statuette.

Especially for this film. It was a tale of two young brothers in Delhi battling poverty and prejudice who dedicated their lives to treating injured birds. But the opening scene showcased neither the brothers nor the birds, but instead one very long night shot of an abandoned lot … full of rats. As the film’s executive producer, all I could picture in my mind were thousands of potential viewers turning the channel to watch something else, anything else. And I spent a fair amount of time during the editing phase ranting to my colleagues how the first five minutes of the movie were killing any chances of it ever being seen by anybody, anywhere.

Was I ever wrong, stupendously wrong.

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One critic began their review by declaring, “The opening shot of Shaunak Sen’s documentary All That Breathes is probably the most beautiful and unnerving thing I saw at this year’s virtual Sundance … What follows is one of the more dreamily provocative documentaries I’ve ever seen.”1

Awe and wonder are the prime emotions that spark and sustain scientific exploration, discovery, and creativity.

The film ended up winning the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance, then the Documentary Prize at the Cannes Film Festival, which launched a magical journey for the brothers, Nadeem Shehzad and Muhammad Saud, and the film team, and a new education for me, as I tried to understand why critics and audiences so willingly and widely opened their hearts to this film.

Eventually, thanks to revelations from psychological research, I got it. I now recognize that director Shaunak Sen and cinematographers Benjamin Bernhard, Riju Das, and Saumyananda Sahi had managed to evoke the powerful experiences of awe and wonder—and in some of the most unexpected and unlikely places. They brought viewers inside a makeshift clinic in a cramped family garage, to be awed by the brothers’ tireless devotion and tender compassion. Outside, the city air is chokingly opaque. But with scenes of black kites, owls, horses, cows, monkeys, turtles, and—yes—rats sharing that harsh environment, the filmmakers elicit wonder at the marvelous richness, even there, of “all that breathes.” Being pulled out of ourselves into another world, viewers experience what psychologists call self-transcendence, a powerful manifestation of awe.

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Illustration by Tara Anand

But awe and wonder are much more than just nice feelings or coveted reactions in audiences. A current surge of scientific and popular interest in awe, including two recent books,2, 3 is being spurred by the discovery of a surprising array of positive psychological and social benefits to awe experiences, benefits that strongly suggest we all need more awe and wonder in our lives.

Research reveals that awe and wonder are the prime emotions that spark and sustain scientific exploration, discovery, and creativity, that motivate science learning, and that inspire the public’s interest in science and nature.

At a time when public support for science in the United States is in jeopardy, scientists, educators, and science communicators need to better understand how to reach people at an emotional, not merely an intellectual level. Here, I explore these powerful emotions at the heart of the scientific enterprise—how they are triggered, shape our outlook and behaviors, and how and where everyone can find more awe and wonder.

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The Science of Awe

Recall an intense experience when something stopped you in your tracks or took your breath away, when you may have felt goosebumps, your heart race, or perhaps audibly gasped “whoa.” Bask again in that moment before reading on.

Now consider, just what is this feeling? Why did it arise? And what impacts did it have on your mood, outlook, or behavior?

These are the questions that awe researchers are exploring.

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ALL THAT BREATHES: A makeshift clinic for injured birds in a family garage in Delhi is the setting for the documentary, All That Breathes. By pulling us into a strange world, the film is a powerful manifestation of awe. Credit: All That Breathes.

Like fear, joy, or anger, awe is recognized as a distinct emotion commonly defined as a feeling of being in the presence of something vast (either perceptual or conceptual) that transcends one’s current understanding of the world, something greater than what we are used to experiencing that causes us to shift our mental frameworks.

A rare and typically fleeting feeling, awe may be either positive “in the upper reaches of pleasure,” as two awe researchers put it, or negative when evoked by a threat (a tornado or earthquake).4 Individuals experiencing awe describe a sense of a “smaller self,” of being in the presence of something greater than oneself, that resituates them as individuals within larger contexts (a group, humanity, the planet, the universe).5 Neil Armstrong, while on his way to the moon to experience perhaps the most profound individual awe moment in human history recalled:

It suddenly struck me that that tiny pea, pretty and blue, was the Earth. I put up my thumb and shut one eye, and my thumb blotted out the planet Earth. I didn’t feel like a giant. I felt very, very small.6

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While the vastness of space or the physical beauty of nature may be the kinds of experiences that first come to mind, sources of awe are much broader. Consider the estimated 650 million people around the globe who gathered on that summer day in 1969 in front of televisions to see the live, grainy, black-and-white images of Armstrong set foot on the moon and hear him utter the immortal phrase, “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” What were they feeling (or I should say “we” as I was also watching)?

We just might tell a story that moves people the whole world over.

Most certainly awe, but for different reasons than Armstrong himself. Dacher Keltner, pioneering awe researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, and his colleagues asked 2,600 individuals from 26 countries (representing 20 languages) what evoked their most intense feelings of awe.

The researchers identified eight common categories of physical, social, or cognitive stimuli that elicit awe. One might anticipate that beauty in nature would top the list, but the researchers found that what they termed “moral beauty”—the courage, kindness, compassion, resilience, or extraordinary abilities of other people—the virtues we associate with heroes like Armstrong or altruists such as the bird-rescuing brothers, was the most cited source of awe.2 A second major category of awe was collective gatherings and experiences such as dancing at weddings, singing together in church, or rooting at sporting events. And the six other major sources of awe identified by Keltner and colleagues include nature, music, art and visual design, spiritual and religious encounters, life or death encounters, and big ideas or epiphanies.

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Scientific interest in awe is being driven by the discovery of a remarkable spectrum of psychological effects and behaviors that are evoked by these experiences and the sense of a smaller self. These include many positive co-occurring states of mind including greater humility,8 gratitude, compassion, and optimism,9 an increased sense of belonging, well-being and overall appreciation for life,10 and sometimes even profound, life-altering changes in perspective and direction.3,4 From these feelings, people then also seem more inclined to prosocial behaviors including greater generosity,10 helping others,11 collective engagement,5 and pro-environmental attitudes and intentions.12 Awe’s cognitive, emotional, and behavioral effects prompt some psychologists to view these experiences as antidotes to the struggles of daily life and even societal conflicts.13, 14

BIRD CARE: Another still photo from All That Breathes underscores the tenderness and compassion shown by brothers Nadeem Shehzad and Muhammad Saud in treating birds in the polluted city.  Credit: All That Breathes.

Wonder has a close relationship to awe, but it is distinguished from it in two important ways. First, wonder is a cognitive state that arises out of an awe experience. Wonder is manifested as curiosity, an openness to novelty, and a desire to explore the unknown that awe has exposed. That is, “I am in awe and therefore I wonder …” (Or another way to look at it: Awe blows the mind; wonder is the drive to try to figure out how to put it back together.) Second, wonder is also viewed as a “quieter, less spectacular emotion” than awe,15 that does not require the dimension of vastness and can arise independently from awe. We may feel wonder encountering phenomena or objects such as a geyser, a fossil, or a handsome owl in the middle of Delhi—even without experiencing a more dramatic state of awe first.

What wonder and awe both do is help us to recognize gaps in our knowledge.5, 15 “Wonder lies at the edge of knowledge,” philosopher Helen De Cruz writes in Wonderstruck, “it opens vistas to the unknown by directing our attention to it.” In encountering the unknown and under the influence of these emotions, we become aware of mystery. According to Einstein, this is where science begins:

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The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: His eyes are closed.16

The Awe of Science

Many scientists before and since Einstein have acknowledged the roles awe and wonder have played in spurring their scientific lives.17, 18 The experience that University of California, Berkeley, ecologist Mary Power recalls is both unique and typical:

When I was a child, I was severely myopic from who knows what age … But something happened before I got glasses, and that was that I was let loose with a mask and snorkel. For the first time, I saw things clearly because of the refraction of the water.

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You can imagine how beautiful it would be when you see detail that you’d never known you could see. What were pondweeds above the water were forests of stems under the water. And in this little forest, there would be sun fish. Then occasionally, a big, larger predator like a pickerel or a perch or a bass goes by.

It was a flashbulb moment, as they say, where I just had to be underwater looking at life that way, for the rest of my life.1

This vivid and emotionally arousing flashbulb moment would inspire Power’s pioneering studies of freshwater stream communities, within which she was the first to demonstrate the operation of what ecologists call a trophic cascade—a domino-like series of interactions through a food chain.20 Five decades later, she continues to look at life underwater.

A similar moment to Power’s inspired my book The Serengeti Rules, later adapted into a film. A decade ago, I visited Serengeti National Park in Tanzania for the first time. I vividly recall being awestruck while gazing at the astounding numbers and variety of wildlife across the landscape. Nothing I had read or seen on television diminished the power of the vista. But it also dawned on me, a molecular biologist, that I had no idea what I was looking at, of how the Serengeti worked, nor whether anyone knew much about it. My awe turned to wonder, and that’s how I learned of pioneering zoologist Tony Sinclair’s insights into Serengeti ecology, work that was inspired by his own Serengeti awe experience five decades earlier:

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Nothing had prepared me for the experience of wildlife in vast numbers, the extraordinary migrations, the sheer diversity of animals and vegetation, and the spectacular landscapes. I decided then that I would spend the rest of my life studying this ecosystem and why it was like the way it was. It was without a doubt in my mind the most extraordinary place on Earth.21

Having written stories and helped to make films about scores of scientists, I could fill countless pages with similar anecdotes. And research psychologists are now investigating why and how such experiences influence the practice of science itself.

In detailed interviews with 30 people with Ph.D.s across a wide swath of disciplines and career stages, Megan Cuzzolino of Harvard University probed the role of awe in their scientific journeys.18 She found abundant support for awe in sparking the desire to become scientists, arousing curiosity about the subjects they chose to explore, and sustaining their motivation to pursue science. Their experiences had many sources spanning several of the eight categories above. For example, awe was inspired by direct firsthand encounters with natural phenomena as well as through secondhand learning about other discoveries that elicited awe for the discoverers (moral beauty) and/or the new big ideas they offered (epiphany).

These epiphanies are treasured by scientists as the rewards for long periods of effort and uncertainty.

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Many scientists also cited being part of the broader scientific community as a source of awe, viewing their efforts as a small way of helping the larger collective enterprise of expanding human knowledge. “It’s my contribution on the path that as human beings—with humility, with difficulties, with resilience—we keep following for a bigger goal. So the awe is not in what I have done, the awe is in the process,” said one interviewed neuroscientist. Similarly, an astrophysicist described themselves as part of “a social community of human beings that are in this together to figure out how the universe works. You’re really rooting for people to figure things out. Even if they’re in competition with you!”18

Numerous scientists also recalled moments of scientific discovery as sources of awe, and described how by making observations with their own eyes they could relish a brief period when they are the only one to see or to know something. Large or small, these epiphanies are treasured as the rewards for long periods of effort and uncertainty, and they stoke the desire for more such moments.

Awe and wonder have been found to promote attitudes that are conducive to scientific discovery itself, such as openness to new phenomena, ideas, and explanations, and to shifts in perspective^18 while reducing reliance on established notions.15 A disposition to awe is associated with increased creativity and creative personality traits.22, 23 The most consistent and strongest personality trait associated with creativity, in fact, is openness to experience^24—which is reflected by intellectual curiosity, a willingness to try new things, and openness to emotion. We can appreciate how awe and wonder spark and sustain the entire journey of scientific discovery and invention, from “what if?” to “a-ha!,” from the initial perception of a mystery, through its exploration, to exhilarating moments of seeing what no one has seen or understood before.

PALE BLUE DOT: This wondrous NASA photo of Earth taken from the Voyager spacecraft, Carl Sagan said, “underscores our responsibility to preserve and cherish that blue dot, the only home we have.”  Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.

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Researchers who found that a disposition toward awe is associated with a better understanding of the nature of science and with scientific thinking even boldly suggested that awe is “a scientific emotion.”25 Surely this term will strike some as an oxymoron, the scientist-archetype persisting as a person striving toward pure facts and reason, not emotion. But psychological research is telling us that under that veneer of dispassionate rationality lies a strong yearning for—and connection with—awe and wonder, shared with the rest of humanity.

For everyone, scientists and nonscientists alike, Keltner offers one all-caps prescription for those seeking a richer life, a greater sense of purpose and meaning, and stronger bonds to the communities and natural systems that support us: FIND AWE. He means more than a once-in-a-lifetime experience such as seeing the Grand Canyon. Rather, he points to more accessible, potential everyday sources of awe such as music, art, or nature.

But what about science itself as a source of awe and wonder? The entire journey of scientific exploration as well as scientists’ own stories—as people who venture into the unknown, take risks, and persevere through frequent failure to experience the exquisite thrill of discovery—are themselves potential sources of life-enriching awe and wonder.

There is, however, an issue of accessibility for non-scientists. As science communication scholar Michael Dahlstrom points out, “In the end, only scientists can know science through science. Everyone else must learn about science through other means.”26 So, how can scientists convey and non-scientists experience, as Richard Dawkins described, “this feeling of spine-shivering, breath catching awe … this flooding of the chest with epiphanic wonder, that modern science can provide?”27

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The Power of Stories

“Scientists say that the world is held together with atoms, and of course, it is. But it is also held together with stories.”

—Colum McCann, American Mother

On June 6, 1990, astronomer Carl Sagan stepped to the podium at NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C. to give a press update on the findings of the Voyager Mission (launched in 1977) to the outer reaches of our solar system. He introduced a mosaic “portrait of the planets” taken by Voyager 1 as the spacecraft cameras looked back across the solar system from more than 4 billion miles away. He then turned to one image with several colored streaks across it, and pointed to a tiny bright speck:

The Earth in a sunbeam … It looks like more than a dot, but it is in fact less than a pixel …  You can see that it is slightly blue, and this is where we live, on a blue dot …

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After a few remarks about other planets, Sagan returned to the Earth’s image:

On that blue dot, that’s where everyone you know and everyone you ever heard of, and every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. It is a very small stage in a great cosmic arena … I think this perspective underscores our responsibility to preserve and cherish that blue dot, the only home we have.

Judged solely on aesthetic merit, one might dare to say that at first glance it was perhaps not the most impressive snapshot. In fact, Voyager imaging scientists Candy Hansen and Carolyn Porco initially either did not see the Earth on the image or mistook it for a speck of dust.28 Sagan and other NASA scientists knew that the picture had no scientific purpose. Yet, the Earth as a Pale Blue Dot stands as one of the most enduring icons of the modern scientific era.

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What insights might we glean from it to learn about the source of its power? Let’s consider what elicitors of awe might be at work. Here are four candidates.

• Nature: The image of our tiny planet in the dark immensity of space evoked vastness and the small self on a new scale. Astronomer and author Jim Bell wrote, “Once again the citizens of Planet Earth, then numbering about 5 billion, bore witness to the next great paradigm-shifting change in perspective. This time it was not just off-world, not just from beyond our backyard, but a vista from out there.”29

• Art and visual design: The less-than-a-pixel Earth in a sunbeam was a surprising, never-before-seen or imagined image, a new space “artwork” with an emotive moniker.

• The virtues and abilities of others: Sagan related how this image was only made possible by the combined efforts and ingenuity of teams of scientists and engineers who had devoted many years of their lives to the mission—a heroic human achievement.

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• Big idea or epiphany: Sagan’s poetic eloquence elevated the power of the image and the moment by focusing on the meaning of that tiny blue dot to every person, transforming an image of admittedly no scientific significance into a global epiphany.

While any one of these elicitors may have been sufficient to evoke awe, it seems very likely that their combination multiplied the overall power. That power remains undiminished more than three decades later, and now psychology researchers have studied subjects’ responses to Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot narrative in conjunction with other images of space.30 In addition to awe, subjects report feelings of compassion, gratitude, love, optimism, greater connectedness, and humility.

This positive emotional wallop suggests that scientists (as well as science teachers and science communicators) have potentially much more emotive power within our reach than we may realize. How can we grasp and deploy it most effectively?

FLASHBULB MOMENT: The awe of underwater nature, ecologist Mary Power said, inspired her life in science: “It was a flashbulb moment, where I just had to be underwater looking at life that way, for the rest of my life.” Photo by UWBALK / Shutterstock.

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Albert Camus, the inspirational voice of the French Resistance and 1957 Nobel Laureate in Literature knew the secret: “The first thing for a writer to learn is the art of transposing what he feels into what he wants to make others feel.”31

One of the most important features of the human mind is our ability to feel what others feel—and we do this most effectively through story. The most powerful reason anyone writes or reads stories, tells or listens to stories, or makes or watches films is to evoke or experience emotions.

Planetary scientist Porco credits Sagan, who was also a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, with turning the revelation of Voyager’s photograph into “an allegory on the human condition”—making it a story about us, summoning our thoughts and feelings about everyone we know and the limited time we have on our unique, precious, common home.28

What was instinctual to Camus and Sagan is now backed by decades of research in narrative psychology which seeks to understand how stories and storytelling shape our understanding of the world. The power of stories to evoke a flurry of emotions stems from their abilities to transport and immerse audiences into worlds created by the storyteller.32 Research suggests that transportation, the feeling of being carried away by a story, occurs most effectively when audiences empathize with characters and experience the plot of the story through them. Immersion, a state of deep mental absorption and subjective sense of “being there,” further supports this when the imagery of a story compels the audience’s mental imagery to shift their attention from their immediate surroundings into the story world.

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For any experience, for any audience, story is the next best thing to being there. For science, for the vast majority of audiences, story is the only way of being there. And science stories work best when the emotion and substance of that experience is conveyed in ways that elicit the audience’s emotions. So, to Keltner’s prescription, I add one all-caps suggestion for where to find more awe: IN STORIES.

Sagan, whose landmark television series Cosmos was seen by a global audience of 500 million, worried deeply about the public’s and politicians’ valuation of science and foresaw the making of today’s crisis. In one of his last major public addresses before he died from cancer at age 62, when asked about how to best champion and support science, he urged:

To present science as it is, as something dazzling, as something tremendously exciting, as something eliciting feelings of reverence and awe, as something that our lives depend upon.33

The stakes for science, for our Pale Blue Dot and all the creatures living on it, and those yet to come, have grown since then. But with some effort, every now and then, we just might tell a story that moves people the whole world over.

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Speaking of which, we didn’t win that Oscar. But that was okay. It was an awesome night.

Acknowledgments: I thank David Guy Elisco and Marjee Chmiel for many conversations about awe, wonder, and storytelling in films, and for comments on this essay; Itai Yanai and Rich Stone for their suggestions; Megan McGlone for help with preparation; and Shaunak Sen for ignoring and forgiving my protest.

References

1. Fienberg, D. All That Breathes: Film Review | Sundance. Hollywood Reporter (2022).

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2. Keltner, D. Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life Penguin Press, New York, NY (2023).

3. De Cruz, H. Wonderstruck: How Wonder and Awe Shape the Way We Think Princeton University Press, NJ (2024).

4. Keltner, D. & Haidt, J. Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion 17, 297-314 (2003).

5. Bai, Y., et al. Awe, the diminished self, and collective engagement: universals and cultural variations in the small self. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 113, 185-209 (2017).

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6. Hanbury-Tenison, R. The Oxford Book of Exploration Oxford University Press, New York, NY (2010).

7. Stellar, J.E., et al. Awe and humility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 114, 258-269 (2018).

8. Nelson-Coffey, S.K., et al. The proximal experience of awe. PLoS ONE 14 (2019).

9. Rudd, M., Vohs, K.D., & Aaker, J. Awe expands people’s perception of time, alters decision making, and enhances well-being. Psychological Science 23, 1130-1136 (2012).

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10. Piff, P.K., Dietze, P., Feinberg, M., & Stancato D.M. Awe, the small self, and prosocial behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 108, 883-899 (2015).

11. Prade, C. & Saroglou, V. Awe’s effects on generosity and helping. The Journal of Positive Psychology 11, 522-530 (2016).

12. Yang, Y., Hu, J., Jing, F., & Nguyen, B. From awe to ecological behavior: The mediating role of connectedness to nature. Sustainability 10, 1-14 (2018).

13. Monroy, M. & Keltner, D. Awe as a pathway to mental and physical health. Perspectives on Psychological Science 18, 309-320 (2023).

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14. Hullinger, J. The scientific reason you should be watching Planet Earth. The Week (2017).

15. De Cruz, H. Issues in science and religion: Publications of the European society for the study of science and theology. In Fuller, M., Evers, D., Runehov, A., Sæther, K.-W., & Michollet, B. (Eds) Issues in Science and Theology: Nature—and Beyond Springer, New York, NY (2020).

16. Einstein, A, The world as I see it. Forum and Century 84, 193-194 (1930).

17. Jaber, L.Z. & Hammer, D. Learning to feel like a scientist. Science Education 100, 189-220 (2016).

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18. Cuzzolino, M.P. “The awe is in the process”: The nature and impact of professional scientists’ experiences of awe. Science Education 105, 681-706 (2021).

19. Brown N., et al. The Serengeti Rules (film). PBS Nature (2019).

20. Power, M., Matthews, W.J., & Stewart, A.J. Grazing minnows, piscivorous bass, and stream algae: dynamics of a strong interaction. Ecology 66, 1448-1456 (1985).

21. Sinclair, A.R.E. Serengeti Story: Life and Science in the World’s Greatest Wildlife Region Oxford University Press, U.K. (2012).

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22. Chirico, A. & Gaggioli, A. Awe: “More than a feeling.” The Humanistic Psychologist 46, 274-280 (2018).

23. Zhang, J.W., et al. Awe is associated with creative personality, convergent creativity, and everyday creativity. Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 18, 209-221 (2024).

24. Feist, G.J. A meta-analysis of personality in scientific and artistic creativity. Personality and Social Psychology Review 2, 290-309 (1998).

25. Gottlieb, S., Keltner, D., & Lombrozo, T. Awe as a scientific emotion. Cognitive Science 42, 2081-2094 (2018).

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26. Dahlstrom, M.F. Using narratives and storytelling to communicate science with nonexpert audiences. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, 13614-13620 (2014).

27. Dawkins, R. Unweaving the Rainbow: Science, Delusion and the Appetite For Wonder Mariner Books, Boston, MA (2000.)

28. Reynolds, E., et al. The Farthest: Voyager in Space PBS Distribution (2017).

29. Bell, J. The Interstellar Age: Inside the Forty-Year Voyager Mission Dutton, New York, NY (2015).

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30. Nelson-Coffey, S.K., et al. The proximal experience of awe. PLoS ONE 14 (2019).

31. Camus, A. Notebooks, 1943-1951 Translated by O’Brien, J. Knopf, New York, NY (1965).

32. Green, M.C. Case studies for theory and practice. In Frank, L.B. & Falzone, P. (Eds.) Entertainment-Education Behind the Scenes Palgrave Macmillan, U.K. (2021).

33. Frazier, K. Skeptical Inquirer 29, 29-37 (2005).

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Sean B. Carroll

Posted on October 17, 2025

Sean B. Carroll is the Balo-Simon Endowed Chair and Distinguished University Professor of Biology at the University of Maryland. He founded and led HHMI Tangled Bank Studios from 2018 to 2023.

Environment

- Here’s What Nuclear Testing Does to the Earth—and Us

- Hurricane Melissa Could Threaten Some Species with Extinction

- How This Haunting Hurricane Illusion Forms

- How “Plant Math” Can Help Predict the Climate’s Future

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Here’s What Nuclear Testing Does to the Earth—and Us

With trials of atomic weapons set to resume, we recall the environmental and health damage wrought by such testing

By Bob Grant    October 30, 2025

Our planet may be headed back to a very dark place.

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In a face-to-face meeting today (October 30th) in South Korea, United States President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping spent 90 minutes discussing the war in Ukraine, trade relations between the two countries, and other issues. Reports indicate that some progress was made in staving off a nascent trade war between the U.S. and China, but it was what Trump wrote on social media just minutes before that meeting that is sending shockwaves through the world.

“Because of other countries [sic] testing programs, I have instructed the Department of War to start testing our Nuclear Weapons on an equal basis,” he posted to his Truth Social platform.

Trump added that the testing will begin immediately. His comments came after Russia announced tests of a nuclear-capable sea drone and missile this week.

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If the U.S. does resume trial detonations of live nuclear weapons, it would be the first such testing in the country since 1992. The Nuclear Test Ban Treaty of 1963 forced nations to conduct nuclear testing underground, and hundreds of detonations occurred in subterranean testing facilities for some 30 years. And in 1996, President Bill Clinton signed the Comprehensive Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which prohibited nuclear explosions anywhere on Earth. The U.S. government complied with the ban, as did those of Russia, China, and most other nuclear-capable nations. India and Pakistan continued testing into the late 1990s and North Korea conducted its most recent nuclear weapons test in 2017.

Read more: “What Nuclear War Means for the Ocean”

Prior to this pause in nuclear testing, Earth’s nuclear powers conducted thousands of test detonations, with the U.S. leading the way during the Cold War. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, the country performed 1,054 nuclear tests between 1945 and 1992, including more than 200 underwater and atmospheric tests. Weapons were detonated mainly at the DOE’s Nevada Test Site just outside of Las Vegas. But the U.S. government also exploded nuclear bombs in the Marshall Islands and off Kiritimati Island, both in the Pacific, and three in the Atlantic Ocean. A handful of tests occurred at other U.S. sites, including in Alaska, Colorado, Mississippi, New Mexico, and in Nevada at locations outside the Nevada Test Site.

This testing, combined with hundreds of other detonations by the Soviet Union during the Cold War, have caused untold environmental damage, and have left permanent marks inside the cells of living things—including humans.

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The most immediate environmental effect of nuclear testing is the spread of radioactive chemicals throughout the air, soil, and water. In Nevada, several radioactive contaminants remain from the hundreds of tests conducted there, including many explosions that occurred after the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty drove such experiments underground. In the worst affected areas, the water table was so befouled by radioactive compounds that water cannot be consumed from it for thousands of years.

In Kazakhstan, the Soviet Union detonated hundreds of nuclear bombs—mostly underground at the Semipalatinsk Test Site—from the 1960s to the 1980s. This testing accelerated the desertification of the area, which continues today, and radioactive contamination of the environment has essentially rendered it a wasteland by stifling economic development there.

But perhaps no environmental damage was worse than that visited upon test sites in the Pacific Ocean during the Cold War. The Bikini Atoll, a coral reef in the South Pacific, northeast of Australia, was rendered uninhabitable by test detonations in the 1950s. A 1998 report from the International Atomic Energy Agency recommended that the area not be permanently resettled due to the radiological impact on the environment. And in Muroroa, another Pacific atoll above which the U.S. conducted nuclear testing, researchers detected fission products in ocean food webs and documented natural disasters, including landslides and earthquakes, that resulted from the detonations.

In humans and other long-lived organisms, a signature of all that Cold War testing, especially at its height in the 1950s, exists in what scientists call the “bomb pulse.” In addition to the immediate harm of radioactive compounds, such as a spike in thyroid cancer incidence near testing sites, all that testing caused a fundamental shift in the chemicals circulating in Earth’s atmosphere, even far removed from test sites. This has caused a unique profile of radioisotopes of carbon—especially carbon-14—in all biological materials formed since that era of frequent testing. Because C-14 decays at a predictable rate, researchers have used the proportion of that isotope to garden variety carbon for a variety of applications, from forensic analysis to dating wines and tracking poached elephant ivory to determining the age of 400-year-old Greenland sharks.

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Aside from this one scientific utility, on the whole, nuclear testing has been disastrous to environmental and human health.

If the world continues on the path toward resuming nuclear testing, there are myriad echoes from our past experimentation in this realm to remind us of the inherent dangers. The question is, will we listen to these warnings?

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Lead image: United States Department of Defense / Wikimedia Commons

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Bob Grant

Posted on October 30, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Hurricane Melissa Could Threaten Some Species with Extinction

As the super strong storm lashes the Caribbean, vulnerable species and habitats lie in its path

By Bob Grant    October 29, 2025

Hurricanes are potent agents of change. But just as powerful hurricanes can upend the lives, plans, and livelihoods of humans, they can devastate ecosystems and change the course of some species’ evolution in their wake.

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Hurricane Melissa made landfall in Jamaica yesterday, its 185-mile-per-hour winds making it the most powerful storm to strike the Caribbean island nation on record. According to initial reports, more than half a million people are without electricity, and some families are trapped in their homes after a 13-foot storm surge.

As rescue workers and government officials survey the damage to human development wrought by Melissa and begin relief efforts, environmental scientists are readying their response to assess the impact on ecosystems and vulnerable species there. One such researcher, University of Zurich postdoctoral researcher Fernando Gonçalves, shared his concerns with Nautilus via email regarding the sensitive environments and animals likely to feel the force of Melissa’s fury.

Estimating the precise number of species at risk is difficult given the unpredictability of the hurricane’s path.

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Among the most vulnerable are some of Jamaica’s birds, the red-billed streamertail and black-billed streamertail. Also at risk is the endangered Jamaican iguana, which was long thought to be extinct until being rediscovered in the wild in 1990. Another species that may fare badly in the face of Melissa is the Jamaican flower bat, which is critically endangered and known to inhabit only a few caves on the island. These species were named among some of the most vulnerable to natural disasters in a paper published in PNAS last year on which Gonçalves was the lead author. That paper mapped the species at risk of extinction due to natural disasters, including hurricanes, around the world.

Plants in Jamaica may fare a little better, Gonçalves added, “due to adaptations such as root systems and reproductive strategies.” But there are still critically endangered plant species scattered throughout the Caribbean, already compromised by habitat destruction and other anthropogenic hazards.

While estimating the precise number of species at risk is difficult given the unpredictability of the hurricane’s path, Gonçalves noted that the number is likely significant. Some “983 species worldwide are at high risk of extinction from hurricanes,” Gonçalves said of his analysis in PNAS. Among those are “156 species of birds, 118 species of mammals, 199 species of amphibians, and 510 species of reptiles. Many of these species are located in the Caribbean archipelago, a hotspot for hurricane-prone extinction species.”

Gonçalves said that he and his colleagues have study sites in the Lesser Antilles—specifically in Dominica and Saint Vincent, southeast of Jamaica—which are likely outside the path of the storm, which slammed into Cuba today. “Our team is ready to assist the biodiversity after the hurricane passes by setting up artificial bird feeders for the nectar feeding birds and rescuing any animals that need attention,” he said.

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There is a woeful precedent to what conservationists might expect to find when they quantify the extent of the hurricane’s ecological damage. In 2017, 239 of the remaining 250 individuals of the endemic and critically endangered imperial Amazon parrot were likely killed when Hurricane Maria swept through the Caribbean, Gonçalves says. That same storm rocked the social networks of macaques on an island off Puerto Rico that researchers had been studying for decades.

Part of what makes populations of plants and animals so vulnerable in the Caribbean is the disruption they’re constantly subjected to from humans. But even in the face of anthropogenic pressures, species endemic to such tropical islands and other hazard-prone areas have evolved and persisted in such environments. “Their evolutionary histories may have influenced their ability to respond to natural hazards, such as developing generalised feeding habits,” Gonçalves said. “Species that have survived past natural hazards might be more likely to endure future, similar exposures.”

But the double-whammy of storms super charged by climate change and populations already fragmented and depressed by habitat loss may be too much for some species to bear. “Even species with advantageous traits may struggle to recover after climatic or geological events if their populations have already dwindled or are restricted to a small area,” Gonçalves noted.

As we realize the human toll that Hurricane Melissa has taken on Jamaica and other Caribbean islands, a community of scientists will also work to assess the impact of the storm on the plants and animals that share those dynamic environments.

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Lead image: Simon Tonge / Wikimedia

Bob Grant

Posted on October 29, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How This Haunting Hurricane Illusion Forms

Powerful storms like Hurricane Melissa foment an odd phenomenon called the “stadium effect” at their centers

By Molly Glick    October 28, 2025

This thick wall of clouds, which resembles the stands in a sprawling sports stadium towering above the viewer, formed at the center of Hurricane Melissa. Yesterday, the “Hurricane Hunters” crew from the United States Air Force flew into Melissa’s eye and snapped this shot—an illustrative example of the “stadium effect.” This phenomenon owes to quickly rising air flowing outward, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), which broadens the eye’s diameter near the top.

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This sight is unique to “very strong, well-organized” hurricanes, AccuWeather reported. The stadium effect was also captured within the centers of Hurricane Katrina and Hurricane Irma, among other powerful storms in recent decades. Hurricane Melissa, which as of the time of this writing is nearing landfall in Jamaica, has become one of the strongest Atlantic hurricanes on record and the most powerful storm yet this year. The Category 5 hurricane is powered by sustained winds of 185 miles per hour—Jamaica has never experienced a hurricane of this intensity.

The “Hurricane Hunters” crew flew through Hurricane Melissa and witnessed the “stadium effect” on Oct. 27, 2025. Credit: U.S. Air Force video by Lt. Col. Mark Withee.

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NOAA’s “Kermit” plane was also slated to travel into Hurricane Melissa’s eye yesterday. But after the crew flew into “severe turbulence” amid wind speeds of 165 miles per hour in the storm’s northeastern eyewall, the mission was abandoned. “Turbulence is common on such flights, but this event was among the worst any had encountered,” wrote Judson Jones, a meteorologist and reporter, for The New York Times.

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Lead image: U.S. Air Force photo by Lt. Col. Mark Withee

Molly Glick

Posted on October 28, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How “Plant Math” Can Help Predict the Climate’s Future

Researchers are building equations for vegetation processes that might improve climate models

By Ula Chrobak    October 27, 2025

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The earliest climate models of the 1960s and ’70s had a bare land surface with no plants. In these models, rain would fall into mathematical “buckets,” then evaporate back into the air, to simulate the water cycle.

Since then, climate models have come a long way in representing forests, grasslands, and other biomes and how they influence the Earth’s water and carbon cycles. But you still might call them a little low-fi. The global climate models of today tend to have only about 10 “functional types” of plants, which approximate how different ecosystems move heat, water, and nutrients—including carbon.

And these plant simulations don’t exactly replicate how responsive flora are to shifts in their environment. That’s because when these models were built, they assumed a stable climate. Now that plants are adapting their photosynthesis to warmer temperatures and increased carbon dioxide, they need new math to represent them in climate models. So one team of researchers created the LEMONTREE project, which is building equations that describe “plant math”: how vegetation optimizes its functions, given a set of climatic variables. (LEMONTREE is short for Land Ecosystem Models based On New Theory, obseRvations, and ExperimEnts.)

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Will plant life on Earth thrive with some extra CO_2?

The team consists of researchers from around the globe with support from Schmidt Sciences Virtual Earth System Research Institute (VESRI). Their expertise also roams widely, from plant ecology to math to remote sensing. “The idea is that we can simplify the models that we use to predict how plants react to climate and how they’re going to react in the future, and also how they will then influence the climate,” says the project’s lead researcher Sandy Harrison, a professor of paleoclimates and biogeochemical cycles at the University of Reading in England.

Even as global climate models have grown more complex and powerful, plant processes are still their weak spot, says Harrison. For instance, in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s reports on climate change, one major area of uncertainty is how vegetation will respond to warmer temperatures and increased carbon dioxide. In some model outputs, plants continue absorbing carbon for many decades into the future, in turn somewhat buffering human emissions. In other models, plants wither in warmer weather, even becoming a net source of CO_2 by 2050.

While physicists have built equations that elegantly describe the atmosphere, ocean, and physical landforms, terrestrial life and especially plants present a unique challenge. Unlike physical forces, plants adapt and evolve. Species adjust their growing strategy to make smart use of water, sunlight, and nutrients. That’s why the amount of carbon that plants take up every year varies—while, on average, it’s about a third of all the CO_2 emitted, there are stark differences year-to-year as plants respond to the environment.

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However, climate models typically include rigid parameters for plant functions. For example, they might prescribe that a pine tree always photosynthesizes most efficiently at 77 degrees Fahrenheit. But these values miss how much plants can flex their functions. “They don’t change during the seasonal cycle or droughts,” says Harrison of hypothetical plants in climate models. “That means that the plants are less responsive to these climatic events than they ought to be.”

SPEAKING IN PLANT: Better understanding the nuances of how plants change their inputs and outputs in response to changes in their environment is helping researchers like Colin Prentice, a LEMONTREE lead researcher and a professor at Imperial College London, better calculate their impact in climate models. Credit: Prentice Lab.

For example, a study last year found that many current climate models underestimate how sensitive plants are to drought. Researchers used satellite data to study how canopies responded during dry periods, and compared this response to existing climate models. The researchers found that vegetation reduced photosynthesis during droughts more strongly than the models predicted.

Small miscalculations like this can add up, leading to misrepresentations of carbon uptake, water evaporation, and more. “Oftentimes, these models were developed using data when maybe it was beautiful and sunny out,” says lead author Julia Green, an environmental science professor at the University of Arizona, who is not currently part of the LEMONTREE team but has previously had research funded by the project. “During extreme conditions, they end up not performing so well.”

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The LEMONTREE team wants to solve this problem by rebuilding plant models from the ground up. In particular, they are guided by a theory called “eco-evolutionary optimality.”

“It’s the idea that through evolution, through ecological processes, plants grow where they’re best adapted to grow,” said Harrison. To create new models based on this theory, “we simply have to look for the trade-offs that a plant is making.”

Photosynthesis is one area where plants make these trade-offs. Plants must open their stomata to pull in carbon dioxide to make sugar, but leaving those leaf pores open too long in dry weather can wilt vegetation. If plants risk it and leave their stomata open too long, they will dry out and die. But overly conservative vegetation will be out-competed by plants that take in more carbon and grow faster. Over time, the organisms that find the perfect balance will win out.

For now, plants are slightly increasing their ability to capture carbon.

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With this balance in mind, the researchers developed an equation that conveys the trade off between stomatal conductance and photosynthesis. They drafted this equation using remote-sensing data that reported canopy greenness. Then, they tested the equation using CO_2 measurements taken at field sites. Through comparisons with field site data, they could test whether the model could correctly predict photosynthetic capacity.

After some adjustments based on comparisons with the observations, the researchers say this single equation for photosynthesis does the work of several more complicated equations in land surface models. “We end up with a model that we can show is substantially more accurate than conventional models, and yet it’s a great deal simpler,” says Colin Prentice, a LEMONTREE lead researcher and a professor at Imperial College London.

The team is also working on other plant-related math equations, such as ones that determine leaf area and the rate of plant respiration across different environments. Instead of relying on pre-defined plant parameters, the equations work out the best “plant math” for a given location, showing how plants are optimizing their growing strategies based on climate. This allows climate modelers to have more flexible—and therefore hopefully more accurate—projections, says Pier Luigi Vidale, a climate scientist with the University of Reading who is on the LEMONTREE team. “We would like to do away with all these parameters that describe what vegetation does, and try to compute those things dynamically.”

An improved mathematical representation of plants in climate models can help answer long-standing questions for ecologists. Importantly: Will plant life on Earth thrive with some extra CO_2, or will drier conditions cause vegetation to desiccate? With more CO_2 in the air, plants can produce the same amount of food while keeping their stomata open for a shorter period, an effect known as CO_2 fertilization. But this benefit extends only as far as plants can have enough moisture and nutrients. With improved vegetation models, “we’re able to look at what’s going to happen when we have both warming and increasing CO_2,” says Harrison.

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RE-CYCLING: Old climate models struggled to capture the complexity of plants’ dynamic roles in water and carbon cycles of the planet. A new generation of modeling is working to recalibrate based on real data and better math. Credit: linojocaru / Shutterstock.

She says that the new models suggest the effect of recent increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide is fertilization—global vegetation as a whole is greening, which means that, for now, plants are slightly increasing their ability to capture carbon (though not nearly enough to offset ever-increasing human emissions).

But extreme conditions can shift this balance, something LEMONTREE researchers hope their models will better predict. If a drought leads plants to shut their stomata, then they won’t release as much water into the atmosphere, which reduces the moisture going to clouds and rainfall, which in turn could lead to even drier conditions. To predict dramatic feedback effects like this, researchers need to capture the relationship between moisture levels and water conductance in plants. “If we manage to be able to predict the vegetation properly, then we’re going to get better predictions of what the climate might look like,” said Harrison.

Once the equations are finalized, the next step will be seeing how they hold up in larger climate models. Researchers can then see how the outputs perform compared to previous models of terrestrial ecosystems. After the LEMONTREE project wraps up in June 2027, scientists with CONCERTO (which stands for (improved CarbOn cycle represeNtation through multi-sCale models and Earth obseRvation for Terrestrial ecOsystems), a climate modeling effort funded by the European Union, will collaborate with the team on the next steps toward seeing how the atmosphere and land surface interact in simulations that include the new plant math.

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“It’s a very helpful way of structuring your model,” says Anna Harper, a professor of geography and atmospheric sciences at the University of Georgia, of the team’s eco-evolutionary optimality approach. Especially since models are still relatively uncertain about terrestrial processes, any improvements are welcome, adds Harper, who is not involved in the LEMONTREE project. “There’s a lot of excitement around anything that can help us better represent the carbon cycle.”

That said, rebooting models with a new set of equations for plants is not straightforward. Today’s climate models are the result of years and years of tuning, where scientists adjust variables when the model output doesn’t line up with observational data. After tuning, the simulations might get the right answer—but for the wrong reasons. So even if the new plant math is more accurate, it might throw off other calculations in the model. “It will just take time, because even if people agree that improvements have been made, you still have to check that it’s not going to have unintended consequences,” says Harper.

While the changes may be messy, the team thinks it will be worth it in the long run. The climate models developed decades ago and are in need of a refresh, says Vidale. “We still really need to develop models and to take big risks, like we’re doing here,” he says. “In the end, even if it’s a huge failure, it was still worth doing it. But the indication so far is that it’s working.”

Lead image: George Trumpeter / Shutterstock

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Ula Chrobak

Posted on October 27, 2025

Ula Chrobak is a freelance science writer based in Nevada. You can read more of her work at ulachrobak.com.

Evolution

- We Might Not Be So Strange

- Evolution Is Written in Our Joints

EVOLUTION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

We Might Not Be So Strange

Perhaps intelligent life wasn’t so unlikely after all

By Philip Ball    October 24, 2025

Timing may, ultimately, be everything.

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It seems a rather odd coincidence that in the 4.6 billion years since Earth formed, humans have emerged now. For us to be here, first life itself had to get started, of course, and then develop more complexity. Then enough oxygen had to accumulate in the atmosphere. And habitability had to continue for a further 2 billion years or so while complex animals evolved. But here we are, now, thinking about such things, on a world that seems uniquely hospitable to us.

Good thing it didn’t take too much longer, however—for in around 5 billion years’ time, the sun will start to run out of fuel and will swell and fry the Earth, before shrinking to a much-cooler white dwarf. It’s hard to imagine any kind of life surviving that.

The odds of all of these things lining up to allow intelligent life to evolve on the same kind of timescale as the life of our planet—neither much sooner nor much later—seemed vanishingly small in the late 20th century to theoretical physicist Brandon Carter.

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Scientists had been bandying about the question of whether complex life exists elsewhere since even before it was famously posed by the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi in the 1950s (“Where is everybody?”). But at a Royal Society meeting in London in 1983, Carter, who had studied alongside Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, presented a new way to think about that problem in a talk on “The anthropic principle and its implications for biological evolution.”

The presentation, to luminaries that included Hawking himself and Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, came at the end of a long day and, as cosmologist Paul Davies, now at Arizona State University, remembers it, was not the most engaging of talks. Carter “overran by many minutes,” he recalls. “His overhead slides were incomprehensible. I remember thinking ‘Whatever is this all about?’ ”

But what ultimately sunk in was that Carter was offering an argument for why beings as cognitively complex as us are likely to be very rare indeed in the cosmos. Even if we are not truly alone, he implied, the chances of other intelligent life forms are so low that we might as well be. “The essence of Carter’s coincidence is that humans evolved on a timescale approaching Earth’s total habitable lifespan—we have evolved close in time to the ultimate extinction of all life on Earth,” says geomicrobiologist Daniel Mills of the Ludwig Maximilian University in Munich.

Why didn’t we appear on Earth much sooner?

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So what? Well, the apparent coincidence has three possible explanations. One is that the two phenomena really do have inherently similar timescales. But there seems to be no logical reason why they should, because they have nothing to do with one another: One timescale is determined by stellar physics, the other by biological evolution. A second is that the evolution of intelligent life is typically much faster than it was on Earth, but for some reason it took an unusually long time here. But, again, there’s no obvious reason why that should be so.

The third possibility is that the appearance of human-like intelligence on a habitable planet is usually slow compared to stellar lifetimes, and so on most planets it never gets the chance to happen. We just got lucky.

Lucky how? Carter argued that, in order to reach human-like intelligence, life here had to clear several hurdles that involve rare, chance events: a gauntlet of “hard steps” along the way. These hard steps are “evolutionary singularities,” leaps that occurred perhaps only once. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be hard. (The evolution of the eye, for instance, can’t be one, as it is thought to have occurred many times independently in various species.)

Carter proposed two candidate hard steps. First, the origin of the genetic code (by means of which DNA sequences can encode proteins). Second, what he called “the final breakthrough in cerebral development,” meaning the appearance of human-level cognitive capabilities, such as language. Other researchers have since suggested other hard steps, including the origin of life itself (abiogenesis), oxygen-generating photosynthesis, the appearance of eukaryotes, and animal multicellularity.

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Carter’s “hard steps” picture remains a pervasive and influential framework for thinking about intelligent life beyond Earth. Earlier this year, though, a team of scientists challenged his argument for why the evolution of intelligent life is cosmically unlikely.

Mills and colleagues took these last four steps, as well as complex cognition, as the best “hard steps” candidates—and considered how unlikely each of them really are. Their conclusion: Perhaps none of them are. “We are raising the possibility that hard steps do not exist at all,” Mills says.

Maybe, they say, the emergence of beings like us is then not hindered by hard steps but is simply slow. Perhaps the universe is teeming with alien civilizations—or will be before very much longer. Whether you find that reassuring or unsettling might depend on which sci-fi movies you’ve watched, but the new work is making some think again about the course of evolution on our planet.

One problem in determining the likelihood of a given evolutionary step is that, of course, we only have one example to study: the trajectory of life on Earth. And even here we have a very incomplete record of all things that ever lived: Evolution has a high rate of information loss over geological time.

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For example, a transition such as the appearance of photosynthetic, oxygen-making bacteria might not have been truly unique but only looks that way now because only the ancestors of one of several such events have survived or left any traces. Alternatively, two such events might have happened independently in closely related lineages that subsequently became genetically indistinguishable enough that they look now like a single event.

Mills and colleagues say that the first such scenario—multiple occurrences of which only one left a trace—might have happened for the appearance of eukaryotes (cells with a nucleus, distinct from bacteria). Some fossil records of single-celled organisms from the Proterozoic era 2.5 billion to 0.54 billion years ago (during which eukaryotes are thought to have arisen) look kind of eukaryotic but can’t be definitely ascribed to the lineage of today’s eukaryotes. They might in fact be the traces of entirely independent eukaryote-like fusions of simpler cells—in which case, far from being rare, such events could have happened several times.

What’s more, just because we now see only one instance of a key evolutionary transition doesn’t mean it was an unlikely event. Evolutionary biologists have long also recognized a winner-takes-all aspect in evolution: The first lineage to make a particular innovation may lay such tenacious claim to the evolutionary niche it opens up that other lineages never get a chance to compete. Mills explains: “The first evolutionary lineage to successfully complete the transition in question is the one that ultimately endures.”

Life began almost as soon as the environment became conducive.

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Take phototrophic bacteria. These convert light energy into chemical energy, the first step toward oxygen-producing photosynthesis. There are two groups of phototrophic microbes today, which use different light-absorbing molecules and two different gambits for making the process efficient. Between them, these two groups might have basically cornered the market, leaving no options for other potential phototrophs to seize. It’s possible that human-like cognition involved such a priority effect, too.

In such ways, evolution pulls the ladder up behind it: By its very occurrence, rather than by its inherent improbability, a major transition limits what can come after it. Most organisms today had better be able to cope with an oxygen-rich atmosphere, for instance. Once a step is taken, there’s no going back—and so it looks as though the step is intrinsically unique and unlikely, merely because it happened at all.

Mills and colleagues say these two illusions might apply to all the candidate hard steps.

“I think the case is far from proven either way,” says Davies, “but I do like how Mills and colleagues discuss the ways that apparently singular evolutionary events may appear intrinsically improbable, even though they are not.”

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If Mills and colleagues are right that there are indeed no truly hard steps to intelligent life, then why didn’t we appear on Earth much sooner? Why have we only arrived about halfway before the inevitable end of our planet’s habitability?

The researchers say this need be no mystery. “It is not hard at all for deep-time paleontologists, geochemists, and Earth system modelers to think of reasons why our arrival could have been so ‘greatly delayed,’ ” they write. While it’s tempting to think of the key evolutionary steps as being all about biology, in fact they could only happen when the environment itself was permissive. It’s not that the crucial steps were hard in themselves but that they had to wait until the time was right.

The final three candidate hard steps, at least here on Earth, required an oxygen-rich atmosphere. But of course life doesn’t simply adapt to a pre-existing environment. Rather, life and environment coevolve. We are adapted to breathe oxygen not because the Earth’s atmosphere was inherently oxygen-rich but because earlier living organisms made it that way. This coevolution of the biosphere and its environment was advocated in the Gaia theory of British scientist and inventor James Lovelock. “Lovelock’s fundamental insight,” says marine and atmospheric scientist Andrew Watson of the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, who was not involved in the work, “is that Earth history is a co-production between the environment of the Earth’s surface and the life developing on it.”

Obviously humans need oxygen—but in fact we need it at a concentration that, according to the geological record, wasn’t established stably until about 400 million years ago, in an episode known as the Paleozoic Oxygenation Event. In other words, says Mills, “for over 90 percent of Earth’s existence, oxygen levels in the atmosphere were likely too low to support long-term human settlement.” And once the atmospheric conditions were right, it only took hundreds of millions of years for humans to appear, not billions. “So, relative to the onset of the permissive conditions, the origin of humans was relatively quick,” says Mills.

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The other two most recent candidate hard steps on Earth—animal multicellularity and the appearance of eukaryotes—also demand a fair amount of oxygen, because they force cells to burn up a lot of energy. It’s not easy to figure out exactly what the threshold oxygen concentration was for multicellular life here. But it seems likely to have been higher than the level that existed before the so-called Great Oxygenation Event (GOE) of around 2.4 billion years ago, when oxygen went from being a mere trace gas in the atmosphere to comprising about 1 percent of it (likely thanks to a combination of photosynthetic microbes and a shift in the way oxygen reacted with the planet’s surface environment).

Perhaps the emergence of life was neither hard nor improbable after all.

So for at least half of Earth’s history, the three final putatively “hard” steps were out of the question anyway, simply because the environment wasn’t right. “I agree that the basic hard-steps model doesn’t take into account the delays that might be inherent in the evolution of the Earth system,” says Watson. He has previously pointed out that eukaryotes seem to have appeared rather soon after the GOE, suggesting that the event responsible for them wasn’t so inherently unlikely once there was enough oxygen around.

What about the earliest two candidate hard steps? Little is known for sure about the origin of life, but one thing seems clear: It likely couldn’t have happened during most of the Hadean era, the period up to around 4 billion years ago. For much of that time, the Earth was still seething with volcanism from the fury of its formation, and was strafed by giant meteorites, the debris left over from the formation of the solar system. For most of this time, the planet would have been too hot to host substantial bodies of water on its surface.

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Some think that the Earth would have been inhospitable until about 3.9-3.7 billion years ago, the age of the earliest fossil evidence for primitive life. But recent work to reconstruct the last common ancestor of all life on Earth today, based on comparisons of their genomes, has suggested this ancestor might have been as old as 4.2 to 4 billion years. That would imply that life began almost as soon as (if not indeed apparently before!) the environment became conducive. Perhaps the emergence of life was neither hard nor improbable after all.

As for the origin of photosynthetic bacteria: Today’s cyanobacteria can’t survive in water warmer than about 163 degrees Fahrenheit, and it might have taken a long time for the Hadean seas to cool to something close to that temperature.

All in all, then, Carter’s puzzle—why have we turned up so late in Earth’s history—needn’t imply a solution involving improbable bottleneck events that don’t happen on most Earth-like planets. Rather, you just can’t rush something like us. Our planet needed billions of years before it could become human-friendly. “Intelligent life could require much less time on other planets that are able to achieve permissive conditions more quickly,” says Mills.

Michael Wong, an astrobiologist at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Washington D.C., thinks that the researchers “don’t make a slam-dunk case” but that their analysis is “probably as good as one can do right now.”

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“I am quite sympathetic to this reasoning that we can only understand the timing of these key inflection points through the coevolution of our biosphere, geosphere, hydrosphere, and atmosphere,” Wong says. “Planets change, and the probability of the emergence of something [on them] is not uniform throughout a planet’s history.”

Admittedly, it does rather look at the moment as though we are a solitary outpost of intelligence floating in an inhospitable cosmos. Decades of searching for signs of intelligence far afield in our galaxy have consistently elicited nothing but what some scientists call the Great Silence.

Others might reply that this is a classic case where absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. The silence is hardly surprising given that we don’t really know what we should be searching for, we’ve been searching for barely a blink of cosmic time, and there’s a lot of space to cover. Maybe it’s just too early to conclude anything at all about the chances of intelligent life on other worlds from our quest so far to find it.

Carter appeared to give reason to think that the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is doomed from the outset. But the not-so-fast response of Mills and colleagues is, they say, a potentially testable idea. For one thing, they argue that we need to develop a better understanding of how the candidate hard-step evolutionary transitions actually happened, being open-minded about how unique they really were. This includes getting a better understanding of the environmental conditions, such as oxygen levels, temperature, ocean acidity and salinity, and so on, needed for these steps to be possible at all.

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You just can’t rush something like us.

But perhaps the most discerning test will be what we find in the atmospheres of planets orbiting other stars, some of which can now be studied by astronomical instruments such as the James Webb Space Telescope.

For example, if the development of oxygen-producing photosynthesis was truly a hard step, we’d be unlikely to find Earth-like exoplanets with significant amounts of oxygen in their atmospheres. Some astronomers say that we might even read the signature of intelligent life in alien atmospheres, for example if they contain relatively high concentrations of complex gases such as chlorofluorocarbons, for which no known natural source exists.

If Mills and colleagues are right, says Watson, “then when we are able to spectrally analyse exoplanet atmospheres, there is a good chance of detecting relatively modern Earth-like biosignatures.”

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That time might not be very far off. In early 2025, a team from the University of Cambridge in the U.K. claimed (controversially) that they had detected the fingerprint of a compound called dimethyl sulfide, made naturally on Earth only by living organisms such as marine plankton, in the atmosphere of a planet called K2-18b orbiting a star 120 light-years away. More certainty about such claims might have to await better instruments. “I look forward to the day we build and launch telescopes that can get us the answer,” says Wong.

While the researchers’ arguments pose a challenge for most of the putatively hard steps, the biggest unknown, Davies notes, is the first: the genesis of life itself. “We have no idea how non-life became life, how many steps were involved and what the prevailing conditions needed to be,” he says. “And you can’t estimate the odds of an unknown process. This is in contrast to all the subsequent putatively hard steps, because at least we know the process involved: Darwinian evolution. Nobody knows the process whereby non-life became life.”

For this and other reasons, Watson thinks that Carter’s notion of hard steps might still hold—even if the slow pace of environmental change puts the brakes on how soon intelligent life can arise. In a forthcoming paper, he presents a model in which such delays are incorporated into Carter’s earlier picture. “The hard-steps model remains a useful and viable framework for understanding the evolution of complexity in the Earth’s biosphere,” he says.

“If I’m right, we will find only Archean-like biosignatures [in exoplanet atmospheres],” says Watson. “Sometime this century, we should find out who is right.

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Lead image: Milosz_G / Shutterstock

Philip Ball

Posted on October 24, 2025

Philip Ball is a freelance writer based in London, and the author of many books on science and its interactions with the broader culture. His latest book is How Life Works.

EVOLUTION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Evolution Is Written in Our Joints

Why do humans have such stupid knees, ankles, and backs?

By Bob Grant    October 22, 2025

You can tell a lot about Homo sapiens from their joints. Mainly, you can tell that our species seems anatomically ill-adapted to our lifestyle.

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This very lifestyle, of standing and walking on two legs unlike some of our primate predecessors, may have been key to supercharging the survival and reproductive advantage of our ancestral species. But oh do our joints—the body parts that do the heavy lifting of supporting this jauntily upright strategy—pay the price.

Knees ache, ankles sprain, hips break, and don’t even get me started on backs. Each of us walks around in a body that has many more millions of years of mammalian non-uprightness etched into the evolution of joints that have changed marginally to support a relatively recent bipedal existence.

Our spines, originally designed to act as a rafter under which hangs a belly and chest full of organs, now act as columns to support the whole tippy enterprise of bipedalism. “By being bipedal, we’ve turned that spine vertical, a bad idea,” Dartmouth College paleoanthropologist Jeremy DeSilva once told Nautilus editor Kevin Berger. “And to make sure that the torso is oriented over the hips, and that all of our joints are aligned and balanced, there’s a curve that’s introduced into the spine.”

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See? Ill-adapted. Humans are one of the only mammals to develop scoliosis and other spine problems, and some 60 to 80 percent of adults across the globe have experienced low back pain during their lives.

DeSilva went on to bemoan the state of H. sapiens’ foot. “If you were going to challenge an engineer to design a structure that has to be compliant enough to absorb forces from the ground, but then rigid enough to push off the ground, and maybe even elastic enough that it can absorb some energy to push off the ground,” he told Berger, “the last thing they would do is make it out of 26 parts.”

Guess how many bones are in the human foot?

That illogical construction owes to the fact that we evolved from apes who made their livings in the trees. One needs all those foot bones to navigate a maze of branches and grip branches all day. Not so much for walking to the corner store. “By evolving bipedalism, natural selection can only work with pre-existing forms,” DeSilva added. “It tinkered with this ape foot. I think of it as using duct tape and paper clips to patch together and stiffen up this foot.”

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Recently, researchers working in the human evolution crucible of Africa shed some light on how ankle construction, in an ancestral hominin species called Ardipithecus ramidus, points to a model where our species derived directly from a species that was not unlike the African apes of today—that is, from primates that inhabit the trees. A study published this month in Communications Biology posits that the 4.4-million-year-old A. ramidus fossil ankle contains numerous similarities to the ankles of chimpanzees and gorillas that are around these days.

Since scientists believe that A. ramidus walked upright, the authors suggest that it could be a true transitional species between tree-living and bipedal primates. The findings essentially tweak earlier interpretations of human evolution, where living apes such as chimpanzees and gorillas were viewed as evolutionary dead ends, to suggest that the species that form the link between upright humans and forest apes may have been more of the latter.

Whatever the case, the reality we living H. sapiens must deal with is that our joints will eventually fail us, by injury or by age. As Bruce Latimer, director of the Center for Human Origins at Case Western Reserve University, once told Nautilus about knees, “You take the most complex joint in the body and put it between two huge levers—the femur and the tibia—and you’re looking for trouble.”

Sure. A ball-and-socket joint might function better than the hinge that is our knee, Latimer continued, but natural selection has simply not had the time nor the impetus to accommodate all the uniquely human physiological challenges—ultra marathon running, rugby, etc.—we subject them to. “We didn’t need it,” Latimer explained. “We didn’t know about football.”

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Lead image: Svetolk / Shutterstock

Bob Grant

Posted on October 22, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

Geoscience

- Pink Boulders Reveal a Hidden Antarctic Giant

- The Trees That Remember the Pyramids

- The Hidden Landscape Holding Back the Sea

GEOSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Pink Boulders Reveal a Hidden Antarctic Giant

Inside the massive, granite slab slumbering beneath the frozen continent

By Bob Grant    October 24, 2025

Unlikely pink granite boulders perched high atop looming volcanic mountains in West Antarctica have yielded their secrets after decades of baffling scientists. By taking precise gravity measurements using airplane-mounted instruments, a team led by researchers with the British Antarctic Survey have suggested that the boulders are mere crumbs of a huge slab of granite buried beneath the massive Pine Island Glacier.

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The slowly flowing glacier, the scientists posit, has been grinding across a deep bed of granite, which is more than 60 miles wide and nearly 4.5 miles thick, for millennia. During this journey, the glacier has been scratching up boulders and depositing them high in the Hudson Mountains, most likely back when the ice sheet was much thicker than it is presently. The researchers dated the boulders by measuring the radioactive decay of elements locked within and found that the rocks formed about 175 million years ago, 75 million years earlier than most of the surrounding rock. The researchers published their findings in Communications Earth & Environment this week.

“It’s remarkable that pink granite boulders spotted on the surface have led us to a hidden giant beneath the ice,” Tom Jordan, a BAS geophysicist and lead author of the paper, said in a statement. “By combining geological dating with gravity surveys, we’ve not only solved a mystery about where these rocks came from, but also uncovered new information about how the ice sheet flowed in the past and how it might change in the future.”

That future bit is important. The region of West Antarctica where Pine Island Glacier site has experienced some of the fastest ice loss in the frozen continent over the past few decades, as climate change has accelerated. And knowing what lies beneath such dynamic ice fields can help predict the fate of such features and how their demise might trigger environmental change across the globe.

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“We have been able to piece together how [the pink boulders] got to where they are today, giving us clues about how the West Antarctic Ice Sheet may change in future,” Joanne Johnson, a BAS geologist and coauthor of the paper said. “[This is] information that is vital for determining the impact of sea level rise on coastal populations around the world.”

Who’d have thought that strange pink boulders in an unlikely place held such big secrets?

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Lead image: Jo Johnson, BAS

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Bob Grant

Posted on October 24, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

GEOSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Trees That Remember the Pyramids

Dendrochronologist Valerie Trouet on what tree rings reveal about climate, fire, and human history

By Elena Kazamia    October 21, 2025    Illustrations by Blaze Cyan

Some trees alive today were young saplings when the Egyptian pyramids were still works in progress. Individual Great Basin Bristlecone Pine scattered thinly across the rocky slopes of Nevada, and Lañilawal—an Alerce Cypress growing in Chile—a tree so grand, it has earned its own mononym. Many others are younger, but ancient still, having erupted out of the ground at the same time as humanity stepped into the Common Era, some 2,000 years ago. Qilian juniper growing along the silk road in China,* Bosnian pine clinging to the marble hills of Mount Olympus, residence of the ancient Greek gods.

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The bodies of these trees carry a record, imprinted in their tree rings, of lives lived in one single spot, under changing weather and climate, through adversity and prosperity, fire and snowstorm, and contact with humans.

Once you know where to look, you can learn to spot these ancients in the landscape. Often, they will have a twisted sturdy bark, a thick trunk and heavy branches, and a deadened, crooked top. That’s because, once they reach a certain age, trees only grow in girth, no longer in height, and the crown begins to die off as it becomes more difficult to deliver nutrients to these most distant branches. And yet many of these trees will continue to live long into our uncertain climate future.

Renowned dendrochronologist Valerie Trouet recently put together a collection of essays written by the scientists who study these greats, called In The Circle of Ancient Trees. Each essay is dedicated to one of 10 species of tree from far-flung geographic locations, and what their tree rings can tell us about the past and future of the Earth. Nautilus talked with Trouet ahead of the publication about what tree rings can tell us about archaeology, Renaissance furniture, climate change, and William Blake.

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TREE TALK: Dendrochronologist Valerie Trouet talked with Nautilus ahead of the publication of her new book In The Circle of Ancient Trees about what tree rings can tell us about our past and our future on Earth. Photo by Bob Bronshoff.

What is dendrochronology?

Dendrochronology comes from the Greek words dendron and chronos, so tree and time. And that’s what we do as dendrochronologists. We read time through the rings in trees, we read history through trees. But it’s not just the number of rings that gives us information, it’s also the width of the rings, the density of the wood, all kinds of characteristics that tell us what happened during the lifespan of those trees. This is climate information, but also information about how we as human beings interacted with the trees, and about fires.

Wildfires, when they don’t kill the tree, they leave scars. And through tree ring research, we can date the exact years and sometimes even the season when those trees were scarred. And so we can build a whole history of when the big fire years happened, what caused those fire years.

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There is a lot of value then, for climate change research in particular.

Worldwide, reliable measurements of even the basic weather, like temperature and rainfall, go back to around 1900. So we only have a-hundred-and-something years of data, which is not bad. But at the same time that we started measuring these climate variables, we started messing with our climate. Around 1850, with the Industrial Revolution, is when we started on a grand scale burning fossil fuels, which has been influencing the entire period over which we’ve been measuring climate.

So if we want to get an idea of how natural climate change functions, how the climate system works under natural conditions, we need to go further back in time than our actual measurements. We need to find other ways of looking at climate. Tree rings are a very good way of doing that.

Image by Blaze Cyan.

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How does dendrochronology fit with other climate science, including a geological perspective on climate?

I think it’s a very good question because I think that’s what makes tree rings so valuable as a method. Where we’re using tree rings to look at the climate of the past we’re looking by and large at the past 2,000 years. We can go further back but it’s rare. And so relatively speaking to many geoscientists who look at millions of years, hundreds of thousands of years, that’s a very short period. But it is a very important period because it’s a period over which we also know the most about human history. So we can really look at the relationship between climate history and human history, if there’s a relationship, and how that relationship works. That’s one.

And two, these are timescales that matter to humanity and our individual lives, but also these are the timescales that we can impact with our current policies. Who knows what our climate will look like a million years from now? I mean, will we even be still around? But what our climate will look like 1,000 years from now, we can determine. The CO_2 we put out into the atmosphere today will still be in the atmosphere 1,000 years from now. So these are the timescales also for policy that are really relevant.

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Wildfires, when they don’t kill the tree, they leave scars.

Is a pattern emerging?

Well, it’s similar to what we know from instrumental data [direct measurement of Earth’s climate from instruments such as thermometers and satellites]. For temperature, it is pretty straightforward. Temperature-wise, we’re in unprecedented terrain currently, where it’s warming up and it hasn’t been this warm in the past 2,000 years. That picture is very clear. But really the goal is to add information to what we know from the instrumental period [which only came into full swing in the 1980s, when satellite coverage covered the whole globe], rather than to say, yeah, it’s all right, or it’s all wrong. It’s adding a level of nuance and of detail to what we know.

I was surprised to learn that a lot of the authors have a background in archaeology. They love trees, but they come to the field because they have an interest in the past. They use tree rings to date Ancestral Pueblan ruins in the American Southwest, or Maori cultural treasures, even Renaissance works of art and furniture made of pedunculate oak.

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A lot of people come through this field of science from an archaeological background because it’s not just about trees, it’s also about wood. The information that the trees store in their rings remains even when the trees die. When they’re being cut, when they’re transformed into wooden buildings or wooden beams or even charcoal, we can still use that wood and the rings in that wood to extract information. That allows us to date that archaeological material to the exact year.

Image by Blaze Cyan.

Is there a shared property that makes certain trees grow incredibly old? What is their secret?

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There are rules and then there are exceptions to the rules. Typically, you will find very old trees in remote places where people over thousands of years have not had easy access to wood. Very often at high elevation and in dry environments, which makes the trees grow very slowly. The paradigm, “live fast and you die young, or you live slow,” it’s the same for trees.

Remote areas that are austere are also a lot harder on organisms that can typically attack trees. So, you have fewer insects, you have fewer grasses and shrubs that can fuel wildfires. But, as I mentioned, there are exceptions.

One of the chapters in the book is about a bald cypress that grows in the southeast of the United States. They can be up to 2,800 years old—so very old. But they literally grow with their feet in the water. They live in marshes, so they’re very unexpected. It’s not the kind of environment where you would expect to find these very old trees.

The book is really at its core about the connections between trees and people. The people telling the stories are the people who are most connected to the trees. It reminded me of some writing by William Blake. In a letter to a friend he wrote “the tree which moves some to tears of joy is in the eyes of others only a green thing that stands in the way.” What else can we do to get people more connected to nature?

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That’s a very good question. On the one hand, there is a growing movement and a growing awe. If you look at how many books have been published about trees in recent years—very good books, very beautiful books, fiction and non-fiction— you know, we’ve come a long way. Some 100 or 150 years back, much of North America was deforested without even thinking about it. So we’ve come a long way.

I think what this book—and the dendrochronological community—can add, and what maybe people don’t think about enough, is the time component. You know, some of these trees are 3-, 4-, 5,000 years old. They were around when we were building pyramids, right? And they’re still around. They’re still alive. They transcend our individual lives and they will still be around, many of them, a thousand years from now. So they are witnesses not just to our past but of the future. And they don’t lie.

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Blaze Cyan is an artist working within the mediums of drawing, etching, woodcut, and wood engraving. Blaze is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Painter-Printmakers, a member of the Society of Wood Engravers, and also the Arborealists. She lives in London.

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*As originally published, this article mistaken identified the trees along the silk road as pedunculate oak. This has been corrected.

Elena Kazamia

Posted on October 21, 2025

Elena Kazamia is a science writer from Greece. She has a master’s degree in conservation from University College London and a Ph.D. in plant sciences from the University of Cambridge in the U.K.

GEOSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Hidden Landscape Holding Back the Sea

The fate of our planet’s coasts rests on Antarctic bedrock

By Evan Howell    October 21, 2025

The ice is melting. The seas, we know, will rise—slowly at first, and then suddenly. Locked within the West Antarctic Ice Sheet alone is enough ice to raise global seas some 16 feet. And some areas, particularly the East Coast of the United States, are set to see far more water than others. But the barrier between the present and the future does not lie at the surface, where sun meets ice. The boundary lies in the cold, hard rumpled Earth below. It is this landscape that determines where ice flows, where seawater can infiltrate, and, ultimately, when sea level rise will go from modest to almost unfathomable.

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Once upon a time, what lurked under Antarctica’s vast ice was unknown and, for all anyone could tell, unknowable. “We didn’t even know if it was a single continent,” says Martin Siegert, a University of Exeter glaciologist. Painting an intimate portrait of Antarctica’s buried landscapes has been difficult, tucked as they are beneath up to nearly three miles of ice, in a harsh and unforgiving environment.

Ice, at large scales, behaves in strange ways.

The first hints came from scattered rock outcrops and early drill cores. A handful of mid-20th-century geophysical surveys followed, and later radar began to sketch the shape of the land below.

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As the picture sharpened over the decades, it revealed a hidden landscape of mountains, ridges, and canyons. And now, using massive troves of radar data and the fundamental laws of physics to divine what’s under the ice, Antarctica is known to have geologic complexity as rich as any other continent on Earth.

But perhaps more than any other continent, its profiles foretell the contours of our own trajectory. Newly detailed maps reveal key vulnerabilities and chokepoints that protect the West Antarctic Ice Sheet’s underbelly. Thanks to a few critical bumps and ridges, the edge of the ice sheet hasn’t yet slipped deeper into the basin, where the bed slopes inland and retreat could run away. But when it does, the world’s seas will rise swiftly.

In 1912, British explorer Robert Falcon Scott and his expedition, in a wretched retreat from the South Pole, perished on West Antarctica’s Ross Ice Shelf along with 35 pounds of fossil-bearing rocks—a remarkable dedication to science, or perhaps the kind of dogged determination that gets you into such fatal predicaments in the first place.

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Previous expeditions had gathered fossil plants from Antarctica (and survived), but Scott’s team helped reveal traces of a broken-up supercontinent. Fossilized leaves from Permian swampy woodlands, or Glossopteris flora, matched specimens from surrounding continents. Aligned like jigsaw puzzle pieces, they revealed a broad swath of ancient forests—evidence of drifting continents, and decades later, the theory of plate tectonics. This was Gondwana, and its slow demise shaped Antarctica’s landscape and the ice it now holds.

Antarctica’s bedrock dates back more than 3 billion years, and its landmass has been incorporated into at least three supercontinents. Gondwana fragmented in the Jurassic 180 million years ago, with some rifting continuing to this day. Mountains rose as plates converged, and basins opened as they unzipped, at times forming shallow and warm carbonate seas. For impossibly long periods, the land simply eroded. Later, volcanoes spewed from a thin and rifted crust, not unlike North America’s Nevada looked some 17 million years ago.

FIRST LOOKS: The first hand-drawn, continent-wide Antarctic bedrock maps by the Glaciological and Geophysical Folio, released in 1983. These maps were the first attempt to reveal the shape of the bedrock below the ice, but they could not be directly fed into computer models. Credit: Glaciological and Geophysical Folio (1983).

Starting about 34 million years ago, ice spread slowly as the continent split from South America and drifted into polar latitudes. By 10 million years ago, spreading ice from eastern highlands filled West Antarctica’s rifted Gondwana basins, bowing down the land and creating unfathomable bedrock chasms—some reaching 8,200 feet below sea level.

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East Antarctica, which lies primarily in the Eastern Hemisphere, is the stoic one—a mostly stable craton of primordial rock, resting high above the fray. Vast plateaus and the ice-obscured Gamburtsev Mountains mark its massive territory (which also includes the South Pole). Its ice sits perched above the sea and is relatively stable for now (the Wilkes Basin, lying below sea level, is one notable exception).

West Antarctica is another story. Separated from the eastern side of the continent by the Transantarctic Mountains, its crust is battered, rifted, and intruded with magma. Penn State glaciologist Richard Alley compares West Antarctica’s bedrock to the western U.S.’s Great Basin. Take a map of West Antarctica’s bedrock and rotate it roughly 180 degrees (and squint): The features—lineaments, mountains, volcanoes, canyons, and swales—coarsely align. The geologic history is similar, too. Nunataks of the Transantarctic Mountains poke from the ice like a geologic cousin to California’s Sierra Nevada, which tower over Nevada’s tectonically stretched country. On the opposite flank, near Antarctica’s western coast, is a rough and “ratty” range—akin to Utah’s Wasatch Range.

West Antarctica’s “marine grounded” ice reflects this restless foundation. Unlike its eastern counterpart, it rests in a deep bowl carved during Gondwana’s breakup, lying below sea level. It is the ratty range that is currently holding back the sea.

And this matters enormously. As warm ocean water reaches beneath floating ice shelves that fringe the continent, those shelves thin and weaken. This pushes the grounding line—the place where ice begins to float—inland into deeper basins, exposing more ice to the sea and triggering a runaway process of melting. If that happens, “The ice sheet collapses,” says glaciologist Frank Pattyn of the Free University of Brussels. “Every model shows that. It’s not rocket science.”

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Ice, at large scales, behaves in strange ways, sometimes like a rock and other times more like a fluid, curving and bending over physical features.

Alley explains that, as snow accumulates year after year, it compacts into ice, eventually forming vast ice sheets that spread under their own immense weight. These ice sheets slowly ooze outward, cracking and bending as they flow around topographical features in long, finger-like glaciers that reach out toward the sea. From these glaciers extend colossal floating ice shelves, which also help anchor the glaciers behind them by lodging against rocky outcrops. On smooth surfaces, glaciers flow relatively unencumbered, like ladled pancake batter on a griddle. But on ribbed surfaces or tight valleys, it’s more like a waffle iron, pushing ice through narrow channels.

All is well so long as interior snowfall keeps pace with ice loss along the seaside edges. But in West Antarctica, the waters are winning.

Warm ocean waters once stayed away, but those days are gone. The now-warmer sea circulates beneath those floating ice shelves, thinning them from below. And along key West Antarctic glaciers, only a few minor ridges act like natural seawalls or anchors, separating the ocean from the continent’s thick grounded ice. “If it gets there, we’re going to see a lot of sea level rise pretty fast,” says Alley.

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“We have a few places with spectacular, wonderfully fantastic data. But we also have big gaps.”

Imagine the fate of Miami’s famed beaches resting on Antarctica’s bedrock—its rock type, density, shape, and dip. How slippery or lubricated is the rock surface? What about the meltwater drainage system—rivers, streams, lakes—that flow in this cold, cavernous world? (“If you take a piece of ice and put it on a table, it’s not going to move. You put a little water on it, it’s going to slide,” says Robin Bell, a geophysicist at Columbia University.)

Now consider the bewildering complexity of rock, ice, and water—each with its variable and heterogeneous properties. Scientific modelers trying to understand the planet’s future must take all of that and boil it down into something clean enough to feed into mathematical equations and computer code. As statistician George Box wrote in 1987, “All models are wrong. Some models are useful.” And useful ice sheet models need reliable bedrock maps.

Until the mid 20th century, scientists had only sparse outcrops and vague hunches upon which to hypothesize about Antarctica’s bedrock. Scattered seismic lines, processed sound waves through the Earth, revealed two-dimensional grainy glimpses of the land below, but these surveys were few, far between, and required drilling through more than 160 feet of soft surface snow. Radar—or specifically, radio-echo sounding—blew it wide open. Deployed in the late 1960s, this technique didn’t require drilling and could collect data on moving platforms. With sensors soon mounted on U.S. Navy long-range Hercules C-130 transport planes, data came rolling in.

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The leap forward was staggering, says Siegert: a five-fold increase in data acquisition. Yet, scientists still had only a “patchwork quilt” of ad hoc surveys, conducted at different times and with varying systems. An effort to systematically survey the continent with standardized techniques began in the late 1970s but soon waned.

After all, in a place this unforgiving, surveying flights are limited, and each can produce only a thin ribbon of radar data directly beneath its path. “It’s like trying to reconstruct the nation’s landscape from I-80 across New Jersey,” says Alley. “We have a few places with spectacular, wonderfully fantastic data,” he says wide-eyed, adding, “But we also have big gaps.” For decades, radar flights have largely buzzed the continent’s western edge, and for good reason: That’s where the threat is greatest.

FILLING IN THE DETAILS: BedMachine, available from the National Snow & Ice Data Center, reveals the hidden landscape beneath Antarctica’s ice. Both BedMachine and Bedmap—gridded models built from extensive radar surveys—map Antarctica’s bedrock at 500-meter resolution. While West Antarctica’s vulnerable marine-based glaciers have been well covered by radar flights, large parts of the continent rely on interpolation where no direct data exist.  Credit: BedMachine.

Glaciologists badly needed compiled maps to understand the evolving ice sheet. The first hand-drawn, continent-wide bedrock maps, Glaciological and Geophysical Folio, released in 1983, were “lovely, aesthetic” maps, says Siegert—ones that might today look handsome framed on a study’s wall but couldn’t be directly fed into computer models. That changed when an international effort led by the British Antarctic Survey released Bedmap in 2001, a continental-scale gridded product. But in terms of data quality, Siegert explains, the map wasn’t much of an improvement on the hand-drawn 1983 effort. Bedmap2, released in 2013, benefited from a much larger trove of data, offering a far sharper picture of what lay below. But huge swaths of Antarctica were, and still are, unexplored by radar flights.

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Peter Fretwell, a geophysicist at the British Antarctic Survey, says the Bedmap team takes an “uglier but honest” approach to interpreting across gaps, honoring every datapoint and making geologically informed assumptions between them.

Dartmouth College glaciologist Mathieu Morlighem, the mastermind behind a product called BedMachine (released in 2020), took a different approach. He read between the lines with fundamental physical laws—primarily the conservation of mass. While satellites can’t penetrate the ice to reveal bedrock topography, they show the ice surface—every bump, crack, and even ice speed—with remarkable clarity.

In a “eureka moment,” Morlighem and his team rearranged equations to compute ice depth in unmapped regions, mathematically rendering the bedrock topography from the known surface shape and speed, or ice flux. This wasn’t just a slight improvement: BedMachine exposed never-before-seen valleys and mountains. It revealed the Denman Glacier in East Antarctica to be resting on the deepest point ever mapped on land, reaching some 11,500 feet below sea level. Even Fretwell concedes wryly that BedMachine is “much better where we don’t have data.”

These two mapping products aren’t in competition. Those trying to understand the paths and fate of Antarctic ice are keen to use all the information available. Following the release of Bedmap3 earlier this year, the teams hope to combine their efforts—each offers 500-meter pixel resolution (for comparison, Google Terrain View often features 15-meter pixel resolution of land not covered in ice). But as Pattyn puts it, “the devil is in the details.”

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Enormous and concerning glaciers, like Thwaites and Pine Island, flow relentlessly toward the Amundsen Sea in West Antarctica. But they are traveling across the Gondwana topographic grain—an ancient wood-like pattern of ridges and troughs carved into the crust during the supercontinent’s breakup. Farther inland, a smoother path leads through deep valleys toward the Ross Ice Shelf, but that’s some 900 miles away. Even ice likes shortcuts. Instead, Thwaites—roughly the size of Great Britain—squeezes through a narrow stone bottleneck along a more direct path.

For now, the floating ice shelves brace the great glaciers and slow their flow. But if the shelves disintegrate—as happened with the rapid and unexpected 2002 breakup of the Larsen B ice shelf—the buttressing disappears. This means the glaciers move faster toward the sea, and the ridges alone may not be enough to hold them back. Meanwhile, the grounding line—where the ice begins to float—creeps inland into the deeper basin where fewer topographic bottlenecks exist. “We need to beat the heck out of understanding that bottleneck,” says Alley.

For some researchers, that means renewing the systematic, continent-wide survey that stalled decades ago. Technology is helping, too. Newly deployed swath radar technology offers a twist on the old technique, enabling, as the name suggests, much wider glimpses beneath each flight’s path and immediate three-dimensional renderings that are “so fantastic it’s hard to imagine,” says Alley. But everyone agrees on the urgency, because nature waits for no one.

And many U.S. shores will be among the worst impacted. Seas don’t rise uniformly like water in a bathtub and will instead creep faster and higher along the Atlantic seaboard and Gulf Coast, into Manhattan’s financial district, swallowing North Carolina’s Outer Banks, and leaving Florida but a sliver. Some places will fare worse, some better. Few doubt these outcomes—the tension lies in when sea level rise goes from gradual to drastic.

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If all of Antarctica’s continental ice vanishes, seas could rise an average of 190 feet above where they lap today. And if it does, the bedrock will be laid bare, its canyons, mountains, ridges, and swales. Something old, something new.

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Lead image: Wirestock Creators / Shutterstock

Evan Howell

Posted on October 21, 2025

Evan Howell is a Colorado-based freelance science journalist. His work has appeared in Science, Scientific American, Science News, and other outlets. Evan holds a master’s degree in geology and spent over a decade working as a senior geologist.

Health

- Does This Gene Determine How You Handle Your Booze?

- What Poop Reveals About Ancient Humans

- The Cure Hiding in a Rotten Eggplant

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Does This Gene Determine How You Handle Your Booze?

Zebrafish with a particular mutation drink like, well … fish

By Kristen French    October 29, 2025

Some people can really hold their liquor. Even after a night of heavy drinking, they don’t get sauced or lose control. Others are more immediately sensitive to the inebriating effects of booze, slurring their words or losing balance after just a couple of drinks. How a person responds to pints and spirits can shape their vulnerability to alcohol dependence.

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Many factors play a role in alcohol sensitivity, including a person’s body composition, variation in alcohol metabolism enzymes, and whether they have built up a tolerance. Now, researchers have found new evidence that a gene known as CHRNA3, a nervous system regulator that is found across a wide range of animals, from roundworms to humans, may also help to determine how an organism responds to alcohol.

The researchers looked at juvenile zebrafish in the lab, giving them the option to self-administer alcohol. For some of the zebrafish, at low concentrations, alcohol had a sedative effect, reducing anxiety-like behaviors. But at higher doses, these fish began swimming in an uncoordinated fashion. Within minutes, their initial attraction to alcohol gave way to aversion.

Things were different for fish with a mutation in their CHRNA3 gene: The sedative effects were muted even at higher doses. Instead, these fish seemed to behave in increasingly gregarious ways, and they continued to tipple, seeking out alcohol at every opportunity.

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The team of researchers published their findings in the Journal of Neuroscience, and say their study provides experimental evidence for a link that had already been reported in human genetic studies between the CHRNA3 gene and alcohol sensitivity. (CHRNA3 has also been associated with nicotine addiction in humans.)

“What we have learned over the past decade is that the heritability of addiction … has both general and substance-specific factors,” writes study author Ajay Mathuru, a professor of physiology at the National University of Singapore, in an email to Nautilus. “This study provides direct functional evidence that CHRNA3 modulates alcohol sensitivity (here in zebrafish), thereby isolating one gene’s contribution to a defined phenotype.” Individual humans with alcohol addiction may each have a different set of genes that play a role in that behavior, he says, which will inform the kind of intervention that is best.

Next the team aims to analyze different variants of CHRNA3 in humans and see how they correlate to differences in alcohol sensitivity. What they learn could help identify people who have specific vulnerabilities to addiction and dependence—and head off trouble before it staggers through the door.

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Lead image: N Universe / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on October 29, 2025

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing features and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, and New York Magazine. She has a masters degree in science journalism from Columbia University.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Poop Reveals About Ancient Humans

The parasites found lurking in 1,000-year-old feces give a glimpse into the health and daily life of the past

By Katherine Harmon Courage    October 22, 2025

Parasites are typically a rather private matter. And so, for that matter, is defecation. So likely never in their wildest dreams did the Loma San Gabriel people (in what is now Mexico), who answered nature’s call in a cave more than 1,000 years ago, imagine that future humans would be sifting through their droppings looking for clues.

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Feces is an open window into the many other organisms living in our bodies—from beneficial bacteria to harmful parasites. The genetic material from these other life forms makes its way out into the world via our own output. So scientists can and do go hunting there for familiar (or unfamiliar) DNA sequences, for a variety of reasons. (Wastewater treatment plants, for example, have been key places to monitor for local COVID-19 surges.)

But while information-rich in the present, DNA, like most biological materials, has a way of degrading over time. So finding such small traces of it from pathogens in ancient excrement can be challenging. Researchers behind a new study, published in PLoS ONE, used PCR testing, and additional sequencing, to see what they could find in a collection of 10 different samples of paleofeces collected from La Cueva de Los Muertos Chiquitos in the Rio Zape Valley in Mexico. The remnants had been deposited approximately in 725-920 A.D.

Pathogens and parasites, it turned out, were exceedingly common in people living in that area then. For example, the vast majority of samples revealed that the human defecator was harboring E. coli, and six of the 10 studied were infected by pinworm.

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The study served as  proof of concept that many of these ailments could be detected using this particular technology—even in very old feces. As such, the team had a list of 30 well-known gut microbes and pathogens they were looking for. Future studies could go hunting in dung piles for lesser-known, or perhaps even novel ones.

“Working with these ancient samples was like opening a biological time capsule,” Drew Capone, an assistant professor in the School of Public Health at Indiana University, said in a statement. “Each one revealing insight into human health and daily life from over a thousand years ago.”

Who knows what clues could come next, that had been buried in ancient poo.

Lead image: BRO.vector / Shutterstock

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Katherine Harmon Courage

Posted on October 22, 2025

Katherine Harmon Courage is the executive editor at Nautilus.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Cure Hiding in a Rotten Eggplant

Bacteriophage therapy’s new renaissance

By Lina Zeldovich    October 22, 2025

A young boy in Nebraska may well have been saved thanks to a particular piece of rotten eggplant collected in South Africa. And a virus it contained.

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Like many other kids, Hudson Campbell was no stranger to ear infections. But his were incredibly persistent. Antibiotics usually seemed to help initially, but once the course was over, the infections would come roaring back. Born in 2017, by age 2, he had already gotten ear tubes surgically implanted to drain the excess fluid the infections produced. A second set of tubes inserted in 2020 fell out within weeks—his infected ears had too much fluid in them.

That fall, doctors took a sample of bacteria growing in Hudson’s ears. The result was troubling: The bacteria were Mycobacterium abscessus. Frequently resistant to antibiotics, not many known drugs can fight the pathogen. The infection threatened his hearing, but also, if it spread, could quickly make its way beyond his ears.

Hudson’s bacterium is, of course, far from the only drug-resistant infection spreading. Its relative, Mycobacterium tuberculosis, which causes TB, has become notoriously resistant to antibiotics. Others include strains of Salmonella and Staph. Each year, some 2.8 million Americans struggle with antibiotic resistant infections and more than 35,000 people die from them.

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Yet, many of these infections do have cures. Known as bacteriophages, bacteria-slaying viruses just don’t yet exist on the shelves of hospital pharmacies. Instead, they lurk in strange places, like sewage, soil, and decaying vegetables.

By summer 2021, just six months after doctors identified M. abscessus in his middle ears, Hudson’s hearing started to disappear. One morning he had woken up and said, “Mom, I can’t hear you.” His mother, Kylie Campbell thought he was just being a mischievous 3-year-old. But three days later, the family was coming back from vacation, and Hudson was sitting in the back seat with his two younger sisters. He kept complaining that he couldn’t hear the video playing in the car. “I turned it up almost as loud as it could go, and he could barely hear the TV,” Kylie Campbell recalls. Sitting in the car with the sound blaring, she realized he meant it. That week Hudson had lost much of his hearing.

Doctors weren’t sure if Hudson’s infection or the antibiotics used to treat it caused his hearing loss. Late in 2020, Hudson had been outfitted with a so-called PICC line—a peripherally inserted central catheter—a long, thin, flexible tube that went into his upper arm and threaded into a large vein near his heart, so he could receive an antibiotic called amikacin, which can only be given intravenously. But in addition to wrecking his gut microbiota—causing such bad gastrointestinal side effects he could barely leave the house to participate in normal little kid life—amikacin can also cause hearing loss.

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Bacteriophages have their own evolutionary incentive to keep up with and outsmart their prey.

Whether it was the drugs, the infection, or a combination, Hudson’s eardrums became so damaged they could no longer transmit sound to the auditory nerve, which passes it to the brain. Hudson became profoundly deaf in his left ear and severely deaf in his right. His hearing could be restored with cochlear implants—electronic devices that bypass the damaged parts of the ear and “talk” to the auditory nerve directly—but whether they would work properly amid a raging M. abscessus infection was the question. Doctors were also worried that if amikacin stopped working, Hudson’s infection would spread.

The bacteria did spread, next infecting Hudson’s mastoid bone, a part of the skull located behind the ear. His parents took him to the Mayo Clinic for mastoidectomy, surgery that cleaned the dead cells from the bone with the hope of clearing the infection, too. He seemed to improve. In 2022, his medical team decided he was ready for a cochlear implant in his left ear, where he had lost almost all hearing. Time was of the essence because without regular stimuli, the auditory nerve could quickly atrophy. The surgery went well, but the implant didn’t last—the infection returned with a vengeance. “About six to eight weeks later, the implant fell out of his ear because the infection was so bad,” Kylie says.

On Good Friday of 2022, Mayo Clinic surgeons took the implant out of Hudson’s left ear and implanted another into his right. The new implant took well, but Hudson’s left ear was not getting better.

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Back in Nebraska, a pediatrician who had treated Hudson at the Children’s Nebraska hospital in Omaha named Bradford Becken had a bold idea: Enlist a virus to fight off the aggressive bacteria.

Evolution has typically been our enemy in the world of antibiotics. These drugs exert their lab-crafted killing pressure on bacteria, prompting the microbes to evolve new ways to defend against or disarm the medications. Some bacteria can eject antibiotics from their cells before they can act, others produce enzymes that cut antibiotic molecules to shreds. And with survival of the fittest as the law of the microscopic land, the more antibiotics we use, the more selective pressures they exert, the tougher the survivors—and the less effective our antibiotics.

Evolution, however, could be our collaborator in a different, dynamic class of treatments. Bacteriophages, the viruses that attack bacteria only and are harmless to humans, have their own evolutionary incentive to keep up with and outsmart their prey. Unlike broad-spectrum antibiotics, which typically target whole classes of bacteria in our bodies—the bad and the good, hence their negative side effects, such as diarrhea and yeast infections—phages are very targeted, preying on very specific bacteria. This is excellent news for our bodies and our commensal microorganisms.

But it can also make finding the right phages tricky. Even within one strain of M. abscessus, there can be big enough variations so that not every M. abscessus-targeting phage may work efficiently enough to kill off the bacterium, explains Graham Hatfull, a professor of biotechnology at the University of Pittsburgh whose research focuses on mycobacteria species. Hatfull also runs SEA-PHAGES, a research course for which students search through soil, compost, and other substances to identify and catalog novel bacteria killers in different parts of the planet.

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And that’s where the expired eggplant comes in. Some years ago, a SEA-PHAGES student in South Africa was digging through a pile of garbage, from which they fished out a half-rotten eggplant chunk. Living on the chunk was a phage that was fairly adept at attacking M. abscessus. The student noted the phage activity against M. abscessus, named the phage Muddy, and added it to the collection, which today totals about 28,000 strains  of bacteria-killers.

BACTERIA-EATERS: Bacteriophages, whose name was inspired by the Greek word phagein (“to devour”) are viruses that have evolved to prey on bacteria. In 1919, French microbiologist Felix d’Herelle isolated one strain of these targeted viruses and used it to treat three children dying from dysentery. All three were cured. Credit: shoma81 / Shutterstock.

Becken had heard about phage therapy, but never used it before, so he reached out to Hatfull to ask if there might be a phage in his collection to try against Hudson’s M. abscessus. It wasn’t the first such email Hatfull had received. He had created a few phage treatments before for similarly stubborn cases. If Hatfull’s lab found the right phage, Hudson would become the first young  child in the United States—that his medical team was aware of—to be treated with phage therapy.

He wouldn’t be the first in medical history, though. In fact, the first documented pediatric use of phage therapy was more than a century ago. The children, three brothers aged 3, 7, and 12, were treated in a children’s hospital in Paris in 1919. The boys were dying from dysentery, caused by a Shigella bacterium, which had already killed their sister. Antibiotics hadn’t yet been discovered and wouldn’t become widely available for another three decades. But French microbiologist Felix d’Herelle had just zeroed in on something that killed the dysentery bug, which he correctly identified as a virus that preys on bacteria.

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That insight struck when one of d’Hérelle’s dysentery patients managed to beat the illness seemingly on his own. As he got better, d’Hérelle noticed that Shigella began to disappear from the patient’s stool samples. D’Hérelle seeded the stool samples onto petri dishes with plenty of beef bouillon to help feed the deadly bacterium, but Shigella dwindled there also, leaving behind clear patches where it originally had been. Something was killing off the bacteria. So d’Hérelle devised a clever trick to isolate the mysterious agent.

He passed the remaining bouillon through a Pasteur-Chamberland filter with holes so small that fluids could trickle through, but bacteria couldn’t. He ended up with a clear liquid, seemingly lacking all microbial life. But when he added Shigella back into the liquid, the bacteria were gone by the next day. “They dissolved like sugar in water,” d’Hérelle later wrote. “What caused my clear spots was in fact an invisible microbe.”

He named the curative agent “bacteriophage,” from the Greek word phagein, which means to devour or eat. D’Hérelle and his colleagues tested phages on themselves first, found no adverse effects, and then gave the medicine to the children, all of whom recovered within days. Later, d’Herelle used phages to treat a variety of infections, including the plague, caused by the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which had no cure.

In the 1920s and 1930s, medics in Europe, North America, and the Soviet Union successfully used phages to treat a range of infectious diseases, including dysentery, cholera, and staph. However, in the U.S., phages eventually fell out of favor, partially because of the advent of more broad-spectrum antibiotics and partially because phages had to match the exact subtype of bacteria the person was infected with to be effective. So with effective antibiotics on hand by the mid 20th century, many U.S. physicians grew less inclined to turn to phage therapy, some even expressing doubt as to their efficacy.

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As antibiotic resistance grew, it became clear that alternatives were needed.

Still, in countries of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, phages were used alongside antibiotics, especially when the latter failed to work. In Georgia, which was then part of the Soviet Union, health officials created an entire research institution, today called George Eliava Institute of Bacteriophages, Microbiology, and Virology devoted to the production and study of bacteriophages. In the 1970s, Georgian researchers managed to cultivate a phage active against methicillin-resistant staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, a dreaded superbug. When the Soviet Union fell apart, Georgian scientists began to arrive in the U.S., bringing their bacteriophage knowledge with them.

But decades of distaste for phage therapy, combined with the Cold War cast a pall on bacteriophages and other corners of Soviet biomedical research as “commie medicine,” made their uptake slower in the U.S. Yet, as antibiotic resistance grew, it became clear that alternatives were needed. In 2016, for the first time, the FDA greenlighted a phage treatment for an experimental case. It was granted for Thomas Patterson, currently a psychiatry professor at the University of California, San Diego, who was near death, infected by bacteria that appeared resistant to all known antibiotics. When phages vanquished his bacteria, saving his life, a paradigm shift ensued. Over the past several years, bacteria eaters have been climbing their way back in the U.S. from scientific obscurity. But slowly.

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Part of the challenge is still finding the right match, which is typically done by pitting phages and bacteria against each other in the lab and looking for a winner. So Becken sent Hatfull a sample of Hudson’s bacteria. At Hatfull’s lab, workers tested a number of phages against the sample, but none were successful. A few weeks later, Becken sent another sample—with the same result. But Becken was tenacious and sent yet another one. Hudson’s third sample found a match, a virus that had descended from the one collected from that mushy eggplant. It was Muddy’s progeny.

When Becken learned that Hatfull’s lab found the match, he was excited and nervous. “It was the first phage patient that I’ve ever had, and the first phage patient this hospital has ever had,” he reflects. “And I was very hopeful, because I didn’t know what would come after a phage if it didn’t work. I wasn’t sure what else was out there.”

Becken filed an Investigational New Drug request with the FDA, and in May of 2023, Hatfull’s lab prepared Hudson’s phages.

Hudson’s phages arrived at the Children’s Nebraska hospital in little glass bottles, ready to be administered intravenously and directly into his left ear to give M. abscessus a double blow. Hudson would also remain on his antibiotics for an extra punch. Phages and antibiotics can work synergistically, each killing the respective susceptible bacterial population. “Hudson was admitted to the hospital because you can’t send a phage to CVS,” Becken says, adding that this also afforded extra protection in case he had any side effects during his first few phage applications.

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He had none, so the rest of his treatments were done as outpatient visits, and the results were fast. “It was just amazing to watch,” Kylie says. “Within the first month of starting it, his ear had completely dried up. We went to Mayo, and they said his ear was better than it had looked in years. You could just tell he was feeling better.”

Hudson received phages for several months. “I probably treated Hudson with the phage longer than he needed to be treated,” Becken says, but he was worried that M. abscessus may rebound once therapy ceased, and he wasn’t taking any chances. Around September 2023, Becken deemed Hudson cured and stopped the phages. The bug did not return. A few months later, Hudson got the cochlear implant in his left ear, and it  stayed for good.

Since Hudson, more patients at Children’s Nebraska have received phage therapy and some are currently being evaluated for the treatment, Becken says. “Phages are fascinating, because I see issues with antibiotic resistance every day, and every time you use an antibiotic, you increase antibacterial resistance.” Becken says.

Bacteria can develop resistance to phages, too, but phages will respond in kind, boosting their attack prowess. “Bacteria and phages have been racing against each other for millions of years,” explains Sandro Sulakvelidze, a Georgian expat and researcher who founded  Maryland-based phage company Intralytix in 1998. Sulakvelidze’s company manufactures phage spray used in the food industry to eliminate pathogens such as listeria, salmonella, and campylobacter. “All we need to do is to sic them on each and harvest the winner.”

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That’s exactly what happened in Hudson’s case, explains Hatfull. The original Muddy phage wasn’t effective against Hudson’s M. abscessus strain, but its progeny was. “We kind of played this battle between the bacteria and the phages,” he says, which made the phage evolve to be a better killer.

This approach to battling bacterial infections will likely be increasingly important. Fighting antibiotic-resistant infections already costs upward of $4.6 billion in healthcare costs in the U.S. annually. And the death toll is climbing. Experts warn that between now and 2050, antibiotic-resistant superbugs will claim 39 million lives around the world. The United Nations has an even grimmer prediction: 10 million deaths annually by 2050.

For Kylie and her husband Gregg, seeing Hudson living his life like most other children was a gift. Before the phage therapy, “Gregg and I were almost at the point of withdrawing all medications because it was hurting Hudson physically so bad, and we felt like we were never getting any better,” she says. “And now he’s enjoying hearing with both ears with 95 percent accuracy.”

Today, Hudson, now 9, plays multiple sports, and one of his favorite activities is swimming. “From a mom’s perspective, I would say that without phage therapy, we would have never cleared the infection,” Kylie says. “It was a game changer.” Thanks to a virus hidden away in a rotten eggplant.

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Lead image: Kristina Savelieva / Shutterstock

Lina Zeldovich

Posted on October 22, 2025

Lina Zeldovich grew up in a family of Russian scientists, listening to bedtime stories about volcanoes, black holes, and intrepid explorers. She has written for the Smithsonian, National Geographic, Reader’s Digest, the New York Times and other publications. Her most recent book, The Living Medicine: How a Lifesaving Cure was Nearly Lost and Why it Will Rescue Us When Antibiotics Fail, chronicled the history of phage therapy and was longlisted for the PEN America Literary Awards.

History

- Meet the Real Dr. Frankenstein

- Remembering the Genius Who Inspired Celebration of the Mind Day

- This Natural History Museum Heist Rivals the Louvre Robbery

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Meet the Real Dr. Frankenstein

The Italian scientist who sparked an electric revolution that led to the beloved horror story—and the battery

By Molly Glick    October 29, 2025

Our centuries-long fascination with Dr. Frankenstein’s monster—which has inspired dozens of films, including the recent Guillermo del Toro movie—might have been sparked by a scholarly feud over frogs. An electric conflict that also gave us the battery.

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In the 18th century, scientists sought to pinpoint electricity’s influence on living things, and whether it could be wielded to resurrect the dead. Italian physicist and physician Luigi Galvani claimed to have discovered an intrinsic form of electricity within animals after observing that frogs’ severed legs appeared to move on their own. For example, he stuck the creature’s limb on a brass hook and, when cutting it with a steel scalpel, it twitched.

This intrigued Italian physicist Alessandro Volta, who later found that the electrical current jiggling these frog legs emerged from the charge moving between two types of metals—not from the frog limb itself. The isolated frog leg was just serving as the conductor. He later went on to invent an early version of today’s batteries, known as a “Voltaic pile,” based on this finding.

IT’S ALIVE!: An illustration from Giovanni Aldini’s 1804 book describing his experiments jolting human bodies with electricity. Credit: Wellcome Collection gallery / Wikimedia Commons.

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Galvani’s nephew, Giovanni Aldini, was intrigued by this work and wondered if it could somehow be used to reanimate bodies. But he took things a step further, experimenting on other animals as well as humans. Using a Voltaic pile, Aldini began showcasing his work on non-human animals and on executed prisoners throughout Europe—at the time, European scientists took an interest in studying the bodies of these individuals to learn how their systems function shortly after death. To the horror of observing audiences, Aldini stimulated decapitated human bodies with electricity and even prompted some to sit upright.

In 1803, Aldini made headlines when experimenting with the body of George Forster, who had recently been executed for murder. In London, Aldini placed electrodes on Forster’s body. The deceased man’s “jaws quivered” and “entire head moved.” In the same experiment, the audience observed how Forster’s “right hand was raised and clenched, and the legs and thighs were set in motion.” To some onlookers, it appeared as if Aldini had revived him.

While the provocative exhibition generated plenty of press at the time, Frankenstein author Mary Shelley was a child when this show was put on. But later connections may have exposed her to Aldini’s work and similar experiments. Her orbit included prominent electrical researchers, who were friends with her father, William Godwin; and her doctor, John Abernethy, claimed that “the phaenomena of electricity and of life correspond.”

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Read more: “The Body Electric”

In the summer of 1816, Shelley spent a summer in Switzerland with a group of literati including poet Lord Byron and her future husband Percy Shelley. On this trip, they allegedly spoke of “galvanism,” a term referencing Luigi Galvani’s work and other electricity experiments that followed. In the 1831 preface to Frankenstein, Shelley notes how the idea influenced her creative process: “Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given a token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.”

Even if Aldini’s dreams never fully came to life, the fiction it spawned has continued to animate our imaginations.

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Lead image: Theodor von Holst / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on October 29, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Remembering the Genius Who Inspired Celebration of the Mind Day

Martin Gardner wanted to make math mathemagical

By Kristen French    October 21, 2025

Martin Gardner, who is honored today with Celebration of the Mind Day, brought math to the masses. For 25 years, Gardner drafted a puzzle column for Scientific American, one of the most popular features of the magazine. Known for these delightful puzzles, as well as for a lifetime of magic tricks and a prolific pen, Gardner believed math and magic were one and the same. He wanted everyone to find math magical, or “mathemagical,” as he called it.

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After Gardner’s death in 2010, Celebration of the Mind Day was established on his birthday, October 21. Hosted by the Gathering 4 Gardner Foundation, the holiday coincides with a worldwide series of events that aims to bring people together to celebrate the pleasures of puzzles, math games, and of course, magic.

Gardner had no advanced training in mathematics himself, but he believed this was one of his strengths, as it helped him to communicate with people. In his memoirs, Undiluted Hocus-Pocus, published posthumously in 2013, he writes, “One of the pleasures in writing the [Scientific American] column was that it introduced me to so many top mathematicians, which of course I was not. Their contributions were far superior to anything I could write, and were a major reason for the column’s growing popularity. The secret of its success was a direct result of my ignorance.” The column, called simply “Mathematical Games,” launched in January of 1957 after one of his puzzles, about so-called “Flexagons,” became a huge hit.

Gardner developed an interest in magic and illusions early on, first writing about one of his magic tricks for a magazine called The Sphinx at the tender age of 15. It was a pursuit he followed for the rest of his life. He was most interested in table and close-up magic and published many original tricks. He was proudest of a card trick known as the Wink Change, but he also invented so-called “tapping” and “spelling” effects. (You can find a sampling of his magic tricks here.)

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Gardner was a prolific writer as well, authoring short stories, a novel, essays, and more than 100 books on subjects ranging from physics to philosophy to rationality to skepticism, and of course recreational mathematics and puzzles. He was also considered a leading authority on Lewis Carroll and was widely known for his annotated versions of Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, which revealed the secret mathematical and literary riddles and references sprinkled throughout the books.

Gardner was devoted to debunking pseudoscience throughout his lifetime and is considered the founder of the skeptic movement. He created the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry in 1976 and wrote a monthly column for the Skeptical Inquirer. American paleontologist, evolutionary biologist, and historian of science Stephen Jay Gould called him “the single brightest beacon defending rationality and good science against the mysticism and anti-intellectualism that surrounded us.”

Revisiting Gardner’s work is a welcome reminder of the power of playful inquiry to engage minds.

Lead image: Konrad Jacobs / Wikimedia

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Kristen French

Posted on October 21, 2025

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing features and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, and New York Magazine. She has a masters degree in science journalism from Columbia University.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

This Natural History Museum Heist Rivals the Louvre Robbery

A young music student lifted nearly 300 rare bird specimens from a British museum

By Bob Grant    October 21, 2025

Thieves robbed priceless jewelry from the Louvre this weekend in a brazen heist that involved an electric ladder, a glass cutter, and high-powered scooters. They were in and out of the iconic museum in 8 minutes. But in 2009, a 20-year-old United States citizen pulled off a robbery near London that rivaled the bold Louvre caper. His target wasn’t jewelry, though. It was birds.

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The Natural History Museum at Tring, about 40 miles northwest of London, houses zoological marvels, including taxidermied mounts of extinct animals, rare books once perused by Victorian-era explorers, and whimsical fleas dressed in traditional garb that were purchased from Mexico around 1905. But Edwin Rist was interested in the museum’s birds.

Rist was a flute student studying at London’s Royal Academy of Music as well as an avid maker of handcrafted fly-fishing lures, having written a well-regarded book on the hobby at age 15. Like other enthusiasts, he had learned that rare feathers from birds, collected during the Victorian era, were highly prized and could fetch handsome prices. In 2009, Rist visited the museum in Tring posing as a photographer capturing images of the facility’s rare bird specimens for an assignment. He snapped photos of hundreds of preserved bird skins as well as the halls and doors of the museum. Later that year, he enacted a plan that had been months in the making: to steal some of the more exotic specimens the museum held to sell their feathers—or make elaborate flyfishing lures from them, which could demand even higher prices.

In June of that year, Rist performed a concert in London and then took a train to Tring. He broke into the Natural History Museum, toting a large suitcase, gloves, and a glass cutter. Rist made off with 299 bird specimens, mostly males of tropical species—quetzals, cotingas, and birds-of-paradise among them—with vivid feathers used to attract mates. Some of the skins had been collected by Alfred Russel Wallace, a contemporary of Charles Darwin who constructed the theory of evolution through natural selection independently from the biologist who would become known as the father of that theory.

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Rist initially got away with the crime. It wasn’t until a month after the robbery, when he was selling feathers on eBay to fund his purchase of a golden flute, that investigators caught the young American. The museum was able to recover 174 specimens intact, though Rist had removed the identification labels from most, decimating their scientific value.

Fined more than £125,000 (the amount he had made selling feathers), given a 12-month suspended jail sentence, and placed on supervision for 12 months in 2011, Rist later graduated from the Royal Academy. He now lives in Germany, has changed his name to Edwin Reinhard, and continues to play flute in orchestras there. His story inspired The Feather Thief, a 2018 true crime book written by Kirk Johnson.

You can catch a glimpse of Rist/Reinhardt on his YouTube Channel HeavyMetalFlute.

Lead image: Charles J. Sharp / Wikimedia

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Bob Grant

Posted on October 21, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

Microbiology

- Witness the Rare Birth of a Water Bear

MICROBIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Witness the Rare Birth of a Water Bear

A vulnerable moment for one of Earth’s most resilient creatures

By Kristen French    October 27, 2025

Water bears are some of the hardiest creatures on Earth: These whimsically-shaped microscopic animals can survive extreme radiation, hypothetical apocalypse, dehydration and starvation, and have even persevered in the harsh conditions of space. And yet, like so many other living things, they are still vulnerable when they first make their entrance into the world.

In the video below, you can witness a baby water bear, also known as a tardigrade, make its earliest stabs at independence. Under the microscope, the mother drags her babies around a petri dish in a large sack of partially shed skin. When she finally sloughs it off, one egg slips free, and the water bear inside pokes and prods with its mouth parts to break out of its shell to freedom.

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According to tardigrade researcher Witold Morek of the Wellcome Sanger Institute, water bears have two egg-laying strategies. They can lay the eggs in the exuvium, the mother’s shed exoskeleton, or freely in the environment, he tells Nautilus over email. The eggs laid in the shed skin have smooth surfaces, while those laid freely tend to have more ornamented exteriors.

The common explanation, says Morek, though there is no experimental evidence for it yet, is that these different birthing strategies help babies stick in place in the moss or lichen where they are often born. The ornaments protect those who are shed directly into the environment from getting washed away by rain. The shed exoskeleton serves a similar purpose for the water bear eggs it contains.

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Water bears got their nickname from a German theologian named Johann August Ephraim Goeze in the 1770s. He was one of the first to observe them under a microscope and chose the moniker due to their bulbous, bear-like shape and because he found them in a nearby pond. The tiny oddball creatures—which live in a vast range of environments, from moss to glaciers—have attracted the fascination of scientists and science enthusiasts ever since. Now we have a rare look at how these tenacious critters make the very first strides in their wild lives.

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Lead image: Bob Goldstein & Vicky Madden, UNC Chapel Hill / Wikimedia Commons

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Kristen French

Posted on October 27, 2025

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing features and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, and New York Magazine. She has a masters degree in science journalism from Columbia University.

Neuroscience

- What Is Your Brain Doing on Psychedelics?

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Is Your Brain Doing on Psychedelics?

Something is happening here, but neuroscientists don’t know what it is

By Grigori Guitchounts    October 20, 2025

On a mellow spring night, I gazed at the setting desert sun in Joshua Tree National Park in California. The sun glowed a warm blood-orange and the sky shimmered pink and purple.

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I had just defended my Ph.D. in neuroscience, and my partner and I had flown west to celebrate and exhale. It was early March 2020, and we were hoping to quiet our minds in the desert. I was also hoping to change mine.

I had been curious about psychedelics for years, but it wasn’t until I read How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan about the new science of psychedelics, that I felt ready. The book made a compelling case that psychedelics provided a fascinating introspective experience. Still, I was nervous. I’d heard stories about bad trips and flashbacks. I knew enough neuroscience to know these were serious drugs—compounds that could temporarily dismantle how the brain makes sense of reality and potentially change it irreversibly.

I also knew I was burned out. My Ph.D. had been hard in the way Ph.D.s often are: thrilling, lonely, disorienting. My advisor had left academia halfway through, and I’d spent years without much supervision, never quite sure whether I was on the right track and if I had a future in academia. But I didn’t take LSD seeking healing or clarity. I just wanted to see what the fuss was about. After years of hunkering down, I was craving a freeing experience.

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The air shimmered. The little bird dolls hanging in the cabin started telling me their secrets.

We put on Bach’s Partitas for keyboard, wrapped ourselves in Navajo blankets, and waited.

What followed was strange, intense, and beautiful. The wooden floorboards of our cabin turned into a bustling cityscape. The mirror in the bathroom showed my face aged beyond recognition: The natural lines in my skin became deep wrinkles, my eyes sunken, as if time had decided to give me a sneak peak of what would come. Later, absorbed with coloring pencils, I watched the marks I was making dissolve in real time, as if the paper were being erased by invisible rain.

The air shimmered. The plants breathed. The little bird dolls hanging in a corner of the cabin started telling me their secrets. My body felt porous, as if boundaries had loosened. I didn’t fully lose my sense of self, but I did feel a kind of communion—with the rocks, the scrub, the sky. It was deeply, inexplicably moving. Everything was love.

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As a neuroscientist, I can’t help but wonder what was happening in my brain on acid. Was my default mode network—a network of brain regions most active when our minds are at rest, drifting through memories, daydreams, and self-reflection—collapsing, as Pollan had described? I wasn’t sure. What I did know was that my perception had changed, not just in content, but in form. My brain was generating coherent sights, emotions, meanings, all from its own imagination, based on my prior experiences. It all seemed both impossibly real and completely made up.

Neuroscientists have tried to explain experiences like mine by turning to physics. Robin Carhart-Harris, a professor of neurology, psychiatry, and behavioral sciences at the University of California, San Francisco, and one of the most influential figures in the psychedelic renaissance, believes that psychedelics increase the brain’s entropy—a term borrowed from thermodynamics that, loosely speaking, refers to disorder or unpredictability.

According to Carhart-Harris, normal waking consciousness is governed by structured patterns of brain activity: Certain regions talk mostly to each other, networks like the default mode network enforce order, and the brain efficiently predicts the world around it based on experience.

Psychedelics, he argues, disrupt this order. The brain becomes more chaotic, more fluid. Rigid beliefs loosen. Novel connections emerge. Freud’s ideas on the id and the ego—particularly the ego’s role in imposing order on unruly unconscious drives—inspired in Carhart-Harris a language to frame the psychedelic state as a temporary loosening of the ego’s grip, reflected in fMRI data as a breakdown of brain organization.

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A different kind of conversation about psychedelics has begun taking shape.

The therapeutic effect of psychedelics stems from this breakdown. “The principal component of mental illness is ‘stuckness,’ this rootedness of thoughts, feelings, behaviors that characterizes so much of psychopathology or mental illness,” Carhart-Harris told me. To cure afflictions ranging from depression to PTSD, eating disorders to OCD, the mind and brain must get un-stuck. And this is where psychedelics shine: “Psychedelics promote plasticity,” Carhart-Harris said. “Formally, a definition of plasticity is changeability, the ability to change.”

And that presents an exciting question, Carhart-Harris said. “How does the entropic brain phenomenon relate to plasticity? I see the entropy of spontaneous brain activity as the thing that we can modulate acutely. It’s like an entropy dial: Dial it down and consciousness drops; dial it up, consciousness enriches.”

His model has appeal. It offers a story that links molecular action to neuronal networks to psychology. And it matches up beautifully with the kinds of testimonies that began to surface in clinical trials and across media accounts of the psychedelic renaissance: the feeling of becoming unstuck, the flood of insights, the sense of seeing clearly for the first time. Rachel Drayer, a physician assistant in emergency medicine, told me how her psilocybin experience in a clinical trial helped her shed the anger and depression that had burdened her since working on the frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic. (You can read Drayer’s story here.)

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But what if Carhart-Harris’ model is not what’s happening in the brain?

As the psychedelic renaissance has matured, a different kind of conversation has begun taking shape. Some neuroscientists have started raising uncomfortable questions: Were these theories supported by the data? What, exactly, was being measured when researchers claimed an increase in entropy? And how solid was the foundation beneath this shimmering structure of metaphor and model?

The critiques didn’t question whether psychedelics had real, even life-changing effects. They questioned whether we understood why. And whether the neuroscience story the researchers had been telling—to patients, clinicians, funders, and the public—was grounded in a robust interpretation of the observed changes in the brain.

Entropy, when applied to the brain, is a slippery concept. In physics and information theory, entropy is a measure of uncertainty or complexity—like the difference between a clear radio signal and one filled with static. A pure tone has very low entropy; a song clearly transmitted has medium entropy; pure static, with no pattern at all, has high entropy. In neuroscience, it often depends on what exactly is being measured—fMRI signals? EEG rhythms? Is it the uncertainty of coordination among brain regions? Or perhaps the randomness of a neuron’s firing over time?

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To understand how fuzzy this is, picture a jazz band. A highly ordered brain might resemble a tight ensemble playing a familiar tune, with each musician sticking to their role. A more entropic brain might sound like free jazz, with unexpected riffs, shifting rhythms, new combinations emerging on the fly.

That captures the vibe. But what exactly are we measuring? Is it the unpredictability of a single player? Or the variability in how two players coordinate? Or the diversity of patterns across the whole band? In the brain, depending on what signals you record—fMRI, EEG, spikes, synchrony—and what questions you ask of them, you’ll get different measures, and possibly different answers.

“Entropy means how predictable is my next state from my previous ones?” said Amy Kuceyeski, a professor at Weill Cornell Medicine. The challenge is determining what aspect of brain signaling is being measured by entropy.

Kuceyeski used Carhart-Harris’s LSD and psilocybin fMRI data to craft an analysis that treats brain states as a dynamical system. The brain is never static. It constantly shifts between different states, such as those relevant to reasoning or solving problems, or ones that guide muscle control and movement. Scientists can map the shift between states by quantifying the energy used for the transition. They refer to this as “control” or “transition” energy.

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As a neuroscientist, I can’t help but wonder what was happening in my brain on acid.

Kuceyeski and her team found that brain activity generally clustered into two large-scale networks—one focused on planning and the other on attention. They discovered that relative to placebo, LSD and psilocybin lowered control energy and shifted brain activity from planning to attention, a dynamic that normally quiets our inner executive. Kuceyeski told me the flattening of the brain’s control energy correlates with an increase in entropy.

“I think it’s measuring the same thing, to be honest,” she said. “People who have bigger decreases in transition energy also have larger increases in entropy.”

Yet Kuceyeski did not find a correlation between the lessening of transition energy and the subjective experience. While a rise in entropy and drop in transition energy seem to overlap, they don’t seem to have the same relationship to the strength of the psychedelic experience.

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The overlap has another problem: If two supposedly distinct metrics—entropy and control energy—are capturing the same underlying signal, it’s unclear which one, if either, reflects a meaningful mechanism. Without conceptual clarity or empirical separation between metrics such as these, it’s hard to know what exactly we’re measuring when we look at a tripping brain.

The entropy story has other troubles. In some datasets it appears that entropy is increased during a trip, and that it scales with the intensity of the subjective experience. But the proper way to demonstrate that dialing entropy up leads to enriched consciousness would be to increase entropy directly, perhaps through some electrical or other stimulation of neurons, and observe the resulting changes to conscious experience. Such an experiment is nightmarishly difficult to design and implement and hasn’t been performed. Without it, we haven’t ruled out that a third factor mediates both entropy and the subjective experience, and that entropy of brain activity doesn’t affect conscious experience.

A recent study from a group in Copenhagen evaluated 13 different ways to measure entropy from fMRI data collected from patients under the influence of psilocybin. Only 3 of the 13 showed reliable increases of entropy during the trip. Others, including many of the static or region-specific metrics, didn’t change at all. Rather than supporting a brain-wide shift into chaos, the results suggest that any increase in complexity depends entirely on how—and where—you look.

Last year, Joshua Siegel and colleagues at Washington University collected fMRI scans before, during, and after psilocybin or an active control (methylphenidate, aka Ritalin). During the trip itself, brain-wide entropy rose in lockstep with self-reported mystical experience scores. But after the trip, entropy returned to baseline. “Preliminary efforts to identify network changes in the weeks after psilocybin have yielded mixed results,” the authors wrote in Nature.

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Manoj Doss, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the University of Texas, Austin, explained to me that the apparent increase in brain complexity, or entropy, during a psychedelic trip could be misinterpreted by researchers. Doss has studied the effects of various psychoactive drugs—including psychedelics—on learning and memory, having subjects perform various cognitive tasks while he scans their brains. When Doss had people under LSD perform real tasks—like watching a movie—their brain complexity went up, but so did the complexity of sober and alert brains also watching a movie. “If you match the mental activity,” Doss said, “the complexity looks the same.”

If entropy doesn’t reliably increase under psychedelics—or our tools aren’t even measuring it accurately—then the explanatory edifice for the therapeutic efficacy of psychedelics begins to wobble. We’re left without a full understanding of the network-wide effect that psychedelics have on the brain. Studies of “bad trips” during the psychedelic renaissance underscore the unpredictability of the drugs’ effect and aftermath.

The inconclusive research into psychedelics also raises the provocative possibility that the brain might not be reorganizing itself in the way Carhart-Harris and others have suggested. Psychedelics may not be lifting us from ruts by dialing up neural chaos. The powerful experience may not be driven by entropy but by something far harder to pin down: the placebo effect.

Placebo is typically understood as the mind’s expectation nudging the body toward healing. Simply believing that a treatment will work can activate real physiological responses, even when the treatment itself is inert. But drugs that affect consciousness, and psychedelics in particular, complicate this picture. What happens when the thing you’re trying to heal is the mind? If someone expects relief and is then given a powerful hallucinogen that radically alters their consciousness, that expectation isn’t just a subliminal hope—it becomes an overwhelming sensory and emotional reality. In that state, could the mind’s belief in healing become even more powerful?

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Boris Heifets, a Stanford anesthesiologist, has been on a quest to break down the elements of psychedelic experience. Determining the cause of an intense experience, he’s reported, is not clear cut. “It is quite difficult to say whether a lasting change in mood or outlook was a result of the drug—a biochemical effect—or of the trip itself, the experiential effect,” he told Scientific American in 2024.

The powerful experience may be driven by something far harder to pin down: the placebo effect.

Placebo is difficult to introduce in psychedelic experiments. If patients have, say, read Pollan’s book or heard stories about the transformational effects of a psychoactive drug substance, they will have expectations of a similar experience, even if they know they may receive a placebo in their session.

Heifets got around that problem by conducting a clinical trial in which he gave ketamine (which has psychoactive effects) or a placebo to patients with clinical depression undergoing surgery for other issues. Their expectant minds would be silent while they were under anesthesia and unconscious. Heifets’s team found that changes in depression scores were statistically similar for the ketamine and placebo groups: The scores decreased for the placebo and ketamine group alike after surgical anesthesia. And these were large changes, cutting the depression scores by nearly 50 percent in both cases, and persisting after the operations, patients reported.

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Heifets has also shown that patients experience a relief from depression and post-traumatic stress disorder from intense dream states induced by anesthesia. “Patients are having a very powerful experience,” he’s said, similar to ones reported by those who’ve taken psychedelics; again, without the drug.

Could it be that some kind of integration effort is the vessel where raw experience is distilled into lasting change? That after the profound experience, the real improvements to mental health happen not because of the drug, but because of the mind’s own work on itself? That psychedelics have clear and strong molecular effects is unquestionable; but to me, it’s more likely the experience than changes in entropy that make this possible.

For months after that night in Joshua Tree, quarantined in the early days of the pandemic, I would notice strange new things. Shifting shadows, dancing dust motes, ghosts taunting my peripheral vision. They weren’t distressing or startling; just little blips that tugged at my attention, as if my brain was still tuned to a different sensitivity, a heightened edge-detection filter no one had reminded it to turn off.

It didn’t feel like some grand unlocking of consciousness, or a permanent new mode of being. It felt small, subcortical almost: a tweak to a circuit, not a transformation of the self. And that, I think, is what science is telling us now, too.

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Something is happening in the brain when psychedelics do therapeutic wonders. But it may not be what the theories have claimed. It may not be neural entropy, or predictive processing, or ego disintegration via control energy gradients. And yet when setting out with the intention to get better, people do, and often in profound ways. Maybe, for now, it’s enough to say: Science doesn’t quite know why. But for some, the experience is still worth the trip.

Read more on Nautilus about the psychedelic renaissance:

“Out of Your Head” Exploring psychedelic experiences that seem wider than the brain.

“Cary Grant Made LSD Therapy Fashionable” Benjamin Breen on his 3 greatest revelations while writing Tripping on Utopia, about the birth of psychedelic science.

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“Can Ecstasy Save a Marriage?” A new wave of experimental therapy is enlisting MDMA in relationship counseling.

“The Bad Trip Detective” The researcher delving into the downsides of psychedelic drugs.

“Will Psychedelics Replace Antidepressants?” Psychedelic treatment is helping patients make difficult emotional breakthroughs.

Lead image by Tasnuva Elahi; with image by Jorm Sangsorn / Shutterstock

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Grigori Guitchounts

Posted on October 20, 2025

Grigori Guitchounts is a neuroscientist, AI researcher, and a senior associate at Flagship Pioneering, working on AI and machine learning.

Philosophy

- The Pretense of Political Debate

- What Is Intelligence?

PHILOSOPHY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Pretense of Political Debate

Grandstanding acts of persuasion restrict free speech and real learning. Just ask Socrates.

By Agnes Callard    October 30, 2025

It is easier to say what freedom of speech isn’t than to say what it is. The first amendment to the United States Constitution protects citizens from a certain kind of government interference in their speech; but government censorship is far from the only way speech can be made unfree. When we hear, as we often do these days, of people being silenced or canceled or experiencing “chilling effects” on their speech, the culprit is rarely the government. Our idea of freedom of speech extends beyond what’s specified in the First Amendment to something that has bearing on how we conduct ourselves on social media, in the workplace, and in classrooms, on sidewalks, and even in homes.

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The great public philosopher John Dewey (1859–1952) made this point, nearly a hundred years ago:

Merely legal guarantees of the civil liberties of free belief, free expression, free assembly are of little avail if in daily life freedom of communication, the give and take of ideas, facts, experiences, is choked by mutual suspicion, by abuse, by fear and hatred. These things destroy the essential condition of the democratic way of living even more effectually than open coercion.

When governments interfere with the free press and the public dissemination of ideas, they place restrictions on what we, as individuals, can talk to each other about, and on what kinds of information can flow into our conversations. It is those conversations that are, first and foremost, the locus of freedom. Dewey’s view is that freedom from government interference is important exactly insofar as it facilitates the free communication between citizens. He continues:

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I am inclined to believe that the heart and final guarantee of democracy is in free gatherings of neighbors on the street corner to discuss back and forth what is read in uncensored news of the day, and in gatherings of friends in the living rooms of houses and apartments to converse freely with one another. Intolerance, abuse, calling of names because of differences of opinion about religion or politics or business, as well as because of differences of race, color, wealth or degree of culture are treason to the democratic way of life.

It is when the topics, values, and commitments that are central to a person’s life become open for discussion and adjudication with others that she can be said to “live together” with those others in a substantive sense. I call that way of living together with other people “free”; Dewey calls it “democratic.” Regardless, we agree that barriers to communication stand in the way of politics, which is to say, of living together under a shared idea. Freedom of speech, in this broader (“democratic”) sense, includes the freedom to communicate with whomever one chooses (freedom of assembly or association) and the freedom to enact the results of one’s communicative exchanges in self-determination (the right to vote).

Socrates refuses to participate in debate. He explains why: Debate politicizes argument.

And yet, for all the emphasis Dewey places on the key role that being able “to converse freely” plays in democratic living, he doesn’t explain what that means. He himself only tells us what free speech isn’t—insulting, abusive, or intolerant—not what it is. Suppose an idea is to travel from my mind to yours, and it must make that journey “freely”: What path should it take?

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The standard answer is persuasion: Our conversations are “free” when we are open to persuasion, and when our changes of mind are the products of persuasion. In a free society, people engage in persuasion. Persuasion is a form of unilateral cognitive determination: When I make you think what I think, I’ve persuaded you. If I’m trying to persuade you, then I succeed if you end up thinking what I think, and in all other scenarios—you leave unpersuaded, you persuade me—I fail.

But persuasion is not the only kind of unilateral cognitive determination. When someone uses hypnosis, brain surgery, or mindaltering pills to manipulate the thoughts of others, that is unilateral cognitive determination, but it is not persuasion. We should also distinguish someone who operates by persuasion from an expert. When we have collectively recognized a set of people as authoritative, and anything they say as “knowledge”—or, as close to knowledge as we can hope for—then they do not need to persuade us. They can just tell us, because we believe what they say on the strength of their say-so. We describe ourselves as “consulting” experts, which is to say, we trust their testimony. And when experts communicate among themselves, they transfer their knowledge by some accepted process of demonstration or proof. Experts interact with one another not by persuasion but by teaching.

Socrates points out that those engaged in politics speak on too many topics to count as experts in any of them. He also notes that heated political disagreement is a sign that no one is in the position to do any teaching; and that there is no standard proof procedure. If persuasion is not hypnotic mind control and it is not how experts engage with other experts—which is by teaching—or how experts engage with nonexperts—which is by telling—then what is it?

Look at the following passage, in which Gorgias the ancient Greek orator describes how his persuasive powers give him an advantage in medicine over his brother, the doctor:

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Many a time I’ve gone with my brother or with other doctors to call on some sick person who refuses to take his medicine or allow the doctor to perform surgery or cauterization on him. And when the doctor failed to persuade him, I succeeded, by means of no other craft than oratory. And I maintain too that if an orator and a doctor came to any city anywhere you like and had to compete in speaking in the assembly or some other gathering over which of them should be appointed doctor, the doctor wouldn’t make any showing at all, but the one who had the ability to speak would be appointed, if he so wished. And if he were to compete with any other craftsman whatever, the orator more than anyone else would persuade them that they should appoint him, for there isn’t anything that the orator couldn’t speak more persuasively about to a gathering than could any other craftsman whatever. That’s how great the accomplishment of this craft is, and the sort of accomplishment it is!

Gorgias prides himself on being able to move your mind where he wants it to go, without using any illicit mind-control devices, and without possessing the relevant expertise; he does this by means of “no other craft than oratory,” which is to say, the art of persuasion. But how do you persuade someone of what neither of you knows? You give them the experience of knowing, without the reality. You do this by choosing your message, and your audience, carefully; as an orator, you have an eye for those claims people were antecedently inclined to tell themselves they know, and a knack for inducing in others the illusion of knowledge. A persuader leverages the general human inclination to tell ourselves that we know things that we don’t know.

Socrates calls this flattery. He says the orator is skilled at flattery, and therefore, unfree: Someone constrained to flatter his audience is not at liberty to speak the truth. Someone bent on persuasion has to tell people what, in some sense, they want to hear.

Those engaged in politics speak on too many topics to count as experts in any of them.

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Debate might at first appear to be an improvement over persuasion. It offers up a platform to both sides, instead of only to one, acknowledging the reality of the disagreement. But Socrates does not believe in debate, and refuses to participate in it. In Plato’s Gorgias, he explains why: Debate politicizes argument. At one point, Socrates’ interlocutor, Polus, insists that Socrates has already been refuted, which is to say, “lost” the debate between them, because he adopted an unpopular position:

Don’t you think you’ve been refuted already, Socrates, when you’re saying things the likes of which no human being would maintain? Just ask any one of these people.

Socrates objects that Polus is treating their conversation as a debate in which

one side thinks it’s refuting the other when it produces many reputable witnesses on behalf of the arguments it presents, while the person who asserts the opposite produces only one witness, or none at all. This “refutation” is worthless, as far as truth is concerned, for it might happen sometimes that an individual is brought down by the false testimony of many reputable people.

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Socrates is not willing to “give in” to Polus’ side on the basis of how many votes Polus can wring from the audience. Debate is always a matter of convincing a third party. The third party might be the judge of the debate tournament, the jury in a court case, the members of the Athenian Assembly, the voters in a presidential debate, or the “general public.” Debate maps the project of determining which idea is true onto a contest between the debaters; more specifically, it becomes a contest between the persuasive powers of those debaters.

Adding another persuader doesn’t change the fact that each remains tasked with fostering an illusion of knowledge; the debate format simply adds the twist of allowing persuaders to compete over who is better at that sort of flattery. If the audience of ordinary persuasion asks themselves, “Is this person making me feel like I know something?” the audience of a debate asks themselves, “Which of these people is best at making me feel like I know something?”

How do you persuade someone? You give them the experience of knowing, without the reality.

Polus thinks that he has refuted Socrates even though Socrates is unpersuaded; Socrates, by contrast, insists, “The truth is never refuted.” In the real kind of arguing Socrates is interested in, the truth can never lose; it is only in the gamified version of refutation in which Polus wants to engage—the version where you win by persuading people—that someone who is saying true things can nevertheless “lose.” Socrates refuses to play this game. Contrasting himself with Gorgias and Polus, Socrates denies that he is in the persuasion business. Elsewhere, he denies that he possesses the art of speaking well, and insists that he has never been anyone’s teacher. In the Gorgias, Socrates suggests that he and Polus ignore the audience and turn toward each other:

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Though I’m only one person, I don’t agree with you. You don’t compel me; instead you produce many false witnesses against me and try to banish me from my property, the truth. For my part, if I don’t produce you as a single witness to agree with what I’m saying, then I suppose I’ve achieved nothing worth mentioning concerning the things we’ve been discussing. And I suppose you haven’t either, unless you disregard all these other people and bring me—though I’m only one person—to testify on your side.

The debater is interested in producing a performance that is calculated to have a particular sort of effect on an audience; Socrates, by contrast, is interested in a two-way inquisitive interaction. His principle is: Persuade or be persuaded. Socrates counts it a victory if he convinces his interlocutor, but an even greater victory if his interlocutor convinces him. Socrates also insists that this method, which treats disagreement as an opportunity for learning, is the “true politics.” You are only engaged in a real political disagreement if you ignore everyone else in the room, indeed, everyone else in the world, besides the one person you disagree with. They are the only one whose vote you need.

Excerpted from Open Socrates: The Case for a Philosophical Life. Copyright © 2025 by Agnes Callard. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

Read a Nautilus interview with philosopher Agnes Callard, “Argue Your Way to a Fuller Life.”

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Lead image: Credit: rudall30 / Shutterstock

Agnes Callard

Posted on October 30, 2025

Agnes Callard is an American philosopher and an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Chicago. She has written for the New York Times, The New Yorker, Atlantic, Harper’s, Point, and others. She lives in Chicago.

PHILOSOPHY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Is Intelligence?

At a church in Italy, we sought to shed an old definition for one that could save us

By Amanda Gefter    October 23, 2025

Marcelo Gleiser rang the church bell to marshal us inside. The clangor cut across a hushed landscape. We were in the Tuscan countryside on an impossibly green hilltop, nothing but sheep bleating in the distance, and the creak of iron gates, flanked by carved stone lions, at the end of a gravel drive lined with Italian cypress trees.

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The church belongs to Gleiser, a Dartmouth cosmologist and author most recently of The Dawn of a Mindful Universe: A Manifesto for Humanity’s Future. It came with the villa he bought here above the town of Moteroni d’Arbia. Gleiser fixed up the 500-year-old chapel with a dream of turning it into a think tank and named it the Island of Knowledge.

We were here to come up with a new definition of intelligence. The old one, according to Gleiser, won’t do. “We have an ideology of infinite growth on a finite planet,” he said. “That’s obviously not sustainable. What kind of intelligence are we using to create this scenario? That keeps me up at night.”

To expand the definition of intelligence, Gleiser brought together cognitive neuroscientist Peter Tse; astrophysicist Adam Frank; evolutionary ecologist Monica Gagliano; philosopher Evan Thompson; technology critic and essayist Meghan O’Gieblyn; and Indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen.

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Inside, the church was small but grand. White stucco walls arched into a vaulted ceiling; colorful rugs were strewn across the terracotta floor. In place of wooden pews were comfortable armchairs. Celidwen, an Indigenous woman of Nahua and Maya lineage from Chiapas in southern Mexico, walked toward the dais, stood in front of the altar and blew into a small clay flute.

Poems would be recited. Tears would be shed. We weren’t allowed to wear shoes.

She produced a haunting melody. The scientists were rapt. I could see the earnestness on their faces, and Gleiser’s most of all—a belief that whatever was about to happen in that church had the potential to save the world. Suddenly, Gleiser’s dog burst into the church and bounded down the center aisle, as if summoned by the song. He stood in front of Celidwen, ears perked at attention and barked. Celidwen repeated the melody.

Celidwen looked around the church, its iconography replete with reminders of colonialism. She asked if we could go outside.

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The sun was beating down. Celidwen told the scientists to gather in a circle. I hung back against the church door. Celidwen gestured for me to join, and I pointed at my notebook to say, “Just a journalist. Just watching.” She shook her head. Not an option. I set my notebook on the grass and found a place to stand.

Celidwen handed us each a dried leaf, which she produced from a small pouch, then told us to taste it. “Let it explore your palate,” she said. I pretended to comply but palmed mine, wondering what it would be like to be the kind of person who puts a strange thing in their mouth just because someone tells them to. Maybe it would be nice, I thought. To feel so open and part of something. She asked us to lay down in the grass, join hands, close our eyes. My little leaf fluttered to the ground.

This was not going to be a typical scientific conference. Which I suppose made sense when you’re trying to overhaul typical scientific ideas. Poems would be recited. Tears would be shed. We weren’t allowed to wear shoes.

I tried my best to keep an open mind.

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Intelligence is usually understood as the ability to use reason to solve problems, skillfully wielding knowledge to achieve particular ends. It’s a linear, deductive, mechanistic view, born in the Renaissance (which bloomed not far from here) and fully embraced by science after a workshop not so different from this one.

In 1949, at Manchester University, a computer scientist, a chemist, a philosopher, a zoologist, a neurophysiologist, and a mathematician got together to debate whether intelligence could ever be instantiated in machines. One of the participants, Alan Turing, inspired by the discussion, went home and wrote up his “imitation game,” now known as the Turing test, where a machine is dubbed intelligent if, through text conversation alone, it can fool us into thinking it’s human.

ANCIENT WATERS: Indigenous scholar Yuria Celidwen enjoys thermal water that once powered a medieval mill in the Tuscan village of Bagno Vignoni. Photo by Steve Paulson.

Seventy-five years later, we’ve got chatbots acing the Turing test, and science conceiving of brains as Turing machines. Is it possible we’re missing something? The roboticist Rodney Brooks once lamented our “intellectual cul-de-sac, in which we model brains and computers on each other,” each model a mirror reflecting the other, with no understanding of how understanding comes in.

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Inside the church, I could feel Gleiser’s urgency as he launched the discussion. Could the world agree on a new definition of intelligence before our collective stupidity destroys us?

In the usual way of thinking, one starts with a problem, applies intelligence, then arrives at a solution. That works great for Turing machines, whose intelligence comes down to the ability to follow explicit rules, or algorithms. But when we turn around and apply it to ourselves, administering IQ tests like Turing tests in reverse, designed to see how well a human can perform like a machine, we fail to capture the essence of living intelligence. Living intelligence, Thompson said, isn’t so much about solving problems as it is about defining problems in the first place.

Problems arise for living systems precisely because they need to keep on living. And they do that, Thompson explained, through “autopoiesis,” the biological process of self-creation and self-maintenance by which a cell or organism builds itself, over and over again, through its interactions with the world. Unlike a living creature, nothing matters to an AI, because the AI is not built out of the consequences of its own actions. When nothing matters, nothing is a problem. Nothing means anything. “People call large language models ‘stochastic parrots,’ ” Thompson said. “But I think it’s insulting to parrots.”

If problem-solving is linear, autopoiesis involves a circular causality that loops through the brain, body, and world. It’s for this reason that the group agreed on a rather radical claim: To understand intelligence, we need a new view of causation. Or rather, an old one, one that goes back to Aristotle’s “final causes” before they were ousted from the scientific method by the likes of Francis Bacon and Galileo. Tse, the neuroscientist, called for a “relational view of causation”; Thompson referred to it as the causality of life, in which, as Kant wrote, “parts reciprocally cause and effect the form of the whole.”

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Our old definition of intelligence forces us to act as if we live in a small world.

Thompson, drawing from work by the anthropologist Gregory Bateson, explained how the old view of intelligence “forces a linear structure onto the non-linear and entangled networks that make up the complex systems of the body and its relation to the environment, which Bateson calls the ‘total mind.’ ” When we lose sight of those circular feedback loops, we become blind to the consequences of our actions—how they react back on ourselves and reverberate through the world. If machine-like straight lines are intelligence, then Bateson’s total mind is something more like wisdom.

O’Gieblyn told a story of how, when she was 13 years old, she set out on a quest to become wise. For three years, on the advice of a pastor, she read daily from the Book of Proverbs. “Did this exercise make me precociously wise?” Not exactly. The trouble, she explained, was that at 13, she hadn’t lived much. “It seems that the wisdom of aphorisms can only be grasped in hindsight, after one has arrived at their truth through the ordinary hell of trial and error.”

When an artificial neural network trains on data, O’Gieblyn asked, or is told what’s right and wrong by a human supervisor, does that result in intelligence? “Or is that a little too much like a 13-year-old girl thinking she can become wise by underlining her favorite proverbs in her study Bible?”

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Aphorisms, algorithms, Thompson said, they’re “late to the party.” They are small bones fossilized from the messy body of lived experience. Take that experience away, and the intelligence goes with it.

I skipped the morning Qigong ceremony the next day and slipped into the church as the group was resuming discussions. Frank suggested that the planet exercises its own form of intelligence. “I’m not talking about consciousness,” he clarified. “Intelligence.”

It’s an idea that goes back to James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis’s Gaia theory: the proposal that the biosphere (the sum total of life on Earth) is self-regulating. Just as a cell’s metabolic network produces the components of which it’s made, including its membrane, which allows it to persist, life on Earth, according to Gaia, is an autopoietic-like network that produces itself and the atmospheric boundaries that allow it to continue existing.

PLANT WISDOM: Ecologist Monica Gagliano’s experiments have shown that plants learn from experience, altering their behavior in response to environmental cues from their past.  Photo by Steve Paulson.

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“Gaia was a really important idea,” Frank said. Until the New Agers got a hold of it in the 1970s. Frank showed a photo of “neopagans” Oberon and Morning Glory Zell-Ravenheart, dressed in full hippie garb, crouching beside what appeared to be a small unicorn. “Yes,” he said, “that’s a unicorn. Somebody took a goat and glued a horn to the top of its head.” (It wasn’t glue; Oberon, a self-declared wizard, had patented a surgical procedure exclusively for unicorn production.)

But the fact remains that for 4 billion years, the geosphere and biosphere have been shaping each other’s evolution. Early in Earth’s history, Frank explained, the biosphere was “immature”—it drew matter and energy from the geosphere but didn’t have enough interconnections to act back on the planet in ways that would stabilize the system, so it was always at risk of running itself into the ground. Then came the “great oxygenation event”—which wasn’t so much “great” as “nearly disastrous.” Some 2.4 billion years ago, life invented photosynthesis and flooded the atmosphere with oxygen, which was poison to most living things at the time, leading to a mass extinction and sending the climate plummeting into an ice age.

Luckily, the system righted itself. Life invented a new form of metabolism, one that used oxygen, which in turn covered the energy cost of multicellular life. Oxygen in the atmosphere formed the ozone layer, which shielded life from fatal ultraviolet radiation. Life and Earth, they were finally in balance—the biosphere had matured.

“Now if there’s a solar flare,” Frank said, “and sunlight increases by 10 percent, certain bacteria will start spawning, generating chemicals which then flow out into the atmosphere, changing the Earth’s reflectivity, which brings the temperature back down.” It’s exactly the kind of autopoietic circular causality that is, according to Thompson, the mark of living intelligence.

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But now, on top of the biosphere, we have the “technosphere”— the sum total of human activity; technology, transport, communications systems. And the technosphere, Frank, is “is not self-maintaining, it’s the opposite. It’s degrading the conditions that it needs to survive. What do we have? Another couple hundred years?”

LIVING INTELLIGENCE: Unlike machines, philosopher Evan Thompson explains, living systems exhibit intelligence through circular feedback loops that produce and maintain themselves.  Photo by Steve Paulson.

Gagliano offered up a new perspective: Maybe the only path to a mature technosphere is to re-engage with the biosphere we seem to have forgotten. “Throughout my 15 years working with plants, it has become ever so clear that we are engaging with a lot of intelligence,” she said. “And we’re so fixated on our own intelligence and capacity to solve problems that we don’t realize we don’t have to do it alone as a human species.”

Gagliano told the group that her plants talk to her. She clarified: literally. They tell her things she doesn’t know; offer design specs for her experiments. Sometimes they’re snarky. Sometimes they’re sweet. Surely they can advise us, if we ask for their help.

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Tse, the neuroscientist, seemed circumspect, and determined to hang on to a shred of human exceptionalism. He insisted that when we talk about the intelligence of other animals, let alone of plants, we don’t really know what we’re talking about, because we have no way of knowing what they think or want.

Just then, Felix, the dog, trotted over to the church doors and barked. Frank walked over and opened the door; the dog happily ran outside. “Empathy is how we know,” Frank said, walking back to his chair. “We don’t have to model it intellectually. We feel it with our living bodies.”

We all took a field trip to float in Etruscan thermal baths. “When the plants talk to you,” I asked Gagliano as we trudged through a garden to get to the ancient hot springs, “are they speaking in English? In Italian?” She laughed, as if she’d been asked this dumb question many times before and slipped into the rippling pool with the other scientists. I hung back, watching from the sidelines, the scent of sulfur stinging in my eyes.

Later, back in the church, Gagliano spoke about attention. Science’s idea of paying attention, she said, is to come to a pre-given reality with pre-given boundaries and try to describe or represent it, passively, as mere observers. “But this denies the porousness of the body,” she said. “The feeling body is not only irrelevant but antithetical to science.”

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I started to understand: The point wasn’t whether the plants were talking; it was that she was listening. And when you listen—not passively, but porously—you begin to hear astonishing things.

People call large language models ‘stochastic parrots.’ I think it’s insulting to parrots.”

Gagliano described an experiment where she and some physicists wired up spruce trees in a forest in the Dolomites to record their electrical signals. They were monitoring the signals when the trees suddenly synchronized their behavior—first the oldest trees, then the younger. Fourteen hours later, there was a solar eclipse.

According to Gagliano, it was as if the oldest trees remembered the signs—the strange tugs of gravity coming from the celestial alignment—and spread word through the forest to take action in advance, to preserve their water. As Gagliano put it, the older trees were saying, “Hold your hydraulic potential!”

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Their sample size was too small to draw grand conclusions, but the results were enough to raise grand questions. Questions you wouldn’t ask if you assumed from the start that trees can’t remember or learn or communicate; if you assumed, that is, that intelligence resides in singular brains alone.

During a coffee break, I asked Celidwen. “In your culture, do people think of the mind as in the head?” She let out a hearty laugh. “Of course not.”

Later, when we were all sitting in a circle wrapped in blankets in the unheated church, she told a story.

“When I was a child, my assimilated teacher told me that I wasn’t very intelligent,” Celidwen said. “I went home to my dad and asked him, what is intelligence? He said, I don’t know what your teacher meant, but we think of intelligence as the way we nourish our relationships. The better you are at caring for all our siblings”—our fellow humans, animals, plants, the elements of the Earth—“the more intelligent you are. My grandmother understood all the gossip of the birds, when to plant, when to cultivate, when to harvest, and the language of the water and wind. She only studied until the first year of elementary school, but she was profoundly wise.”

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ARISTOTLE IN THE BRAIN: Neuroscientist Peter Tse argues for bringing Aristotelian causes—agency and purpose—back into science. Photo by Steve Paulson.

Something seemed to click in the room. The questions we’d been asking about who has intelligence—birds? ferns? machines?—had been utterly beside the point because intelligence is not something one has. It’s something one participates in, the tangled feedback loops that make up this whole interwoven planet. We’re intelligent if our participation keeps the system healthy, and stupid if we eat through it like a cancer.

Gleiser’s wife, Kari, a trauma psychologist, showed the group a video of the famous “still face experiment” to demonstrate what happens when relational intelligence breaks down. In the video, a psychologist instructs a mother to interact normally with her baby—talking, cooing, making silly faces. Then, she’s told to freeze. The baby tries to engage the mother; the mother doesn’t react. The baby tries harder. Nothing. The baby begins to wail. It’s hard to watch. You feel it in your chest. You feel for the confused baby, of course, but you feel worse for the mother, forced to deny all her own instincts, to stop her body from doing what it knows, responsively, responsibly—intelligently—to do.

By the end of the week, I began to feel it in my chest: Science had gotten intelligence wrong.

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Back at that 1949 workshop, Turing found himself debating the scientist and philosopher Michael Polanyi. What Polanyi argued at that meeting was that human intelligence has a component that can’t be stated in propositional terms, and therefore can’t be mechanized as AI, a “tacit knowledge,” he called it, saying, “We know more than we can tell.”

Thompson had said AI functions in “small worlds”—realms of narrowly defined problems in search of formal solutions, purposeless billiard games of cause and effect, lacking context and meaning and care.

Our old definition of intelligence forces us to act as if we live in a small world. A world where trees can’t remember eclipses and the planet is a dumb, spinning rock. Only we know—somewhere deep in our biology, in our total mind—that the world is so much bigger. That we are so much bigger. Yet we stare at it, still-faced, hanging back against the church door.

“Those leaves,” I asked Celidwen, “the ones you gave us to put in our mouths on the first day—what were they?” I was kicking myself for having been so stubborn then.

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“It’s from a native plant of Coelhá, where I was born, that is called mummun,” she said. “In the Indigenous lore of the area, it is used in ceremony to bring people together, to enhance “heart relationships,” or relationships based on emotional intelligence.”

It occurred to me that if intelligence is participation in big, messy cycles of activity and self-regulation that loop through the whole system of life on Earth, then our job is not really to join in. Our job is to realize that we’re already in. That we exist in relation from the start, linked through gravity, oxygen, language, through lines of evolution and adaptation that stretch back billions of years. That we know this—not as one knows an aphorism, but tacitly and totally. That the real work is to trust in the intelligence all around us, in all the things we know but can’t tell.

As the final meeting wound down, I found myself alone in the church with Gleiser. He was gazing at one of the paintings on the wall, The Temptation of St. Anthony. Artists throughout history, including Hieronymus Bosch and Michelangelo, have depicted St. Anthony being seduced by Satan to indulge in wealth and glory. But this version, by Italian painter Rutilio Manetti, is unusual. “The weird thing is that the devil is wearing glasses,” Gleiser said. “It’s reason tempting faith.”

Read more from Nautilus on the scientists, philosophers, and ideas at the conference:

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“What Science Forgets” Human experience must be factored into science. The authors of a new manifesto argue why.

“Guided by Plant Voices” Plants talk to this ecologist. They tell her how to do better science.

“Consciousness, Creativity, and Godlike AI” American writer Meghan O’Gieblyn on when the mind is alive.

“Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees” Plants communicate, nurture their seedlings, and get stressed.

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“Is Life a Form of Computation?” Alan Turing and John von Neumann saw it early: the logic of life and the logic of code may be one and the same.

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Lead image: fran_kie / Shutterstock

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Amanda Gefter

Posted on October 23, 2025

Amanda Gefter is a science writer and the author of Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn.

Physics

- No More Tears? Scientists Take a Keen Eye to Onion Slicing

- The World’s Tiniest Wave Tank

PHYSICS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

No More Tears? Scientists Take a Keen Eye to Onion Slicing

New research sheds light on a familiar problem, with important implications for food safety

By Jake Currie    October 29, 2025

You get home from work after a busy day and rush to prepare dinner. Moments later, you’re reeling from a chemical attack in your own kitchen—onion fumes and a blurry-eyed interruption of the evening’s prep. It’s a scenario so familiar it seems inevitable, but what if science can help?

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While tips for mitigating the tear-inducing effects of chopped onions are legion, the science behind them is relatively scant. We know the chemistry of why slicing onions causes tears—sulfur-containing compounds tickle the nerves in the cornea—what’s less clear are the physics behind the eruptions of these noisome fumes. Until now.

Publishing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Cornell University researchers revealed some new insights into the mechanics of onion droplet formation—and some handy tips on how to minimize it.

To study the phenomenon, researchers used a computer model to analyze high-speed footage of knives of various sharpness cutting onions at various speeds. They found that “faster or blunter blades significantly increase both the number and energy of ejected droplets.” In other words, using a sharp knife and slow slices can limit obnoxious onion aerosols from reaching your eyes. (Bad news for those of us whose knives and time management skills aren’t as finely honed as they should be.)

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Read more: “Why Revolutionaries Love Spicy Food”

The reason, according to the authors, lies in the structure of the onion itself. The outermost layer of the bulb, just beneath the papery skin, is relatively tougher than the inner layers. That means when a blunt blade presses down, it compacts the spongier mesophyll beneath, yielding a more energetic burst and a higher volume of fluids upon release.

So razor-sharp knives and deliberate cuts are your best bet to minimize droplets reaching your eyes, but what about other remedies? Researchers did take a look at whether refrigerating onions reduces droplets, but came up with a fresh caution. They found that chilling onions actually yields a larger volume of droplet ejection, possibly due to the brittleness of plant tissues at lower temperatures (although the authors note more study is needed before any definitive conclusions can be reached).

For those wondering why scientists would spend their efforts parsing diced onions, the applications of their research go beyond merely making meal prep a more dry-eyed affair. Foodborne illnesses can spread, not just by contact with contaminated tissues, but also through aerosolized fluids. “Atomized droplets are perfect carriers of viruses and bacteria,” the authors wrote, including Salmonella and Campylobacter. Something to consider the next time you jump into slicing without sharpening your knives first.

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Lead image: Photoongraphy / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on October 29, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

PHYSICS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The World’s Tiniest Wave Tank

This ocean on a chip unlocks the mysteries of rogue waves, tsunamis, and other aquatic oddities

By Kristen French    October 24, 2025

The ocean seems infinite when you stand at its edge, stretching in shades of blue to the horizon. But scientists have managed to create a model of this vast body of water that is so tiny it can fit on a grain of rice. They miniaturized the sea so they can more easily study the nonlinear behavior of water waves, such as rogue waves, tsunamis, and solitary waves known as solitons.

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All of these waves can be modeled to a certain extent in large wave pools, with artificial channels extending several hundred feet. But the new device, essentially the world’s tiniest wave tank, could cut the time needed to do experiments on wave dynamics a millionfold—and days needed for data collection in traditional wave tanks to milliseconds, according to Professor Warwick Bowen, who leads the Quantum Optics laboratory at the University of Queensland in Australia.

When they set their tiny wave tank in motion, Bowen and his team observed some pretty exotic stuff: phenomena that had been predicted by physics but had never been seen before, such as waves that leaned back instead of forward, and solitons that traveled as depressions rather than peaks. The physicists used laser light to drive exotic fluid through a miniscule tube, which created the waves they wanted to study. They also used laser light to observe the waves that emerged. They published the data generated with the tiny wave chip in Science.

“A lot of the physics behind waves and turbulence has been a mystery,” said Christopher Baker, lead author of the paper and a physicist at the University of Queensland in Australia, in a statement. But the laws of nonlinear wave motion and turbulence govern “everything from ocean waves and the swirl of hurricanes to the flow of blood and air through our bodies,” he said, as well as the planet’s weather, climate, and even the functioning of some clean-energy technologies like wind farms.

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The device Baker and his team used was built with a layer of superfluid helium only a few millionths of a millimeter thick and the chip that holds it is smaller than a grain of rice. (Superfluid helium is liquid helium that flows with zero viscosity and has unique quantum behaviors: For example, it can climb walls.)

In the future, the researchers say they hope to use the tiny wave pool to discover new laws of fluid dynamics, improve the design of wind turbines and ship hulls, better predict the weather, and explore “energy cascades,” where large eddies transfer energy to smaller ones.

If they succeed, tiny wave pools might just be the wave of the future.

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Lead image: (Fast Cargo Boat Battling The Waves), print by Hokusai, c. 1805. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

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Kristen French

Posted on October 24, 2025

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing features and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, and New York Magazine. She has a masters degree in science journalism from Columbia University.

Psychology

- The Science of Unrequited Love

- Psilocybin Lifted Her Burden

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Science of Unrequited Love

Researchers are learning more about limerence, the term for obsessive, involuntary love that is often unreturned

By Kristen French    October 28, 2025

We’ve all pined for loves that we knew were impossible. Such crushes may burn intensely, particularly when we are young and inexperienced, but they tend to flame out almost as quickly as they ignite. As we grow older, many of us learn to love people who will love us back in equal measure. But some continue to cling to one-sided love affairs. And when this unrequited love becomes obsessive, all consuming, even involuntary and addictive, when it drags on for years, we have left the territory of crushes for a much stranger and more lovelorn land: The land of limerence.

The term limerence was coined in the 1970s by psychologist and philosopher of science Dorothy Tennov, who drew on a decade of her own research, including thousands of questionnaires and case studies, as well as autobiographies and published personal journals. She noticed that many people, across a wide range of time periods, backgrounds, and life circumstances, shared unrequited romantic experiences that had some remarkably consistent features. In her 1979 book, Love and Limerence, Tennov defined limerence as “an uncontrollable, biologically determined, inherently irrational, instinct-like reaction.”

One of the most quixotic features of limerence is the sufferer’s ability to temporarily satisfy their longing with the imagination. As Tennov writes, people with limerence have an “acute sensitivity to any act or thought or condition that can be interpreted favorably, and an extraordinary ability to devise or invent ‘reasonable’ explanations for why the neutrality that the disinterested observer might see is in fact a sign of hidden passion,” from the object of one’s interest.

Circumstances may be ripe today for a surge of limerent love affairs, according to a recent review: It’s easier than ever to feed a romantic obsession with a steady diet of idealized images and accounts of a person’s daily life on social media. And in fact, an entire community of people who suffer from limerence exists on Reddit, with 40,000 weekly visitors. But limerence is not a formal diagnosis. Nor does the condition have any clear overlap with existing clinical disorders, such as erotomania, also known as de Clérambault’s syndrome, a paranoid state where a person believes that another is infatuated with them.

Despite a shortage of psychological study on limerence, some clear parameters have been established: People with limerence typically pine for affection rather than sex and only sustain these feelings towards a single love object at any one time. One sustaining force is uncertainty about whether one’s affection is returned—she loves me, she loves me not. The more uncertainty, the greater the potential for obsession, rumination, and longing.

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In her popular blog The Marginalian, essayist and author Maria Popova writes that limerence is “a style of attachment, the origins of which are still unclear,” and that many people who suffer from it are “otherwise reasonable and high-functioning.” Though race, gender, age, or sexual orientation do not seem to have any bearing on who is limerent, it does seem to tend to afflict more people in creative professions, something she attributes to the fact that,  “the very process of limerence is in a sense a creative process—a process of sustained attention and selective amplification.”

One of literature’s most classic cases of limerent love might be Jay Gatsby’s obsession with Daisy Buchanan in the 1925 novel The Great Gatsby. To be fair, it isn’t the real Daisy who Gatsby loves. It’s an idealized version of her, what she represents. Daisy does not ultimately return Gatsby’s affection, but his obsession with her consumes his entire life. Author F. Scott Fitzgerald writes, “There must have been moments even that afternoon when Daisy tumbled short of his dreams—not through her own fault but because of the colossal vitality of his illusion.”

A certain measure of illusion feeds all forms of love, but limerence suggests that too much fantasy ultimately can leave one adrift and unmoored on the high seas of one-way romance.

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Lead image: Nicoleta Ionescu / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on October 28, 2025

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing features and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, and New York Magazine. She has a masters degree in science journalism from Columbia University.

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Psilocybin Lifted Her Burden

The Covid pandemic left this frontline medical worker burned out, angry, and depressed. Then she got high.

By Grigori Guitchounts    October 20, 2025

When the COVID-19 pandemic erupted in 2020, Rachel Drayer was on the frontlines. She was a physician assistant in emergency medicine at a large hospital in the Seattle area. Patients poured in every day, sick and dying from shortness of breath.

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“I wore the same N95 mask for three weeks,” Drayer, 48, told me recently. She stored it in a paper bag between shifts. “I worried every day about dying. People just like me, fit and healthy, were dying.”

For months on end, Drayer weathered the worst stress she had ever felt. Then things got worse. The atmosphere in the hospital and city changed. “Initially people were pretending to be really kind and supportive, and then people got vile and angry and so selfish and mean,” Drayer said. “It was really hard for me to wrap my head around why people would act that way.”

“I’d like to have joy back. I want to be able to laugh and cry. I want to feel anything.”

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Constantly angry, burned out, and depressed, Drayer moved to a rural town in Washington state to work in a community hospital. She thought the change would do her good. It brought her to a new level of dejection. Patients were now complaining that Covid wasn’t real, it was a government conspiracy.

“I went from managing really scary trauma situations to being told that I was part of some governmental lie to fleece people out of, well, I don’t know what,” Drayer said. “I tried to be nice, but I had to say there’s no way you’re going to convince me that this is fake or contrived or a liberal hoax because I’m pretty sure that I was not shoving tubes down people’s throat for fun.”

TRIP OF A LIFETIME: Psychedelic therapy helped Rachel Drayer overcome the debilitating stress she experienced working in emergency medicine during the COVID-19 pandemic. “It changed my life,” she says. Courtesy of Rachel Drayer.

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Drayer had become an emotional zombie by 2022. At the time, she said, all she could think was, “I don’t want to feel like this anymore. I’d like to have joy back. I’d like to have lightness. I want to be able to laugh and cry. I want to feel anything.”

When Draper learned about a clinical trial in 2022 to take psilocybin to relieve burnout and depression, she signed on the dotted line without hesitation. The clinical trial was designed for people exactly like her: healthcare workers who labored on the Covid frontlines. She also laughed at the prospect, she told me. “Oh, somebody wants to pay me to get high? OK, cool.”

Before the “medicine day,” Drayer said, the trial’s researchers explained to her why she made a good candidate. They told her, she recalled, “You don’t have a long neurobiological history of this kind of depression and stress, which tells us that your brain is not necessarily predisposed to feeling this way. This is an acute stressor that’s causing this. If we can rewire your brain and convince it not to feel this way, it’s probably going to work.”

“It was healing childhood wounds. It was understanding my gifts in the world.”

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The six-hour trip surprised Drayer. “My journey had nothing to do with the hospital or Covid,” she said. “It had nothing at all to do with anything current.” She encountered what she described as “the three mothers of the universe” who showed her that her job was to give light to others. She watched them remove her soul—“this beautiful egg-shaped white light”—from her chest, explain it to her, and nestle it back “in this nest of blankets.”

“It was healing childhood wounds,” Drayer said. “It was understanding my place in the world. It was understanding my gifts in the world. It changed my life.”

Drayer’s story is representative of the renaissance in psychedelic medicine. Drugs like psilocybin promise something extraordinary: a rapid, almost magical relief from mental afflictions that resist conventional treatments. But scientists now challenge that narrative, a topic I explore in my Nautilus article, “What Is Your Brain Doing on Psychedelics?” The scientists suggest it may not be changes in brain activity sparked by psychedelic drugs that explains their therapeutic value, but the subjective experience—and aftermath—of being high.

Drayer agreed the drug wasn’t doing all the work of her recovery. Prior to her psilocybin trip, she said, “the work I did with a therapist trying to figure out how to separate my personal life from my work life and learn how to be softer and not so harsh, primed my brain for change more than anything. I was ready to make a change. I was in a perfect place and time for this.”

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The lasting power of her psychedelic journey, Drayer said, has been reliving it. Six months after the clinical trial, she began experiencing what felt like panic attacks. “I was like, ‘What does this mean?’ And then I realized the thing I experienced during my journey, that’s what it means. I had a moment of clarity and then my whole body calmed down again. And I could just carry on.”

Today, Drayer said, she is no longer consumed by anger at hospital rules like the maximum amount of time she can spend with patients (20 minutes). “I realized that’s not where I should spend my energy, because that energy is not coming back to me in any positive way.” Now she focuses on patient care, has dropped to half-time at the hospital, and opened a private clinic focused on health and wellness. “The whole vision for the place and what I should be doing came from my journey,” she said.

Lead image by Tasnuva Elahi; with image by Jorm Sangsorn / Shutterstock

Grigori Guitchounts

Posted on October 20, 2025

Grigori Guitchounts is a neuroscientist, AI researcher, and a senior associate at Flagship Pioneering, working on AI and machine learning.

Technology

- Your Chatbot “Friend” Is Only Pretending to Like You

- Space Is Raining Junk, and It’s Getting Worse

TECHNOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Your Chatbot “Friend” Is Only Pretending to Like You

ChatGPT and Claude can’t offer real empathy

By Kristen French    October 21, 2025

Last week, Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, tweaked ChatGPT to make it act more like a “friend” again. The company had briefly tuned the dials to make its popular AI chatbot less “effusively agreeable,” after it guided a teenager named Adam Raine, who had become very attached to it, to take his own life. But users revolted when Open AI made the change, complaining ChatGPT now sounded like a robot, so Altman changed it back. “If you want your ChatGPT to respond in a very human-like way, or use a ton of emoji, or act like a friend, ChatGPT should do it,” Altman wrote on X.

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We made ChatGPT pretty restrictive to make sure we were being careful with mental health issues. We realize this made it less useful/enjoyable to many users who had no mental health problems, but given the seriousness of the issue we wanted to get this right.

Now that we have…

— Sam Altman (@sama) October 14, 2025

Lonely people everywhere are increasingly turning to AI chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude for friendship and psychological support. We are, after all, in the midst of a loneliness epidemic, and unlike humans, chatbots have an infinite amount of time to listen. But one of the pillars of friendship is empathy, the ability to share and understand the feelings of another person. Can a virtual machine living in the cloud serve up real empathy?

The answer to that question is complicated, says empathy researcher Anat Perry of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. She spoke on a panel about human-AI relationships at a conference on minds, artificial intelligence, and ethics hosted by the Dalai Lama Library in Dharmasala, India last week. “When it says it feels your pain or it shares your experience, it’s just faking it,” explained Perry. Chatbots can express cognitive empathy, taking another person’s perspective, and motivational empathy, signaling that they want to alleviate the listener’s pain, she said. But they can’t offer affective empathy, the actual sharing of another person’s joy or pain, which comes from real-life experience.

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Perry suspected that most humans already understand this and value the empathic support of a human more than that of a chatbot. To test her hunch, she ran an experiment in which she tricked her subjects. Perry and her colleagues asked 1,000 people recruited online to share a recent emotional experience. Half of the group was told they would get a response from ChatGPT and the other half from a human. In fact, all of the responses were AI-generated—but prompted to be highly empathic. When they rated the responses, people said they felt more positive emotions, and fewer negative ones, when they perceived the responder to be a human.

A second experiment showed that 40 percent of people were willing to wait up to two years for a response to an emotional experience from a human instead of getting an immediate response from a chatbot. Those who chose a human said, “they wanted someone who could truly understand them, share some of their emotions, care for them, and maybe even alleviate their loneliness.”

But that still leaves the other 60 percent, who were more interested in hearing from a chatbot right away. It’s a potentially concerning finding. While Claude, ChatGPT, and other chatbots might offer a temporary bandaid for humanity’s loneliness crisis, the more we turn to the machines, the less time we will have for each other. Ultimately, we may all realize there is no actual shoulder to lean on, no hand to wipe away the tears. We will have tumbled into a hall of machine-held mirrors.

Lead image: Vector Mine / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on October 21, 2025

Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing features and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, and New York Magazine. She has a masters degree in science journalism from Columbia University.

TECHNOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Space Is Raining Junk, and It’s Getting Worse

With another hunk of space debris crashing down, the perils of a jampacked low-Earth orbit hit home

By Bob Grant    October 21, 2025

A huge hunk of burning metal appeared in the Australian desert this past weekend, discovered by mine workers in the remote Pilbara region of Western Australia. Yesterday, the Australian Space Agency confirmed that the smoking wreckage smashed into Earth from space, writing on X that, “The debris is likely a propellant tank or pressure vessel from a space launch vehicle.”

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Though officials there wouldn’t conjecture as to the precise source of the junk—“The Agency is continuing the process of determining the exact nature of the debris and its origin through engagement with global counterparts”—at least one expert suspects it came from a Chinese rocket. Dutch archaeologist-turned-space scientist Marco Langbroek of Delft Technical University, wrote on his blog SatTrackCam Leiden that, “the origin of this apparent space debris is a Chinese Jielong 3 upper stage.”

This is not the first time that smoldering space junk has pummeled Earth. Not by a longshot. The first recorded incident, in fact, was in 1969, when debris from a Soviet spacecraft struck the deck of a Japanese ship. And the space age has been littered with such events. Notably, in 1978 a Soviet satellite that descended through the atmosphere above Canada sprinkled radioactive debris across the northern part of that country.

The number of satellites and assorted space jetsam in low Earth orbit has increased exponentially since those early days. Just comparing now with 2019, there are almost 10,500 more objects floating at altitudes below 1,200 miles above our heads. In total, there are now more than 24,000 objects in low Earth orbit. That 76 percent increase, according to a recent study in Acta Astronautica, is cause for alarm.

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Hugh Lewis, a professor of astronautics at the University of Birmingham in England, recently told Space.com that there is a 10 percent chance that those orbiting objects collide within a year. That could increase as more objects join the fray—as more debris floats around our planet, the chances of more space junk raining down increases. Just last May, two pieces of the trunk section of the SpaceX Crew-7 Dragon vessel rained down from the sky in North Carolina, and several more space junk incidents have occurred this year.

Though satellites and other spacecraft can and do perform evasive maneuvers to avoid such collisions, the more crowded low Earth orbit gets, the more errors in these maneuvers are apt to happen.

And you thought traffic on your morning commute was bad.

Lead image: NASA

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Bob Grant

Posted on October 21, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

Zoology

- You Might Be Loving Fluffy to Death

- Rats Grab Lunch on the Wing

- Naked Clams and Sunken Ships

- Bats That Glow

- The Secrets of Deadly Snake Bites

- These Three Species Have Eased Back From the Brink

- Mysterious Deep Sea Habitats Reveal New Species

- Check Out the Beak on This Baby Basking Shark

- The Problem with Farmed Seafood

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

You Might Be Loving Fluffy to Death

Overexuberant pet care could be killing our fur babies

By Bob Grant    October 29, 2025

We’ve all seen them: Puppies pushed along in strollers. Cats parading in Halloween costumes custom made for them. Canines and felines so coddled and cuddled that even they know they’re more than just a companion animal.

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But the rise of “fur baby culture” is a dangerous trend, breeding animal welfare problems and bilking well-intentioned humans out of millions of dollars per year. This is the warning issued in the recently published book Veterinary Controversies and Ethical Dilemmas, which contains dozens of essays edited by a quartet of veterinarians.

The path from wolf to domesticated hunting companion to purpose-bred working dog to pampered lap dog has been a long and winding one. The same goes for cats. But the latest chapter in the saga of these unique species, where pets are anthropomorphized into members of our families, has given birth to a culture of overdiagnosing and overtreating humanity’s best friends. Often, unnecessary and invasive procedures can actually compromise the health of pets, while pet parents seek to salve their consciences. Veterinary care and pet-related companies have evolved into substantial industries that continue to feed this culture.

Read More: “How We Really Tamed the Dog”

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“A few vets, us included, see the rise of the ‘fur baby’ as a huge problem for animals and their welfare,” Eddie Clutton, a veterinary anesthesiologist and editor of the book, said in a statement. “Some, perhaps many vets, as well as corporate shareholders, see the concept as a tremendously useful way in which to make loads of money.”

Pets are of course already a big business. According to a 2024 survey from the American Veterinary Medical Association, there are an estimated 89.7 million pet dogs and 73.8 million pet cats in the United States. Each dog owner spent an average of more than $1,700 per year on their canine companions in 2024, and each cat owner spent more than $1,300. A whopping 88.8 percent of dog owners and 84.7 percent of cat owners consider their pet to be a “member of the family.”

There is currently a double-edged sword of advancing veterinary medicine, as the book’s writers point out. It has led to a significant increase in the lifespans of most pets. “Better preventative [sic] medicine has allowed animals to reach old age,” said vet and wildlife researcher Tanya Stephens, who also edited the book. “However, longer lives may not necessarily be happier ones if the animal is riddled with old-age ailments and the owner and veterinarian are reluctant to say the last goodbye.”

Complicating matters for pet owners and their fur babies is an ecosystem of petcare influencers, who often share health and wellness tips for pets with little or no underlying scientific support or evidence.

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Meanwhile, some U.S. veterinarians are noting an uptick in pet parents who are anti-vaccination for their animals. As the country’s top health officials peddle vaccine skepticism and seek to change long-standing vaccination schedules for human children, it appears the trend is being reflected in some vet clinics.

The enduring and unquestioning companionship gifted to us by our animal copilots deserves an approach to their care that strikes a balance between the quality of their lives and the quality of ours. Not too little and not too much should do us both best.

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Lead image: IvoKirov / Pixabay

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Bob Grant

Posted on October 29, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Rats Grab Lunch on the Wing

An unexpected behavior captured on film

By Bob Grant    October 28, 2025

Forget about Pizza Rat. Scientists have found Bat Rat.

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The ever adaptable and clever brown rat has surprised researchers with its survival acumen yet again. This time, rats in Germany were caught on video camping out at urban bat hibernation sites and snatching the winged mammals out of the air.

Global Ecology and Conservation

Scientists there observed the novel hunting behavior between 2020 and 2024 and shared videos of the midair predation in a Global Ecology and Conservation paper. They also saw rats grab bats who had landed near the sites and found piles of bat remains, indicating instances of predation that they didn’t capture on video.

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The brown rat, also known as the Norway rat, originally hails from Asia, but has made its way onto every continent save for Antarctica so far. And today they happily make their homes in a variety of domains, from woodlands to city sewers. Although they have a reputation as foragers (see: Pizza Rat), previous research has also documented them catching fish, lizards, and young birds as well. This is the first mid-air bat-snatching documented yet, however.

The authors of the paper bemoan the negative ecological effects that rats have had on countless native species the world over, particularly by preying on ground nesting bird species. Their work adds evidence of disruption to yet another native fauna, one that plays the important ecological role of insect population control.

And there is another potential danger of this unique rat-bat connection: disease spread between the well-documented pathogen reservoirs. “Our observations suggest that it should be investigated whether and how these interactions contribute to pathogen dynamics in urban ecosystems,” they write.

Interactions between rats and bats don’t always go in the rats’ favor, however. Other recent research, published in BMC Biology, found that at one study site in Israel, sometimes bats attacked local rats instead.

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As we pause to appreciate the majesty and wonder of bats during Bat Week, let us spare a thought for those members of Genus Myotis who eke out a living in their urban landscape as they contend with death from below at the claws of crafty rodent predators.

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Lead image: Global Ecology and Conservation

Bob Grant

Posted on October 28, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Naked Clams and Sunken Ships

A brazen plan to grow an animal that has been the bane of sailors for centuries—to feed the world

By Alex Riley    October 28, 2025

Fifteenth-century explorer Christopher Columbus was certain that his expedition had been cursed. Sailing across the Caribbean Sea with four ships in his fleet, a series of brutal storms kept the flotilla at the mercy of the wind, rain, thunder, and waves for nearly three months, preventing the vessels from reaching safe harbor. As he wrote in a letter in 1503, “It seemed as if it were the end of the world.”

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Under the chaotic waves, a more insidious threat was destroying his ships from within. Like a Biblical swarm set loose in the ocean depths, thousands of hungry worm-like animals gnawed at the wooden boards of his hulls. The ravenous beasts could grow to a foot in length in just six months. “My ships were pierced by borers more than a honey-comb,” Columbus later wrote.* “With three pumps, and the use of pots and kettles, we could scarcely clear the water that came into the ship, there being no remedy but this for the mischief done by the ship-worm.”

Battered by storm and made porous by the shipworm, Columbus’ ships were left stranded on an island that would come to be known as Jamaica. In an age before iron and steel hulls, his plight was a common experience for any voyage; if you build something out of wood and soak it in the ocean for long enough, it will get eaten by shipworms. From the Ancient Greeks to the Spanish Armada, boat-builders not only had to make a vessel sea-worthy but also attempt to make it shipworm-proof. Hulls were coated in tar, animal hair, seal oil, lead, copper, and, in the 15th century, a second layer of wood that was bolted to the outside the actual hull—a sacrificial offering to the insatiable wood-boring worms of the ocean.

Just as shipworms did not exactly evolve to eat ships, they are also not exactly worms.

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Even today, shipworms eat piers, breakwaters, and pilings. At a cost of $300 million, the foundations underneath Brooklyn Bridge Park, for example, are presently being wrapped with concrete or coated with epoxy resin in order to stop these animals from collapsing this sprawling structure near New York City’s iconic span into the East River.

Just as shipworms did not exactly evolve to eat ships, they are also not exactly worms. Members of the Teredo genus, these animals are mollusks most closely related to clams. The two valves of their shell aren’t used for protection but as sharp jaws able to scrape through even the toughest oak. Their long, worm-like body is protected by the burrow it excavates in a piece of wood—whether a floating ship, a pier piling, or a sunken tree trunk.

It was the shipworms’ insatiable appetite for all things wooden that caught the attention of David Willer, a scientist who studies sustainable aquaculture at the University of Cambridge. Fast growing, able to subsist entirely on wood, and with little investment in a biologically costly large shell, the animals seemed to him an intriguing and promising candidate for a big problem: Helping to feed the world. He suggests they might be an unlikely means for tackling far reaching problems of hunger, malnutrition, and a global food system that contributes about 26 percent of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions. In other words, he sees the shipworm very differently from the mariners who have long cursed the animals: not as scourge but as savior. With this in mind, he has a rebranding suggestion: When prepared for human consumption, he calls them “naked clams.”

Shipworms don’t dine on ships out of spite. For those organisms that can stomach it, wood is nutritious stuff. It is made from lignocellulose, a natural polymer composed of closely packed chains of cellulose wrapped in a mesh of lignin and hemicellulose. Hard to break, it is even harder to digest. But for any organism that has evolved the ability to do so, the rewards are well worth their efforts. Cellulose is the most abundant biological polymer on Earth, and it is made entirely from repeated linked molecules of glucose—sugar. “If you think of an ice lolly,” says Simon Cragg, a researcher who studies wood-borers at the University of Portsmouth, “the biggest energy potential is in the little stick.”

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To turn wood into glucose, the ancestor of modern shipworms (and a deep-sea group of Teridinids known as Xylophagids) formed an alliance with bacteria that are capable of digesting lignocellulose. While symbiotic relationships are common across the tree of life—grass-digesting bacteria inside the rumen of cows and sheep, for example—the shipworms’ alliance is a bizarre one. Their symbiotic bacteria are kept separate from the digestive system, contained within cells in their gills, which span most of their body’s length. “It’s the equivalent of us having bacteria in our lungs that provide us with the ability to digest our food,” says Reuben Shipway, a shipworm taxonomist who, in 2021, co-founded the Naked Clam project with Willer. They aim to spin up an entirely novel sector of the robust global aquaculture market by capitalizing on the shipworm’s unique biology. “They’re the only animals that do this.”

WHAT’S IN A NAME?: When preparing shipworms for human consumption, David Willer calls them “naked clams” to make them seem more palatable. And a fancy presentation, like in this shipworm dish, doesn’t hurt either. Courtesy of David Willer.

Crucially, only the enzymes that can break down wood enter the digestive system from a shipworm’s gills, a hypothesis first proposed by a scientist in the 19th century but only confirmed in 2022. What may seem unnecessarily complex is actually an evolutionary sleight-of-hand that favors the shipworm. Keeping their bacterial helpers away from their woody banquet, the host organism retains control of the riches, keeping their bacterial symbionts just happy enough on scraps while they consume the lion’s share of the sugar.

With these tactics and when surrounded by their food, shipworms can grow up to 20 times faster than the blue mussel, a commercially grown bivalve eaten across the globe. This extreme growth rate, combined with its bottomless appetite for the indigestible, also makes shipworms one of the elite oceanic recyclers, able to transform a sunken tree trunk into a protein-rich buffet that can, in turn, help feed their predators and surrounding ecosystems.

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All of these ideas coalesced into an unconventional plan in Willer’s mind. Why not grow these naked clams as an even more efficient food source? Perhaps in shipping containers or along coastlines. This, he thinks, could help feed the 1o billion or so people projected to live on Earth by 2050, and also tackle the increasing rates of food poverty and malnutrition in the shorter term.

The history of shipworm aquaculture predates Willer’s naked clam project. Actually by quite a bit. Roughly 8,000 years ago, in what could be the first form of aquaculture, Indigenous people living in and around what would later be named Sydney, Australia, sunk branches and trunks of swamp oaks to grow their own local supply of shipworms. The name of these people—the Cabrogal—literally means “the shipworm clan.” In Southeast Asia, shipworms are still harvested from mangrove roots at low tide and eaten raw with a sprinkling of salt, chili, and calamansi (a citrus fruit similar to lime). Known in Thailand as tamilok, they are also eaten in stews and battered like calamari. Shipworms are even added to halo-halo, a popular type of ice cream in the Philippines.

When prepared for human consumption, Willer calls them “naked clams.”

Shipworms are also reasonably nutritious. Willer’s own analyses have found that naked clams are high in DHA omega acid, contain more protein than beef, and, like other animal-based products, offer micronutrients such as vitamin B12, selenium, iron, and zinc.

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Willer says that he seeks to expand the appetite for shipworms across the globe. Willer enjoys eating them raw, himself, describing it as a true connoisseur: “a bit like a whiskey that holds onto the taste of wood.” Working with professional chefs, Willer is also developing some modern twists on this seafood. Battered and fried, chopped into meat-style chunks, or packed into burgers, modern processing could enhance the flavor of shipworms while also making them more approachable to Western consumers. He has even experimented with injecting garlic butter microcapsules into tanks containing shipworms, a flavoring that is then suffused throughout the naked clam’s body.

If Willer manages to get widespread shipworm aquaculture off the ground, it would join a rapidly growing sector in the global food production landscape. From a few million tons in 1950, aquaculture now produces more than 90 million tons of fish and mollusks every year across the world.

But this surge in popularity—salmon, for example, is now being grown from Norway to Chile—has also led to widespread environmental concerns. Producing 1 kilogram of farmed salmon, for instance, requires catching and processing 4 kilograms of smaller fish pulled from some of the most productive food webs in the oceans. As Patricia Majluf, a biologist and vice president focused on Peru at the international conservation advocacy organization Oceana, and her colleagues wrote in the journal Science Advances in 2024, “most of this global supply, especially of FO [fish oil], now being used by the aquaculture industry purportedly to ‘contribute to global food security’ is, in fact, primarily being used to produce high-value, globally traded seafood that benefits only the few who can afford it.”

Eating lower in the food chain can be less environmentally damaging than eating large predatory fish (such as salmon and tuna) because smaller fish require fewer inputs of food and can grow and reproduce faster, bolstering their recovery from potential overfishing. And growing and consuming any bivalve is often even more sustainable. As an additional environmental asset, bivalves also reduce levels of dissolved nitrogen and phosphorus, compounds that can fuel toxic algal blooms.

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But even these apparent benefits and a long history of shipworms as food doesn’t mean that more people will accept them, even with their rebranding. “It is difficult to predict consumer acceptance,” Birgit Rumpold, a researcher who studies insects as food at Technical University of Berlin, tells me via email. “In the end, [the] key factor is always taste. But disgust, food neophobia, and food culture are also of great importance.” She adds that, like with insects, shipworms could also be grown to feed other animals or farmed fish.

In 2026, Willer has plans for his first large-scale aquaculture project, an underwater farm of mussels, shipworms, and marine algae called sugar kelp common in Asian cuisine on the north coast of Devon in southwest England. With long stretches of sandy beaches, this area is famous for its relentless wind and waves, a place where the Atlantic Ocean meets the land with a running hug. Setting sail from western Spain in the 15th century, the waves that Columbus first met would have been much the same. But here, the shipworm is far from a scourge but instead an unlikely glimmer of hope.

Lead image: Ekaterina Gerasimchuk / Shutterstock

Footnote

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*While Columbus’s legacy is tarnished by the cruelty and callousness he showed the Indigenous people he encountered in the New World, he did keep good ship’s logs, some of which were preserved, giving us a window into nautical troubles of the time.

Alex Riley

Posted on October 28, 2025

Alex Riley is an award-winning science writer and the author of Super Natural: How Life Thrives in Impossible Places. He lives in south Devon, UK, with his family.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Bats That Glow

And shifting battles with rats: New discoveries take flight during Bat Week

By Bob Grant    October 27, 2025

Bats are sometimes called the “invisible mammal.” Their nocturnal lifestyle, combined with their silent hunting strategy and hidden haunts make them obscure to all but the most dedicated chiropterologists. But new light is being shed on the typically shadowy mammal, and just in time for Bat Week.

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Six species of North American bats recently managed to surprise researchers who learned that the flying mammals emit an eerie green glow after being illuminated with ultraviolet light. Checking 60 separate museum specimens, scientists working at the Georgia Museum of Natural History found that all of them glowed a shade of green under the ultraviolet light. Although several insects, plants, and mammal species—including flying squirrels and pocket gophers—have been shown to glow, this is the first time that researchers have documented the phenomenon in North American bats. They published their findings in Ecology and Evolution.

Interestingly, the bats all seemed to glow in the same spots, specifically on their wings and hind limbs. Because they all glowed in the same way with the same hue, the authors suggested that the function of the characteristic is not to differentiate species or sexes. “It’s cool, but we don’t know why it happens,” said Steven Castleberry, study coauthor and University of Georgia biologist, in a statement. “What is the evolutionary or adaptive function? Does it actually serve a function for the bats?” Castleberry and his colleagues posit that the glow may be a remnant of some ancient adaptation retained by numerous bat species, but add that studying it in living bats might yield more information as to its ecological function.

Photo by Mickey Samuni-Blank / Wikimedia Commons

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The mammals have other tricks up their sleeves. In a survival struggle between bats and rats, researchers have highlighted some clever behavioral changes. Things can get rather testy between Egyptian fruit bats and black rats where their ranges overlap. They compete for food and sometimes even prey upon each other. It turns out that the fruit bats change the way they forage depending on the abundance of rats—and of their shared resources.

Researchers at Tel Aviv University studied hundreds of hours of video of a semi-natural bat colony for seven months and noticed that bats altered their feeding strategies in unexpected ways from winter to warmer months. In winter, when rats—which sometimes prey on bats—and food were both scarce, bats behaved skittishly, landing less frequently and showing heightened vigilance, which decreased their feeding efficiency. But when the weather warmed, and the bats’ chances of encountering food and rats increased, they landed and fed more often. This time of year also saw an increase in bat-rat interaction, with bats boldly attacking the rodents at times.

The researchers published their results in BMC Biology. “We tend to describe relationships between different species in simplistic terms—either as competition or predation,” said study coauthor and Tel Aviv University bat biologist Yossi Yovel in a statement. “This study shows how complex such relationships can be and how animals are able to adapt their response strategies to changing circumstances.”

As new insights into the physiology and behavior of bats emerge, scientists are also discovering entirely new species. Researchers studying bats from the tropical forests of the Philippines have formally named six new species. All of the new-to-science bat species are so-called tube-nosed bats, members of genus Murina. Scientists with the Royal Ontario Museum, the Field Museum in Chicago, and Lawrence University in Wisconsin, used several methods, including morphological analysis and genetic testing, to confirm the classification of the new species, which all subsist on a steady diet of insects in their protected forest home. “It has been a long and slow process of discovery, but these six previously unknown species show clearly just how wonderfully extensive Philippine biodiversity is,” Lawrence Heaney, Curator Emeritus of Mammals at the Field Museum and coauthor of the Zootaxa paper detailing the discovery, in a statement.

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As you progress through Bat Week 2025, spare a thought for these oft-maligned marvels of nature. They may be spooky to some, but they are also a source of continuing scientific surprises.

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Lead image: Ecology & Evolution

Bob Grant

Posted on October 27, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Secrets of Deadly Snake Bites

Slow-motion video reveals how these strikes could kill you, in surprisingly different ways

By Bob Grant    October 24, 2025

Snake bites happen in the blink of an eye. Some can strike fleet-footed rodent prey in a flash of scales and fangs that lasts a mere 60 milliseconds. An action so quick, though potentially deadly, is mysterious simply because it defies careful consideration. Until now.

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Researchers have recorded the lightning-quickness of snake bites with two high-speed cameras recording at 1,000 frames per second. Publishing their findings in the Journal of Experimental Biology, an international team of scientists captured 36 venomous snake species biting a faux prey item made of ballistics gel. They used 3-D coordinates to compare the style and motion of the strikes as measured by several variables, including velocity, acceleration, contact angle, and gape angle, to name a few.

They found that snakes in family Viperidae, so called vipers, were able to reach higher peak velocities than snakes in family Elapidae, which contains the king cobra, black mamba, and other species.

The researchers also reported these gruesome snake bite facts. Elapids bite victims repeatedly to pump as much venom into them as possible. And one member of family Colubridae they recorded, a species native to sub-Saharan Africa called the Fischer’s cat snake (Toxicodryas pulverulenta), thrashed its jaws from side to side in order to rip a gash in its victim. This, of course, was so it could deposit the maximum volume of venom into the wound.

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Although the researchers helped generate unprecedented insight into the interesting realm of snake bites, they likely did not do much to quell the fears of ophidiophobes.

Here’s a viper bite:

Science X: Phys.org, Medical Xpress, Tech Xplore / YouTube

And here’s that bite from a Fischer’s cat snake:

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Journal of Experimental Biology

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Lead image: Marzufello / Shutterstock

Bob Grant

Posted on October 24, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

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These Three Species Have Eased Back From the Brink

Recent conservation wins are proof that such efforts can make a difference

By Bob Grant    October 23, 2025

Green sea turtles are back. Right whales are increasing their numbers. A fish in Virginia has much more room to swim. In what seems like a rare moment, a handful of endangered species have recently experienced conservation wins.

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Here are a few of the species making a comeback, for the moment:

Green sea turtles

These charismatic marine reptiles are on the upswing, according to a recent report from the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN). The IUCN’s decision to change the conservation status of the species—in a substantial swing from “Endangered” to “Least Concern”—mainly came from data indicating a 28 percent increase in the average annual abundance of egg clutches, which the green sea turtles lay and bury on sandy, tropical and subtropical beaches across the world.

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Green sea turtles can grow three to four feet long and live for up to 70 years or more. They also are slow to mature, only reaching reproductive age in their mid 20s-30s. So their recovery speed can be slow. Researchers documented about 526,000 clutches of eggs per year in 2024, where previous year, the average was closer to approximately 419,000 per year. Each individual clutch can contain up to 120 eggs. Although many eggs and younger turtles do not survive to create clutches of their own. Protection of sensitive nesting beaches, limiting accidental catches of turtles in fishing gear, and laws against hunting the turtles have likely aided in their recovery.

While this is promising news, the IUCN cautions that the increases in turtle numbers are uneven. Some subpopulations aren’t yet seeing better days—for example, green sea turtles in the North Indian Ocean, are still listed as “Vulnerable,” and in the Maldives they remain “Endangered,” according to the Olive Ridley Project, a sea turtle rescue, conservation, and education nonprofit. “These local and regional disparities remind us that progress in one part of the world does not mean security everywhere,” the organization said in a statement.

North Atlantic right whales

These massive marine mammals haven’t quite stepped back fully from the precipice of extinction. But North Atlantic right whales have enjoyed a few consecutive years of population growth. Most recently, the North Atlantic Right Whales Consortium shared an estimate indicating that the critically endangered species increased by 2.1 percent from 2023 to 2024.

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Pcb21 / Wikimedia Commons.

North Atlantic right whales can grow to more than 40 feet long and tend to travel in pairs. Total population numbers are low, though—there were 376 whales estimated in 2023 and 384 in 2024—so their total increase is modest. But this small bump in numbers is the latest in a few years of such rises after an estimated low point of 350 whales in 2020. Right whales were hunted to near extinction until the 1960s, when commercial whaling bans went into effect across the world.

Researchers who closely monitor the species’ population have noted no deaths and fewer significant injuries from boat strikes as well as some individual whales birthing calves for the first time. “The slight increase in the population estimate, coupled with no detected mortalities and fewer detected injuries than in the last several years, leaves us cautiously optimistic about the future of North Atlantic right whales,” Heather Pettis, who leads the North Atlantic Right Whale Consortium, told PBS News.

Populations have increased before, and in 2011 there were an estimated 481 of these mammals in the sea. So with population numbers so low, robust conservation measures will be needed to ensure the long-term viability of the whales’ population numbers. ”What we’ve seen before is this population can turn on a dime,” Pettis said.

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Roanoke logperch

This lovely fish, a species of freshwater darter that inhabits streams and rivers in Virginia and North Carolina, recently moved from “Endangered” to “Vulnerable” in the eyes of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. When it was listed as endangered in 1989, the Roanoke logperch swam in only 14 streams within its range. By 2019, that range had more than doubled, to 31 streams in Virginia and North Carolina.

USFWS/Southeast / Wikimedia Commons.

The key to the fish’s successful recovery? Dam removal and the subsequent restoration and connection of thousands of miles of habitat, where Roanoke logperch feed along rocky streambeds, slurping up aquatic insects and other prey items. Once habitats were restored, conservation groups reintroduced fish into them, increasing overall populations.

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But some conservation groups are urging caution, saying that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did not adequately account for the impacts of a gas pipeline called the Mountain Valley Pipeline that began operating in June 2024. Also, the devastating hurricane flooding in North Carolina last year disrupted many of the freshwater ecosystems in the fish’s range. “The efforts and investment from agencies and organizations to reconnect and reintroduce the Roanoke logperch to former habitats should be celebrated, but full delisting seems premature as threats to the region from pipeline construction and hurricane flooding remain,” Ridge Graham, program manager for Appalachian Voices North Carolina, said in a statement. “It is difficult to relist a species once it has been removed.”

Lead image: Kris Mikael Krister / Wikimedia Commons.

Bob Grant

Posted on October 23, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

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Mysterious Deep Sea Habitats Reveal New Species

Ecosystems that have not been fully explored or catalogued by science are at risk of severe damage

By Bob Grant    October 22, 2025

A dainty porcelain crab and a small shark with large eyes and a glowing belly are two of the newest inductees into the ranks of scientific recognition. Researchers identified both new species after collecting them during a research voyage off the west coast of Australia at depths of about 400 feet and more than 2,000 feet, respectively.

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Both of the new species are rather diminutive—the adult shark specimen, with its bioluminescent belly and flanks, measured slightly more than 16 inches long, and the crab, which lives symbiotically inside invertebrates called sea pens, clocked in at about half an inch long. And they are just two of 20 newly identified organisms discovered since the cruise that collected them in 2022, which was led by scientists at Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO). Other notable species include deep-sea scale worms, a Carnarvon flapjack octopus, and numerous deep-living sea stars.

A LIGHT IN THE DARKNESS: This newly described West Australian Lanternshark is the third new shark species described by scientists who were part of a 2022 research voyage just miles off the west coast of the continent. Image by the CSIRO Australian National Fish Collection.

That’s just the tip of the biodiversity iceberg. According to the CSIRO, “Researchers estimate that there are potentially up to 600 new species still waiting to be described from the voyage.”

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The continuing identification of previously unknown species points to the mystery and fragility of the deep-sea habitats they call home. Across the globe, deep-sea ecosystems are not only ripe for scientific discovery, they’re being eyed by developers seeking to mine the bottom of the ocean for minerals. As Brandon Keim reported for Nautilus in 2023, almost two dozen companies have secured licenses to explore some 500,000 square miles of seafloor to assess its propensity for yielding cobalt, nickel, manganese, and copper.

With so much biodiversity emerging from one small patch of deep-sea just 12 miles off the coast of Western Australia from a single research cruise, the ecological riches hiding in the planet’s other swaths of unexplored ocean floor seem poised to be staggering.

Lead image: CSIRO-Cindy Bessey

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Bob Grant

Posted on October 22, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

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Check Out the Beak on This Baby Basking Shark

An intriguing image resurfaces from a decades-old paper

By Bob Grant    October 22, 2025

Basking sharks are wonders of the marine realm. This second-largest living fish species can reach 40 feet long and weigh upward of 4.5 tons—all on a diet of plankton. Perhaps because the ocean behemoths make their livings lolling at the water’s surface (thus the “basking”) vacuuming up the sea’s tiniest animals, they also have the smallest weight-for-weight brain size of any shark. I suppose you don’t need much in the way of street smarts when hunting entails opening your massive mouth and swimming along with the krill-filled currents.

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As if basking sharks couldn’t get any more wonderfully weird, they have a seldom appreciated trick up their sleeves: babies with extraordinary honkers.

In 2020, Tyler Greenfield, who identifies as a paleontologist and science writer, posted a delightful figure from a Japanese Journal of Ichthyology study that shows a 8.5-foot baby basking shark in all its nasal glory.

Image from Izawa, K. & Shibata, T. Japanese Journal of Ichthyology (1993).

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The researchers captured the nosy specimen in the photo off the Pacific coast of Honshu, Japan, in 1977, and estimated the female shark’s age to be less than 6 months. The fortuitous catch was an unusual opportunity to elucidate an ephemeral feature of developing basking sharks. “Specimens are rare and growth changes after birth rapid[ly],” the authors wrote.

But the baby basking shark’s impressive nose, which included a groove running down the underside of it that went straight to the fish’s palate, isn’t merely for show. “It is thought that the snout structure is related to juvenile feeding,” the researchers wrote, “during the early, free-living stage, when the snout shape may increase the efficiency of water flow into the mouth.” They suggested that, because a baby basking shark doesn’t quite have the swimming chops of an adult, this specially configured nose helped increase the current of plankton-bearing water into its mouth.

Baby basking sharks grow quickly, though, and soon exit this awkward phase. More recent photos, of a juvenile basking shark feeding off the coast of Scotland, captures a slightly less-Gonzo-esque version of a baby basking shark’s schnozz, though likely serving the same purpose of directing food into its gaping maw.

Lead image: from Izawa, K. & Shibata, T. Japanese Journal of Ichthyology (1993)

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Bob Grant

Posted on October 22, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

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The Problem with Farmed Seafood

We’re decimating the ocean to feed farmed fish. But an innovative solution has surfaced.

By John Steele    October 22, 2025

In the cold waters of the Pacific, the anchoveta once shimmered in swarms so vast that sailors described them as turning the sea into a river of quicksilver. They were small, unassuming fish, yet the abundance of the ocean rested upon their delicate bones. Seabirds wheeled overhead in their millions, sea lions and whales dove into their depths, and predatory fish rose through the blue to feed on them. In those shoals lived the vitality of the sea itself. But in our age, the anchoveta, along with sardines and menhaden, have been transformed from living threads in an ancient web into bags of meal and casks of oil. Ninety percent of the forage fish caught by human hands are not eaten by us but ground down to feed salmon being raised in the cold fjords of Norway and shrimp and fish in the tropical ponds of Southeast Asia.

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It is one of the great ironies of our time. To farm the sea, we strip the sea. We take from the ocean’s foundation to build its surface anew, and in the process we imperil both. In 2016, the anchoveta failed to arrive in the expected numbers, and entire fishing seasons in Peru were canceled. Again in 2023, the same collapse occurred, this time coinciding with a spike in ocean temperatures that drove the fish to depths where nets could not reach. The seabirds starved, their nests abandoned. Seal pups died in the thousands. Farmers watched as the price of feed climbed and their livelihoods faltered. What seemed infinite revealed itself as fragile.

Kevin Fitzsimmons, an aquaculture scientist at the University of Arizona, has described the predicament with characteristic bluntness: “Reliance on wild-caught marine-animal ingredients is a weak link in the aquaculture supply chain. It puts global seafood security at risk, while also affecting vital marine ecosystems.” As the former president of the World Aquaculture Society, Fitzsimmons knows that what appears efficient on paper is brittle in practice.

Ninety percent of forage fish caught by humans are ground down into fish food.

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Today, Fitzimmons is chairman of the F3 Challenge, a competition for the aquaculture industry to produce marine-animal free food for farmed fish. “Amid growing supply chain uncertainties, this contest offers an opportunity to future-proof farm operations by developing strong, sustainable feed contingency plans,” Fitzsimmons said. It is the voice of a scientist speaking, but also of a pragmatist who knows that disruption, like the sudden cancellation of Peru’s anchoveta fishery, will come again.

The paradox of aquaculture is that it is at once a salvation and a threat. It now provides more than half the fish we eat, and it has spared some wild stocks from further collapse. Yet the act of raising carnivorous fish—salmon, trout, grouper, shrimp—has bound us more tightly to the fragile shoals of forage fish. This is what scientists call the forage fish bottleneck. And in this bottleneck, the future of seafood, of food security for billions, of entire ocean ecosystems, is squeezed.

The realization that fish do not need to eat fish to grow—that what they require are nutrients, not the bodies of other creatures—may seem obvious once said aloud. But it is an idea as revolutionary as the day when humans first understood that plants could be sown in neat rows and harvested, that food could be cultivated rather than chased. The birth of agriculture 10,000 years ago was not the discovery of seeds; it was the recognition that sustenance could be abstracted, reimagined, shaped to our will. So too now, the future of fish feed begins with a recognition: The proteins and oils that have always come from the sea can come, instead, from our imagination.

BARRACUDA: Aquaculture has become a barracuda industry of the ocean, catching and mashing forage fish into feed for farmed seafood. Photo by Virgil Zetterlind.

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When Fitzsimmons and his colleagues launched the F3 Challenge in 2015, they did not turn to governments to regulate or to foundations to endow. They chose instead the ancient spur of human ingenuity: a prize. “By incentivizing farms to innovate,” Fitzsimmons explained, “we reduce pressure on wild fish stocks while building a more resilient and sustainable seafood system for the future.”

History remembers moments like this. The prize offered for determining longitude at sea in the 18th century, which spurred clockmakers to craft chronometers more precise than ever imagined. The Orteig Prize, which drove Charles Lindbergh across the Atlantic, opening the era of aviation. Similarly, the F3 Challenge is not a discovery imposed from above, but a challenge flung wide, trusting that competition and ambition will drive a breakthrough.

And breakthroughs came. A Chinese company, Evergreen Feed, demonstrated that plant-based blends could scale to industrial volumes, saving an estimated 350 million forage fish. Veramaris, a joint venture in the Netherlands and the United States, cultivated algae that produced the same omega-3 fatty acids found in fish oil, and in quantities sufficient to replace billions of forage fish. In Ecuador and Japan, companies devised feeds for shrimp and sea bream, proving that even the most voracious of farmed carnivores could thrive without wild prey. Each success was counted not only in profit, but in the lives of the small fish left in the sea: hundreds of millions here, billions there.

The contests have continued, each more ambitious than the last. A challenge to replace krill, the shrimp-like creatures that sustain penguins and whales was won by BRF, a Brazilian company using Chicken hydrolysate, a product made by using enzymes to break down chicken protein into smaller, more easily digestible peptides, and by Symrise, a German company working with flavors and fragrances to enhance the non-marine food’s appeal to farmed fish. A new competition now rewards not just feed producers but fish farms themselves, those willing to commit their entire operations to marine-ingredient-free diets. The ambition is not modest.

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Labels on seafood could proclaim “fish-free feed,” like “grass-fed” on beef.

The tools of this new future are dazzling in their diversity. Algae fermenters that glow with green light, their oils rich in DHA (docosapentaenoic acid) and EPA (eicosapentaenoic acid), both types of omega 3 fatty acids identical to the molecules that give fish their nourishment. Tanks of bacteria fed on carbon dioxide or methane, spinning waste into protein, a kind of culinary alchemy. Insects—black soldier fly larvae—raised on food scraps, their bodies transformed into high-protein meal. Yeasts bubbling in vats like beer, dried into powders that rival fishmeal in digestibility. Even the humble pea and soybean, engineered and processed until their amino acid profiles mimic those of the anchoveta. Each of these is not simply a replacement, but a reinvention: a recognition that the fabric of nutrition is not bound to one source but can be woven anew.

To coordinate this frontier, the Future of Fish Feed, a collaborative effort between NGOs, researchers, and private partnerships to support alternative aquaculture feed, created the Feed Innovation Network, an open commons where recipes are shared, protocols exchanged, trials published. In an industry long bound by secrecy, this openness is itself a revolution. And in farms across the world, from shrimp ponds in Ecuador to bass tanks in the U.S., demonstration trials show that these diets work. Carnivores remain carnivores, and yet the ocean remains more whole.

At stake is more than the price of shrimp or the yield of salmon. It is the resilience of entire ecosystems. Forage fish are the currency of the sea. To deplete them is to starve seabirds, to silence the calls of whales, to empty the beaches of seals. To spare them is to let the ocean breathe. At stake, too, is human food security. By mid-century, 10 billion mouths will need feeding, and aquaculture is one of the surest ways to provide protein. But if aquaculture is shackled to the rise and fall of forage fish, then it will falter when most needed. And finally, at stake is the climate itself. If bacteria can be grown on carbon waste, if algae can thrive on light and air, then aquaculture can become not a burden but a partner in the work of repairing the planet.

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One can already imagine the cultural shift that might follow. Labels on seafood proclaiming “fish-free feed,” just as beef carries the words “grass-fed.” A shrimp cocktail served at a wedding, its story not of plundered krill but of innovation, of microbes turned to nourishment. The act of eating fish would carry with it a continuity, not a rupture, with the health of the sea.

And here, perhaps, lies the deepest resonance. Human history is a succession of moments when we recognized that our survival depended not on taking more from nature, but on working with her patterns. Agriculture, fire, medicine, electricity—all arose from this recognition. The F3 Challenge is another of those moments. It is not about feed alone. It is about the imagination to see that the scaffolding of life can be rebuilt by our own hands, if only we choose to do so.

Today, the anchoveta still swim, though in fewer numbers, and the seabirds still wheel above them. But their future, like ours, now depends on whether we will grind them into meal until none remain, or whether we will let them remain what they have always been: the living silver of the sea. “Our shared future becomes more sustainable,” Fitzsimmons said, “only if we can learn to take the pressure off the oceans and create feeds that free us from this dependence.” The future of fish feed is the future of fish. And the future of fish is the future of us all.

Lead image: A salmon farm in Norway. Credit: Photofex_AUT / Shutterstock.

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John Steele

Posted on October 22, 2025

John Steele is the publisher and editorial director of Nautilus.

Table of Contents

Nautilus: 2025 Oct 30

Anthropology

This Inca Building was the Original Boom Box

How Scavenging Made Us Human

Arts

In Awe of Tiny Things

Astronomy

A Crisper Look at a Cosmic Creepy Crawler

What Happens in Space Matters on Earth

Can We Beam Away Our Space Junk Problem?

This Spiritual Eclipse Calendar Might Still Work

The Dark Side of Putting Mirrors in Space

Why Have We Never Sampled an Interstellar Comet?

Communication

More Than a Feeling

Environment

Here’s What Nuclear Testing Does to the Earth—and Us

Hurricane Melissa Could Threaten Some Species with Extinction

How This Haunting Hurricane Illusion Forms

How “Plant Math” Can Help Predict the Climate’s Future

Evolution

We Might Not Be So Strange

Evolution Is Written in Our Joints

Geoscience

Pink Boulders Reveal a Hidden Antarctic Giant

The Trees That Remember the Pyramids

The Hidden Landscape Holding Back the Sea

Health

Does This Gene Determine How You Handle Your Booze?

What Poop Reveals About Ancient Humans

The Cure Hiding in a Rotten Eggplant

History

Meet the Real Dr. Frankenstein

Remembering the Genius Who Inspired Celebration of the Mind Day

This Natural History Museum Heist Rivals the Louvre Robbery

Microbiology

Witness the Rare Birth of a Water Bear

Neuroscience

What Is Your Brain Doing on Psychedelics?

Philosophy

The Pretense of Political Debate

What Is Intelligence?

Physics

No More Tears? Scientists Take a Keen Eye to Onion Slicing

The World’s Tiniest Wave Tank

Psychology

The Science of Unrequited Love

Psilocybin Lifted Her Burden

Technology

Your Chatbot “Friend” Is Only Pretending to Like You

Space Is Raining Junk, and It’s Getting Worse

Zoology

You Might Be Loving Fluffy to Death

Rats Grab Lunch on the Wing

Naked Clams and Sunken Ships

Bats That Glow

The Secrets of Deadly Snake Bites

These Three Species Have Eased Back From the Brink

Mysterious Deep Sea Habitats Reveal New Species

Check Out the Beak on This Baby Basking Shark

The Problem with Farmed Seafood