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Anthropology

- Was This Mysterious Mountain Feature an Incan Tax Document?

- Neanderthals: Do a Little Art and Take a Stroll on the Beach

- Have We Learned King Tut’s Lessons?

ANTHROPOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Was This Mysterious Mountain Feature an Incan Tax Document?

Thousands of holes dot a mountain in Peru—they might have been used by the Inca to tally tributes

By Molly Glick    November 10, 2025

In southern Peru, Monte Sierpe or “serpent mountain” is dotted with more than 5,000 elusive, meticulously arranged holes that are lined up for nearly a mile. More than six centuries ago, these pockmarks might have served as a tax spreadsheet of sorts for the Inca Empire, according to new findings published in the journal Antiquity.

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These mysterious mountain dots were captured in aerial photographs by National Geographic explorer Robert Shippee, which were published in 1933. Since then, they have captivated the public and researchers, who have offered up wide-ranging explanations behind their origins: capturing fog, collecting water, mining, gardening, or even aliens, among other theories. Now, detailed analysis of this site, also known as the Band of Holes, has revealed intriguing patterns that point to intricate record-keeping, an international team of researchers argues.

THE VIEW FROM ABOVE: An aerial photograph of Monte Sierpe from 1933. Photo reproduced courtesy of the American Natural History Museum; AMNH Library negative no. 334709.

The Inca people appear to have used this feature continuously between 1400 and 1532, and it sits near the intersection of once-bustling pre-Hispanic trade routes. It’s also located between two Inca administrative centers: Tambo Colorado and Lima La Vieja. This suggests a link to trade and government affairs, the new paper’s authors say.

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When taking a closer look at Monte Sierpe via drone imagery, they noticed that the holes are grouped into at least 60 sections. The researchers also spotted precise numerical patterns in these sections, such as alternating repetition in the number of holes per row.

This reminded them of another Inca invention: khipus, Inca accounting tools made of knotted string that were used to tally information including census data and tribute taxes. Researchers have found more than 1,000 surviving khipus, and one discovered near Monte Sierpe shows similar organization of data into 80 groups of cords.

“The regularity of these squares is comparable to the numerical patterns at Monte Sierpe, suggesting a potentially similar purpose: the counting and sorting of different goods,” the paper notes.

ANDES ACCOUNTING: A khipu found near the Monte Sierpe site with patterns that reflect those found in the holes. Photo © Ethnologisches Museum, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin; photographs by Claudia Obrocki.

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These thousands of holes may have been turned into a spreadsheet after the Inca Empire took over the area in the 15th century, which was previously ruled by the powerful and sophisticated Chincha Kingdom. As in other areas, the Inca introduced a tax system that demanded labor or tribute, such as produce.

At Monte Sierpe, each section of holes may have been “linked to a particular social group for the payment of tax and the redistribution of commodities,” the new paper suggests. The range of numerical patterns they observed might be linked to local khipus and 16th-century tribute lists in the Andes, and the size of taxpaying populations may have varied among specific towns and villages.

But this striking site might not have always worked as a dynamic tax document. Scientists also studied sediment samples from holes throughout the Monte Sierpe, and they discovered ancient pollen from plants such as willow, which was traditionally incorporated into baskets and mats, and from corn, a staple crop in the Andes. Before the Inca Empire took power in the region, the Chincha Kingdom might have used these holes to maintain a standardized barter system. “Depositing goods in the holes could have been a way of publicly displaying information about the quantity of goods available as well as the quantity of goods required for a fair exchange,” study authors Jacob Bongers and Charles Stanish wrote for The Conversation. A specific number of holes filled with corn might have been equal to a different number of holes filled with cotton, for example.

The authors say these theories are “tentative,” but it “brings us closer to unravelling the purpose behind one of the most enigmatic archaeological sites in the Andes.”

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Lead photo by Charles Stanish

Molly Glick

Posted on November 10, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ANTHROPOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Neanderthals: Do a Little Art and Take a Stroll on the Beach

Two recent discoveries about the extinct human species refine our understanding of our evolutionary kin

By Bob Grant    November 10, 2025

Not a bad little Sunday if you’re a Neanderthal living on the Iberian peninsula about 80,000 years ago: Do a little painting on that cave wall you’ve been meaning to spruce up, and then take the kids for a walk on the beach. We now know this completely imaginary itinerary could well have played out millennia ago, thanks to a slew of Neanderthal discoveries in Spain, France, and Portugal.

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Neanderthals are typically considered to be an ancient hominin species that is less artistically inclined than others—though they did bust out the crayons on occasion. But researchers working in three Spanish caves uncovered art that they suggest indicates “much richer symbolic behavior than previously assumed.” The Spanish caves housed works containing geometric shapes, stencils of hands, and linear forms that, according to the scientists, were at least 64,000 years old. They published their findings in Science in 2018.

Read more: “Our Neanderthal Complex”

Another group of scientists studying a French cave found lines and finger mark engravings, “unambiguous examples of Neanderthal abstract design.” Their dating methods suggested that the marks were made more than 57,000 years ago. That team detailed their discoveries in a PLOS One paper in 2023.

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And researchers working in Portugal recently reported finding fossilized footprints in coastal Portugal, the first such trackways discovered in the country, and dated them at between 78,000 and 82,000 years old. At one of the sites, they noted footprints that were likely left by adults and young kids on what was once a coastal dune. They published those findings in Scientific Reports just last week.

It’s endlessly exciting that the lives of an extinct human species comes into increasing focus based on continually emerging clues from the shadows of subterranean spaces and from the land where they trod. Even though modern humans retain traces of Neanderthal DNA in our genomes, science helps us learn more about our ancient cousins with each new discovery.

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Lead image: WH_Pics / Shutterstock

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Bob Grant

Posted on November 10, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ANTHROPOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Have We Learned King Tut’s Lessons?

Just over a century ago today, British archaeologists discovered the entrance to the Ancient Egyptian monarch’s tomb … eventually scattering its treasures far and wide

By Bob Grant    November 4, 2025

In 1922, British archaeologist Howard Carter and his team stumbled across a descending staircase amid rubble and debris near the 12th century B.C. tomb of King Ramses VI in Luxor, Egypt. On this day—Nov. 4, 1922—103 years ago, they had discovered the tomb of King Tutankhamun. Later that same month, on Nov. 26, Carter and another egyptologist named Lord Carnarvon, who bankrolled the search, would enter the surprisingly intact inner sanctum of the tomb, occupied by the teenage king’s three-millenia-old, gilded sarcophagus surrounded by priceless treasures.

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Carter, with co-author Authur Cruttenden Mace, would later recall the revelation of entering the burial chamber, in a 1923 book: “At first I could see nothing, the hot air escaping from the chamber causing the candle flame to flicker, but presently, as my eyes grew accustomed to the light, details of the room within emerged slowly from the mist, strange animals, statues, and gold—everywhere the glint of gold.”

What followed was not atypical of the unfortunate way that archaeology was practiced a century ago. Some of the incalculable wealth and history ensconced in King Tut’s 14th-century B.C. tomb, which had managed to escape the grasp of graverobbers for more than 3,000 years, was summarily looted and carted off to the United Kingdom and beyond, some apparently by Carter himself.

CARTER, ENTOMBED: This 1922 photo shows British Egyptologist Howard Carter working in the tomb of King Tutankhamen, the find that would define his life and career. Credit: Harry Burton / Wikimedia Commons.

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There were long simmering suspicions that Carter helped himself to some of the ancient treasures in King Tut’s tomb, even as the find itself was still being excavated. In 1924, the Egyptian government and the archaeologist were at loggerheads concerning control of the tomb and its contents, and Carter and his team stopped working in protest until a deal was hammered out. In short, Carter agreed to transfer most artifacts to Cairo’s Egyptian Museum down the Nile from Luxor, and then got back to work near the end of that year.

But rumors of malfeasance continued to swirl for decades as artifacts presumed to have come from King Tut’s tomb showed up in museums around the world. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York acquired 19 objects in the 1920s and 1940s that it returned to Egypt in 2010, saying in a statement that the treasures “can be attributed with certainty to Tutankhamun’s tomb.”

Read more: “An Archaeological Reckoning”

In 2022, a letter sent to Carter in 1934 from Sir Alan Gardiner, a philologist tasked with translating hieroglyphics on Carter’s team, came to light. In it, Gardiner mentioned an amulet that Carter had gifted him, saying that he had shown it to Rex Engelbach, the director of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo at the time. Engelbach told Gardiner that the amulet was “undoubtedly stolen from the tomb of Tutankhamun.” Gardiner ever-so-gently scolded Carter: “I deeply regret having been placed in so awkward a position.”

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The letter strongly suggested that Carter had looted at least some of the treasures in King Tut’s tomb. Other archaeological digs of the same era were plagued by similar accusations of thievery. In 2019, Egypt unsuccessfully demanded the return of a King Tut stone statue that eventually sold for nearly $6 million at auction at Christie’s in London that year. Zahi Hawass, an Egyptian archaeologist claimed that the statue was stolen goods. “It seems that this sculpture was looted from [Luxor’s] Karnak Temple,” he told ABC News before the sale of the artifact. “Christie’s would not have any proof whatsoever of its ownership.” And Egyptians have been demanding the repatriation of the famed Rosetta Stone for years. That key deciphering tool, which still sits in the British Museum, was claimed by the United Kingdom in 1801, when Napoleon Bonaparte ceded his claim to it after French soldiers removed it from its discovery location near the town of Rashid, Egypt, a few years earlier.

And this is just Egypt. There are countless other examples across the globe of a culture’s rich material heritage being extracted and exported by colonial entities.

But at least for King Tut, most of his riches are home. Earlier this month, the $1 billion, 120-acre Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza opened its main galleries, where visitors can see more than 5,000 artifacts from the tomb on display. These include his famous golden burial mask and his gilded chariot.

We may be far removed from archaeology as practiced a century ago, but there are still many artifacts that have yet to make their way back to their rightful places. It is certainly a more regular practice for archaeologists and anthropologists to consult with Indigenous communities and to take other care as to the treatment of artifacts or remains they unearth. Hopefully, the continued efforts to repatriate artifacts to cultures where they belong and the spread of more sensitive and collaborative approaches to tell the ancient stories of humanity will help us relegate the bad old days of archaeology to the distant past.

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Lead image: Credit: Mark Fischer / Wikimedia

Bob Grant

Posted on November 4, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

Astronomy

- Take a Trip Through the Milky Way in the Most Detailed Image Yet

- Carl Sagan Shared a Shocking Space Secret

- Visit Our Solar System’s Tallest Mountains

- A Martian Mystery May Finally Be Solved

- Is the Moon Worth Mining?

- Before the Supermoon Showed Its Face It Flashed Us

- The Most Fascinating Findings After A Quarter Century of Science in the ISS

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Take a Trip Through the Milky Way in the Most Detailed Image Yet

By Jake Currie    November 11, 2025

The sheer magnitude of our galaxy, the Milky Way, is difficult for the human mind to fully grasp. Its 105,700 light-year width also makes it just about as difficult to capture with a camera. But recently, researchers from the International Centre for Radio Astronomy Research achieved an important milestone in this gigantic effort.

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The team, led by doctoral student Silvia Mantovanini, collected images of the southern sky taken by the Murchison Widefield Array telescope in Australia over 141 nights spanning seven years. Rather than relying on visible light, which can be blocked by clouds of gas and dust, they recorded images using low-frequency radio waves capable of illuminating all manner of cosmic phenomena.

Each image captured a section of the sky sliced into 20 different radio wavelengths with a corresponding color—red for longer wavelengths, blue for shorter. Then, with the help of roughly 1 million computing hours, they stacked the images and connected them together into one giant cosmic portrait. The results are stunning, and you can explore a zoomable version of their finished product here.

Read more: “Can Dark Energy Kill Galaxies?”

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The image shows a radiant edge-on perspective of the Milky Way, rippling with stellar activity. It also offers a glimpse into our galaxy’s distant past. “You can clearly identify remnants of exploded stars, represented by large red circles,” Mantovanini said in a statement. “The smaller blue regions indicate stellar nurseries where new stars are actively forming.”

Capturing some 60,000 light-years, it’s the largest low-frequency radio color image of the Milky Way ever recorded, twice the size and twice the resolution of the next largest, which was compiled in 2019. It will remain the most detailed view of the Milky Way until the new largest low-frequency radio telescope array—the Square Kilometre Array Observatory—completes its survey in the next decade.

Until then, this cosmic masterpiece will offer researchers plenty of data to dig into as they explore the place in the cosmos we call home.

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Lead image: Silvia Mantovanini and the GLEAM-X Team

Jake Currie

Posted on November 11, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Carl Sagan Shared a Shocking Space Secret

The legendary astronomer once unveiled a top-secret plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon

By Molly Glick    November 10, 2025

As the Cold War simmered between the United States and the Soviet Union, both nations proposed some pretty outlandish ideas—but one of the most mind-boggling was the once-classified plan to detonate a nuclear bomb on the moon before humans had ever stepped foot there.

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After the U.S.S.R. made cosmic history by sending the world’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik, to space in 1957, the U.S. hoped to follow up with an unprecedented display of power. “Specific positive effects would accrue to the nation first performing such a feat,” according to a 1959 report that was declassified in 2000.

These bizarre plans might have remained under wraps to this day if not for Carl Sagan, celebrated astronomer, science popularizer, and pioneer in the hunt for extraterrestrials. Sagan, at the time a Ph.D. student at the University of Chicago, was recruited by Dutch astronomer Gerard Kuiper—the namesake of the Kuiper belt of icy objects that form a massive disk past Neptune’s orbit. The U.S. Air Force had enlisted scientists from the Armour Research Foundation (ARF) lab, based in Chicago, to spearhead what became known as Project A119.

“The main aim of the proposed detonation was a PR exercise and a show of one-upmanship. The Air Force wanted a mushroom cloud so large it would be visible on Earth,” Project A119 physicist Leonard Reiffel told The Observer in 2000. “The U.S. was lagging behind in the space race.”

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Read more: “How the Cold War Created Astrobiology”

Reiffel warned Project A119 planners of “a huge cost to science” by “destroying a pristine lunar environment.” In fact, the bomb’s crater might have disfigured the face of “the man in the moon.” But the brazen feat was technically feasible at the time, he noted, using an intercontinental ballistic nuclear missile—one equipped with a warhead roughly the size of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, or larger.

Sagan was tasked with determining whether researchers could “gather scientifically useful information by detonating nuclear weapons on the moon,” and he also explored the potential effects of radioactive fallout on the moon, according to the 1999 biography, Carl Sagan: A Life by Keay Davidson.

Ultimately, the U.S. Air Force put the kibosh on Project A119. The exact reasons remain unclear, but some theories suggest that the government wanted to avoid potential harm to Earthlings, or had concerns that the moon would become radioactively contaminated.

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But stories of the aborted plan would live on thanks to Sagan, who shared details on the project in 1959 when applying for a graduate fellowship at the University of California, Berkeley—a slip noticed by Davidson when researching the book. Sagan’s friends “believe he never would have wilfully revealed classified information,” according to The Observer. Later on in his career, though, Sagan communicated the dire risks of nuclear war: It could “destroy the global civilization and conceivably … could end the few million year old experiment, human experiment, on the planet Earth,” he said in a 1987 speech.

Carl Sagan is famous for having cracked open the cosmos and made the mysteries of the universe accessible to the common person through clear and compelling storytelling. Among these astronomical accomplishments, it seems, is inadvertently disclosing the harrowing tale of a Cold War show of force that could’ve marred lunar exploration for generations to come.

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Lead image: Internet Archive Book Images / Wikimedia Commons

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Molly Glick

Posted on November 10, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Visit Our Solar System’s Tallest Mountains

These extraterrestrial treks make Mount Everest look like an anthill

By Molly Glick    November 7, 2025

If you’re an adrenaline junkie who chases breathtaking views, consider summiting these unprecedented peaks—but it’ll be quite the hike to get there. The solar system’s tallest mountains are found on planets, moons, and asteroids not named Earth. Some of these extraterrestrial treks put Mount Everest, which towers at nearly 30,000 feet or about 5.5 miles above sea level, to shame.

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Learn about some of the solar system’s highest peaks ever discovered, which would prove quite the challenge even for Earth’s hardiest climbers.

IO: A map of the surface of Io. Credit:NASA/JPL/USGS.

On Jupiter’s moon Io—the solar system’s most volcanically active world—you’ll find the mountain Ionian Mons. Its height is estimated at nearly 8 miles. All in all, scientists have discovered more than 130 mountain structures on Io and hundreds of areas associated with volcanic activity.

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Also on Io, the mountain Boösaule Montes tops out at around 10.9 miles high. It’s named after the cave where Io, the Greek god Zeus’ lover and the moon’s namesake, gave birth to her son Epaphus.

IAPETUS: The walnut-like moon Iapetus has an impressive equatorial ridge. Credit: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute.

Saturn’s third largest moon, Iapetus, hosts an equatorial ridge with peaks reaching up to about 12 miles high, more than twice the height of Mount Everest—but this moon is nearly 650 times smaller than our planet. This ridge circling Iapetus makes the moon look like a huge walnut.

ASCRAEUS MONS: The huge volcano Ascraeus Mons, which is found on Mars. Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech / Arizona State University.

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On Mars, the volcano Ascraeus Mons looms about 11 miles tall. Meanwhile, Earth’s highest volcano, Mauna Kea, measures 6.2 miles from its base below sea level to its summit.

VESTA: A 3-D view of the asteroid Vesta. Credit: NASA.

Some 1 billion years ago, an asteroid crashed into the huge asteroid Vesta. This left a crater around 311 miles across—taking up the vast majority of Vesta’s limited real estate. In the center of this crater, called Rheasilvia, a peak of uplifted material rises about 14 miles above the crater’s low spot on its floor.

OLYMPUS MONS: Illustrated here with Earth’s Mount Everest and Mauna Kea, Olympus Mons takes the crown with its staggering height. Credit: Resident Mario/Wikimedia commons.

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Finally, Olympus Mons is the most massive of our cosmic neighborhood’s known peaks. It’s difficult to fathom, towering at a height of up to roughly 16 miles. It’s also about 374 miles wide, roughly the size of the state of Arizona.

If you’re headed to one of these formidable features, be sure to pack plenty of water—and oxygen.

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Lead image: NASA/Goddard Space Flight Center, Scientific Visualization Studio

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Molly Glick

Posted on November 7, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Martian Mystery May Finally Be Solved

Scientists might have finally uncovered the origins of bold streaks on the Red Planet’s surface

By Molly Glick    November 7, 2025

While this image might look like streaks of mascara absentmindedly left on a pillow, you’re actually glimpsing what appears to be the aftermath of dust avalanches on Mars.

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Sometime between 2013 and 2017, a meteoroid slammed into the edge of Apollinaris Mons, a massive ancient volcano. Fine dust then cascaded down steep slopes of the crater and formed the dark streaks seen in this image, which was captured by the European Space Agency’s ExoMars Trace Gas Orbiter on Christmas Eve in 2023.

But it’s not the only such collection of these dark streaks on the Red Planet’s surface. More than 2 million streaks seem to exist around its globe, according to a new Nature Communications study by Valentin Tertius Bickel, a planetary geomorphology researcher at the University of Bern’s Center for Space and Habitability in Switzerland. According Bickel’s analysis of streak images, they rarely seem to result from dramatic events, such as meteoroid impacts and marsquakes. Instead, often, these streaks appear to emerge from something far more mundane: The seasons.

Read more: “Do Our Oceans Feel the Tug of Mars?”

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In Mars’ southern summer and autumn, it gets windy enough to knock plenty of sand around. And at various spots on Mars, the most intense wind stresses seem to occur around sunrise and sunset. This could explain why scientists have rarely seen these streaks form, because most Mars orbiters aren’t capable of capturing images at these dimmer times. These streaks also tend to fade after a few years or decades.

The new study also adds to growing evidence that the streaks aren’t associated with liquid water on Mars. Scientists have posited this possibility since the 1970s, when the elusive features were first discovered by NASA’s Viking lander. This past May, a previous paper coauthored by Bickel, bluntly titled “Streaks on martian slopes are dry,” noted that the streaks may play “a major role in the martian dust cycle.”

While evidence throws cold water on features once associated with habitability on a dry planet, NASA’s Perseverance Mars rover has recently run into other findings that might point to previous life on the Red Planet.

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Lead image: ESA/TGO/CaSSIS

Molly Glick

Posted on November 7, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Is the Moon Worth Mining?

Lunar riches may lie in wait. But securing the bounty may be a logistical nightmare.

By Bob Grant    November 6, 2025

Since time immemorial, the moon has sparked something in humanity—love, longing, wonder, fear, and more. Now we can add one more human emotion to those that our luminous celestial neighbor coaxes from us: greed.

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Astronomers have long known that the moon and its thin outer layer of soil, called regolith, contains a bevy of potentially useful resources. Now, companies are clamoring to claim their little piece of the lunar pie in the hopes of converting moon dust into a steady stream of profit.

Most recently, the hottest commodity on the moon seems to be helium-3, a stable isotope of the noble gas that solar winds have deposited on the moon in quantities that far exceed those found on Earth. Helium-3 could serve as fuel for future nuclear fusion reactors and, more immediately, as a crucial component of the high-tech refrigerators needed to cool quantum computers.

Recently, Bluefors, a cryogenics company based in Finland, inked a $300 million deal with a moon resource harvesting startup called Interlune to buy up to 265 gallons of helium-3 annually between 2028 and 2037. On the heels of that deal, Blue Origin, the aerospace company launched by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, announced its plan to intricately map the resources harbored by the moon, including helium-3, water ice, and a bevy of rare earth elements and precious metals. The moon is also known to be abundant in many elements, especially iron, oxygen, and silicon.

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Read more: “The Moon Is Full of Money”

But while companies and countries jockey to mine the moon, making such ventures financially feasible is another matter altogether. “The new moon race will not be won by whatever nation plants boots and flags on the lunar surface,” wrote Mustafa Bilal, a research assistant at Islamabad-based Centre for Aerospace & Security, in a recent SpaceNews piece, “but by the one building the infrastructure to sustain a long-term presence and reaping the economic dividends.”

The thing is, it’s incredibly expensive to travel to the moon, especially in spacecraft laden with the heavy-duty equipment that would be needed to extract resources, much less ferry those spoils and machines back to Earth. One 2004 estimate held that it costs about $1,000 per pound for a round trip from Earth to the lunar surface. And that is likely on the low side.

With technology advancing at a breakneck pace, the moon’s days as distant tugger of heartstrings are likely numbered. Let’s just hope any extraction of its wealth leaves a little something to continue hitting our eye like a big pizza pie.

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Lead image: NASA/JPL

Bob Grant

Posted on November 6, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Before the Supermoon Showed Its Face It Flashed Us

Twice

By Bob Grant    November 6, 2025

The lunar surface isn’t pockmarked for no reason. Asteroids have peppered the moon since that sassy celestial body came into being some 4.5 billion years ago. And just last week, a museum curator and stargazer in Japan captured two of the latest lunar impacts and the flashes of light coming off the moon as yet more space rocks slammed into its barren face. Just as it was gearing up for its supermooning this week.

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Daichi Fujii, the curator of the Hiratsuka City Museum, captured the cosmic impacts on October 30 and November 1 with an almost 8 inch telescope he keeps locked on the moon, posting the videos to his X account. “Last night, a lunar impact flash appeared on the night side of the waxing crescent moon!” he wrote on X, according to a Google translation of his post of the first impact.

FIRST IMPACT: This video, taken on Oct. 30, 2025, shows a lunar impact flash. These appear as a brief flash of light, and occur when objects strike the moon. Video by Daichi Fujii.

Fuji added that, given the position of that first strike, the flash may have resulted from an impact with debris that constitutes the Taurid meteor shower, when rocks spew from Comet Encke as it streaks through space about 300 million miles from Earth. He told Space.com that he calculated the probable weight of that first asteroid to be a little less than half a pound and its velocity to be about 60,000 miles per hour as it slammed into the dark side of the moon.

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Read more: “The Violent Birth of the Moon”

The second flash Fuji captured, on November 1, happened when another asteroid struck the lunar surface. Whereas meteors that fall to Earth, with its thick atmosphere, typically burn up due to the intense friction generated by their atmospheric transit, asteroids that impact the moon tend to strike the surface with full force.

TAKE TWO: This second video, from Nov. 1, 2025, shows another crater being formed. Because the moon has no atmosphere, you can’t see the meteor itself—but you can see a quick, small flash of light, which occurs when the meteor forms. Video by Daichi Fujii.

Fuji is something of an expert on such lunar impacts. With his specialized setup, he has recorded and shared about 60 since 2011. “I want the public to enjoy science,” Fuji told The New York Times.

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Tracking such celestial interactions may be more than a curiosity, though. Information on where, when, and how the moon is pummeled with space rocks could help determine the logistics of building and protecting human outposts there in the future. “Understanding the frequency and energy of impact flashes can be used to inform the design and operation of lunar bases,” Fuji added.

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Lead image: Dylan O’Donnell / Wikimedia Commons.

Bob Grant

Posted on November 6, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Most Fascinating Findings After A Quarter Century of Science in the ISS

This lab is out of this world

By Molly Glick    November 3, 2025

The International Space Station recently celebrated a cosmic milestone—hosting space travelers non-stop for a quarter of a century. In 1998, the ISS was launched as a state-of-the-art research facility among the stars. Since then, the station has welcomed more than 280 people from 26 countries, along with butterflies, rodents, and fruit flies, among other creatures.

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While aboard, astronauts have conducted thousands of studies, from tracking space’s effects on the human body to exploring the bizarreness of the quantum realm. Here are some of the most important findings that emerged aboard the ISS, benefiting both space exploration and our terrestrial lives.

SUPER CRYSTALS: Researchers are growing crystals on the ISS to boost drug development. Photo by JAXA.

The microgravity in the orbiting ISS offers a unique opportunity for drug development, researchers on the space station have learned. On Earth, gravity can hinder the precise processes involved in growing intricate protein crystals within life-saving drugs. In space, these can grow more evenly, and often bigger. Pharmaceutical companies have collaborated with scientists aboard the ISS to take advantage of these conditions. For example, experiments with the cancer drug pembrolizumab on the ISS illuminated ways to improve the medication’s production on Earth, enabling it to be delivered as an injection—rather than a slow intravenous transfusion—to make life easier for patients and caregivers.

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SUPER COOL: NASA astronaut Christina Koch working on the Cold Atom Lab on the International Space Station. Photo by NASA.

In the mini fridge-sized ISS Cold Atom Lab, scientists concocted the strange fifth state of matter—Bose-Einstein condensates, which were first glimpsed in 1995 but predicted by Albert Einstein and Satyendra Nath Bose a century ago. In this form of matter, super cold clouds of atoms “coalesce, overlap and become synchronized like dancers in a chorus line,” according to NASA. These frosty atoms—as chilly as one ten billionth of a degree above absolute zero—are easier to study in space, without the influence of terrestrial gravity. “Waves” of Bose-Einstein condensates could eventually power instruments that pick up signals from mysterious phenomena such as dark energy and gravitational waves.

BODIES IN SPACE: NASA astronaut Kate Rubins works with tissue chips that mimic the heart. Photo by NASA.

Much work on the ISS probes a critical question: How do human bodies fare over long periods spent in microgravity? Scientists aboard the space station have gleaned plenty of insights over the past two decades. For example, one study compared astronaut Scott Kelly’s health as he spent nearly a year aboard the ISS to that of his twin Mark Kelly on Earth. Scott’s body mass shrank by 7 percent, his eyeball shape shifted, and he experienced changes in gene expression, among other findings reported by NASA in 2019. For a closer look at the impacts of spaceflight on individual organs, researchers have created chips that incorporate living cells to “mimic complex functions of specific human tissues and organs.” Close study of these chips aids in the hunt for drugs that can reduce the adverse health effects of prolonged space travel, and these insights could also inform the treatment of age-related conditions on Earth.

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SPACE PLANTS: Canadian Space Agency astronaut David Saint-Jacques testing the Passive Orbital Nutrient Delivery System. Photo by NASA.

If we’re going to send people on increasingly lengthy missions to the moon and beyond, they’re going to need some grub. Since 2015, NASA scientists have been developing the Passive Orbital Nutrient Delivery System, which was tested on the ISS. This is a passive set-up that doesn’t require any electricity. Water and nutrients continuously flow into plants through a capillary-like wicking material, resulting in growth that could offer a steady supply of healthy produce for cosmic explorers. Water is also a critical resource for spacefarers—to guarantee astronauts have a steady supply, NASA has recovered drinking water from astronauts’ pee on the ISS.

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Lead image: NASA

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Molly Glick

Posted on November 3, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Communication

- Your Exclamation Points Speak Volumes!

COMMUNICATION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Your Exclamation Points Speak Volumes!

Employing this most excitable of punctuation marks changes how its writer is perceived

By Bob Grant    November 3, 2025

I personally don’t mind an exclamation point. In my written communications with colleagues, sources, friends, and family, I let my feelings guide my employment of the punctuation mark. Can it be overdone? Of course! (See paragraph below.) But I’ve always felt that a well-positioned exclamation point can speak volumes about my intentions and motivations, whether or not my tongue is well-positioned in my cheek.

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And now science backs me up! Sort of!

Exclamation points in digital communications may cause users of the emphatic marks to come across as more-feminine and warm, according to recent research. But message recipients may also see exclamation mark users as less powerful or lacking in analytical thought. And these perceptions seem to hold no matter the gender of the exclamation point user.

Read more: “Your 🧠On Emoji”

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Researchers at three business schools across the United States tested the effects of exclamation points on a variety of recipients of messages sprinkled with the punctuation marks. They published their insights (in a paper titled “Nice to meet you.(!) Gendered norms in punctuation usage”) in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

Their findings, gathered from thousands of participants, included that messages sprinkled liberally with exclamation points were more likely to be from an assumed female sender, that women were more likely to prefer messages with exclamation points and to see them as a norm in communication than men, and that messages with exclamation points were more likely to be seen as warm and enthusiastic, but also less analytical and powerful.

“We further find that the decision to use exclamations does indeed shape social perception, leading to more positive impressions overall but also some negative concerns,” the authors wrote in reference to this latter insight. Interestingly, the qualities attributed to the sender of these exclamatory messages did not differ depending on their gender.

So there appear to be some trade-offs in using exclamation points in digital communication, within the workplace and beyond. Whether or not you employ them depends on how powerful, warm, analytical, or feminine you want recipients to perceive your message. Choose wisely!

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Lead image: Photo Veterok / Shutterstock

Bob Grant

Posted on November 3, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

Environment

- Some Bacteria Have Evolved the Ability to Degrade Plastic

- The Secret Lives of Tree Roots

- Are We Trashing Earth’s Loneliest Spot?

- Nature’s Prescription for Our Future

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

- Hurricane Melissa Could Threaten Some Species with Extinction

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Some Bacteria Have Evolved the Ability to Degrade Plastic

But can this make a dent in Earth’s plastic crisis?

By Jake Currie    November 7, 2025

Plastics are easy to throw out but hard to get rid of. Unlike biodegradable materials, bacteria and fungi haven’t evolved the ability to break them down, leaving plastic garbage to languish for decades, eventually making its way into our oceans. And everywhere else. Now that may be changing.

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According to a new study published in The ISME Journal, marine bacteria are starting to develop enzymes capable of breaking down polyethylene terephthalate (PET), one of the most common plastics. Researchers at Saudi Arabian and Spanish institutions used artificial intelligence and genetic information from a slew of ocean bacteria to identify a genetic sequence pattern they call the M5 motif that codes for functional PETases—the enzymes that break down PET plastics.

“The M5 motif acts like a fingerprint that tells us when a PETase is likely to be functional, able to break down PET plastic,” team co-leader Carlos Duarte said in a statement. “Its discovery helps us understand how these enzymes evolved from other hydrocarbon-degrading enzymes.”

Duarte and his co-authors confirmed that the M5 motif is what distinguishes true PETases from lookalikes with lab experiments. The M5 motif was present in almost 80 percent of the water samples tested, indicating that the potential for bacteria to develop the ability to feed on plastics is widespread. They reported that the bacteria making functional PETases were found between about 3,200 and 6,500 feet deep and at the surface of the ocean in spots with lots of plastic pollution.

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Read more: “Can Humanity Stem the Plastic Tide?“

It’s welcome news. According to the study, more than 150 million tons of plastic waste have ended up in the oceans since 1950, so there’s plenty of potential food out there for enterprising bacteria that have the ability to break it down. In the meantime, the authors say this discovery could help with efforts to create synthetic PETases for use in recycling.

But the plastics crisis is multifaceted. It’s unlikely that the evolution of plastic-degrading microbes will happen at a pace that can keep up with the production and consumption of plastic by humanity.

A report released earlier this year, authored by an international team of health researchers, economists, and others, estimated that plastics-related health problems cost the world $1.5 trillion annually. “First and foremost, I’d like to see some kind of cap or limitation on global production of new plastic,” Philip Landrigan, lead author of that report and director of Boston College’s Program for Global Public Health and the Common Good and of its Global Observatory on Planetary Health, told Nautilus in August. “Even if we were to stop production totally today—which, of course, is not going to happen—there are 8 billion tons of plastic waste, large and small, circulating in the biosphere.”

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These new findings offer some ray of hope that the planet’s microbes are starting to adapt to this massive input of waste and at least beginning the process of breaking some of it down.

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Lead image: Maksim Safaniuk / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on November 7, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Secret Lives of Tree Roots

A glimpse into the arboreal underworld tells us how trees will cope in a changing climate

By Kristen French    November 7, 2025

The thrumming subterranean networks of tree roots in forests have been harboring more secrets than we realized: Scientists have now learned that roots time their growth according to who their neighbors are, and the winners of these competitive hierarchies are not always the ones we might expect.

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The finding could have implications for how well mixed forests conservationists are planting today will survive a changing climate.

Most of what we know about seasonal cycles of tree root growth comes from studying stands of single species of trees. But in nature, forests are typically mixed. Qiwen Guo, a doctoral student in the Institute of Forest Ecology at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna, wanted to know how a tree’s neighbors influence the dark underworld of its root systems.

Read more: “Never Underestimate the Intelligence of Trees”

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To find out, she studied trees in an Austrian experimental forest, where the trees are fitted with minirhizotrons, a non-destructive root imaging and analysis technology that offers a glimpse into the underworld via transparent tubes. The experimental forest contains four common European tree species in different mixes: oak, hornbeam, linden, and maple. Her biggest question was: Do roots adjust their calendar for growing depending on which trees surrounded them?

It turns out they do. Guo found that in mixed forests, one species is dominant and it sets the pace of root growth for the rest, even if that dominant species is not always the most productive tree of the bunch when grown in monoculture. “We discovered that mixing rewrites the underground calendar: Trees shift their root growth timing in mixtures, often matching dominant neighbours rather than keeping individual schedules,” she writes in a recent behind-the-scenes essay about the work, which was published in the journal Functional Ecology. She also found that root growth depended on specific combinations of species, not merely diversity.

The forest came alive as the scientists worked, and the local inhabitants often had different ambitions than the researchers: “Curious animals stealing our sensors left us equal parts astonished and amused,” she adds. But the payoff for their patience was worth it: “Our biggest surprise was the magnitude of the timing shift: In monocultures, peak root growth followed full leaf expansion by two to three weeks, but in mixtures this gap stretched to about five weeks!”

Roots start growing before new seasonal leaves sprout from a tree’s branches, but when trees are surrounded by other species, the time gap between peak root growth and full leaf development is longer, she notes. That’s because some trees wait to suck up resources from the soil until there is less competition from other species with conflicting growth calendars. In sum, the findings suggest that belowground competitive dynamics may differ substantially from expectations based on monoculture performance.

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To collect their data, Guo and her colleagues photographed the tree roots frequently, generating almost 7,000 images, and spent up to an hour per image tracing the individual roots. It was tedious work: “In mixtures, identifying which species each root belonged to was tricky,” she writes. They also measured the temperature of the soil every two hours and, above ground, tracked leaf development with fisheye images.

The findings inspired a slew of additional questions for future research: Does mixing influence total biomass, the ability to gather nutrients from the soil, the kinds of fungal colonies that make their home in the forest? “And critically,” she writes, “how will climate-driven shifts in seasonal temperatures disrupt the thermal cues that have regulated these phenological patterns for millennia?”

All more than academic questions, she says. Solving these mysteries is essential for predicting how Earth’s forests and roots will fare in a changing world.

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Lead image: Chokniti-Studio / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on November 7, 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.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Are We Trashing Earth’s Loneliest Spot?

Point Nemo, the most remote location on the planet, is serving as humanity’s cosmic junkyard

By Bob Grant    November 4, 2025

I for one, enjoy a periodic splash of solitude. A solo walk in the woods. A blissful morning of unaccompanied kayaking. An entire hour to myself, reading. But I don’t know if I could handle Point Nemo.

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This spot is the most remote on Earth. Referred to more formally as the “oceanic pole of inaccessibility,” Point Nemo is not so much a point of land as a very pointed absence of it. It lies farther from land than any other point (48°52.6′S, 123°23.6′W, if you’re planning your own trip) on the planet. Even boat and plane traffic don’t tend to come anywhere near it. Not only is it lonely, there’s also the falling space junk you have to watch out for.

For decades, satellites and other decommissioned space debris have been burning up over Point Nemo, remnants splashing into the desolate depths. Since 1971, more than 260 spacecraft have crash landed at or near the spot, including several Russian space stations and resupply vehicles, Japanese and European Space Agency cargo ships, and dozens of satellites, according to a 2018 paper in the California Western International Law Journal. Although much of the material that makes up these crafts burns up as they pierce Earth’s atmosphere, more substantive components make it into the ocean at Point Nemo.

This is all by design. When satellites or other orbiting spacecraft have outlived their purpose or completed their missions, deorbiting them is a way to declutter the crowded band of sky known as low Earth orbit. And, to limit damage to humans and their infrastructure, it makes some sense to aim for the spot farthest from any of that stuff.

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Read more: “Comets Are More Dangerous Than We Thought“

According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, Point Nemo is more than 1,600 miles from the nearest land, which includes an Antarctic island to the south, one of the extremely isolated Pitcairn Islands to the north, and one of the Easter Islands to the northeast. Even its name, “Nemo” after the Captain of the Nautilus in Jules Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea, roughly translates to “no one” in Latin. Visitors to Point Nemo—there have been intrepid sailors and scientists who’ve ventured there—find themselves surrounded by a circle of desolate ocean that measures more than 8 million square miles and dives to depths of about 13,000 feet. It’s no casual paddle out there.

In fact, when the orbiting International Space Station flies directly above, the space travelers in residence there are almost always closer (about 250 miles away) to Point Nemo than the nearest Earth-bound human.

Speaking of the ISS, that’s the next planned addition to what some refer to as Earth’s “space graveyard.” And it will be the biggest. After it retires from duty in 2031, the ISS—all 925,000-plus pounds of it—will be sent on a collision course with Point Nemo. Almost certainly, some of the solid structure that makes up the ISS will plunge into the icy depths there. And marine debris is only part of the potential problem.

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A 2023 study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences found that 10 percent of the aerosol particles in the stratosphere contain “aluminum and other metals that originated from the ‘burn-up’ of satellites and rocket stages during reentry.” These contaminants would have originated from reentries above Point Nemo and other spots, but as more and more orbiting bodies are deorbited, those metals could induce critical changes to the stratospheric aerosol layer. An altered stratosphere could influence how radiation and sunlight penetrate Earth’s atmosphere, disrupting climate and weather patterns.

Logistics make it difficult to study Point Nemo, but scientists have noted a substantial lack of biological activity on the seafloor in the region. While there is a community of organisms living in the sediment in the South Pacific Gyre, a spinning current that encircles Point Nemo, it is notably low biomass and low in metabolic activity, according to a 2009 PNAS paper.

If Point Nemo continues to serve as Earth’s space junkyard, it might behoove humanity to make an effort to further study the effects of this dumping on its surrounding ecosystem, however depauperate it may be. The ocean is full of surprises, and Point Nemo could be hiding one yet.

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Lead image: European Space Agency

Bob Grant

Posted on November 4, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Nature’s Prescription for Our Future

Why caring for nature is caring for ourselves

By Dona Bertarelli    October 31, 2025

For much of my life, I have worked at the intersection of human and environmental health. For three generations, my family has been dedicated to healthcare, with a constant focus on improving people’s well-being through science. I grew up surrounded by conversations about health, how the body functions, how to enhance quality of life, how science can help new life begin.

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At the same time, I was fortunate to spend my childhood in nature, from the Italian seaside to the Swiss mountain tops. Those early days by the sea and in the mountains left an imprint that shaped me. I have never lived far from nature, and so I cannot imagine myself as a city girl. What I felt then was how nature awakens us—how, in nature, we feel more alive, more curious, more connected to the world around us, to the ties that link us to other living beings, and to the cycle of life and death—and that this, too, is part of being healthy.

We feel better in nature because we belong to it.

Over the years, I came to understand that human health and nature’s health are not separate. They are two sides of the same coin. And as science and technology continue to advance, our progress on health has expanded in remarkable ways, yet we sometimes forget that it begins with the world around us. In our search for cures, we sometimes overlook the most powerful one of all: nature.

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The healing power of nature

Nature itself has long been one of our greatest sources of healing. Many of our most effective medicines, including treatments for cancer and pain, originate from compounds found in wild plants and marine organisms. The bark of the willow tree gave us the foundation for aspirin, now used around the world to ease pain and reduce inflammation. From the foxglove plant came digitalis, a medicine that has saved countless lives by treating heart conditions. The rosy periwinkle, a small flower from Madagascar, led to breakthrough cancer treatments. And the sweet wormwood plant gave us artemisinin, a powerful cure for malaria. These are just a few reminders that protecting biodiversity is not only about saving species—it is also about safeguarding nature’s pharmacy, a living source of cures that has already transformed human health.

One ecosystem, one health

Science increasingly confirms what many of us have long felt: that our health depends on the health of the natural world. The concept of One Health, recognized by the World Health Organization, captures this connection. It affirms that the well-being of people, animals, and ecosystems is inseparable. It is one living system, constantly in balance.

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NATURE’S PEACE: Dona Bertarelli believes that the health of humans and the health of nature are intertwined. “Even brief moments in nature, a walk in a park, the sound of birds, the sight of water, can already ease stress, steady the mind, and sharpen our attention,” she says. Photo courtesy of Dona Bertarelli.

When we lose biodiversity, we lose more than the extraordinary species that share our planet. We lose stability in the systems that feed, protect, and heal us. The plankton drifting in the ocean produces much of the oxygen we breathe and supports entire food webs. The microbial life in forests and soils filters the water we drink and enriches the crops that nourish us. Each loss of biodiversity weakens this web of life, and with it, our own resilience.

And as we lose those benefits, we also create new risks. When marine ecosystems are degraded, toxins and microplastics make their way into the food we eat and the water we drink. When air pollution worsens, rates of heart and respiratory disease rise. These are not isolated environmental problems, they are symptoms of the same imbalance.

Reconnecting for well-being

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Nature’s ability to sustain us is not only ecological. It is deeply personal. More and more studies show that spending time in natural environments reduces stress, lowers blood pressure, and strengthens the immune system. A large study in the United Kingdom found that those who spent at least two hours a week outdoors were 59 percent more likely to report good health and 23 percent more likely to report high well-being, regardless of age, income, or location. Other research shows that even brief moments in nature, a walk in a park, the sound of birds, the sight of water, can already ease stress, steady the mind, and sharpen our attention.

These are not luxuries or coincidences. They are reminders of how closely our bodies and minds are tuned to the natural rhythms around us. For millions of years, human beings evolved in connection with the natural world. We feel better in nature because we belong to it.

When we create sanctuaries for nature, we also create sanctuaries for ourselves.

This connection between nature and well-being is especially powerful, and increasingly needed, for young people. Yet, one long-term study in the United States found that between 1981 and 2003, children’s time spent in outdoor activities declined by roughly half. Time spent outdoors builds confidence, curiosity, and empathy, qualities that no classroom alone can teach. Through my program Sow My Dream, which encourages schools to bring learning outside, I have seen how nature can awaken something essential in children: a sense of wonder and belonging, together with critical thinking and passion that nurtures mind, body, and heart. A passion they may carry with them throughout their lives, whatever paths they choose.

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Our common ground

Yet in our increasingly urban and digital world, nature has become something we visit rather than something we live within. Rebuilding that connection strengthens not only our health, but our communities. Green and blue spaces bring people together, restore our spirits, and foster a sense of belonging and purpose. When people have access to nature, they are more likely to be active, to engage with others, and to care for the places they share. Whether in schools, neighborhoods, or workplaces, reconnecting with nature as a society shows that well-being is not just personal, it is shared.

Our parks, rivers, forests, and the vast ocean carry the truth that what sustains one community sustains us all. This is why caring for these shared spaces is not only an environmental duty, but an act of mutual care. This is the idea behind the 30×30 global goal, adopted under the Convention on Biological Diversity, to protect at least 30 percent of the planet’s land and ocean by 2030.

The remedy around us

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When we create sanctuaries for nature, we also create sanctuaries for ourselves, places where life can recover, harmony can return, and future generations can thrive. Protecting nature is not about keeping people out; it is about giving life room to grow, so that humanity, too, can flourish.

Our well-being rises and falls with the health of the planet. Every action we take to care for nature—protecting the land and the ocean, preserving biodiversity, and making space for the wild—is an investment in a healthier, more resilient future.

The more we care for nature, the more it gives back to us.

The remedy we have needed all along is all around us. We just need to embrace it.

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Lead image: courtesy of Dona Bertarelli.

Dona Bertarelli

Posted on October 31, 2025

Dona Bertarelli is a Swiss philanthropist and biodiversity champion, deeply committed to impactful initiatives in ocean conservation, education, and gender equality. As executive chair of Dona Bertarelli Philanthropy and co-chair of the Bertarelli Foundation, she works to balance human well-being and environmental stewardship.

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.

General

- Print Edition 64

GENERAL | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Print Edition 64

By Liz Greene    October 31, 2025

Issue 64 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our September and October 2025 online issues. It includes contributions from neuroscientist Grigori Guitchounts, science journalist Megan Scudellari, author Philip Ball, and more.  This issue also features new illustrations by Tara Anand.

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Geoscience

- Antarctic Team Drills 6 Million Years Into Earth’s Past

GEOSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Antarctic Team Drills 6 Million Years Into Earth’s Past

The recovery of the ancient ice core to date reveals key insights into our changing climate

By Jake Currie    October 30, 2025

At the end of the Earth there’s a record of sorts, preserved in layers of layers of Antarctic ice—you could even call it our planet’s memory. Now, scientists have unearthed a new chapter in this prehistoric record.

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Drilling through ancient glaciers in the Allan Hills region of southeastern Antarctica, researchers from the Center for Oldest Ice Exploration (COLDEX) retrieved an ice core dating to 6 million years old—more than twice as old as the oldest similar ice core on record.

In a paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the COLDEX team said they determined the age of the core by analyzing the levels of an isotope, argon-40, trapped in tiny air pockets. For the first time, researchers were also able to directly measure how much the region cooled over the past 6 million years. An analysis of oxygen isotopes in the frozen water showed the area has cooled by roughly 22 degrees Fahrenheit. While Antarctica was once covered by lush forests, the snapshot captured by the COLDEX ice core records the gradual cooling that occurred after the continent had been covered in ice.

Read more: “The Hidden Landscape Holding Back the Sea“

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Earlier this month, a team from the British Antarctic Survey announced the discovery of a 1.2-million-year-old ice core—the oldest continuous ice core retrieved to date. The new find from COLDEX represents the oldest discontinuous ice core, or a core taken from ice that’s been disrupted by movements. The Alan Hills region, where the core was drilled, is an area where glacial ice upheaval has thrust older ice closer to the surface, making it possible to study with relatively shallower drilling.

Both samples will provide researchers with invaluable data about how our planet has changed over millions of years—and potentially help them glean clues as to how our climate will change in the future.

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Lead image: Liam Quinn / Wikimedia Commons

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Jake Currie

Posted on October 30, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Health

- How Junk Science Threatens Maternal Health

- Fentanyl’s Deadly Recipe

- Does This Gene Determine How You Handle Your Booze?

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Junk Science Threatens Maternal Health

The abortion pill is under attack, again

By Kristen French    November 3, 2025

The abortion pill mifepristone is a lifeline for millions of women in the United States. In the 19 states where abortions are now banned, it is often the only way that women can safely end an early pregnancy or treat a miscarriage. Current shield laws allow telehealth providers in states without bans to mail the abortion pills across state lines without fear of prosecution, creating a fragile workaround.

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Now fake science threatens to sink the drug—again. Last month, Secretary of Health Robert F. Kennedy Jr. ordered an FDA review of mifepristone, not because of new evidence about its safety or effectiveness, but due to a report written by anti-abortion activists. It’s just the latest round in a series of attacks on the drug from anti-abortion groups over the years.

The report, authored by the Ethics and Public Policy Center, found that more than 10 percent of people who take mifepristone experience “serious adverse events.” But the analysis wasn’t peer-reviewed, the authors have no scientific background, and they fail to provide a verifiable source for their data. Experts say the math does not add up.

The authors—Jamie Bryan Hall, EPPC’s director of data analysis, and Ryan Anderson, the organization’s president—say they took their data from an insurance database, but because they don’t specify which database, “there’s no way for anybody to try to re-create their analysis to see if they receive the same results,” Sara Redd, of the Center for Reproductive Health Research in the Southeast at Emory University’s Rollins School of Public Health, told The Atlantic.

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Read more: “Termination of Pregnancy Has Always Been Part of Women’s Health”

The abortion pill is actually two drugs: Mifepristone and misoprostol. In the U.S. this combo is used to terminate two-thirds of pregnancies up to 10 weeks, and sometimes to treat miscarriages.

Last week, the Center for Reproductive Rights sued the Trump administration for stonewalling freedom of information requests related to the FDA review.  The lawsuit points to the decades of evidence showing that 99 percent of people who have taken mifepristone have experienced zero complications. More than 100 peer-reviewed studies have confirmed the safety and efficacy of the drug since it was approved 25 years ago, and more than 7.5 million women in the U.S. have used it for abortion or to manage a miscarriage with vanishingly few adverse events.

Junk science has been used before to attack mifepristone. According to The New York Times, in February of 2024, a publisher retracted two of the studies that anti-abortion groups had used in court to claim the drug is dangerous. Last year, in a 9 to 0 ruling, the Supreme Court dismissed a lawsuit brought by anti-abortion groups that sought to restrict or ban the drug.

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The FDA imposed certain limits on the drug in 2011, requiring that it be prescribed by certified clinicians and dispensed under specific conditions. Legal challenges to those rules are pending across the country, and last week a federal district court in Hawaii ruled that the restrictions violate federal law.

Meanwhile, the FDA’s approval of a generic version of mifepristone in October set off fresh outrage among anti-abortion activists. The new generic meets the same safety standards as the brand name drug and could ensure continued access while lawsuits over the original drag on.

If junk science wins this round, the consequences will extend well beyond one pill.

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Lead image: Carl DMaster / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on November 3, 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

Fentanyl’s Deadly Recipe

The chemistry behind the synthetic opioid at the center of global trade tensions

By Bob Grant    October 31, 2025

The opioid crisis that grips the United States has a central chemical villain: fentanyl. The synthetic drug, deadly even in the tiniest doses, flows into the country and is mixed with other narcotics, such as heroin and cocaine, and is sometimes pressed into pills that masquerade as prescription painkillers. In 2022, more than 73,000 people died from fentanyl overdoses in the U.S. alone, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

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The primary ingredient in fentanyl is piperidine, a ring-shaped organic molecule that sits in the center of a compound that includes three other components: an aniline ring, an alkyl chain, and an acyl group. Andrea Holmes, a chemist at Doane University in Nebraska, told Reuters last year that the chemical structure of fentanyl is best imagined as a Mr. Potato Head toy—piperidein is the head while the other three compounds make up the eyes, nose, and mouth.

Piperidine is used in the manufacture of many other pharmaceuticals, but the U.S. government has placed the toughest restrictions on precursors of fentanyl, which all have piperidine at their core, that make it relatively simple to synthesize the deadly drug. These include 4-anilino-N-phenethylpiperidine (4-ANPP), N-Phenethyl-4-piperidone (NPP), 4-Aminopyridine (4-AP), and norfentanyl, each just a simple chemical tweak away from becoming fentanyl.

Read more: “Painkillers That Don’t Kill”

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According to a 2020 report from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, China is the main source of fentanyl and fentanyl-related products that end up in the U.S. That latter class includes chemical precursors of the drug, which make their way to Mexico, where cartels oversee the manufacture and export of fentanyl.

Exporters can and do alter the chemical makeup of these precursors to mask their identity, making it extremely difficult to track and stem their flow across borders, and potentially leading to fentanyl analogs—such as the elephant tranquilizer carfentanil—that can be 100 times more potent than fentanyl.

The lethal game of cat and mouse between drug exporters and manufacturers and authorities shows no signs of slowing, but fentanyl deaths did dip in 2023 and 2024, according to provisional data from the CDC.

As authorities seek to slow the damage that fentanyl is causing in the U.S. and beyond, they must keep an eye on an entire spectrum of chemicals, from the finished product to all the components that make it up.

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Lead image: United States Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) / Wikimedia Commons

Bob Grant

Posted on October 31, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

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.

History

- How the Spoils of an Infamous Heist Traveled the World

- Medieval Medical Misinformation Persists

- The 19th-Century Entomologist Who Dreamed Up Daylight Savings

- Meet the Real Frankenstein

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How the Spoils of an Infamous Heist Traveled the World

The Stone of Scone may have been returned, but bits of this sacred object were distributed in a hidden network

By Molly Glick    November 11, 2025

On Christmas morning in 1950, four students who were members of a Scottish nationalist political party carried out a legendary heist. They broke into Westminster Abbey in London and nabbed a 335-pound Medieval relic called the Stone of Scone. This scheme sparked a political border closing and a decades-long mystery, as bits of the stone have remained missing. One archeologist spent years trying to track them down, and has now revealed her findings.

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The students behind the hefty theft were avenging a theft that transpired six centuries earlier, which has long been viewed as a symbol of Scottish subjugation under England: This block of red sandstone had been used by Scottish rulers in coronation ceremonies sometime during the 13th century, until it was stolen by English troops under the direction of King Edward I in 1296. From then on, the stone became a fixture in British coronation ceremonies.

During the mid-20th-century heist, the thieves dropped the Stone of Scone, also known as the Stone of Destiny, onto the floor of Westminster Abbey—and it cracked into two pieces. People involved with this plot crudely repaired the stone before it was returned to authorities in 1951.

But not all of the stone made it back. Some bits stayed in Scotland, others were scattered far afield, many of their whereabouts largely unknown until recently.

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Read more: “The Curse of the Unlucky Mummy”

Sally Foster, an archeologist at the University of Stirling in Scotland has been on this case and reports her findings in a new Antiquaries Journal paper on the storied stone. A mastermind behind the stone’s clandestine repair was Robert, or Bertie, Gray. He was a sculptor and politician involved in the movement for self-governance of Scotland, which had unified with England in 1707, disbanding its own parliament in the process to send members to London as part of the new Parliament of Great Britain.

In the process of piecing the stone back together, Gray kept 34 fragments that he numbered, curated, and gave out over a period of 24 years.

In her recent research, Foster reported her adventures in hunting down these fragments and tracing their journeys as they secretly switched hands. While on this quest, she dug through archives, collaborated with curators and experts, and asked the public for information. Foster also conducted detailed ethnographic research, including interviews with families associated with fragments of the stone.

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Ultimately, Foster learned that “Gray traded on styling himself as the man who repaired the Stone, so we see him employing the fragments as a form of personal capital in his social and political networks,” she wrote.

Recipients of the stone include those involved in the robbery, people from as far as Canada and Australia, and politicians Gray respected. Some recipients even fashioned their fragments into jewelry, safeguarding them as family heirlooms. Pieces were also sent out for scientific testing to learn about the stone’s origins.

Ultimately, Foster located half of the 34 fragments, but the remaining pieces remain a mystery—she hopes that increasing public attention could lead her to tantalizing new clues.

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Lead image: Firebrace / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on November 11, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Medieval Medical Misinformation Persists

A 14th-century tale still promotes dubious origins behind the deadliest known pandemic

By Molly Glick    November 5, 2025

Centuries before questionable COVID-19 information began rippling through social media, another inaccurate account of infectious disease sparked an early spread of misinformation—a myth that still lingers, in clever prose, today. A new look at this fable helps to paint a more accurate picture of the deadliest pandemic in written history, a new paper claims.

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Between 1348 and 1349, Syrian poet and historian Ibn al-Wardī spun a rhyming yarn concerning the spread of the Black Death called Risālat al-nabaʾʿan al-wabāʾ or “An Essay on the Report of the Pestilence.” In this tale, the plague is portrayed as a traveling trickster that zipped from an unidentified “land of darkness” to China to the Mediterranean region in merely 15 years. This timeline and precise path have been subject to much debate.

But 15th-century scholars took al-Wardī’s story quite literally. This led to a persisting theory that the Black Death that killed so many people in the Middle East and Europe between 1347 and 1350 resulted from relatively rapid disease spread—roughly a decade—over thousands of miles via traders. All in all, the pandemic killed some 50 million people in Europe and the Mediterranean between 1346 and 1353.

Read more: “Why Medieval Cats Approved of the Plague”

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But al-Wardī never intended to provide a literal historical account, as argued in a paper recently published in the Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies. His story is an example of a maqāma, or “a literary tale in rhymed prose that often features an itinerant trickster.” al-Wardīalso quoted snippets of this maqāma in his historical research, sowing plenty of confusion about the pace of this plague’s spread.

“All roads to the factually incorrect description of the spread of the plague lead back to this one text,” said Nahyan Fancy, a historian of Islamic medicine from the University of Exeter in the United Kingdom, in a statement. “It’s like it is in the centre of a spider’s web of the myths about how the Black Death moved across the region.”

According to more recent analysis of DNA from human remains, the strain of bubonic plague behind Black Death might have emerged from one that spread in what’s now Kyrgyzstan—adding weight to the theory that the pathogen emerged in Central Asia. Still, the timeline implied by al-Wardī’s still doesn’t add up when weighing the collective evidence, Fancy and his co-author Muhammed Omar, a Ph.D. candidate in Arab and Islamic Studies, write: “The notion that a lineage of this bacterium moved over 3,000 miles overland within a few years, and established itself sufficiently to cause the devastating Black Death of the Middle East and Europe makes little historical or biological sense.”

Still, Fancy and Omar note that mythical tales like al-Wardī’s offer valuable insights—they divulge how people took up creative pursuits to cope with the unfolding tragedy of the Black Death—even if some of them may have been a little loose with the facts.

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Lead image: Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on November 5, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The 19th-Century Entomologist Who Dreamed Up Daylight Savings

Hungry for more light to find insects, this scientist championed the “unscientific and impractical” idea of changing time

By Bob Grant    October 31, 2025

Daylight Savings Time is a hot button issue. Whether you love the futzing with the clocks or hate it, there is one historical figure who was a key proponent of the annual springing forward and falling back: George Hudson, an amateur entomologist in New Zealand hoping for a couple more hours of daylight to find and catch his insect quarry.

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In the late 1800s, the preteen Hudson started a lifelong love affair with insects, particularly moths and butterflies, collecting specimens with his brother around their London home.

The Hudson family moved to New Zealand in 1881, and George got shift work as a cadet in the post office in Wellington in 1883. He continued collecting insects, and his fervent curation and illustration resulted in his first book, completed at age 19, in 1886. But meshing his work in the post office with his passion for entomology was vexing to Hudson. There simply didn’t seem to be enough hours in a day for both.

PARTY TIME: In 1907, Hudson (center row, left with vest and cap) was a member of the Auckland Islands Party, a scientific expedition to subantarctic islands off of New Zealand’s South Island. He and his colleagues collected 61 species of insects there. Credit: Samuel Page / Wikimedia Commons.

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So George Hudson proposed a radical idea: Set clocks back two hours during the summer so that sunlight would grace the land for a longer stretch of the workday. Hudson presented his idea to the Wellington Philosophical Society, first in a paper published as a brief abstract in 1895.

His plan to “alter the time of the clocks at the equinoxes so as to bring the working-hours of the day within the period of daylight, and by utilising the early morning, so reduce the excessive use of artificial light which at present prevails,” was met with ridicule by the Society. “Mr. Hudson’s original suggestions were wholly unscientific and impracticable,” wrote one Society member. “If he really had found many to support his views, they should unite and agitate for a reform.”

Read more: “How Darkness Can Illuminate the Insect Apocalypse”

Disappointed but undeterred, Hudson submitted his proposal at greater length to the Society in 1898. By that time others, around the world, were suggesting similar time shifts, and war-time England and Germany were the first to institute a single hour change in spring and fall in 1916, the need to conserve fuel trumping the desire to avoid the whole hassle. The United States adopted the change in 1918, and New Zealand in 1927.

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While the world warmed to annual clock manipulation, Hudson continued to collect and paint insects. In total, he authored seven entomology books, designed to share the splendor of New Zealand’s insect denizens with the public.

KIWI BEETLES: Hudson drew this adult and larval stage of Pericoptus truncatus for the book New Zealand Beetles and their Larvae. Credit: Siobhan Leachman / Wikimedia Commons.

These days Daylight Savings Time is a contentious issue. Some U.S. states observe the twice-yearly clock changes, some don’t. Ditching Daylight Savings Time or sticking with it permanently is a perennial debate in legislatures from state to federal levels. Researchers have found various ills associated with practice. Last month, Stanford biologists suggested in a PNAS paper that shifting to Standard Time permanently “would lead to a decrease in the prevalence of stroke and obesity.” Sticking with Daylight Savings Time would have a similar, though less pronounced, effect, they added. But for better or worse, about 70 countries around the world still observe the changing of the clocks.

Side note: Hudson was also something of an astronomy buff, installing a four-inch telescope at his section of the post office in 1904 and watching the transit of Helly’s Comet in 1910 with rapt interest. He even discovered and named a star, Nova Aquilae, in 1918. I guess he did have a soft spot for darkness after all.

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As we all drag our one-hour-more-rested carcasses from the bed next week, let’s spare a thought for old George Hudson. Unscientific. Impracticable. And ahead of his time.

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Lead image: George Hudson / Wikimedia Commons

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Bob Grant

Posted on October 31, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Meet the Real 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 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.

Microbiology

- How Moss Fights Crime

- From Deep Blue Mud, Unexpected Life Emerges

MICROBIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Moss Fights Crime

Even tiny bits of an unassuming carpet of plant matter can be enough to lead investigators to a suspect

By Molly Glick    November 11, 2025

You’ve likely stepped on an unlikely crime solver: Mosses may be low-profile, but they can offer a huge help in closing classes. The mat-like plants and their relatives have previously been used to gauge the timing of people’s deaths and tie suspects to the scene of a crime, among other crucial forensic insights.

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Mosses and other members of the bryophytes plant group have served as helpful pieces of evidence in forensic investigations for a few reasons—they dwell in many different habitats, can be linked to specific locations, and easily stick to people’s clothing, vehicles, or other personal items. They’re also easily preserved, and only a wee bit of a bryophyte sample is needed to narrow down the main group the specimen is from.

Despite the valuable secrets they harbor, bryophytes have only been documented in aiding a few reported forensic cases around the world, according to a paper recently published in the journal Forensic Sciences Research.

BOTANICAL CLUES: A dried Sphagnum moss sample that was collected in 2013 during a homicide investigation in Michigan. Photo courtesy of Field Museum.

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“We reviewed 150 years of scientific literature to see how these plants have been used in investigations,” said study co-author Matt von Konrat, head of botanical collections at the Field Museum in Chicago, in a statement. “Well, it turns out, the answer was, ‘Not that much.’”

Along with his collaborators, von Konrat encountered several cases where bryophytes were used to calculate the postmortem interval of remains—the time that has passed between one’s death and the discovery of their body—based on these plants’ growth rates. Investigators have also analyzed bryophyte fragments taken from suspects. When investigating a 2001 homicide in Finland, officials there “used recovered bryophyte fragments to link suspects to the scene of the crime where human remains were discovered,” according to the paper.

Read more: “The Curious Case of the Bog Bodies”

During the investigation of the 2011 abduction and homicide of a 4-month-old baby in Michigan, dried mud on a suspect’s shoe contained Sphagnum moss and a collection of other plants that don’t typically grow near each other, leading officials to a specific area to search for the victim’s body. Several of the new paper’s authors were involved in that case. Though the body has not been found, “the analysis and identification of the botanical samples recovered from Phillips’ shoes greatly narrowed down investigators’ search radius.”

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Outside of these few examples, the authors note that plants are “underused” in forensic investigations. In fact, few law enforcement professionals are trained to identify and collect any type of botanical samples.

“Plants, and specifically bryophytes, represent an overlooked yet powerful source of forensic evidence that can help investigators link people, places, and events,” study co-author Jenna Merkel, who was pursuing her master’s degree in forensic science at George Washington University during this research, said in the statement. “Through this paper, we aim to raise awareness of forensic botany and encourage law enforcement to recognize the value of even the smallest plant fragments during investigations.”

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Lead image: Des_Callaghan / Wikimedia Commons

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Molly Glick

Posted on November 11, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

MICROBIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

From Deep Blue Mud, Unexpected Life Emerges

Surprise biology in deep-sea mud volcanoes

By Devin Reese    November 11, 2025

The deep sea is a foreboding, almost impenetrable, place for us surface dwellers; darkness prevents photosynthesis, and animals at great depths must withstand extremely low temperatures, high pressures, and scarce nutrients. Yet, ecosystems just beneath the seafloor contain an estimated 15 percent of Earth’s living biomass—in the form of wildly resourceful microbes that make do in the abyss.

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Hardy communities of microbes inhabit the ocean’s crust, clustered around hydrothermal vents, which spew life-giving minerals in superheated streams of water. Now, a study in Communications Earth & Environment announces marine microbial life that even further pushes the limits of environmental tolerance.

University of Bremen researchers and colleagues searched for evidence of microbes in two sediment cores extracted from mud volcanoes near the Mariana Trench. The cores, which were drilled from seafloor more than 9,800 feet down, contained mud from up to 5.4 feet below the seafloor, down into what’s called serpentinite, a sediment layer that is tinged a bright blue.

In that blue mud, the pH is a startlingly alkaline 12, the same as some household bleaches, oven cleaners, and hair relaxers. But the scientists, using lipid analysis, detected, in that punishing mud, fat molecules that could only have resulted from biological activity.

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Read more: “The Bacteria That Revolutionized the World”

The conditions are more alkaline than is known for any other ecosystem on Earth. “What is fascinating about these findings is that life under these extreme conditions, such as high pH and low organic carbon concentrations is even possible,” said organic geochemist at the University of Bremen’s Center for Marine Environmental Sciences and co-author Florence Shubotz in a statement.

Add to those challenges the virtual lack of oxygen at such depths, and life has to find unique ways of making it. Known deep-sea microbes gain their energy through chemosynthesis, exploiting minerals in rocks and gaseous hydrocarbons from vents. The same appears to be true of these newly discovered organisms.

The lipid molecules detected in the study are from the cell membranes of either bacteria or archaea, an ancient domain of organisms that resemble bacteria. In the cell membranes of those microbes, fats provide a barrier against the alkaline conditions. Their condition indicates whether the microbes are living or long-dead. Intact lipid molecules indicate a living community, whereas degraded lipid molecules could be from fossil organisms. The results showed both types of lipids in the sediment cores—a community of contemporary microbes and evidence of ancient microbial populations.

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These extremophile organisms could also provide a window to how life first started on Earth. “We suspect that primordial life could have originated at precisely such sites,” Shubotz added. Furthermore, the core samples just scratched the surface of a habitat that could extend much farther below the seafloor, harboring even deeper insights into the earliest life here on Earth—and potentially beyond.

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Lead image: Ethan Daniels / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on November 11, 2025

Devin Reese is the executive editor of Natural History and a science writer based in Alexandria, Virginia.

Neuroscience

- He Erased Memory in Mice. Then Thought About Erasing His Own

- The Brain’s Hidden Drain

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

He Erased Memory in Mice. Then Thought About Erasing His Own

Sunk in grief and alcoholism, this neuroscientist discovered the power of memory in himself

By Kevin Berger    November 11, 2025

Steve Ramirez was feeling on top of the world in 2015. His father, Pedro Ramirez, had snuck into the United States in the 1980s to escape the civil war in El Salvador. Pedro Ramirez held jobs as a door-to-door salesman for tombstones, a janitor in a diner, and a technician in an animal lab. After years of ’round-the-clock work, Pedro Ramirez became a U.S. citizen. And here was his son, born in America, with a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, still in his 20s, being celebrated as one of the most exciting and promising neuroscientists in the country.

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Steve Ramirez had published research papers with his MIT mentor Xu Liu that reported how they used lasers to erase fear memories, spur positive memories, and even fabricate new memories in the brain. The experiments were only in mice. But they were impressive. Memories are made of networks of brain cells called engrams. The lasers targeted specific cells in engrams. Zap those cells and the whole engram was muted. The pair of neuroscientists gave a popular TED Talk on memory manipulation and were featured in international press stories that invariably mentioned the plotlines in the movies Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Inception could be real. Bad memories could be deleted. New memories could be implanted.

One night in 2013 Ramirez and Liu were celebrating the publication of one of their papers in a jazz lounge at the top of the Prudential Building in Boston. The music was grooving, and the city below glittered like stars. Ramirez thought, I’ve never been so happy and so fully alive.

That was unbearable. I didn’t want to look at my phone, let alone our text history.

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In early 2015, Liu, age 37, died suddenly. There had been no warning signs. Ramirez had never had a friend like Liu. Liu opened his mind to experiences in science he couldn’t have imagined. Their relationship felt organic from Ramirez’s first day in the lab. Liu joked they would always have chemistry doing science together. Grief is when the future your brain plans for is cut off. Ramirez’s thoughts of doing science without Liu became a trapdoor that landed him in a cellar of pain.

A relief in that cellar is alcohol. Ramirez had been an enthusiastic social drinker. Now he was something more. After a long day at a neuroscience conference in 2017, Ramirez hit the bar and afterward partied with an old friend in his hotel room, binging on beer, whiskey, and vodka. Ramirez awoke the next morning in a panic. He couldn’t breathe. He was choking on his own vomit. His friend heard him gagging and rushed into the room and rolled Ramirez on his side. At some point, Ramirez recalls, “through some miracle of biology, my brain and body decided to live on.” Live on, attend an alcohol support group, get his career back in order, and write a book about it all.

The book, How to Change a Memory, hooked me and didn’t let go. Ramirez writes clearly about brain anatomy and how memory can be manipulated—in mice, yes, but also in humans. What I liked most about the book, I told Ramirez in a recent conversation, is its undercurrent: His academic research became intensely personal. Memories of his mentor and friend brought his research out of the lab and into the storm of his own brain. Memory was now a window into the meaning of his own life.

Ramirez, today an associate professor at Boston University, spoke with ingratiating candor and energy as we discussed his personal experiences and the weird, pliable, and redemptive nature of memory.

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CHEMISTRY: Steve Ramirez and his mentor and close friend Xu Liu, who died in 2015 at age 37. Liu joked with Ramirez that they would always have chemistry doing science together. Photo courtesy of Steve Ramirez.

How did the death of your mentor and close friend Xu Liu affect you?

I had this real existential crisis. My thoughts were almost nihilistic. I began thinking, “Why am I doing this? Why is anyone doing anything? What is the real purpose behind it?” Then, slowly, I began appreciating that for as long as I have a life, I can transform some part of that life into a career in science to make discoveries that can be of service to the world. Learning to live with grief was accepting that it never goes away. I began asking myself, “What would Xu do?” I learned a person really does live on as a memory inside of you.

It’s awfully tough, though, to realize someone you spent most every day with is now a memory.

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Yes, yes, it is. At first, it didn’t feel real. It felt foreign. I understood the emptiness that people talk about when they lose someone. It really did feel like you lost your most important limb. You’re physically not the same anymore. I couldn’t stop thinking, “What is death like?” Xu was so animated as a person. That this person no longer has a physical form is the grandest mystery that humanity has ever had to wrestle with. And in that moment, I realized, “Damn, I certainly don’t have answers for those questions.” At the height of grief, it was just a sense of anger and sadness. Anger that we’re so fragile biologically and there’s got to be a finish line. And sad because I had to figure out how to grieve and honor someone at the same time. I was so used to having him by my side.

Did you wish you could do an Eternal Sunshine of a Spotless Mind on your own brain? Erase your painful memory of Liu’s death?

You know, I did think about it. But honestly, I don’t think I ever seriously wanted to delete any aspect of those memories. There’s a part of me that’s like, “You’ll never move past this. But you will grow and learn to maintain this added weight of death and finality. You’ll learn to carry it with you.” If the grief really continued to impair me in my work, then maybe the “eternal sunshine” scenario becomes more of a reality. But I am weirdly fortunate enough to know that this is something I could handle, even if it takes a decade-long odyssey to figure out.

Grief may be “an adaptive form of learning,” you write. What did your own grief teach you?

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It taught me how powerful memory is. At first, what helped nudge me forward was drinking. I felt temporarily disinhibited enough to let my thoughts and memories of Xu come in. What did he mean to me? What did the last time I saw him mean to me? His last text to me was, “Let’s do this together.” That was unbearable. I didn’t want to look at my phone, let alone our text history. So, drinking helped open the floodgates. What I didn’t realize, of course, was how unbelievably unsustainable that is. When you keep drinking, feelings and memories start to black out. And then you reach the point of numbness. I needed to build a life where I could access those memories and reframe them without drinking. And that was the hardest thing I had to do. We can become the master of memory. Which I’m certainly not. But at least I’ve tried to reframe what memories mean to me in a way that feels purposeful.

Every moment is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We can never get any moment back.

Did you go to AA?

No, I was in an online recovery community. It was definitely the thing that saved my life. I always knew I wasn’t alone in addiction. But seeing and experiencing it was a whole other ballgame. In those meetings, you see a part of yourself in everyone. And you also see what you can become if you stop drinking, or what you can become if you continue drinking. I felt like the meetings were a way of planting my life in a parallel universe and pressing fast-forward and rewind. You meet people who struggled for 20, 30, 40 years, and what that leads to, as well as people who have been sober for 20, 30, 40 years, and what that leads to. It’s the whole wealth of human experience in a room. I think it’s the most powerful thing I’ve ever done. It felt like the opposite of addiction is connection, and that was instantly real to me in those meetings.

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One of the most fascinating things I learned from your book is the brain cells that form a memory are not the same cells that are activated when you recall a memory. That’s wild. It underscores that memories are not permanently implanted in our brains.

Right. That’s a leading theory in the field right now. We don’t conclusively know that they’re not the same cells. But we have every reason to believe they are. If you have—I’m going to make this up—1 million specific cells that were active during an experience from when you were 18, when you recall that experience, only a very small fraction of that million are being reactivated. So, you’re not getting all the million cells coming back the way they would if you were to hit rewind on a video. It’s much more dynamic and malleable and has morphed and changed over time, as you’ve morphed and changed over time as well.

“Know thy memory,” you write. “It contains our conscious and unconscious self—it contains all of us.” But learning from you and other neuroscientists like Charan Ranganath that memory is also malleable and changeable sparks its own kind of existential crisis. Our self is a mirage. What are we supposed to do with that information?

You’re right. Memory is malleable, it’s weird, it’s flexible, it’s pliable. It’s certainly not this vertical, stable representation of the past. What we do with that information depends on our goal. Is it to sit by the campfire and tell stories and share memories with our best friends? We all remember things slightly differently and so maybe we get into arguments over it, “No, it happened this way.” And that serves a great purpose. In a court of law, where a case depends on memory, the consequences are much more serious, and other factors may need to come into play to triangulate what happened.

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Knowing memories are malleable has consequences for us personally, too. Maybe I have aspects of my past that I’m trying to come to terms with, to either resolve or celebrate. Let me pull them out of my brain library, scribble some notes of what I know now, and add some nuggets of wisdom that I hope that I’ve acquired through life. That changeability can help me learn from my past, so I’m not condemned to it. I can revisit it, reframe it, and either learn from it or just package the book away and learn from it another time. So, malleability can be a blessing and a curse, depending on how we look at it. I like to look at it as a blessing.

The price we pay for imagination and cognition is having memories like Silly Putty.

Liu said to you one day, “Everything you live through is part of who you are. Everything. Sometimes you get caught in a loop, wondering what you could have done differently, but the reality is that you can never undo the past. You can only redo it.” How do you understand that now?

Very, very physically and deeply. Because he’s right. It’s the one law of physics that, as far as I know, we will never be able to break. Every moment is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. We can never get any moment back. Time is a unidirectional arrow that we can bend and warp and fast-forward but can’t rewind.

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When we accept that we can’t rewind the past, that every moment will never happen again, we can say, “If I can’t get the past back, let me anticipate what’s incoming.” If I can influence what’s incoming, then it can be an experience for growth. I can go to bat again. I can say, “OK, maybe the first time was a strikeout, and I can’t get that strikeout back, but I’m a little bit more seasoned now, and I see the curve balls incoming. So let me try to swing the bat a little differently and see if that can adjust my future.”

Memories can feel so real, regardless of whether they’re accurate or not. Why does the brain have a hard time distinguishing between false and real?

My guess is that, from the brain’s perspective, experience is experience. Experience leaves its imprint on the Silly Putty that is the brain. It’s almost like it doesn’t matter whether it’s real or false. The brain has a hard time distinguishing between the two because, for the most part, it doesn’t have to. One of the theories out there is the reason why memories can be so fallible or warpable is because by recombining the building blocks of our past, we can imagine ourselves in the future. The net positive is we are more likely to survive by anticipating the future. So, the price we pay for the human gift of imagination and cognition is having memories like Silly Putty. From the brain’s perspective, that’s good enough.

That’s evolution talking.

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Yes, exactly. Some things are better for us adaptively than others. So, even if some bad thing piggy-backed along, that’s OK. It’s just a kind of an evolutionary side effect.

When we have experiences, not everything gets recorded, right? Most of our lives is simply forgotten.

It’s a really interesting question because the common consensus is, yes, we forget or don’t remember all the irrelevant details because we’re bombarded with information left and right. My opinion is that it’s still an unsolved mystery of the brain.

Based on the consensus of neuroscience, what percentage of experiences do our brains store?

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My guess is that people think we store about 5 percent—that is, really store it, the stuff that’s meaningful to us. But I think the brain stores so much more than we give it credit for. We all have anecdotes of remembering things that we hadn’t thought of for 40 years or since we were 5 years old. To me, that’s evidence that we probably store more like 80 percent. We just don’t need to access it all the time, because it tends to be irrelevant most of the time. I don’t really need to remember what I had for lunch nine days ago. But the fact that we can recall memories that were seemingly gone for decades is to me evidence that there’s a rich repository there that remains under the hood of consciousness.

At some point, if the right cue matches up, suddenly we have this eureka moment. When we’re in a good mood, we’re likely to recall good memories. When we’re in a bad mood, we’re likely to recall bad memories. A lot of the memories that come flooding back from the past tend to have an emotional tinge to them. You feel something in remembering them. And that’s not by accident because the emotion part is our brain’s way of saying that once upon a time this really mattered to you.

You seem so even-tempered, Steve. But you were down-and-out there for a while. What ultimately got you back to a good place?

Well, I’m both the calm and the storm. I just needed to accept that because I’m a cup-is-nine tenths-full person, and my parents are as well, I still have this unshakable hope and optimism about the world in me. They were suffocated for a while by things that life can be. We all go through something that is BS, unfair, and it just sucks to go through. And it might not have any purpose or meaning at that moment. But I’m willing to bet that in five or 10 years or however long, someone at some point is going to come up to you with that same problem, and now suddenly you can connect with them, offer a nugget of wisdom. That’s a moment of redemption. And I’ve learned to keep my eyes open for more of those moments now.

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Lead image: Lightspring / Shutterstock

Kevin Berger

Posted on November 11, 2025

Kevin Berger is the editor at large of Nautilus.

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Brain’s Hidden Drain

Newly discovered vessels may be key to flushing waste away from our brains

By Bob Grant    November 7, 2025

Now this is what I call a brain drain. A newly described component of the human brain’s waste removal system has come to light. A network of lymphatic vessels, called the middle meningeal artery, appears to be central to clearing waste from the human brain, according to a team of researchers that recently published its findings in iScience.

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The scientists, led by Onder Albayram, a neuroscientist at the Medical University of South Carolina, conducted MRI scans to track the flow of the fluid that surrounds the brain in five healthy adults over five hours. They noted the real-time, slow drainage of fluid from the underside of the brain, suggesting that this represented lymphatic vessels passively channeling waste to remove it from the brain.

Read more: “The Strange Similarity of Neuron and Galaxy Networks”

To confirm these MRI data, they used high-resolution imaging to map the area of the brain around the middle meningeal artery, noting the presence of several different cell types. That map showed the area crowded with cells often found in the body’s other lymphatic vessels.

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Surprisingly, the anatomical details of the lymphatic system in the brain are not well characterized. These findings, even though they are in an exceedingly small cohort of people, could begin to elucidate the darker corners of the brain and provide baseline knowledge that can be used to diagnose and treat dysfunction in these emerging systems. “A major challenge in brain research is that we still don’t fully understand how a healthy brain functions and ages,” Albayram said in a statement. “Once we understand what ‘normal’ looks like, we can recognize early signs of disease and design better treatments.”

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Lead image: SpeedKingz / Shutterstock

Bob Grant

Posted on November 7, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

Paleontology

- Unique Puke Fossil Reveals New Pterosaur Species

- Can Lichen Light the Way to Dinosaur Finds?

- “Tiny T. Rex” Makes Big Waves in Paleontology Community

- Neanderthals May Have Invented the Original Crayon

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Unique Puke Fossil Reveals New Pterosaur Species

Discoveries abound in an ancient predator’s upchuck

By Bob Grant    November 10, 2025

You’ve likely heard of coprolites, or fossilized feces, from which paleontologists can tell a lot about the ancient animals who deposited them. You’ve maybe even heard of gastroliths, stones swallowed by herbivorous dinosaurs to help grind their fibrous diets. These trace fossils often contain a wealth of knowledge that scientists can use to reconstruct the ancient world and the beasts that inhabited it. Now there’s a new trace fossil on the scene—the regurgitalite. That’s right, it’s fossilized puke.

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And researchers claim to have identified an entirely new species of pterosaur, ancient flying reptiles that soared through Cretaceous skies, in the fossilized puke of an unknown predator that ate and then spit up the creature.

REVEALING VOMIT: This is the regurgitalite that contains remains of the new pterosaur species, Bakiribu waridza gen. et sp. nov., whose name means “comb mouth” in the language of the Kariri people, Indigenous inhabitants of the area of Brazil where scientists found the fossil. Credit: Scientific Reports (Sci Rep).

A team of scientists examining fossils in the Araripe Basin of Northeast Brazil reported their discovery of Bakiribu waridza gen. et sp. nov. today in Scientific Reports. In addition to being a newly described species, the animal is the first filter-feeding pterosaur—which used mouth structures similar to those of baleen whales to sift small food particles from water—from the tropics.

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Not only did the fossil vomit contain traces of this new species, it also revealed volumes about the ecology and food web (or trophic) dynamics of the Gondwanan ecosystem in which these animals lived. The mineralized lump also contained remnants of fish that could have been ralphed up by an ancient predator.

Read more: “Conjuring Imaginary Creatures”

“The exceptional preservation of the specimen within a regurgitalite, alongside head-aligned fish remains, provides rare direct evidence of trophic interactions in the Early Cretaceous Araripe paleoecosystem,” the authors wrote. The researchers suggest that the clustered position of the fish in the regurgitalite support their classification of the accretion as fossilized vomit and not just the result of a carcass floating in the water until it became mineralized over time.

Fossil puke. Just another trace of ancient life that contains more insight than one could ever imagine.

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Lead image: Julio Lacerda / Scientific Reports (Sci Rep)

Bob Grant

Posted on November 10, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Can Lichen Light the Way to Dinosaur Finds?

The bold idea to enlist satellites in the search for fossils

By Bob Grant    November 5, 2025

For decades, dinosaur seekers have anecdotally noted the presence of distinctive orange growth on fossil bones. It turns out that vibrant orange lichens—crusty little colonies that can comprise algae or cyanobacteria locked in symbiosis with fungus—do indeed have a preference for growing on exposed dinosaur bones. And researchers working in western North America are suggesting that the colorful growths could serve as homing beacons leading paleontologists directly to their fossilized quarry.

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Working at a known dinosaur fossil site in Alberta, Canada, the scientists measured lichen colonization in three microfossil bonebeds, which contained high proportions of ironstone. They found that two species of lichen preferentially grew where fossil bone density was greatest. “The exponential increase in lichen colonisation with increasing fossil density that we observed,” they wrote in a recent Current Biology paper, “… reinforces the potential for using lichens as indicators of productive bonebeds.”

Read more: “The Dinos’ Demise Gave Rivers Their Shape”

This means that instead of manual digging for fossils, or relying on the odd serendipitous find, paleontologists might employ aircraft or even satellites to scan the ground and zero in on the lichen color spectrum that indicates a high likelihood of ancient bones.

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Such a methodological shift could take fossil hunting to the skies and beyond, something that might prove invaluable in the types of rugged and remote locales where some dino fossils are unearthed.

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Lead image: Pickles, B.J., et al. Current Biology (2025).

Bob Grant

Posted on November 5, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

“Tiny T. Rex” Makes Big Waves in Paleontology Community

The discovery marks the end of an “acrimonious” debate

By Jake Currie    November 4, 2025

In 2006, a curious specimen was unearthed in the fossil-dense Hell Creek Formation of eastern Montana—what appeared to be a small Tyrannosaurus rex locked in battle with a Triceratops. Dubbed the “dueling dinosaurs,” these fossilized skeletons eventually landed at the North Carolina Museum of Natural History in Raleigh, North Carolina, where they would help end another battle that’s been raging in the dinosaur research community.

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For years, paleontologists have debated whether the T. rex-like dinosaur in the fossilized tableau and others are indeed juvenile T. rexes or whether they belong to another species entirely. Now, according to a study by researchers at North Carolina State University and Ohio University published in Nature, they have their answer.

After analyzing growth rings within the fossilized bones, the paleontologists determined they weren’t still growing, as a teenage dino’s would be, rather they were fully developed, suggesting they belonged to an adult. Computer modeling also showed bone growth trajectories differed from the T. rex’s, and an examination of other specimens led researchers to conclude they had not just one, but two new species on their hands. The discovery marks the end of a debate the authors characterized as “acrimonious” at times.

Read more: “T. Rex Was a Slacker”

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Naming their newly discovered genus Nanotyrannus, the researchers noted some key differences between the tiny terror and its more famous namesake. First, and most obvious, is the size. While an adult T. rex is roughly the length of a school bus, Nanotyrannus is closer to a pickup truck. It was also likely speedier and more agile, with longer legs and stronger arms, relative to Tyrannosaurs.

Nanotyrannus joins a variety of diminutive dinosaurs that once called North America home, including the herbivorous Aquilops americanus (seen in Jurassic World: Rebirth), the birdlike Fruitadens haagarorum, and the smallest predator discovered on the continent, Hesperonychus elizabethae, a theropod species about the size of a chicken discovered in Alberta, Canada.

The outsized mystery of the small dinosaur now seemingly solved, the researchers present it as yet another piece of evidence for dinosaurs’ diversity up until close to their very end.

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Lead image: Geekgecko / Wikimedia Commons

Jake Currie

Posted on November 4, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Neanderthals May Have Invented the Original Crayon

The most concrete evidence of the tools this human ancestor used to doodle

By Bob Grant    November 3, 2025

In another blow to the image of Neanderthal as brutish troglodyte, we’ve identified the tools the ancient hominin used to draw and decorate. Chunks of hardened clay and sand pigmented an earthy red by iron oxide may have served as Neanderthal’s original crayon.

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Researchers analyzed 70,000-year-old bits of ochre, a natural clay earth pigment, and noticed that some of the artifacts, recovered from known Neanderthal dig sites scattered in Crimea and mainland Ukraine, bore marks of shaping and sharpening that pointed to their use as ancient crayons. Using scanning electron microscopy and portable X-ray machines, European scientists studied 16 pieces of ochre and suggested that Neanderthals may have used some for symbolic (read nonutilitarian) purposes.

Read more: “How Neanderthals Kept Our Ancestors Warm”

“These objects and the markings they produced likely played roles in communication, identity expression, and intergenerational knowledge transmission,” the researchers wrote in a recent Science Advances paper. “The curated nature of the ochre fragments further supports this interpretation, suggesting that they were preserved, transported, and reused—behaviors that reflect both planning and cultural investment.”

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ANCIENT CRAYONS: Researchers studied these Crimean “coloring materials,” noting the scratch marks and evidence of sharpening that hint at their use as paleolithic art tools. Three of the objects—ZSKV-05, ZSKV-06, and ZSKV-07—have features “exceeding utilitarian use,” they suggest. Image by D’Errico, F., et al. Science Advances (2025).

Did all Neanderthals doodle with crayons? The authors of the paper say their findings can’t answer this question. Neanderthals lived for millenia and across a vast geographical range, from Western Europe into Central Asia and Siberia. “Our findings do not imply that all Neanderthal ochre use in Crimea was symbolic nor that this behavior was continuous over tens of thousands of years.”

But the findings do lend some material support to the long-held suspicion that Neanderthals, at least in some places at some times, expressed themselves by decorating their bodies, clothing, or surroundings. Our ancient ancestors seem to get a little more human everyday.

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Lead image: D’Errico, F., et al. Science Advances (2025).

Bob Grant

Posted on November 3, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

Philosophy

- The Pretense of Political Debate

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.

Physics

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

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.

Psychology

- Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most

- To Be More Creative, Immigrate

- Is There Such a Thing as Too Many Houseplants?

- Should Teenagers Take Psychedelics for Mental Health?

- How to Face Your Fears

- When Do People Speak Out Against Tyranny?

- Why We Love Horror Stories

- Is Loneliness Really an Epidemic?

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most

A new study upends conventional wisdom about how we relate to those closest to us

By Kristen French    November 11, 2025

Humans are social animals. We depend on our friends, partners, and family members to steer through troubled waters and cheer us on when we shine. One popular school of psychology known as attachment theory suggests that these close relationships tend to follow established patterns that differ from one person to the next: Some of us feel secure in our relationships, while others are more anxious about abandonment, less willing to trust even those we hold most dear.

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Now a large, new, 30-year study has found that our earliest friendships may have the biggest impact on how well we “attach” to friends and romantic partners in adulthood. If true this finding would upend conventional wisdom that our relationships with our parents leave the biggest mark on our attachment styles later in life. The team of researchers found that, in fact, mothers come second, and fathers, at least in the cohort studied, had little influence. The study, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, followed 705 people and their families over three decades, starting in the 1990s.

British psychiatrist and psychoanalyst John Bowlby developed attachment theory in the 1970s and early ’80s, and it entered into the popular discourse in the intervening decades. The theory evolved, with subsequent research suggesting that our attachment styles are shaped across our lifetimes by multiple relationships, not just those with our parents, as Bowlby had initially proposed.

But until now, few studies had experimentally tested, over a person’s lifetime, the fundamental assumptions underlying attachment theory. To do this, Keely Dugan, an assistant professor of social personality psychology at the University of Missouri and her colleagues, analyzed data from one landmark longitudinal study of 1,364 children and their families that started in 1991 and stretched over 15 years. They then followed up with 705 of the original study participants, who were now 26 to 31 years of age.

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Read more: “Love Is Biological Bribery”

The data for the original study came from a variety of sources: The authors periodically videotaped mothers and fathers interacting with their young children and made notes about their sensitivity to their children’s needs. They analyzed parent-child conflicts and closeness through reports from the parents and measured parents’ warmth and hostility through reports from the children. They also examined how the children rated their friendship quality and collected teacher and parent reports about their social competence with peers.

In the follow up, Dugan and her team evaluated the attachment styles and relationship quality of the now-adult participants, with their romantic partners, friends, and family members. They controlled for family income-to-needs ratio, maternal education, race and ethnicity, and sex assigned at birth.

Dugan and her colleagues found that a person’s relationship with their mother does shape their general attachment style and their specific individual relationships with friends, romantic partners, and fathers, accounting for 2 to 3 percent of differences in anxiety and avoidance. So, for example, people whose mothers were less warm and fuzzy during their younger years tended to feel more insecure in their adult relationships. The more recent the interaction with the mother, the more influence it potentially seemed to have. But early friendship bonds played an even bigger part than maternal relationships in the ways people navigated adult friendships and romantic partnerships, accounting for 4 percent of the variance in adults’ romantic partner- and best friend-specific attachment anxiety, and 10 to 11 percent in their partner- and best friend-specific avoidance.

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“In general, if you had high-quality friendships and felt connected to your friends in childhood, then you felt more secure in romantic relationships and friendships at age 30,” Dugani told Scientific American. “When you have those first friendships at school, that’s when you practice give-and-take dynamics,” she added. “Relationships in adulthood then mirror those dynamics.”

Even more reason to choose your schoolyard friends wisely.

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Lead image: Ihnatovich Maryia / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on November 11, 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

To Be More Creative, Immigrate

Creativity flourishes when people cross borders—and when those borders blur through deep, human connection

By Keith Sawyer    November 7, 2025

Why do so many great ideas seem to come from people far from home?

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I’ve long been fascinated by how creativity crosses borders. Immigrants, research shows, are statistically more likely to generate exceptionally creative works. Indeed, there’s a long list of immigrant geniuses: W.H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, Nikola Tesla, Marie Curie, Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein. The list could go on and on. Of course, anecdotes only take us so far. What does the data say?

In 2016, Eric Weiner published some numbers in the Wall Street Journal:

An awful lot of brilliant minds blossomed in alien soil. That is especially true of the U.S., where foreign-born residents account for only 13 percent of the population but hold nearly a third of all patents and a quarter of all Nobel Prizes awarded to Americans.

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Those are some pretty convincing numbers—suggesting that immigrants contribute disproportionately to creative and innovative output.

Creativity research offers an explanation: Psychologists have shown that bigger creative insights result from distant associations—connections between ideas drawn from widely different experiences or domains of knowledge. Associations between similar conceptual material also spark creative insights, but those tend to yield the ordinary, incremental kind that improve on what already exists. It’s the distant associations that lead to radical, breakthrough innovation. Weiner makes a similar argument based on recent research, citing studies showing that “schema violations” lead to greater “cognitive flexibility,” which in turn is linked to creativity.

Immigrants can enhance the creativity of the Americans they live and work with.

I probably won’t have trouble convincing you that immigration to the United States can be great for the immigrants. But do immigrants enhance the creativity of the American citizens who already live here? In October 2025, I interviewed creativity researcher and social psychologist Adam Galinsky, who teaches at Columbia Business School. For 20 years, Galinsky has been studying how cross-cultural connections contribute to creativity. In one study, he and Will Maddux, who studies organizational behavior, looked at whether traveling overseas makes you more creative. They asked people whether they’d traveled abroad or not, and then they gave them a creativity test. They found that travel abroad has no effect on creativity. But the people who had lived in another country scored higher on a creativity test. What’s more, the people who’d lived overseas longer scored higher.

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In another study, Galinsky and his colleagues examined the careers of fashion directors at the top fashion houses in Milan, Paris, London, and New York. They found a clear pattern: The more time these designers had spent living abroad, the more original their work tended to be.

Galinsky then turned to personal relationships. Were you more creative if you dated someone from another country?

A brief romance didn’t seem to matter. However, being in a long-term romantic relationship with someone from another culture did affect creativity. The same was true of friendship—close cross-cultural friendships predicted greater creativity, while superficial acquaintances did not. The lesson is that creativity comes from deeper connections, not superficial contact. When you really get to know someone, you start to see the world through their eyes—and it’s not always the way that you imagined.

Deep cultural engagement benefits creativity everywhere, not only in the U.S. In another study, Galinsky looked at non-U.S. citizens who had lived in America on J-1 visas, a program that allows non-U.S. citizens to stay in the U.S. from six months up to five years before returning home. Galinsky wondered whether that experience abroad made them more entrepreneurial when they returned to their home countries. The answer was yes: The longer they had lived in the U.S., the more creative they were when they went back home.

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Having relationships with people from other countries enhances your creativity.

In August 2025, the Trump administration proposed a new rule that would limit the time foreign students, professors, physicians, and other visa holders may remain in the U.S. without additional screening and vetting. That might sound like a bureaucratic adjustment, but research suggests it comes at a cost. Deep cultural engagement—the kind that fosters creativity—takes time. Immigrants can enhance the creativity of the Americans they live and work with, but only if they form close relationships. If they remain isolated among people from their own country, speaking their own language, the creative benefits never spread. The key is the depth of a relationship, not mere proximity.

There’s another body of research suggesting that the universities that immigrants work for produce more scientific breakthroughs and spin off more businesses. It’s hard to design rock-solid causal studies, but leaders of the top universities certainly believe in the importance of having immigrants working there. It’s not because they’re woke; it’s because they want to generate the innovations that improve the U.S. economy.

Creativity research strongly suggests that having relationships with people from other countries enhances your creativity. The lesson for everyone is: If you want to be more creative, seek out difference—and engage with it deeply. Get to know people from other cultures, and go beyond surface interactions. This is what drives the cognitive connections that lead to more surprising creative ideas. Meet people very different from you. Travel to a very different place and consider staying a while. Read magazines that you’ve never looked at before. Date someone from another culture. Fill your mind with variety.

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Living abroad may be the most direct route to greater creativity, but even if you can’t do that, you can learn from creativity research: Creativity flourishes when your mind is open to worlds beyond your own.

This excerpt is reprinted with permission from MIT Press Reader. It is adapted from Learning to See.

Lead image: Master1305 / Shutterstock.

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Keith Sawyer

Posted on November 7, 2025

Keith Sawyer is a creativity researcher. He has published 20 books, including Group Genius, Zig Zag, and, most recently, Learning to See. Sawyer is the Morgan Distinguished Professor in Educational Innovations at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. A version of this article first appeared on Sawyer’s Substack, The Science of Creativity.

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Is There Such a Thing as Too Many Houseplants?

It might not be good for us to go overboard with indoor greenery

By Molly Glick    November 6, 2025

People have adorned their homes with greenery for millennia—in China, for example, people may have brought plants indoors more than 3,000 years ago. But houseplants became especially popular amid the rapid surge of industrialization in the mid-19th century in Europe and the United States, when people might have been craving a bit of nature in their cramped living spaces in polluted cities.

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The COVID-19 pandemic ushered in another escapist houseplant frenzy, and this living decor remains exceedingly popular. Research has suggested that houseplants boost our mental health by, for instance, easing stress and depressive symptoms. They’ve also been linked with improved cognition on cognitive tasks, and less frequent sick leave among workers. Natural materials like wood have also been found to enhance mental and physical well-being.

But what dose of indoor greenery is ideal to reap the most benefits? The methods used in previous studies aren’t uniform enough to offer a clear answer, according to a new paper published in the journal Sustainable Cities and Society. For example, some papers only analyze the impacts of nature versus no nature in a room, or subjective amounts of plants.

Read more: “What Plants Are Saying About Us”

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For a more precise measurement, researchers from Stanford University created a software called the Nature View Potential tool. This calculates how much nature people can glimpse in a specific indoor space. “The tool is calculating how many of those rays that are coming from your eyes are seeing natural elements,” said study author Eva Bianchi, who recently received her Ph.D. in civil engineering at Stanford University, in a statement.

The team combined this tool with 3-D modeling software to create realistic-looking virtual office environments with different levels of plants, wood, and window nature views. They recruited 412 participants from a crowdsourcing platform and randomly assigned them to these digital rooms. After completing a survey that assessed various measures of well-being, the subjects did some tricky tasks in these leafy environs, including counting down from 1,022 to zero in increments of 13. To make things even more stressful, Bianchi told participants their scores were below average—and that they weren’t getting paid (they were, in fact, paid for their time at the conclusion of the study).

Ultimately, a 20 percent dose of nature “had the strongest response in restoration and sense of belonging for participants,” according to the statement. Yet the room with the highest dose in the paper—60 percent—appeared to intensify stress the most. “I wasn’t expecting this at all,” Bianchi said in the statement. This outcome “was contradictory to prior work.”

The paper also indicated that those who reported an elevated connection to nature got more out of its presence indoors than those who didn’t. But this work has limitations, primarily that the experience was purely digital rather than in real life.

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Going forward, the Nature View Potential tool could help designers envision healthy indoor spaces, including schools and offices, the authors say—giving our spaces just the right amount of flora for us to thrive.

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Lead image: Reytschl / Pixabay

Molly Glick

Posted on November 6, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Should Teenagers Take Psychedelics for Mental Health?

The potential risks are high, but scientists say we need to study the possible benefits

By Kristen French    November 5, 2025

Plenty of teens have tripped on psychedelics. At a party, a friend may slip them a pill or a tab and suddenly they tumble into the bizarro world of mind-altering drugs, the boundaries of the self dissolving into ecstatic visions.

These trips do not always end well. Some teens end up in the emergency room for psychological distress or dangerous behavior, suffer persistent hallucinations and perceptual disorders, develop symptoms of schizophrenia, or have other cognitive and social troubles.

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But other teens may find that, in the weeks following their trip, they are better able to psychologically cope with the stressors of daily life. Given the real need for new therapies that work for adolescents with treatment-resistant mental illness,  is there room to consider hallucinogens—or are the risks too great?

This is one of the questions posed by a recent review of the psychedelic literature published in Lancet Child Adolescent Health by a team of international scientists.

Clinical research on the use of psychedelic drugs for mental health treatment has mushroomed over the past couple of decades. To date, ketamine is the only psychedelic that has been approved for treatment of mental health conditions, but evidence suggests other varieties can also be effective for some conditions in some adults. A couple of months ago, for example, researchers found that psilocybin therapy was linked to lasting recovery from depression over a period of five years.

The problem is, the vast majority of studies focus exclusively on adults, as investigating these therapies in teenagers is much more ethically fraught.

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Some teenagers find they’re better able to cope with daily life in the weeks following their trip.

“If we want to explore whether young people with unmet mental health needs might benefit from psychedelic therapies currently being tested in adults, then we need to gather evidence and develop clinical knowledge which, as we show, does not currently exist,” said lead author Khaleel Rajwani, in an email. As a doctoral candidate at the McGill University Department of Philosophy, Rajwani studies ethical issues in psychiatry and mental health.

Over the past 25 years, only four of almost 1,600 psychedelics studies registered or published in the medical literature have involved adolescents younger than 18, according to the review by Rajwani and his colleagues. These trials, which propose to investigate the use of MDMA- and psilocybin-assisted therapy in adolescents suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, autism, social anxiety, and self-harm, haven’t been completed and no findings have been published.

Some research has looked into the impact recreational use has on healthy kids, however. One Swedish study of more than 16,000 healthy adolescent twins published in Jama Psychiatry in 2024 found that kids who used psychedelics recreationally had fewer episodes of psychosis than kids who did not use them—at least when substance use was accounted for, as 99 percent of the kids in the study were also using other drugs. On the other hand, psychedelic use was associated with more manic symptoms in young people with genetic vulnerabilities to schizophrenia.

The gap in research on how adolescents with mental health conditions respond to psychedelics needs to be addressed, the authors of the new Lancet paper argue. Even though adolescent brain structures that support planning and impulse control are still developing, they say, the risks of treatment-resistant mental illness for kids may be greater than the risks presented by the hallucinogens—and clinicians may try treating younger patients with these substances anyway.

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Many psychiatric medicines are prescribed now to adolescents even when there is little evidence from clinical trials that they are effective for that age group, Rajwani and his colleagues write. If psychedelics are approved for treatment of mental illnesses in adults, psychiatrists may similarly begin prescribing them off label to adolescents despite a lack of clinical evidence.

The scientists urge caution, of course—such research should only proceed in populations for whom the potential benefits are substantially greater than the risks, and with strong consent controls in place.

“We must stay mindful of the unique risks and vulnerabilities in adolescent contexts, and make sure that any psychedelic research conducted in this population is rigorous and held to the highest ethical standards,” writes Rajwani in an email.

It’s unlikely adolescents will stop taking psychedelics recreationally or even to self medicate. But at least, with a little more careful research, we may know more about where their minds go after they take a brain-bending trip.

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More from Nautilus about psychedelics:

“What Is Your Brain Doing on Psychedelics?” Something is happening here, but neuroscientists don’t know what it is.

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

“Clergy Blown Away by Psilocybin” A 10-year-old study finally comes into the light.

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Lead image: ooodles / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on November 5, 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

How to Face Your Fears

And why a bit of fright can be a good thing

By Molly Glick    November 5, 2025

When Barbara Rothbaum crashed her bike on a hill and broke both her elbows a few years ago, she “needed to be her own therapist,” she says—luckily, she’s a clinical psychologist. Rothbaum was hesitant to hop back on the saddle after her injuries, but she knew had to face these feelings head-on and move past them.

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Our evolutionary instincts can seed lingering fears after scary experiences like her crash, but this built-in system of danger avoidance is essential for our survival. Our ancient ancestors encountered myriad threats—from hungry crocodiles to deadly infections—so humans have evolved intricate physiological responses that keep us on our toes.

“We are hard-wired for fear,” says Rothbaum, a professor of psychiatry at Emory University School of Medicine in Atlanta. “We are animals, and we live in a dangerous world—that hard-wired system will help us survive.”

Similar defensive impulses are found in most mammal species, so dissecting rodents’ brains has allowed scientists to glean detailed insights on the neurological underpinnings of fear. Studies have also mapped people’s brain activity as they experience and work through fears in lab settings.

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You need to ride out your fear in order to overcome it.

After sensing a threat, the human brain quickly kicks off a domino effect of responses throughout the body. The brain’s amygdala immediately dictates how we behave—squaring up with a foe, fleeing, or freezing, depending on our proximity to the threat, says Michael Fanselow, a psychologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. Our brain also revs up the nervous system and propels us to produce useful stress hormones such as adrenaline and cortisol. Our heart and breath rates shift, and blood flows toward our limbs to prepare for a tussle or quick escape.

But these responses can go haywire, leading to irrational and persistent fears—referred to as phobias—and conditions such as post-traumatic stress disorder. PTSD may be associated with reduced connectivity between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex, Fanselow says, and increased gray matter volume in the amygdala. Such changes can inhibit one’s ability to process fear in a healthy way.

Read more: “How Evolution Designed Your Fears”

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Exposure therapies, the gold standard methods used by professionals to treat phobias and other conditions related to fear processing, can help people recover. In fact, you can conduct exposure therapy on your own, Rothbaum says, as long as the fear is mild and doesn’t interfere with your daily life. The key is to immerse yourself in the stimuli that triggered a given fear—whether it’s dogs, driving, heights, crashing a bicycle, or any other specific experience that makes you anxious. “When we avoid [these situations], we don’t get to see that the fear is not necessary—that the threat isn’t at the level that it feels like in our bodies,” Rothbaum says.

You need to ride out your fear in order to overcome it, she explains. She did that, quite literally, while biking, continuing to peddle as her panic spiked and eventually settled. If you’re fearful of dogs, for instance, you can spend time with a small, calm, well-behaved canine and wait for your distress to fizzle out.

Rothbaum and Fanselow also recommend escalating exposure in increasing doses—that might look like hanging out with larger dogs over time, riding down increasingly steep hills, or driving farther from home, depending on the given stimulus. Having loved ones present could make exposure therapy more effective, Fanselow says, based on past findings linking social support and fear inhibition.

“Fear in a truly dangerous situation is a good thing.”

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It’s important to get professional help if “your life is compromised,” Fanselow says. “If you can’t do things you want or need to do, then you should seek therapy.”

Therapy is effective to address fears, Fanselow says. But in the long run, he has noted that it’s common for people’s longstanding or intense fears to return. Exposure therapy helps to develop a “safe” association with a certain stimulus, he says, but it tends to be limited to the specific context where people learn it, such as a therapist’s office. People still retain the “dangerous” association, which the mind may retrieve in other, non-controlled environments. To treat a fear of flying, for instance, Rothbaum says she used to accompany patients on actual flights—but this is often impractical.

Virtual reality exposure therapy is one way to help overcome this limitation. Rothbaum is a pioneer in the practice and has researched it for decades, including as a treatment for combat veterans with PTSD. Because virtual reality is highly customizable, Rothbaum says it can be used to mimic settings that would otherwise be difficult to visit. It can also serve as an especially useful stimulus for PTSD patients by enabling therapists to match the memories they describe. Scientists are also exploring whether exposure therapy can be enhanced with certain drugs, including hallucinogens, along with brain stimulation.

But it’s important not to be afraid of fear itself, Fanselow notes, and to keep the benefits in mind when it’s working as intended. “People should recognize that fear in a truly dangerous situation is a good thing,” he says. “These are biological systems that evolved to do something good for us.” Whether you encounter a grizzly in the woods, or perhaps a misbehaving Chihuahua, you have millions of years of evolution backing your next move.

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Lead image: Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on November 5, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

When Do People Speak Out Against Tyranny?

What a mathematical model can tell us about self-censorship

By Kristen French    November 4, 2025

Population-level surveillance, through phones, social media, and facial recognition, is on the rise in the United States and around the world. So are punishments for dissent. The examples of politicians and protestors who have been targeted, jailed, or pursued by authorities are too many to count. When these kinds of threats to fragile democracies emerge, self-censorship becomes a real risk. So how do people decide whether to stay quiet or to speak up?

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A new game might help answer this question. Researchers created a mathematical model to see how ruling powers and individual people make choices and weigh tradeoffs in authoritarian regimes. What they found suggests that self-censorship is less a simple fear response and more a strategic one: Whether someone is willing to risk speaking out is governed by the likelihood of getting caught and the severity of punishments they might face. But certain personality traits, such as boldness, that can characterize entire populations, play an important part. The researchers published their results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“A population’s willingness to speak out early on, and suffer the negative consequences, has an outsized effect on how long it takes an authority to suppress all dissent,” said study author Stephanie Forrest, a professor of computing and augmented intelligence at Arizona State University, in a statement. “This is because the cost of punishing an entire population simultaneously is too high.”

How punishments are meted out also has a big impact on how willing people are to speak out, Forrest and her colleagues found. When the consequences for dissent are uniform—blanket bans on certain types of speech or activity and Internet shutdowns—people readily self-censor. But when punishments are proportional to the offense, for example tougher penalties for repeat offenders, some individuals will still take small risks to speak out.

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Read more: “There Are No True Rebels”

In the model the researchers created, hypothetical ruling powers were enabled to adjust the extent of their surveillance and the severity of their punishments according to their need to minimize dissent and costs. Protestors, meanwhile, had to weigh the risk of getting caught. Each responded to the other. In these simulated societies, the authorities that started out with more lax surveillance and punishments often ramped up repressive policies over time.

This is in line with how such regimes have played out historically. In 1957, Chairman Mao Zedong launched the “Hundred Flowers Campaign,” which lifted restrictions on Chinese intellectuals and writers, who were encouraged to critique the communist government. “Let a hundred flowers bloom,” said Mao in a speech announcing the new initiative, citing a line from a Chinese poem. Soon letters began to flood government offices and a “Democratic Wall” went up at Beijing University, with messages of dissent. By July, Mao had quashed his own campaign. Hundreds of thousands of critics were rounded up and sent to labor camps or executed.

The researchers’ model showed that as surveillance grows, so does self-censorship. But populations with higher levels of “boldness,” defined as a willingness to risk punishment, were able to draw out their resistance over longer periods of time. When this happened, those in power often struggled to fully repress dissent no matter how high the risk of protest. “The most powerful lever a population has for sustaining dissent is its boldness,” the authors write in their paper.

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Preserving open dialogue, then, seems to depend not only on punishments and surveillance, Forrest says, “but on the courage of individuals and the collective willingness to keep speaking, even when it’s uncomfortable.”

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Lead image: NDanko / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on November 4, 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

Why We Love Horror Stories

From ancient monsters to modern slashers, our fascination with horror may be an evolutionary gift

By Kristen French    October 31, 2025

Some of our oldest tales are horror stories. Greek and Roman myths are full of gore, psychological terror and vile corporal punishments. The Odyssey, composed around the eighth or seventh century B.C., gave us the Sirens, whose enchanting songs lure lonely sailors to their deaths, and Polyphemus, a colossal, lawless, cannibalistic Cyclops who devours humans. Even earlier than that, the ancient Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh, penned around 1800 B.C., recounts a half-human king’s encounter with a terrifying underworld where the dead eat dust and dirt.

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Perhaps humans have always been so enamored with horror stories because, as a species, we are built for threat detection. We can’t help but imagine all of the potential horrors in store for us, but in the process of imagining these threats, we can also imagine how we might vanquish them. This is the argument author and behavioral scientist Coltan Scrivener makes in his latest book, Morbidly Curious: A Scientist Explains Why We Can’t Look Away. We enjoy dark, terrifying stories not because we’re twisted but because they are psychologically adaptive, he says. Nautilus spoke with Scrivener about the relationship between a love of horror and empathy, why some people are especially drawn to the macabre, and how engaging with horror can help us.

What makes some people more morbidly curious than others?

Morbid curiosity tends to peak as a trait around adolescence or young adulthood. It slowly declines at a population level after that. A personality trait that tends to correlate positively with morbid curiosity is sensation seeking. If you’re a more curious person in general, some of that also gets directed toward things that are dangerous. Also contextually, if you’re getting cues that something dangerous is looming on the horizon, it might pique your morbid curiosity. This happened in 2020, around the time COVID-19 hit, people became very interested in fictional stories of pandemics.

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Why does an interest in morbid, gory stuff sometimes inspire condemnation?

If you see someone who enjoys a movie where there’s a lot of suffering, for example, like a horror movie, you might think, “oh, well, maybe that person thinks suffering is okay, or maybe that person doesn’t have an issue with violence or suffering.” I understand that intuition. But it doesn’t seem to bear out in the data. There’s no evidence, for example, that horror fans or morbidly curious people are lower in empathy. In fact, they score about the same as everyone else on empathy. And in some cases, their levels of compassion and cognitive empathy are actually higher. Humans can still make a pretty clear demarcation between what is real and what is fictional, or what is a story and what is not a story.

WHY WE CAN’T LOOK AWAY: Behavioral scientist Coltan Scrivener, author of Morbidly Curious, explains why fear sometimes feels good and what that tells us about being human. Photo by Matt Loveland.

What are some of the documented psychological benefits of consuming horror stories in books and video games and engaging in scary play more broadly?

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One of the studies I did at a 30- 40-minute haunted Halloween attraction found that a large portion of the people experienced self-realization or personal development. Some of them had a better understanding, for example, of how they handled their own fear and their own anxieties, what they needed to work on and what they were good at.

There’s a really great game called MindLight produced in the Netherlands and used to treat anxiety in children. It only works because it’s a scary game. The player wears an EEG headband that measures brainwaves associated with relaxation. As they play the game, they control a character who wakes up in this dark mansion that’s filled with monsters, and they need to escape the mansion. The only way to fight the monsters is for the character to look at the monsters and shine a little headlamp that’s called the “mind light” on the monster. If the EEG headband picks up that you’re getting too anxious, it actually pauses the game and gives you some tips on how you can calm down, including reminders that if you calm down, your mind light will shine stronger and you can defeat the monsters. And of course, once you calm down, the EEG headband detects your relative calm and that makes your mind light shine brighter and defeat the monsters.

That’s so cool. I love that. It’s a spooky form of neurofeedback.

It’s incredible. And several studies have shown that it is as effective as cognitive behavioral therapy at treating anxiety, which is the best way we know how to treat anxiety.

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Outside of games like MindLight, how does engaging with morbid stories help people psychologically prepare for threats, particularly if the fictional threat is not one that they might encounter in real life, like say getting attacked by a paranormal spirit or psychopathic killer?

One of the things that I discovered is that a lot of people who enjoy horror score a bit higher in anxiety than the general population, which is a little counterintuitive at first. You would think people who would enjoy horror would be much lower in anxiety. Why would someone who’s feeling anxious seek out something that causes them to feel anxious? And I think what’s going on there is that when you’re experiencing anxiety, particularly generalized anxiety, but you don’t have a source that you can attribute that anxiety to or control to help reduce the anxiety, you can get caught in these vicious cycles of rumination about potential dangers. It becomes very difficult to just relax because your mind will still latch onto whatever it is you’re feeling anxious about.

As soon as language came about, we were probably telling scary stories.

But one thing that some people have discovered is that horror movies can help them turn off their mind because it helps redirect their attention to a new threat—in this case, a threat that is fictional and controllable in some way. You can pause the movie, you can watch with the lights on, you can do things to control how anxious you’re feeling. And then after about 90 minutes, in the case of a movie, the threat goes away. And that signals to your brain that this thing that you were anxious about is gone, and your parasympathetic nervous system, which is the rest and digest part of your nervous system, can activate, and that will physiologically calm you down.

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You divide morbid curiosity into four types: The minds of dangerous people; acts of violence; the aftermath of violence, such as bodily injury; and finally the paranormal: malevolent ghosts, demons, angry deities, upset ancestors, even aliens. Do humans have different ways of responding to these different kinds of morbid curiosity?

It’s a little easier to sit back and learn about the mind of a dangerous person or the psychology of a dangerous person than it is to learn about a violent act itself, because violence itself produces other kinds of feelings that motivate us to avoid it. So disgust, or high levels of empathy, could lead us to look away from violence. So it’s kind of a gas-and-brake system like in a car. Your morbid curiosity is your gas, but some of these things produce feelings that help us push the brakes a little bit.

What is your favorite horror story?

I have a few that always float around in my top fear category. In the case of movies, one of my favorites is the 1982 The Thing. I think it’s one of the most perfect horror movies ever created. It does an excellent job of tapping into fear of uncertainty and isolation and coalitions and powerful entities that we just don’t understand. It includes lots of body violations. It does a good job of kind of capturing all of the domains of morbid curiosity in some way.

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What is the oldest known horror story?

As soon as language came about, we were probably telling scary stories. There is a really great phylogenetic study of folklore and the oldest stories we know. One of the oldest ones they identified was about making a deal with the devil. Little Red Riding Hood is also phylogenetically a very old story with elements of horror that you find in a lot of different languages. I would say quite a few of the old stories are trickster stories, which are horror stories in their own way.

Lead image: paseven / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on October 31, 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

Is Loneliness Really an Epidemic?

Social isolation is a health problem, but how we talk about it matters

By Kristen French    October 30, 2025

In the spring of 2023, Vivek Murthy, then the surgeon general of the United States, declared that Americans were in the midst of an epidemic of loneliness. Murthy asserted that 1 in 2 adult Americans reported experiencing loneliness, which has been found to increase risks of all kinds of serious health conditions, such as heart attack, dementia, and even premature death (though some of these findings have since been thrown into doubt). Murthy also claimed that loneliness underlies many of our societal ills, including violence, addiction, and political extremism.

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But is loneliness really an epidemic? The answer to that question could influence how the problem is addressed—and whether the efforts to combat it are successful.

Writing in the Conversation, Brendan Kelly, a professor of psychiatry at Trinity College Dublin, says that the proportion of people feeling lonely is actually quite stable over time. An epidemic is a rapid increase in the number of people afflicted by a particular disease or condition within a specific community or region. But, argues Kelly, “Loneliness is not a sudden crisis that needs a short-term fix. It is a long-term challenge that requires a sustained response.”

Read more: “Lifetime of Friendships Slows Aging“

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Social connection is essential to well-being, without a doubt, but calling a phenomenon an epidemic when it isn’t one is not just misleading, it could undermine efforts to find real root causes and effective interventions, he writes.

Some researchers have even found that the messaging around loneliness could increase the negative impact being alone has on our health, because how we feel about being alone can shape our experience of it. The authors of one 2024 study measured how lonely people felt over a two-week period  along with how positive or negative their beliefs about loneliness were. Those with negative beliefs experienced a steep increase in loneliness after spending time alone in daily life, whereas those with positive beliefs felt less lonely after spending time in solitude.

There are of course differences between being alone and being lonely. And, in any case, Kelly notes, “Loneliness is part of the human condition, but alleviating each other’s loneliness is also part of who we are—or who we can become.”

Ultimately, both Murthy and Kelly say we need to connect with one another better and more. But we might need a better diagnosis of our collective condition before we can find the right cure.

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Lead image: Jorm Sangsorn / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on October 30, 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

- How Super Recognizers See What the Rest of Us Miss

TECHNOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Super Recognizers See What the Rest of Us Miss

The secret to their extraordinary ability lies not in the brain but the eyes

By Kristen French    November 5, 2025

Some people never forget a face. A brief encounter at a party can be enough for them to imprint that person’s visage in their minds so indelibly that they recognize it years later—enough even to pick the person out in a sea of faces on a city street. People with this uncanny ability are known as super-recognizers. They make up 1 to 2 percent of the population, and their talents are thought to be inherited through genetics rather than learned.

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It’s a skill that is in demand. Super-recognizers are better than AI at many facial recognition tasks, and people who score highly on facial recognition tests can get professionally licensed, which allows them to work with law enforcement.

Recently scientists figured out how they do it: It’s less about how much information about a face they can absorb and process in their brains than about the quality of the information they take in. The researchers published their results in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

“Super-recognizers don’t just look harder, they look smarter. They choose the most useful parts of a face to take in,” said James Dunn, a research fellow in the School of Psychology at the University of New South Wales Sydney and lead author on the research, in a statement. “Our previous research shows super-recognizers make more fixations and explore faces more broadly. Even when you control for the fact that they’ve looked at more parts of the face, it turns out what they are looking at is also more valuable for identifying people.”

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Read more: “Human Super-Recognizers See Faces Better Than AI”

The researchers used eye tracking on 37 super-recognizers, mapping where and for how long they looked at photos of faces on a computer screen. They did the same for 68 people with average facial recognition abilities. They then fed the information they had gathered from the different groups of participants into nine different neural networks that had been trained to recognize faces and asked the AI networks to decide whether two faces belonged to the same person.

“AI has become highly adept at face recognition,” Dunn said. “Our goal was to exploit this to understand which human eye patterns were the most informative.”

The AI was much better at matching faces when fed the super-recognizers’ eye tracking patterns than that of average recognizers. This was true even when the total amount of visual information was the same and even when the face was partially hidden from view.

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One reason super-recognition might be difficult to learn is that, while some features are more critical for recognition on average, such as the eyes, evidence suggests that features that are most helpful for recognizing and identifying any particular face will differ from one person to the next. This may be why super-recognizers focus their gaze broadly across the face rather than most entirely on critical individual features.

The findings upend earlier assumptions about why super-recognizers are so super at recognizing faces: It’s about differences in how they encode information on the retina rather than how they process visual information after it reaches the brain.

The researchers note that their study focused on facial recognition in still images, whereas future studies could look at how super-recognizers are able to identify faces in changing context such as video.

Either way, it seems you can’t hide from a super-recognizer.

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Are you a super-recognizer? Take one of these tests:

The UNSW Face Test (University of New South Wales)

The Cambridge Face Memory Test (Birbeck University of London)

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Lead image: Fractal Pictures / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on November 5, 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.

Zoology

- Chameleon’s Eyes Have Been Hiding a Secret

- These Spiders Build Doppelgängers to Stay Alive

- Orcas Giveth and Orcas Taketh Away

- The Secret of the Triangle Weaver’s Springy Web

- The Worm That Survived Multiple Apocalypses

- A Pretty Anemone Makes Space and Eats Waste

- The Secret Superpowers of Frog Skin

- The Mystery of 111,000 Spiders Living in a Giant Subterranean Web

- Octopus Camouflage Could Give Us Better Sunscreen

- Fish Forensics Yield Surprising Results

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Chameleon’s Eyes Have Been Hiding a Secret

Their wandering gaze results from a structural adaptation in their nerves

By Devin Reese    November 10, 2025

Chameleons’ bulging eyes do strange things; they swivel in different directions like periscopes as they peer around their surroundings. One eye may be fixed on you, while the other eye is trained on an insect scuttling away.

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Though scientists have been fascinated by this ability for centuries, the physiological mechanism that makes it possible has remained mysterious. Until now.

A team of researchers has discovered that chameleons possess two coiled optic nerves that operate independently to bring two separate scenes into the reptile’s focus. They report their findings in a Scientific Reports paper published today.

“Chameleon eyes are like security cameras, moving in all directions,” said biologist Juan Daza at Sam Houston State University, the lead author of the paper, in a statement. “They move their eyes independently while scanning their environment to find prey. And the moment they find their prey, their eyes coordinate and go in one direction so they can calculate where to shoot their tongues.”

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Read more: “Seeing Through Animal Eyes”

In the new study, Daza and his colleagues examined the optic nerves of three species of chameleon that differ in body size, evolutionary history, and behavior. The brown leaf chameleon, Brookesia superciliaris, is about the length of a golf tee and lives on the ground or in shrubby vegetation. The bearded pygmy chameleon, Rieppeleon brevicaudatus, is a bit larger, about crayon-sized, and similar in its habitat use. The veiled chameleon, Chamaeleo calyptratus, is the big one of the bunch, nearly a foot long and thought to be entirely tree-dwelling. By comparing disparate species, the researchers hoped to ascertain which features of the optic nerve structure were common across chameleons.

High-resolution CT scanning corroborated an earlier observation that a chameleon controls each of its eyes independently but can coordinate eye movements when locking in on a target. Daza and his team found that this was possible though the use of optic nerves coiled up like old-fashioned telephone cords. The coiling showed up in all three species. This coiling gave each species far more optic nerve length than would typically be present, allowing wild swings of their eyes with plenty of slack in their nervous tissue.

When a chameleon’s eye swivels to look at something, the coiled optic nerve unfurls to give it the length it needs. Without coiling, the study authors hypothesize that the nerve would likely experience strain from these radical eye wanderings. Examining scans of chameleon embryos, the study authors noted that the optic nerves are initially straight during development—like in other reptiles—in the egg, but they lengthen and coil up by hatching.

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The discovery sets chameleons apart from other animals, who employ different  adaptations to swivel their gaze without straining the optic nerve. For example, owls dramatically rotate their necks while keeping their eyeballs steady. In rats, the optic nerves are stretchy, providing them with a little extra give for gazing around.

Chameleons, it appears, might have evolved an approach that is unique in the animal kingdom, making this startling creature even more of an evolutionary marvel.

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Lead image: LuckyStep / Shutterstock

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Devin Reese

Posted on November 10, 2025

Devin Reese is the executive editor of Natural History and a science writer based in Alexandria, Virginia.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

These Spiders Build Doppelgängers to Stay Alive

Creepy crawlers turn detritus, silk, and prey carcasses into astonishingly realistic look-alikes

By Molly Glick    November 10, 2025

These spiders put on a show for their foes: Arachinids from Peru and the Philippines were observed spinning together surprisingly realistic decoys from detritus, silk, and prey carcasses. These objects resemble larger spiders and might fool predators like lizards and birds, according to a recent paper published in the journal Ecology and Evolution.

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The clever trick was observed among two small spider species in the Cyclosa genus, including one from the Philippines that was described for the first time but has not yet been specifically identified. Cyclosa species are orb-weaving spiders, the world’s most common type of spider. These creatures construct round, “more or less symmetrical webs” in the open air. To protect themselves, many orb-weaving spiders that are active in the day “build a silken retreat to hide from predators,” but some assemble web decorations called stabilimenta, according to the paper. Both tactics are rarely observed in the same species. And most Cyclosa stabilimenta seen by scientists have a simple linear shape, rather than this more elaborate doppelgänger appearance.

WILD WEBS: On the left, a spider-shaped stabilimentum built by Cyclosa longicauda in Peru; on the right, a linear stabilimentum made by Cyclosa inca Levi in Peru. Photos by Olah, G., et al. Ecology & Evolution (2025).

Scientists have previously observed other Cyclosa species in Brazil building decoy-like objects in their webs, the paper notes, but these were “a more rudimentary stabilimentum described as a blob with extensions resembling legs.”

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During their research, the authors noticed key differences: The Philippine species was spotted seeking shelter inside its decoy, while they saw the Peruvian species sitting directly above its decoy—potentially to redirect attention and escape.

Read more: “Nature’s Invisibility Cloak”

It’s also possible that these structures are meant to mimic bird poop—another potential benefit of these strange spider crafts. “This suggests the decoy’s function may be multifaceted, serving as a deterrent through both mimicry of a larger spider and an undesirable object,” the authors write.

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Lead image: Olah, G., et al. Ecology & Evolution (2025).

Molly Glick

Posted on November 10, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

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Orcas Giveth and Orcas Taketh Away

Killer whales divulge more of their private lives with never-before-seen images of a wild birth and gruesome hunts

By Bob Grant    November 7, 2025

It seems like orcas are ready for their close-ups. This week, the charismatic marine mammals have made headlines for two very different activities, both captured in unprecedented detail.

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On Sunday, a group of scientists in Norway witnessed and recorded a real-time orca birth—perhaps the first time such an event was photographed in the wild. Writing on their Facebook page, Orca Channel recounted the cetacean delivery, which occurred off Skjervøy in the Arctic Circle. “We were floating calmly and watching the feeding, when all of a sudden, close to the boat, there was blood spilling and splashing everywhere …” Krisztina Balotay, a photographer and videographer at Orca Channel, a wildlife documentary and tour outlet, wrote. “At first, I had no idea what was going on. A moment later, I saw a little head pop above water …”

Read more: “The Story of a Lonely Orca”

Whale watchers aboard Orca Channel’s boat and another group, with the Norwegian Orca Survey, waited nervously while the newborn orca struggled to breathe and swim on its own for about 15 minutes. But with the aid of pod members, who formed a perimeter around the vulnerable calf and buoyed it on their backs above the water until it was able to swim on its own.

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“This event represents a historic first: the first-ever documentation of a killer whale birth and the newborn’s first hour of life in the wild,” wrote the Norwegian Orca Survey, a conservation group, on its Facebook page. “Our observations will allow us to identify the individuals involved and understand their roles in supporting the calf during its first moments. We are now working to collate all available data and plan to publish the full documentation as a scientific article in the near future.”

On the other end of life’s spectrum, orcas have been documented employing a deadly strategy to obtain sustenance from one of the ocean’s most lethal predators—the great white shark.

KILLIN’ IT: This sequence of photos shows an orca-on-great-white hunt in August 2020 in the Gulf of California. Panel C shows an orca with a great white’s liver in its mouth. Credit: Jesús Erick Higuera Rivas.

Researchers published a report this week in Frontiers in Marine Science detailing the shark hunting strategy of a pod of orcas in the Gulf of California, off the coast of Mexico. In two separate incidents, both videoed using aerial drones, orcas surrounded juvenile great white sharks, flipping them onto their backs—which immobilizes sharks—and ripping out their livers, sharing the spoils of the hunt. Hey, they didn’t earn the name “killer whales” for nothing.

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Orcas are perennially fascinating marine creatures. Scientists continue to learn new things about the species the more they watch its behaviors. From standing guard around a struggling newborn calf to inventive hunting tactics to take down an oceanic assassin, orcas likely have more secrets to share. And humans, equipped now with ever-more advanced tools to record never-before-seen behaviors, seem up to the challenge.

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Lead image: MuhammadIshfaq1 / Shutterstock

Bob Grant

Posted on November 7, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Secret of the Triangle Weaver’s Springy Web

The simple shape belies some complex chemistry that could be the key to advances in biomaterials

By Jake Currie    November 6, 2025

The triangle weaver spider (Hyptiotes cavatus) gets its name from the three-sided web it weaves—and deploys—to capture prey. The spider anchors two corners of the triangle while holding the third corner itself, stretching it back to create a taut, elastic platform. When unlucky prey wander in, the spider releases its corner, causing the entire web to rapidly recoil around its future meal—faster than even the spider’s twitchy muscles can move.

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It might feel a bit like a trap Wile E. Coyote would spring, but the real artistry of the triangle weaver’s ambush lies in the craftsmanship of its silk.

Spiders can produce several different types of silk, each uniquely suited to its job—sticky silk to ensnare prey, wispy silk to float on air currents, sturdy dragline silk to anchor a web, and so on. The secret of the triangle weaver’s dragline silk is its elasticity, and the key to its elasticity, according to a recent study, is the amino acid proline.

Read more: “We Crush, Poison, and Destroy Insects at Our Own Peril”

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Spider silk is made from proteins called “spidroins” and the spidroins that make up the triangle weaver dragline silk are composed of up to 24.3 percent proline—the highest known proline levels of any known spider silk. Proline is rare among amino acids for its side chain that forms a ring with the protein backbone, and it’s this structure that imparts such extreme elasticity to the triangle weaver’s web.

Of course, arachnids aren’t the only organisms that create or use spider silk. Humans have learned to synthesize and employ spider silk in medicine, optical instruments, bulletproof vests, and more. Gaining a deeper understanding of what gives this incredible material its marvelous properties will allow us to construct even better biomaterials in the future.

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Lead image: Judy Gallagher / Wikimedia Commons.

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Jake Currie

Posted on November 6, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

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The Worm That Survived Multiple Apocalypses

A riddle wrapped in a question mark

By Kristen French    November 6, 2025

Though their wriggling, oozing forms may provoke a shudder, worms seem like uniquely fragile creatures—prone to getting flattened underfoot, flash-dried on a sidewalk, or crushed in the beaks of the early birds that patrol the dawn. And yet, scientists have recently discovered one species of worm that would inspire the envy of any survivalist: It endured multiple mass extinction events across a half billion years without ever changing its lifestyle.

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Karma Nanglu, a University of California, Riverside, paleobiologist, says she and her colleagues were studying ancient bivalves who lived hundreds of millions of years before the dinosaurs went extinct when they noticed a series of mysterious question mark shapes etched into the fossil shells. They began asking themselves some questions about the traces of this symbol of inquiry, curiosity, and doubt.

“It took us a while to figure out the mystery behind these peculiar-looking traces,” said Javier Ortega-Hernandez, a Harvard University evolutionary biologist, in a statement. “It was as if they were taunting us with their question mark-like shape.” Ortega-Hernandez is a curator at the university’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, which houses the fossils studied by Nanglu’s team.

Nanglu, Ortega-Hernandez, and their collaborators eventually came across their answer in some obscure scientific literature: One image from a study of modern worms showed the identical shape carved into another shell. “That was the smoking gun,” said Nanglu. The slithering question marks, they realized, were made by a family of soft-bodied marine bristle worms that still writhe through today’s oceans. The scientists published their results in iScience.

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Read more: “Strange Worms Are Taking Their Place on Your Family Tree”

The bristle worms, which sport little bristles across the lengths of their bodies, belong to a group known as the spionids, which live and feed on mussels and oysters. They aren’t very considerate of their hosts: They damage the bivalve shells, which can eventually kill the creatures that inhabit them. The shells on which the scientists found the worm traces belonged to an ancestor of modern clams that thrived during the Ordovician, a period of time that stretched from 485 million to 444 million years ago, when ocean ecosystems became intensely competitive, featuring increasing movement, predation, and parasitism.

“This parasite didn’t just survive the cutthroat Ordovician period, it thrived,” Nanglu said. “It’s still interfering with the oysters we want to eat, just as it did hundreds of millions of years ago.”

At first the team thought the question mark shapes were made by the shellfish themselves or some other organism. But the evidence began to pile up that it was, in fact, the work of the freeloading bristle worm.

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To get a better look at the questionable traces the worms left, the researchers used an imaging device called a micro-CT scan: What they found was a layer cake of fossils stacked one on top of the other, bivalves infected with parasites all the way down.

The parasite’s life cycle also offered some hints. It appeared to follow a consistent pattern, the scientists found. In the larval stage, it would settle onto a host shell, destroying a bit of the shell in the process and then burrowing deeper and deeper, creating that unique question mark trace. Spionids are the only animals known to leave behind this mysterious symbol in their wake.

Parasitism: It’s a survival strategy that may never die.

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Lead image: Nanglu, K., et al. iScience (2025).

Kristen French

Posted on November 6, 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.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Pretty Anemone Makes Space and Eats Waste

This newly discovered sea creature has built a “faithful” relationship with hermit crabs

By Molly Glick    November 6, 2025

This deep-sea anemone seems to be an amazing roommate. Scientists recently discovered this creature, which was named Paracalliactis tsukisome, living in harmony with hermit crabs off Japan’s coast in the Pacific Ocean. P. tsukisome dwells on the shells of the hermit crab Oncopagurus monstrosus, which live around 650 to 1,600 feet below the ocean’s surface.

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According to a recent study published in Royal Society Open Science, the spiky sea anemone builds a shell-like structure called a carcinoecium, which adds more square footage to the home of its hermit crab companion. The name tsukisome is fitting—it comes from a classical Japanese word meaning “pale pink color,” which is also associated with a “deep, faithful bond” described in ancient Japanese poetry.

DEEP FRIENDSHIP: Scientists caught detailed videos of the surprising relationship between a newly discovered deep-sea anemone and a hermit crab. Video by Yoshigawa, A., et al., Royal Society Open Science (2025).

Shell building is an unusual tactic for sea anemones, which don’t often possess rigid skeletons. In fact, it’s “surprisingly sophisticated behavior” for a simple animal like a sea anemone, said study author Akihiro Yoshikawa, an associate professor at Kumamoto University in Japan, in a statement.

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Beyond finding a place to settle down, P. tsukisome also benefits from its crabby partner by snacking on its feces—an “unusual but efficient form of recycling on the deep-sea floor,” according to the statement.

This is a rare look at an unexpectedly mutualistic relationship forged by co-evolution in the ocean depths.

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Lead image: Yoshigawa, A., et al. Royal Society Open Science (2025).

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Molly Glick

Posted on November 6, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Secret Superpowers of Frog Skin

The slime coating frog bodies could hold the key to fighting infections, healings wounds and even curing cancer

By Sofia Quaglia    November 6, 2025

Clad in their hiking gear, headlights punching through the shadows, Carolina Muñoz and her teammates slogged through the thick foliage of the Amazon jungle of Colombia, searching for slimy fluorescent treasure while trying to evade the thorns of chonta palms and rattan lianas, and the fangs of venomous snakes. When they finally spotted their quarry, she and her team all froze to avoid startling it. Then, they plucked the lime green and blue frog—an Orinoco lime treefrog—from the tree branch and plopped it into a fabric bag, where it would stay, swaddled in foliage and water mist, until it was ready for its new home.

It was just one of many amphibians the frog-hunting crew collected over a five year period, repeating this process in forests, mountains and wetlands, even urban areas, around the country. In all, they collected two frogs from 50 different species of interest. Each frog they captured held the promise of a cure hidden in its skin.

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Back in the lab at the Universidad de las Andes in Bogotà, Muñoz and colleagues swabbed the frog bodies and collected the gooey mucus they secrete, to test for chemicals that might cure human diseases.

They had good reason to believe they would be successful. Frog skin is a marvel of nature. A mucous membrane, this outer layer is kept moist and is filled with a cocktail of chemicals that frogs have developed over millennia of evolution. It’s thin and delicate and highly permeable, which allows frogs to use it to breathe in oxygen when they’re submerged under water, and to spit out toxins that kill infections and poison predators when they’re under attack.

Read more: “Can Organoids Take Us into a New Era of Medicine?”

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During her field work in the Amazon, in addition to the chubby green Orinoco lime treefrogs, Muñoz collected warty Boulenger’s backpack frogs and tiger-striped whistling frogs known as rã-assobiadora, among others. When she took them back to her lab, she found that the skins of all three species of frog are infused with new-to-science peptides—small protein snippets—that can help cells fight the yellow fever virus, a viral disease spread by mosquitoes in much of Africa and South America that presents with severe flu-like symptoms. Cells treated with the peptide saw their infection potency reduced by 35 percent.

Orinoco lime treefrogs, it turns out, ooze peptides known as frenatin and buforin II, which can jam up bacterial membranes and DNA. And her tests of the skin of 11 other frogs and toads from her field work revealed some molecules that can break down cancerous human leukemia cells.

Frog secretions may even help with wound healing.

Muñoz initially thought she would find the most potent antidotes to human maladies in frogs that live in the most remote areas of the jungle. But she soon realized that the ones living closer to human settlements—such as an Orinoco lime treefrog specimen she actually picked up from a playground in an Amazonian city—would be more likely to encounter the same pathogens as humans, and therefore develop toxins that could be useful to us. “Frogs that we captured near human activity have peptides that are 10 or more times more potent than the ones that are far from humans,” says Muñoz. Still, she has a lot more work to do: “We identified nearly 70 peptides, but only published reports about two or three,” she says.

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Muñoz is not the only one who has looked to frog skin for anti-viral, anti-cancerous, and anti-bacterial remedies. Researchers from Emory University in Atlanta have also found that the slime produced by the skin of some frogs could act as an antidote for the influenza virus, and maybe even for COVID-19.

Elsewhere, scientists studying jaguar leaf frogs and Kuatun frogs have found peptides that act both as antimicrobials and anti-cancerous molecules, too. The jaguar leaf frog’s skin, for instance, is bathed in a peptide that, in a petri dish, corrodes the cells of human lung cancer, breast cancer, prostate cancer, and brain cancer. It also has these same effects, though less potent, in real-life mice without many toxic side effects.

Frog secretions may even help with wound healing, some researchers have found. A team in China analyzed the skin secretions of the Yunnan odorous frog, a stinky frog found in South Asia, and found a peptide that can boost human skin-cell reproduction in a petri dish and can accelerate wound closure in the skins of real-life mice. The skin secretions of the East Asian bullfrog—famed in Chinese traditional medicine—have also been shown to contain a peptide that can treat wounds, as has the goo from the skin of the Asian black-spined toad. Ideally, these organic molecules could be used to design creams, gels, and other topical drugs to help heal burns or chronic wounds, such as the kind that some people with diabetes develop.

Frog skin is “an extraordinarily fertile source for drug development,” says Michael Zasloff, the first scientist to describe antimicrobial peptides in a frog’s skin in the late 1980s. He has studied the evolution of frog skin peptides throughout the world.

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But it’s one thing to get a molecule to fend off bacteria or cancer in cell culture, and quite another to get it to work in the human body. Almost all of the above-mentioned studies were carried out in the laboratory in petri dishes: the very first step for drug development. “When a peptide is put into the bloodstream, it’s now looking at membranes everywhere,” says Zasloff. “It has to be sufficiently selective so that it disregards all these membranes,” and zooms in on its target: the disease-causing molecule floating around a live organism’s blood.

The few tests being done on mice are also hard to extrapolate to humans, Zazloff adds. “One has to advance from mouse to humans. That’s really the issue, isn’t it?”

The excitement surrounding these discoveries, though, isn’t just about what the peptides do—but rather how they do it.

Frog skin is “an extraordinarily fertile source for drug development.”

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Many of the peptides found in frog skin are positively charged, whereas bacterial cell membranes are composed of negatively charged lipids. As a result, these peptides are drawn by electrostatic charge to the bacterial membranes, and when they bump into the membrane, they destroy it. (Don’t worry, these peptides are not as violently drawn to cell membranes in animals and plants, which are mostly neutrally charged, instead.) The buforin II and frenatin peptides found in the Orinoco lime treefrog skin, for instance, kill bacteria by piercing into the bacterial cell’s membranes and scrambling their genetics, binding to the DNA and RNA. This is true for many of the peptides found in the jaguar leaf frog and the Chinese frogs, too, among many others.

“That’s marvelous and exciting for me,” says Muñoz, who also penned a paper about these types of peptides in Nature in 2024.

With antibiotic resistance rising, scientists have been racing to find new therapeutic compounds, and the ones hiding on a frog’s back might have unique advantage. Antibiotics conventionally target the enzymes in bacteria, and enzymes can mutate and adapt over time, reducing their vulnerability—but the bacteria themselves don’t have the same shapeshifting abilities, so they cannot adapt to membrane-scrambling antidotes. Similarly, these peptides act through multiple mechanisms at once; they don’t just disrupt the bacterial membrane but also penetrate the cell and bind to its genetic material, which is why bacteria find it much harder to develop resistance.

“Unlike traditional antibiotics that target a single pathway, these peptides attack from several fronts,” says Muñoz.

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Most importantly, while antimicrobial peptides are much more gentle on human cell membranes than they are on those of bacteria—because human cell membranes are neutrally charged—they can still penetrate those membranes too, entering the cell without destroying it. This selective interaction is what makes them so promising as tools for delivering genes or drugs to the inside of a human cell. The peptides act like keys that unlock the cell membrane and guide or direct the therapeutic cargo to its destination, says Muñoz, as if the peptide started the engine of a truck full of medicine, allowing the delivery system to enter the cell and drive the treatment precisely to where it needs to go.

“These molecules can help to ensure the cargo is delivered in the right position in the nucleus,” says Muñoz.

This special power gives the frog skin molecules a whole new biotech application, says Muñoz, which is what she has been focusing most of her efforts on of late. Having recently moved on from her time plucking frogs from jungle tree branches, Muñoz now works on using artificial intelligence to help predict which of those molecules might have the best fighting chances against ailments in massive numbers, and studying and designing pathways for them to break into human cells in clever and effective ways.

Despite the challenges of bringing these compounds from the laboratory to the drugstore, it seems like the world of frog peptides still has a lot more to share. In a way, Muñoz has traded the jungle canopy for a digital one—using AI to predict which frog-made molecules could one day leap from petri dishes to patients.

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Lead image: reptiles4all / Shutterstock

Sofia Quaglia

Posted on November 6, 2025

Sofia Quaglia is a freelance journalist writing about all things science and nature and how we talk about them. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, BBC, National Geographic, The Guardian, New Scientist, and more. She’s on a mission to visit the entire planet by spending each month in a different country, so she’s been living on the road since 2021. You can find her on X (formerly known as Twitter) at @sofiquaglia.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Mystery of 111,000 Spiders Living in a Giant Subterranean Web

The first known supercolony of its kind

By Jake Currie    November 5, 2025

Imagine exploring the depths of a pitch black cave. A sulfurous stream trickles beneath your feet, the air reeks of rotten eggs. With each step you take, the ceiling gets lower and the narrowing walls are covered in what seems to be a pale, living slime. As you slowly push into the darkness, you feel clouds of tiny flies swarming your face. Sensing movement, you swing a flashlight over to the wall. Standing before you is a ghostly web sprawling as far as the eye can see and teeming with thousands and thousands of spiders.

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It might sound like the opening of a particularly skin-crawling horror story, but to a team of researchers venturing into Sulfur Cave, it was very real, and likely thrilling. They recently published their findings in the journal Subterranean Biology.

The massive Sulfur Cave, which begins in Greece and stretches deep into Albania, is home to a unique ecosystem. Completely cut off from the sunlight, the primary energy source for this ecosystem is a sulfuric hot spring. Chemoautotrophic bacteria convert the sulfur into energy, forming slimy microbial biofilms on the cave walls that, in turn, feed swarms of midges. One step up the food chain are the spiders feasting on midges in a massive shared web, a curious living arrangement that caught researchers’ attention.

Read more: “In the Land of the Eyeless Dragons”

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Usually solitary, two species of spiders have formed a kind of supercolony along one wall in Sulfur Cave—the barn funnel weaver (Tegenaria domestica) and the sheet weaver (Prinerigone vagans). Scientists estimate the colony contains some 111,000 individual spiders from both species in a web spanning about 1,140 square feet, making it one of the largest spider webs ever discovered. (That’s roughly the footprint of a spacious three-bedroom apartment, if, in this case, you don’t mind 111,000 roommates.) It’s also the first documented case of colonial behavior in these species.

But why would not one but two solitary species choose to live together in relative harmony? According to the research team, the sheer abundance of resources and the lack of sunlight could have something to do with it. The larger funnel weaver spiders typically use their eyesight to locate prey. Blessed with a bounty of midges and unable to detect the smaller, usually stationary sheet weavers in the dark, they seem to leave them to go about their own fly-eating business.

It’s a remarkable arrangement and a living, crawling testament to the diversity of animal relationships and solutions to life flourishing in strange environments.

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Lead image: Evgenii Predybailo / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on November 5, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Octopus Camouflage Could Give Us Better Sunscreen

A clever trick to churn out a natural color-changing pigment in the lab could lead to more effective SPF

By Molly Glick    November 5, 2025

Cephalopods like squid, octopuses, and cuttlefish are remarkably sneaky—they imitate their marine environments to evade both predators and prey. These expert camouflage skills have intrigued scientists as long ago as 350 B.C., when Aristotle took interest in octopuses’ shifting hues. We now know that this clever camouflage process involves a color-changing pigment called xanthommatin, which is also what gives some insects like butterflies their vibrant colors.

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Xanthommatin could offer major benefits for humans, too. It could be harnessed to make hue-shifting displays and dyes, for example, and more effective sunscreen. The pigment absorbs ultraviolet light throughout the visible spectrum and has been found to enhance the effectiveness of chemical sunscreens. (It could also be less harmful for marine environments.)

So researchers have spent decades trying to produce xanthommatin in the lab and take advantage of these tantalizing properties. Now, one team of scientists says they’ve found a way to churn out significant amounts of xanthommatin with the help of a modified microbe.

Read more: “Nature’s Invisibility Cloak”

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Thanks to some genetic tweaks, these scientists were able to prompt a bacterium to produce up to 1,000 times more xanthommatin than other genetic engineering methods, as reported in a recent paper in Nature Biotechnology.

“We needed a whole new approach to address this problem,” said lead author Leah Bushin, a chemical biologist formerly at the University of California, San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography, in a statement. “Essentially, we came up with a way to trick the bacteria into making more of the material that we needed.”

To fool this microbe, Bushin and her colleagues tied its survival to manufacturing xanthommatin. They modified the genes of a soil-dwelling bacterium called Pseudomonas putida, forcing it to create both xanthommatin and a chemical called formic acid—which, in turn, propelled the cell’s growth. This spurred “a self-sustaining loop that drives pigment production,” according to the statement.

The team also pinpointed the genetic mutations that allowed these engineered microbes to pump up the volume, and selected for strains that only require a single carbon source. These key details make xanthommatin production as efficient and sustainable as possible.

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It’s still early days for this potential bacterial boon, but the paper authors say they’ve received interest from cosmetics companies who’d like to incorporate the substance into natural sunscreens. Xanthommatin might also make its way into color-changing paints for consumers or environmental sensors. But it’s up to these mighty microbes and whether they’re up to the demand.

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Lead image: Mike Bartick / Ocean Image Bank

Molly Glick

Posted on November 5, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Fish Forensics Yield Surprising Results

New study fills in the gaps in our understanding of marine life

By Jake Currie    November 4, 2025

The oceans are teeming with life, but the sheer volume of water on our blue planet makes that life a bit frustrating to find at times. Traditional methods of locating sea creatures—cameras, direct observation, net catches, and so on—are far from exhaustive, and monitoring remote regions poses even more logistical difficulties. That means that even the most extensive surveys of ocean life are going to have some gaps.

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Now, those gaps are being filled thanks to some infinitesimally small clues.

To get a more complete picture of life in our oceans, a team of researchers turned to environmental DNA, or eDNA. These DNA traces are left behind by marine organisms during the normal course of their lives, from fluids, shed cells, and the like. The eDNA is then scooped up in samples of seawater, filtered out, and matched to databases to determine which animals discarded them. In aquatic environments, eDNA tends to degrade relatively quickly, making it a good indicator that the species it belongs to was present in the area. All told, the team’s eDNA survey comprised more than 900 samples of water from a variety of depths ranging from the poles to the tropics, according to their study published in PLOS Biology.

Read more: “The Challenge of Deep Sea Taxonomy”

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The team, from the University of Montpellier, France, and the Center National de la Recherche Scientifique, found that the geographic ranges of more than 93 percent of detected species had previously been underestimated, meaning those species actually live in a larger territory than previously thought. Additionally, some species were discovered to tolerate surprising environments. For example, the team found DNA from the crocodile icefish—a species believed to only inhabit the frigid waters of Antarctica—as far north as Patagonia in waters around 18 degrees Fahrenheit warmer.

These results have important implications for ocean conservation for a very simple reason: It’s impossible to fully grasp the threats to marine life without first fully grasping the scope of marine life. With this study, our net of understanding surrounding ocean life draws a little tighter.

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Lead image: Marrabbio2 / Wikipedia

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Jake Currie

Posted on November 4, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Table of Contents

Nautilus: 2025 Nov 12

Anthropology

Was This Mysterious Mountain Feature an Incan Tax Document?

Neanderthals: Do a Little Art and Take a Stroll on the Beach

Have We Learned King Tut’s Lessons?

Astronomy

Take a Trip Through the Milky Way in the Most Detailed Image Yet

Carl Sagan Shared a Shocking Space Secret

Visit Our Solar System’s Tallest Mountains

A Martian Mystery May Finally Be Solved

Is the Moon Worth Mining?

Before the Supermoon Showed Its Face It Flashed Us

The Most Fascinating Findings After A Quarter Century of Science in the ISS

Communication

Your Exclamation Points Speak Volumes!

Environment

Some Bacteria Have Evolved the Ability to Degrade Plastic

The Secret Lives of Tree Roots

Are We Trashing Earth’s Loneliest Spot?

Nature’s Prescription for Our Future

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

Hurricane Melissa Could Threaten Some Species with Extinction

General

Print Edition 64

Geoscience

Antarctic Team Drills 6 Million Years Into Earth’s Past

Health

How Junk Science Threatens Maternal Health

Fentanyl’s Deadly Recipe

Does This Gene Determine How You Handle Your Booze?

History

How the Spoils of an Infamous Heist Traveled the World

Medieval Medical Misinformation Persists

The 19th-Century Entomologist Who Dreamed Up Daylight Savings

Meet the Real Frankenstein

Microbiology

How Moss Fights Crime

From Deep Blue Mud, Unexpected Life Emerges

Neuroscience

He Erased Memory in Mice. Then Thought About Erasing His Own

The Brain’s Hidden Drain

Paleontology

Unique Puke Fossil Reveals New Pterosaur Species

Can Lichen Light the Way to Dinosaur Finds?

“Tiny T. Rex” Makes Big Waves in Paleontology Community

Neanderthals May Have Invented the Original Crayon

Philosophy

The Pretense of Political Debate

Physics

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

Psychology

Childhood Friends, Not Moms, Shape Attachment Styles Most

To Be More Creative, Immigrate

Is There Such a Thing as Too Many Houseplants?

Should Teenagers Take Psychedelics for Mental Health?

How to Face Your Fears

When Do People Speak Out Against Tyranny?

Why We Love Horror Stories

Is Loneliness Really an Epidemic?

Technology

How Super Recognizers See What the Rest of Us Miss

Zoology

Chameleon’s Eyes Have Been Hiding a Secret

These Spiders Build Doppelgängers to Stay Alive

Orcas Giveth and Orcas Taketh Away

The Secret of the Triangle Weaver’s Springy Web

The Worm That Survived Multiple Apocalypses

A Pretty Anemone Makes Space and Eats Waste

The Secret Superpowers of Frog Skin

The Mystery of 111,000 Spiders Living in a Giant Subterranean Web

Octopus Camouflage Could Give Us Better Sunscreen

Fish Forensics Yield Surprising Results