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Anthropology

- Top Roman Military Officers Loved Their Pet Monkeys

- How Monogamous Are Humans Actually?

ANTHROPOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Top Roman Military Officers Loved Their Pet Monkeys

An animal cemetery at a once-bustling port adds to growing evidence that Romans collected and deeply cared for these primates

By Molly Glick    December 10, 2025

Nearly two millennia ago at an ancient port on the Red Sea, elite Roman officers seem to have kept some unusual primate pets—and loved them dearly.

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In a Roman animal cemetery at the port of Berenike, located in what’s now Egypt, researchers encountered three dozen burials mostly consisting of Indian macaque monkeys, or rhesus macaques. They dated the remains back to the first two centuries A.D. High-ranking Roman military members were documented to live in Berenike around that time, when the port was a bustling trade center. It was built to import African war elephants to beef up general Ptolemy I’s army, and other animals seemed to stream in over time, including monkeys.

The recently analyzed monkeys appeared to be treasured companions, according to items placed in their graves including collars, shiny shells, food, and small pets of their own, discoveries detailed in the Journal of Roman Archaeology. This finding offers the “the richest source to date of zooarcheological and archeological knowledge on primates kept as pets in antiquity,” the authors wrote. Cats and dogs were found at the same burial site, but only around 3 percent of those graves contained such goods, compared to about 40 percent of the monkey graves.

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MACAQUE MEMORIALS: The monkeys found buried at Berenike seem to have originated from India, unlike other Roman primate pets. Photos by Osypiński, P. & Osypińska, M.; from Osypińska, M. et al. Journal of Roman Archaeology (2025).

Previously, the site was thought to be an Early Roman trash dump, until researchers characterized it as an animal burial ground in 2011—one of the oldest pet cemeteries found around the globe.

Archeologists have previously unearthed evidence of ancient Romans keeping pet monkeys. For example, researchers excavating sites in Pompeii found a skeleton belonging to a monkey that died during the eruption of Vesuvius. Some Roman monkey burials may have been associated with military members, like a grave discovered in the foothills of the Pyrenees from the fifth or sixth century. This particular macaque was buried with belt buckles and bronze plaques, both considered Roman military decorations.

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All of these previously studied primate companions seem to have come from Africa, so the new findings suggest this is the first clearly documented instance of the organized movement of non-human primates overseas. It also highlights the Roman Empire’s “intensive contacts with India during the Early Imperial period.”

Read more: “I Bought a Robot Cat for My Rabbit”

Despite their glamorous graves, these pet monkeys seem to have lived tough lives—two of the macaque skulls suggested that the animals experienced malnutrition due to a diet with little to no fresh vegetables and fruit. It was tricky to source these foods in Berenike, which was highly isolated, and they were probably fed the seafood that their human companions ate. But the Romans do seem to have tried to treat the monkeys for certain health conditions—one monkey’s feet were covered with tree resin, which may have been used as a painkiller or general healing remedy.

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The officers thought to have owned these precious primates were part of legions that explored Africa and the Near East, and they may have helped spark an exotic animal trend that persisted over the following centuries among the Roman elite.

Ultimately, the authors wrote, the “ancient Romans valued animals for their psychological and social qualities rather than their economic value, and in this sense, they assigned primates an almost semi-human status.”

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Lead image: Shantanukaps / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on December 10, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ANTHROPOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Monogamous Are Humans Actually?

How we rank among species on fidelity to a single partner may have shaped our evolution

By Molly Glick    December 9, 2025

Across cultures and millennia, humans have embraced a diversity of sexual and marital arrangements—for instance, around 85 percent of human societies in the anthropological record have allowed men to have more than one wife.

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But in the broader evolutionary picture, some researchers have argued that monogamy played a dominant role in Homo sapiens’ evolution, enabling greater social cooperation. This theory aligns with research on mammals, birds, and insects, which hints that cooperative breeding systems—where offspring receive care not just from parents, but from other group members—are more prevalent among monogamous species.

To decipher how monogamous humans actually have been over our evolutionary history, and compare our reproductive habits to other species, University of Cambridge evolutionary anthropologist Mark Dyble collected genetic and ethnographic data from a total of 103 human societies around the world going back 7,000 years. He then compared this against genetic data from 34 non-human mammal species. With this information, Dyble traced the proportion of full versus half siblings throughout history and across all 35 species—after all, higher levels of monogamy are linked with more full siblings, while the opposite is true in more polygamous or promiscuous contexts.

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This is “a direct, theoretically salient, but relatively overlooked approach” to understanding specific mating systems, he wrote in a new paper, which was published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B.

SIBLING RIVALRY: Dyble determined monogamy rankings across 35 species. Image by Dyble, M. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 2025.

Dyble estimated the proportions of half and full siblings in these populations and fed the genetic information into a model that calculated a monogamy rating for each population. This enabled him to compare various species.

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On a list descending from most to least monogamous, the California deermouse claimed the top spot, with 100 percent of siblings estimated to be full siblings. Meanwhile, humans came in seventh place, with 66 percent of siblings estimated to be full siblings—below the Eurasian beaver but above the white-handed gibbon.

“There is a premier league of monogamy, in which humans sit comfortably, while the vast majority of other mammals take a far more promiscuous approach to mating,” Dyble said in a statement, comparing the rankings to those of a professional soccer league in England.

This suggests that, despite the mix of marriage and mating arrangements throughout human history, we seem to collectively display higher levels of monogamy than most of the animals tracked in the study. Meanwhile, our primate relatives mostly sit near the bottom of the list, including several species of macaque monkeys and the common chimpanzee.

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Read more: “Casual Sex May Be Improving America’s Marriages”

The list ranks humans high among species known to be socially monogamous, but we display some key differences from these animals. For instance, we only birth up to a few offspring per pregnancy, rather than entire litters, and live in social groups where multiple females have children. Dyble thinks human monogamy emerged from non-monogamous group-living, an unusual transition in the animal kingdom that might owe to different evolutionary pressures faced by humans compared with other species.

While these findings are a rough estimate of monogamy among species, and only examine a small slice of the vast numbers of species on Earth, Dyble thinks they provide solid evidence that this lifestyle was essential for human evolution—it helped spark large family networks that “provided the first step in building large-scale societies and networks of cultural exchange that have been crucial to our success as a species,” he wrote.

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Lead image: NatalyaDDD / Shutterstock

Molly Glick

Posted on December 9, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Astronomy

- Was the Earth Created by a Supernova Shockwave?

- This Black Hole Blasts Cosmic Wind at 130 Million Miles Per Hour

- Exploding Stars Like We’ve Never Seen Them

- A Speed Camera for the Universe

- Satellite Photobombing Is Disrupting Space Telescope Astronomy

- We Finally Know the Time of Day on Mars

- The Secret Busy Lives of Small Icy Moons

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Was the Earth Created by a Supernova Shockwave?

New model suggests cosmic rays from a supernova led to the formation of our planet

By Jake Currie    December 11, 2025

When a solar system is born, it isn’t really much of a system at all. Instead, it’s just a protostar surrounded by a whirling disc of gas and dust. Given time, gravity, and a variety of forces, the protostar becomes a star and the planets begin to take shape from the material within this cosmic cloud. The types of planets that form in a given solar system depend on their distance from the star and the available elements.

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A new study suggests that in our solar system, the formation of rocky planets, including the one we live on, were created in part by an explosive outside force as well—supernovae.

For rocky planets to develop, heat-generating radioactive elements called “short-lived radionuclides,” or SLRs, need to be present to boil off excess water from burgeoning protoplanets. While these SLRs can come directly from a supernova blast, a stellar shockwave so close to a fragile baby solar system could disrupt the whole solar system construction project. A new “immersion model” proposed by researchers in Japan and published in Science Advances suggests an interesting twist.

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Read more: “The Cosmic Web and the Fate of the Universe”

In this model, a supernova around three light-years away could have seeded our own protoplanetary disk with SLRs while being cosmically gentle enough to keep the nascent solar system intact. Still, it wouldn’t produce the ratio of SLRs that analyses of meteorites have shown were present in our solar system’s infancy. To account for the missing SLRs, University of Tokyo Ryo Sawada astrophysicist and his team proposed that cosmic rays emanating from a supernova irradiated material within the protoplanetary disk to produce additional radioactive elements. In other words, a supernova could cause an initial dose of SLRs followed by a kind of cosmic radiation “booster shot.”

It’s an exciting model, and not just because it could explain how Earth formed; it also increases the chances of finding other rocky planets capable of supporting life in the Milky Way.

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“At least 10 percent, possibly 50 percent of sun-like stars are likely to host protoplanetary disks with SLR abundances similar to those of the protosolar disk,” Sawada and his co-authors wrote. “Our results suggest that Earth-like, water-poor rocky planets may be more prevalent in the galaxy than previously thought.”

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Lead image: Merikanto / Wikimedia Commons

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Jake Currie

Posted on December 11, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

This Black Hole Blasts Cosmic Wind at 130 Million Miles Per Hour

A staggering glimpse into our beautiful, violent universe

By Jake Currie    December 9, 2025

Deep in the heart of a spiral galaxy, 130 million light-years from Earth, lies a monster—a supermassive black hole 30 million times the mass of our sun. As this behemoth gobbles up matter, it casts off blasts of light and cosmic winds.

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For the first time, astronomers were able to observe one of these explosions along with the blistering winds it generated, and the sheer scale of the phenomenon was almost unfathomable. The international team, led by Liyi Gu of the Space Research Organisation Netherlands, published their findings in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

Using X-ray telescopes from both NASA and the ESA, the scientists captured a sudden burst of light followed by cosmic winds blowing more than 130 million miles per hour—a fifth the speed of light. “We’ve not watched a black hole create winds this speedily before,” Gu said in a statement. “For the first time, we’ve seen how a rapid burst of X-ray light from a black hole immediately triggers ultra-fast winds, with these winds forming in just a single day.”

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Read more: “Before There Were Stars”

The astronomers say the winds blasting from the black hole—which sits at the center of a spiral galaxy called NGC 3783—-resulted from its host galaxy’s active galactic nucleus (AGN) untwisting, creating a snarled magnetic field. The process is similar to the coronal mass ejections that occasionally erupt from the surface of the sun, but with one key difference. Our sun’s eruptions typically travel at only 3 million miles per hour—a snail’s pace compared to the blasts witnessed by the team.

Aside from showcasing the mind-boggling power of supermassive black holes, the researchers suggest this finding will help inform our understanding of how galaxies evolve. “Because they’re so influential, knowing more about the magnetism of AGNs, and how they whip up winds such as these, is key to understanding the history of galaxies throughout the universe,” said study co-author Camille Diez, an astrophysicist at the European Space Agency.

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Lead image: European Space Agency (ESA)

Jake Currie

Posted on December 9, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Exploding Stars Like We’ve Never Seen Them

A super crisp look at novae suggests they’re far more chaotic than once thought

By Molly Glick    December 8, 2025

When dying stars called white dwarfs rob a stellar neighbor’s hydrogen, the growing stash of hot gas can trigger a violent eruption from the white dwarf’s surface. This may go on for days, or even months.

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These dramatic outbursts are known as novae, and it’s tricky to figure out how exactly they kick off. When scientists try to glimpse them with telescopes, they can look like a flash of light. Yet these mysterious, gaseous gusts somehow create intense shock waves that can trigger high-energy radiation like gamma rays, and astronomers are eager to figure out how this cosmic chain of events unfolds. Now, one team has gotten an exceptionally sharp look at nascent novae.

By merging light from multiple telescopes—the same technique used to snap the first image of a black hole—researchers imaged two novae that exploded in 2021: Nova V1674 Herculis, a roughly day-long blast that was one of the quickest ever recorded, and Nova V1405 Cassiopeiae. These clear views offered never-before-seen insights, which the scientists reported in the journal Nature Astronomy. The images were captured by an array of six telescopes at the Center for High Angular Resolution Astronomy in California.

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A NOVEL NOVA: An artist’s impression of Nova V1674 Herculis. Image by The CHARA Array.

The authors noted that Nova V1674 Herculis involved two colliding outflows of gas. This upends the longstanding theory that novae emerge from a single outflow. Meanwhile, Nova V1405 Cassiopeiae held onto its outer layers for more than 50 days before they blew off—this marked the first delayed nova explosion ever seen by scientists. Both novae seem to have produced gamma rays, according to additional analysis from NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope.

“Novae, once seen as simple explosions, are turning out to be much richer and more fascinating than we imagined,” said study lead author Elias Aydi, an astronomer at Texas Tech University,  in a statement.

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Read more: “The Universe Has Already Made Almost All the Stars It Will Ever Make”

These unprecedented observations will help scientists better grasp the chaotic lives and deaths of stars, including the high-energy radiation released during their demise.

“This is an extraordinary leap forward,” said study co-author John Monnier, an astronomer at the University of Michigan. “The fact that we can now watch stars explode and immediately see the structure of the material being blasted into space is remarkable. It opens a new window into some of the most dramatic events in the universe.”

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Lead image: NASA / Goddard Space Flight Center

Molly Glick

Posted on December 8, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Speed Camera for the Universe

Astronomers developed a clever method to measure our universe’s expansion

By Jake Currie    December 5, 2025

The universe is enormous. By the time you finish reading this sentence, it will be even more enormous.

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That’s because the universe is expanding—but not everything is expanding at the same rate. The farther away things are, the faster they’re moving away from us. For every megaparsec (around 3.3 million light-years) of distance from our vantage point, this rate of expansion increases by around 45 miles per second. This rate is known as “Hubble’s Constant,” named after the astronomer Edwin Hubble of space telescope fame, who discovered it in 1929.

Now, astronomers from the University of Tokyo have developed a novel method called “time-delay cosmography” to get a more accurate measure of the Hubble Constant, publishing their findings in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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Traditionally, the Hubble Constant has been recorded using “distance ladders.” Astronomers pick a relatively close and familiar cosmic entity—a supernova or star—and observe it, then pick one farther away and observe that, and so on, to measure the rate at which they’re traveling away from us.

COSMIC DISTORTION: Eight artificially colored time-delay gravitational lens systems. Each depiction features a massive galaxy in the center, and the surrounding bright spots are images of quasars lensed around the galaxy. Images by TDCOSMO Collaboration et al.

Meanwhile, time-delay cosmography relies on the gravitational lensing of massive objects in space to determine the Hubble Constant. In this method, scientists use a huge galaxy to act as a lens. Super bright objects beyond this galaxy called quasars look distorted because gravity deflects their light. Changes in these distorted images allowed the researchers to measure the difference in time that light from the objects took to reach them.

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Using this clever methodology, the authors arrived at a value for the expansion rate consistent with the Hubble Constant. This could help solve a major cosmic kerfuffle.

When astronomers measure this rate of expansion using space telescopes (like the one named after Edwin Hubble), they get one number—around 45 miles/second/megaparsec; when they use another method, measuring the cosmic background radiation generated during the early universe, they get a different, smaller number—around 42 miles/second/megaparsec. This discrepancy is called the “Hubble Tension,” and it has attracted much debate about whether it was due to experimental error, or the actual physics of the universe.

Read more: “How Much More Can We Learn About the Universe?”

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“Our measurement of the Hubble constant is more consistent with other current-day observations and less consistent with early-universe measurements,” study co-author and University of Tokyo astronomer Kenneth Wong said in a statement. “This is evidence that the Hubble tension may indeed arise from real physics and not just some unknown source of error in the various methods.”

Still, the team stressed that they’ll need to further refine their time-delay cosmography method to get more precise results. Its current precision is at about 4.5 percent, but it would need to reach a precision of around 1 to 2 percent “to really nail down the Hubble constant to a level that would definitively confirm the Hubble tension,” said study co-author Eric Paic, also at the University of Tokyo, in the statement.

The only real constant in astrophysics? More research is needed.

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Lead image: ESA/Hubble & NASA, C. Murray, J. Maíz Apellániz

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Jake Currie

Posted on December 5, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Satellite Photobombing Is Disrupting Space Telescope Astronomy

Yet another peril of a teeming low Earth orbit

By Bob Grant    December 5, 2025

The space around Earth is aswarm with satellites. Recently, the dangers of overcrowding the area lower than 1,200 miles overhead—so-called low Earth orbit (LEO)—have emerged. For example, collisions threaten to destroy valuable tech and sometimes rain space junk down on our planet.

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Scientists have started sounding another alarm regarding the throng of satellites that encircles us: They’re now messing up astronomical images taken by ground and by space telescopes designed to image the deep cosmos.

According to NASA researchers, if humanity continues to launch orbital satellites into low Earth orbit, or LEO, at the projected pace—satellite launches are slated to increase by two orders of magnitude—over the next decade, more than one in three of the images taken by the Hubble Space Telescope will be contaminated by satellite trails.

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OBSTRUCTED SEATING: These simulated images show Hubble (a), SPHEREx (b), Xuntian (c) and ARRAKIHS (d) space observatories. The lines represent the anticipated effects of the satellites planned to be operational by 2040. Images from Borlaff, A.S., et al. Nature (2025).

And the news is even worse for other space telescopes, such as NASA’s SPHEREx (Spectro-Photometer for the History of the Universe, Epoch of Reionization and Ices Explorer), and the soon to launch European Space Agency ARRAKIHS (Analysis of Resolved Remnants of Accreted galaxies as a Key Instrument for Halo Surveys) and Chinese Xuntian space telescopes. More than 96 percent of images captured by those orbiting observatories could be marred by satellite traffic.

Read more: “The Weirdest Stuff We’ve Sent Into Orbit”

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Publishing their results in this week’s issue of Nature, the authors offer solutions to the problem, without sacrificing the boom in satellite operations by telecommunications companies. “We propose a series of mitigation measures that can be applied to prevent, avoid, and correct the unwanted effects of satellite trails in space telescopes, enabling responsible use of LEO for both science and industry,” they write. These include limiting the upper orbital range of large satellite constellations to keep them out of frame for space telescopes, carefully tracking and planning satellite orbital paths, and maintaining precise paths for the telescopes themselves such that they can avoid the satellite swarms, among other strategies.

If these floating observatories are to capture images that help humanity demystify the universe, we must be smarter about how we exploit LEO so that satellites steer clear of the cosmic snapshots.

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Lead image: Nature (Nature)

Bob Grant

Posted on December 5, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

We Finally Know the Time of Day on Mars

This deceptively difficult question to answer is vital to exploration

By Jake Currie    December 4, 2025

Knowing the time is useful for all kinds of things, and now, physicists from the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have finally figured out what time it is on Mars. Beyond the need to satisfy our cosmic curiosity, knowing the precise time at other locales in our galaxy is a navigational necessity for future travelers to places like the Red Planet just as it was to Earth’s early ship-bound explorers in bygone eras.

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“What time is it on Mars?” is a deceptively tricky question to answer. The Martian day is slightly longer than Earth’s (around 40 minutes), and its year is almost double the length of ours, but there are layers of complications beyond those circumstances that involve Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Einstein (and anyone who’s seen Interstellar) tells us that gravity has a dilating effect on time—clocks will tick slower where it’s stronger and faster where it’s weaker. To figure out the time on Mars, you first have to figure out the effects of gravity there. That’s exactly what NIST physicists Bijunath Patla and Neil Ashby did, publishing their findings in The Astronomical Journal.

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After choosing a reference spot on Mars, the team estimated that its surface gravity was five times weaker than Earth’s, but they didn’t stop there. Mars is swayed by the gravity of more than just its own mass, being tugged at by the sun, the Earth, and the moon. Mars also has a more oval-shaped orbit than Earth, meaning the sun’s gravitational pull varies throughout the Martian year more than it does on Earth. Taken together, this makes the precise determination of the time on Mars a considerably tangled problem to unravel.

Read more: “How Melting Ice Has Altered Time-Keeping”

“Its distance from the sun and its eccentric orbit make the variations in time larger. A three-body problem is extremely complicated. Now we’re dealing with four: the sun, Earth, the moon and Mars,” Patla said in a statement. “The heavy lifting was more challenging than I initially thought.”

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After crunching the numbers, the team found that clocks on Mars would need to tick 477 millionths of a second faster than on Earth per day, but that this discrepancy can vary by as much as 226 millionths of a second a day over the course of a Martian year.

“Millionths of a second” doesn’t sound like a big difference, but precise timing is vital for communicating with GPS satellites to get an accurate location.

“It may be decades before the surface of Mars is covered by the tracks of wandering rovers, but it is useful now to study the issues involved in establishing navigation systems on other planets and moons,” Ashby said. “Like current global navigation systems like GPS, these systems will depend on accurate clocks, and the effects on clock rates can be analyzed with the help of Einstein’s general theory of relativity.”

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Lead image by Tasnuva Elahi; with images by BAprod and Yevgenij_D / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on December 4, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Secret Busy Lives of Small Icy Moons

A surprising churn of activity conducive to life may lie beneath their frigid surfaces

By Jake Currie    December 1, 2025

The icy moons at the outer reaches of our solar system are hiding a secret—and it could have important implications for life beyond our planet.

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New research published in Nature Astronomy examines the surface features of the frigid moons of Saturn and Uranus, modeling the activity beneath their frozen shells. On Earth, tectonic forces are governed by molten rock. Moons like Enceladus, Mimas, and Iapetus (of Saturn) and Miranda and Titania (of Uranus), which get tugged at by the gravitational pull of their parent planet and neighboring moons, generate a heat from within as they squish and expand. But the new work finds that even more immediately in oceans themselves, water and ice may be responsible for heat as well. And it turns out there could be a lot more to this action than previously thought.

“Not all of these satellites are known to have oceans, but we know that some do,” lead author Max Rudolph of the University of California, Davis said in a statement. “We’re interested in the processes that shape their evolution over millions of years and this allows us to think about what the surface expression of an ocean world would be.”

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Read more: “Intelligent Life May Be Hiding in the Moons”

Water, believed to be a key component in the evolution of life, has some other unique characteristics. While most things expand when they heat up and contract when they cool down, water’s unique hydrogen bonds force the molecules apart when they get too close together, somewhat paradoxically making ice take up more volume than liquid water. When the layer of ice surrounding a liquid mantle melts, this drop in pressure can actually cause the water beneath to boil.

That’s because the freezing point and boiling point of substances are as much a function of pressure as they are a function of temperature. Apply a great enough vacuum and you can even make water boil at its freezing point here on Earth. If you graph the pressure vs. temperature of water, there’s a point called the “triple point” where all three phases of matter can exist simultaneously.

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This new research suggests that some icy moons have conditions where water can exist in this turbulent state—but only the small ones. Moons with a radius of less than about 186 miles (Enceladus, Mimas, and Miranda), are able to maintain the integrity of their icy shells when the pressure drops, the researchers say. Any larger than that (Titania and Iapetus), and the drop in pressure causes the shell to buckle.

Rather than frozen satellites quietly orbiting in the dark, this new research suggests these small, icy moons are actually churning with activity beneath their icy surfaces. It’s that churn that could provide more favorable conditions for life, as the movement of water also transports materials and nutrients from the rocky core to the surface.

In other words, if you want to find life on a frozen planet, it’s best to look at a smaller one. There could be a groundswell of activity hiding just beneath the surface.

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Lead image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Jake Currie

Posted on December 1, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Economics

- How to Actually Combat Economic Inequality

ECONOMICS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How to Actually Combat Economic Inequality

Put it on display

By Molly Glick    December 1, 2025

The gap between the haves and have-nots has grown even wider in recent decades in many wealthier nations. At the same time, however, researchers have observed that most people are against inequality in theory, but they disagree on how it should be solved. People’s opinion on this subject appears to vary, in part, based on how—and whether—they observe inequality around them.

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These perceptions seem to be skewed by an individual’s social circle, which is often composed of people with similar incomes and levels of wealth. These homogenous niches can lead many of us to underestimate broader income inequality. This bias in our personal samples can sway sentiments toward taxes and other policies that spread the wealth around.

Now, a new study, in the journal PNAS Nexus, suggests that when lower-income people see lots of richer people in their milieu, they’re more in favor of wealth redistribution than when their environs seem fuller of people in a similar economic bracket. The finding, based on an online interactive group activity, suggests that this also comes with rising risks of conflict.

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Researchers from the Santa Fe Institute and the London School of Economics created a model that simulates how people observe inequality in various social network structures and vote on taxes to redistribute money. Then, they tested the model’s predictions with an online experiment where 1,440 study participants based in the United States voted on tax rates.

EYING INEQUALITY: Study participants voting on tax rates were shown eight members of their group at once, who had scores representing their income. Image from Tsvetkova, M., et al. PNAS Nexus (2025).

Participants were randomly assigned as “poor” or “rich” with corresponding numerical scores, and they could only see eight people at once on their screen, representing their hypothetical social network. The study subjects were told ahead of time that they’d potentially see a wide variety of scores. In these mini societies, the participants voted for a tax rate. Ultimately, the median vote won and the theoretical tax would be equally allotted among all the users. People were able to view their group’s vote results and change their vote over three rounds. Then they filled out a survey asking about individual demographics, voting motivations, and their opinions on the results.

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These imagined worlds included a range of scenarios with varying rates of wealth diversity. Ultimately, segregated networks in which people only saw others with similar incomes resulted in the lowest wealth redistribution from taxes, even so the “poor” and “rich” were comparably satisfied and found it fair, and the votes were the least polarized. Meanwhile, when poorer participants viewed lots of rich participants, taxes spread more money among people—yet people reported less satisfaction, and their votes were more polarized. Throughout the various network scenarios, “richer” subjects infrequently upped their support for redistribution. But over more rounds, support among the poor grew as they watched the positive impacts of higher tax rates.

Read more: “Investing Is More Luck Than Talent”

These results differed from the model, which predicted that the network with majority rich participants would reduce vote polarization. That’s because the rich didn’t up their support for redistribution in any scenario, “while the poor radicalized to demand 100 percent taxation.” The authors ultimately identified a “a tradeoff between the level of redistribution and agreement about it, with no simple resolution,” they acknowledged in the paper.

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“What we found was that wealth segregation is inequality’s best friend—it keeps the status quo by keeping the poor apathetic,” study author Milena Tsvetkova, a computational social scientist at the London School of Economics, wrote for The Conversation, “In contrast, observing the rich increases support for redistribution and reduces inequality.”

Going forward, the researchers suggest raising awareness of extreme wealth through social media, news reports, and political discourse. While this might worsen growing social friction, Tsvetkova noted that “dissatisfaction and polarization might be necessary for social change in a highly unequal society.”

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Lead image: corlaffra / Shutterstock

Molly Glick

Posted on December 1, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Environment

- A Warming Arctic May Be Changing Polar Bears’ DNA

- How Many Insects Fill the Air on a Typical Summer Day in the US?

- How to Really Convince People to Prepare for Climate Disasters

- Potential Deep-Sea Mining Site Harbors Scores of New Species

- A Rare “Fairy Lantern” Finally Comes to Light

- Is the Drought in the Southwest Permanent?

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Warming Arctic May Be Changing Polar Bears’ DNA

Polar bears in a warmer region of Greenland have shown some surprising genetic changes that may help them adapt

By Molly Glick    December 12, 2025

Average temperatures are climbing around the globe, with particularly severe swings in the Arctic—this region has heated up nearly four times quicker than the rest of the world over the past few decades. Polar bears depend on the ice there to survive, and more than two-thirds of the species are estimated to become extinct by 2050.

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Now, scientists have noticed that surging temperatures might be changing polar bears’ DNA—this may represent the first solid evidence tying climate change to genetic shifts in a wild mammal.

A team from the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom studied blood samples taken from 17 adult polar bears living in Greenland. This sample included 12 from the northeastern region and five from the southeastern region, an isolated population that migrated there around 200 years ago. Over the past six decades, northeastern Greenland experienced colder, more stable temperatures, while the southeast tended to be warmer, with more fluctuations. Southeastern Greenland has also lost more ice, offering a preview of what more polar bears will likely experience in the future.

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Read more: “A Strange New Gene Pool of Animals Is Brewing in the Arctic”

These differences enabled the researchers to better grasp how polar bears respond to varying environmental stressors. They found that certain genes associated with aging, heat-stress, and metabolism “are behaving differently in the southeast population of polar bears,” lead study author and molecular biologist Alice Godden wrote for The Conversation. “This suggests they might be adjusting to their warmer conditions.” These observations were reported in the journal Mobile DNA.

Godden and her co-authors looked specifically at the polar bears’ “jumping genes,” also called transposons, which she explained are “mobile pieces of the genome that can move around and influence how other genes work.” Such shifts can help animals adapt to new surroundings. In the southeast, the warmer climate seems to have sent these jumping genes into a flurry of activity throughout the polar bear’s genome relatively recently.

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The findings also point to a new menu for polar bears in the southeast. Changes in parts of the polar bear genome associated with fat processing might mean that they’re adapting to eating plants in the southeast of Greenland, while their northern relatives tend to mostly munch on fatty seals.

“We cannot be complacent, this offers some hope but does not mean that polar bears are at any less risk of extinction,” Godden told The Guardian. “We still need to be doing everything we can to reduce global carbon emissions and slow temperature increases.”

Future research should examine all other polar bear populations, the authors noted. This can inform conservation efforts by pinpointing the most vulnerable groups—an important task as their Arctic home continues to warm.

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Lead image: AWeith / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on December 12, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Many Insects Fill the Air on a Typical Summer Day in the US?

NOAA weather radar stations help track the ups and downs of insect abundance

By Devin Reese    December 9, 2025

For many in the United States, the soundtrack of a lazy summer evening is the drone of insects filling the air. But how does one translate that languorous buzz to the cumulative insect air traffic across the entire U.S.?

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Weather radar. That’s how.

Typically, flying insects are accounted for at local scales through sampling in natural areas (if you’re thinking butterfly nets, you’re not too far off). But those numbers don’t extrapolate to entire countries or continents. Researchers from the Swiss Federal Research Institute, the University of Oklahoma, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have devised an estimation method that takes advantage of weather radar data already gathered by large radar networks. And the insect numbers they’ve tallied are wild.

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Based on data from 140 NOAA weather radars across the continental U.S., about 100 trillion insects fly over the lower 48 on a typical summer day, according to the new findings published in Global Change Biology. Collectively, this mass of insects comprises millions of tons of biomass that sustain birds and other insectivores.

Read more: “5 Devious Ways People Made Bugs Into Bombs”

While individual insect species aren’t identifiable in the compiled data, the radar information is valuable in monitoring overall insect abundance. The new methodology allows for analysis of trends, such as long-term flighted insect population and behavioral responses to climate change.

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The researchers constructed a time series of continental U.S. flying insect abundances from 2012 to 2021 and found the overall abundance to be remarkably stable over those years. Fluctuations were regional, with winged insect density rising in some areas and falling in others, in association with winter temperatures. Where winters got warmer over that period, density of these insects decreased, and where they got cooler, density increased. The higher the latitude, the more dramatic the winter-warming effect. In their paper, the study authors explain that warming may disrupt the cold-induced dormancies that allow some insect species to conserve energy during lean winter months.

So, even though the climate effects might so far balance out at a continental scale, temperature fluctuations appear tied to insect abundance at a regional scale. “It is therefore important to combine radar data with other data sources—local surveys, citizen science, and so on,” says Swiss Research Institute biologist Elske Tielens in a statement. It’s also likely that steep insect declines preceded the inception of NOAA radar data, i.e., pre-1990s, says Teilens.

Going forward, the weather radar approach provides a baseline against which researchers can measure future changes in flying insect populations across the continental U.S. The approach can also be used in other parts of the world that are undergoing intense anthropogenic changes, but where ground-based insect counts are not as common or as feasible as the radar snapshots—to help track the number of wings behind all that buzz.

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Lead image: Tunatura / Shutterstock

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Devin Reese

Posted on December 9, 2025

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

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How to Really Convince People to Prepare for Climate Disasters

The most effective messaging hits home

By Molly Glick    December 8, 2025

It’s tough to convince people to act when we won’t reap immediate rewards—researchers have found that this psychological barrier applies to managing our finances, looking out for our long-term health, and reducing the impacts of climate change. The latter is particularly urgent as climate change intensifies and myriad natural disasters threaten people’s homes around the globe.

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Studies have increasingly sought to figure out how to effectively communicate climate risks and encourage people to respond with actions—such as opting for sustainable diets or taking public transportation—that curb emissions in the long run. But few experiments have explored another critical piece of the equation: How government officials and insurers can convince people to make their homes more resilient to rising risks from floods, wildfires, and other hazards exacerbated by climate change. Now, researchers say they have identified a winning tactic: make things personal.

A team from Harvard University and the Stockholm School of Economics in Sweden sent emails to nearly 13,000 homeowners in parts of Australia vulnerable to wildfires. The messages offered tips to protect their properties, including cleaning gutters and cutting back trees. The homeowners were randomly placed into two groups of roughly equal size: The test group received emails that mentioned their specific suburb several times, and the control group received emails that didn’t mention any specific location. Ultimately, people who received the personalized email were nearly twice as likely to click on a link to learn more about preventive measures ahead of wildfires.

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Read more: “Crying Wolf in an Age of Alarms”

“We know climate threats often feel distant and abstract,” said study co-author Nurit Nobel, a behavioral scientist at the Stockholm School of Economics, in a statement. “This simple localization helped people connect the message to their own lives, and therefore nudged them toward action.”

The study subjects, who were customers of a large Australian bank, received these emails a few weeks before the 2023 summer wildfire season. The researchers kept close tabs on how people interacted with these emails. In addition to link engagement, they also measured the difference in email open rates and found that more people opened emails when the subject lines mentioned their suburb—around 55 percent versus 53 percent—but the result wasn’t statistically significant.

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Overall, the “intervention in this study produced a modest impact in absolute numbers,” the statement noted, which is typical in this type of large-scale experiment. But “in real-world settings, even modest changes in behavior can have meaningful impact when applied across thousands or even millions of people,” said co-author Michael Hiscox, a professor of international affairs at Harvard University.

Nobel and Hiscox wrote that the insights generated by this research can be used to prepare for other types of climate risks, including floods and hurricanes. They added that they hope that future work focuses on varying cultural contexts—enabling communities around the world to act as disasters loom.

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Lead image: Sharida Jackson / Wikimedia

Molly Glick

Posted on December 8, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Potential Deep-Sea Mining Site Harbors Scores of New Species

Troves of invertebrates inhabit the sediments of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone

By Devin Reese    December 8, 2025

The deep seabed offers an alluring source of minerals to sustain our modern lifestyles. But the same sediments that yield valuable substances, from rare earth elements to copper and manganese, may also harbor unexplored ecosystems teeming with organisms new to science.

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Potato-sized rocks dubbed “polymetallic nodules” have formed over millions of years from the precipitation of elements from seawater. These nodules started attracting commercial interest as early as the 1960s for their deposits of nickel, cobalt, copper, manganese, and trace amounts of rare earth elements like lithium and titanium used in battery technology.

Now, new findings describe an ecological cost of mining the nodules—such activities may impact undiscovered species before they are found and described.

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COOL CORAL: One of the new species discovered by the mining robot was Deltocyathus zoemetallicus, a type of solitaire coral that was attached to a polymetallic nodule. Image courtesy of Natural History Museum, London; the University of Gothenburg; and Bribiesca-Contreras, G., et al. The Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society (2025).

In 2022, in a test of the feasibility of deep-sea mining, more than 3,300 tons of polymetallic nodules were collected almost 2.5 miles down on the abyssal plain of the eastern Pacific Ocean. Mining companies targeted an area called the Clarion-Clipperton Zone between Hawaii and Mexico, that’s known to have dense concentrations of nodules. A robotic nodule collection vehicle traversed nearly 50 miles of seafloor and used what’s called a riser-pipe to bring nodules, sediment, and anything else embedded in the substrate to the surface.

To ascertain the impacts of the mining, researchers worked in conjunction with the feasibility test to conduct a pre-post study of deep-sea fauna in the area that was mined. From 80 sediment samples, a team of scientists measured the abundance and diversity of sediment-dwelling organisms for two years before and two months after the test mining.

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“The research required 160 days at sea and five years of work,” said University of Gothenburg marine biologist and co-author Thomas Dahlgren in a statement. “Our study will be important for the International Seabed Authority (ISA), which regulates mineral mining in international waters.”

Read more: “The Challenge of Deep-Sea Taxonomy”

The results showed that, while this mining method has less of a negative ecological impact than expected, most of the disturbed species had not even been described by scientists yet. The 788 species identified through molecular DNA analysis included new species of marine bristle worms, crustaceans, and mollusks including both snails and mussels.

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Post mining, the number of animals in the nodule extraction machine’s tracks decreased by 37 percent, with a 32 percent reduction in species diversity. So, while the deep-sea fauna was not totally wiped out by the nodule mining, certain species were eliminated.

“It is now important to try to predict the risk of biodiversity loss as a result of mining,” said Adrian Glover, co-author from the Natural History Museum of London. “At present, we have virtually no idea what lives there.”

There are likely to be many more undiscovered species lying in wait in the Clarion-Clipperton Zone and other areas attractive to deep-sea mining interests.

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Lead image: Craig Smith / ABYSSLINE

Devin Reese

Posted on December 8, 2025

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

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Rare “Fairy Lantern” Finally Comes to Light

Researchers discovered this tiny, mysterious plant species in Malaysia—now, they want to make sure it survives

By Molly Glick    December 3, 2025

Despite its name, this is no light source for a woodland sprite. What you’re gazing at is a type of fairy lantern, an incredibly rare plant. Beyond its mystical appearance and whimsical name, the newly described species is unusual in that it gobbles up energy not from the sun, like most flora, but from fungi in the soil.

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Thismia selangorensis was discovered by scientists in the lush Hulu Langat Forest Reserve in Malaysia. In 2023, naturalist Tan Gim Siew was stopping by to snap some photos in the forest, and noticed a wee, 4-inch-tall plant that had sprouted up in leaf litter near the roots of a riverside tree. During follow-up surveys of the area, fewer than 20 individuals of T. selangorensis were counted over an area of around 1.5 square miles, according to a paper recently published in PhytoKeys. People have spent time in the area for decades—it’s a camping and picnic spot not far from the country’s capital of Kuala Lumpur—but the species hasn’t been officially documented until now.

TINY LANTERN: Researchers holding the petite Thismia selangorensis. Photo by Gim Siew Tan.

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“This discovery shows that significant scientific finds are not limited to remote jungles; they can also be made in ordinary environments where constant human activity leaves little room for expectation,” said paper author Siti-Munirah Mat Yunoh, a plant taxonomist at the Forest Research Institute Malaysia, in a statement.

This petite plant belongs to the otherworldly Thismia genus, also called “fairy lanterns,” which includes 120 known species that gain energy from fungi in a parasitic relationship. Such plants, which are referred to as mycoheterotrophs, are highly elusive—they often dwell underground, and may only be visible if they’re flowering or fruiting. Mysterious members of this genus tend to live in undisturbed, shady forests within moist microhabitats full of leaf debris. Still, scientists have documented increasing numbers of Thismia species in recent years.

Read more: “7 of the World’s Strangest Plants”

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Now, the study authors hope that researchers, government officials, and the public can collaborate to conserve T. selangorensis, which is classified as critically endangered. For example, plants that crop up near campsites and picnic areas might get accidentally stepped on or prove vulnerable to flooding. “The most important effort now is to raise awareness about this species so the public realizes that it exists—right here, in this small corner of the world, and nowhere else, at least for now,” Siti-Munirah said. “Understanding its presence is the first step toward ensuring that this extraordinary plant is not lost before many people even know it exists.”

Now, this tiny fairy lantern’s discovery could illuminate even nature’s tiniest components, inviting people to take a closer look.

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Lead image: Gim Siew Tan

Molly Glick

Posted on December 3, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Is the Drought in the Southwest Permanent?

New models foretell more dry years ahead

By Syris Valentine    December 3, 2025

Reservoirs along the Colorado River—some of the most important stores of water in the nation—dwindle by the day, exposing sunken boats, dumped bodies, and barren soils. It’s just the latest phase in a drought that has crushed the Southwest over the last two and a half decades: the driest period the region has seen in 1,200 years. Even the lashing rains of the atmospheric rivers that have swept over the Southwest in recent winters have done little to alleviate the trend.

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Drought, it seems, is here to stay for many more years. In fact, the current dry spell could last another two decades, according to a paper recently published in Nature. The results of their analysis, which relied on the data of over 500 climate simulations produced by world-leading research institutions, rewrite our understanding of one of the key climate systems controlling weather in the western United States.

The Pacific Decadal Oscillation, or PDO, is a fluctuating pattern of warm and cool sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific that shapes rainfall trends on both sides of the ocean. Much like the related El Niño/Southern Oscillation, the PDO has historically shifted between so-called positive and negative phases, with rainfall increasing in the western U.S. when it’s positive and decreasing when it’s negative. Since the PDO was first described in the 1990s, scientists have assumed that any shifts in the index were dictated by natural variability in the climate cycle and wholly independent of global warming and humanity’s various pollutants.

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The prevailing wisdom no longer made sense.

But this assumption makes it difficult to describe the climate pattern’s recent behavior. Since the late 1990s, save a few odd years, the PDO has been consistently negative, according to the data maintained by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. “And July was the most negative in recorded history,” said University of Colorado, Boulder climate scientist Jeremy Klavans, lead author of the recent paper.

Klavans and his colleagues wanted to tease apart what has been driving this negative trend since the prevailing wisdom no longer made sense. According to conventional explanations, random fluctuations should have swung the PDO positive by now—pushing ocean surface temperatures to a warmer than normal phase. Instead, aside from a few brief upticks, it has spent nearly 30 years “stuck” in negative territory, or colder than “normal.” “The only way to get stuck, if you think that the PDO is driven by natural phenomena, is to have really extreme luck,” he said. Maybe there’s something else at play, he thought.

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To identify what that might be, the team collected the data from 572 different simulations across 12 different, state-of-the-art climate models, then calculated the average PDO index over time across all the simulations. Although the climate models cover a super wide range of results, the average closely aligns with what has played out in reality which, Klavans said, “ is totally unexpected.” If the fluctuations in the PDO were totally natural like most have believed until now, that correlation shouldn’t exist. When these simulations were averaged together, natural variability canceled out, leaving only one common factor: carbon emissions and climate change.

The drought enduring for another two decades or more becomes the most likely possibility.

Klavans believes the findings show that human impacts on the climate are responsible for about half of all decade-to-decade variability in the PDO. This includes both the increase in greenhouse gases that have warmed the atmosphere and the decrease in aerosols—tiny particles of dust, smoke, salt, and sulfur often emitted by heavy industries—that have had a cooling effect, until recently. “If these two things continue to happen at the same time, aerosol abatement and greenhouse gas forcing, we would expect the PDO to keep going on its negative trend.”

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“It’s very well done work,” said climate scientist Young-Oh Kwon from the Wood Holes Oceanographic Institute, who was not involved in the research. “It’s definitely changing our view on what the Pacific Decadal Oscillation is.” Scientists can no longer just consider the PDO and related patterns like the El Niño or the North Atlantic Oscillation to be purely natural phenomena, as they have for decades; they have to reckon with the pronounced influence that human emissions have on these regional climate patterns and how that, in turn, shapes the range of possible climate futures that people can expect to experience.

This new view allows for better clarity on what the future holds for the western United States. Under classic assumptions, rainfall projections varied wildly for the region. Some predicted the drought would break; others suggest it will deepen. But when models are tweaked to fall in line with Klavans’ findings, the sensitivity of the PDO to climate change increases and the range of rainfall projections narrow. The drought enduring for another two decades or more becomes the most likely possibility. And while that outlook is far from heartening, the results ultimately give policymakers and water resource managers the ability to better plan for what the future holds.

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Lead image: Lisa Parsons / Shutterstock

Syris Valentine

Posted on December 3, 2025

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

Evolution

- Is the Secret to Long Life Freedom From Procreation?

- What an Ancient Sheep Reveals About a Bronze Age Plague

EVOLUTION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Is the Secret to Long Life Freedom From Procreation?

A study notes marked lifespan increases in mammals that have been castrated or kept on contraception

By Devin Reese    December 12, 2025

In life, there are trade-offs between energy allocation for reproduction and lifespan. With a finite amount of metabolic energy available, where it is allocated makes a difference.

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Scientists have observed on a species level that longer-lived animals typically produce fewer offspring. But does this tradeoff manifest at an individual animal level? A paper published this week in Nature presents evidence that it does.

Researchers from the University of Otago–Ōtākou Whakaihu Waka in New Zealand and several other universities analyzed data on 117 species of captive mammals housed at zoos and aquariums and conducted a meta-analysis on studies of several other vertebrate species.. Selecting species for which there were records for at least 30 individuals of each sex, they examined survival vis-à-vis reproductive output. On average, across species, sterilization increased animal life expectancy by almost 18 percent.

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Variability cropped up with some animal care and demographic details, such as timing of the treatment, care environment, and sex of the individual. For example, the effects were distinct across males and females. In males, castration—i.e., removing the testicles—improved life expectancy, especially if it was done before puberty. But vasectomy—closing the tubes that move sperm out of storage in the testicles and into action—did not. So, extended lifespans in males apparently resulted from eliminating the sex hormones made by the testicles, which include testosterone and several others.

Read more: “What Good Is Grandma?”

“These hormones may interact with pathways that regulate the biology of aging, particularly during early-life development, since early-life castration has the strongest effects on lifespan,” explained co-author Mike Garratt, a reproductive biologist at the University of Otago, in a statement.

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Castrated males also tend to engage in less aggressive behavior surrounding competition for mates, and may reap the benefits of fewer risky fights with other males.

In contrast, the lifespans of female mammals tended to increase with various forms of contraception, which Garratt attributed to the benefits that “arise from reducing the substantial energetic and physiological costs of pregnancy, lactation, and caring for offspring.”  Female animals who were treated with hormonal contraceptives appeared to have more robust immune systems, buffering them from diseases, likely thanks to the energy saved by not having offspring.

Even foregoing reproduction in females that had previously reared offspring extended their lifespans, supporting arguments for “the evolutionary benefits of menopause, where reduced later-life reproductive investment contributes to improved longevity,” the study authors wrote.

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There’s a caveat for females, however. When ovaries are removed in permanent surgical sterilization, the elimination of ovarian hormones makes females frail. Although they may live longer, that longevity is compromised by poor health.

The authors also considered data from human studies that retrospectively tested whether castration in historical populations was associated with improved survival. Those results, though mixed, revealed a similar average lifespan increase in castrated human males—about 18 percent.

As each animal traverses their own timeline, reproduction either happens or does not, and lives play out accordingly. But on a biological level, the tradeoffs involved seem to be coming into focus.

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Lead image: Reto Buehler / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on December 12, 2025

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

EVOLUTION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What an Ancient Sheep Reveals About a Bronze Age Plague

Scientists found the plague pathogen hiding in a 4,000-year-old sheep, shedding light on the earlier, more elusive pandemic before the Black Death

By Molly Glick    December 10, 2025

Millennia before the Black Death pandemic killed nearly half of Europe’s population, a different strain of the same plague bacterium, Yersinia pestis, tore across Eurasia. It infected people across the region and lingered for 2,000 years before disappearing.

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While we know that the Black Death bacterium spread in part via fleas in the 14th century, it’s unclear how the earlier strain spread so widely and over an extended period of time during the Bronze Age, from about 2900 to 500 B.C. Previous research suggested that the older Y. pestis strain hadn’t yet evolved to efficiently travel via fleas. But the common carriers of that earlier, long-lasting pestilence remained mysterious for millennia.

Now, scientists think they have identified a critical piece in the puzzle of that Bronze Age plague.

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An international team of researchers found Y. pestis DNA in the bones of a roughly 4,000-year-old domesticated sheep from Russia’s Southern Ural Mountains, a finding reported in Cell. The discovery offers an intriguing hint into origins of this elusive ancient pandemic.

Read more: “The Magic of Herding”

“Our plague sheep gave us a breakthrough,” said study co-author Taylor Hermes, an archeologist at the University of Arkansas, in a statement. “We now see it as a dynamic between people, livestock, and some still unidentified ‘natural reservoir’ for it.”

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This was a rare discovery—it’s difficult to find well-preserved animal remains from the Bronze Age because the archeological record of such material from that period mostly consists of ancient meal leftovers that were cooked and discarded, which degrades any genetic material within them. That’s why few research teams have reported intact pathogen DNA from ancient animals.

Hermes encountered the sheep skeleton during an ongoing study of ancient livestock DNA, which tracks how people shepherded domesticated goats, cattle, and sheep from the Fertile Crescent across Eurasia—movements that sparked empires and sustained nomadic communities.

He and his colleagues found the bones when poring over livestock samples dug up from this area of the Southern Ural Mountains in the 1980s and ’90s. “It was alarm bells for my team,” Hermes said. “This was the first time we had recovered the genome from Yersinia pestis in a non-human sample.” The sheep was excavated from a settlement that’s associated with the Sintashta people, a Bronze Age culture known for its early mastery of horse riding and bronze weapons, along with the construction of impressive walled cities.

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Ultimately, the Bronze Age plague probably resulted from increasingly close contact between people and animals as they herded and lived among livestock across grasslands teeming with wild creatures like birds, deer, and rodents, the latter of which serves as the primary reservoir for plague today. The Sintashta people also interacted with various nearby communities, which potentially facilitated the person-to-person transmission of disease. While sheep likely don’t spread plague among themselves, people might have caught the disease while handling or consuming them.

This finding matters today, according to Hermes, by highlighting the risks of human disturbance to the delicate balance of natural ecosystems. “It’s important to have a greater respect for the forces of nature,” he said.

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Lead image: Pixabay

Molly Glick

Posted on December 10, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Genetics

- Vampire Squid Genome Offers Glimpse Into Octopus Evolution

GENETICS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Vampire Squid Genome Offers Glimpse Into Octopus Evolution

Scientists decoded the elusive creature’s genome for the first time

By Jake Currie    December 2, 2025

Lurking deep in the ocean is a crimson, many-limbed beast known as Vampyroteuthis infernalis—the “vampire squid from hell.” Despite its theatrical name, this seldom-seen cephalopod is a scavenger, feeding on detritus with the help of its cloaked arms. Unsurprisingly, it’s not a vampire (or from hell). More surprisingly, it’s not a squid either.

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With its squidlike appearance and eight arms like an octopus, the vampire squid doesn’t fit neatly into either group. Instead, it’s a kind of living fossil, representative of the primordial ancestors of both lineages. Now, for the first time, researchers have decoded the vampire squid’s genome—and they found plenty of surprises. They recently published their findings in iScience.

“The vampire squid sits right at the interface between octopuses and squids,” study author Oleg Simakov from the University of Vienna said in a statement. “Its genome reveals deep evolutionary secrets on how two strikingly different lineages could emerge from a shared ancestor.”

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Read more: “What It Feels Like to Be an Octopus”

The biggest secret the vampire squid was hiding is just how massive its genome is: 11 billion base pairs, or gigabases. (A whopping 62 percent of their genetic material consists of non-coding repetitive elements, DNA sequences that repeat, but aren’t translated into proteins.) To give a bit of perspective, the vampire squid’s giant genome is nearly four times larger than the human genome and more than double the size of the largest known squid genome. Octopuses, on the other hand, have much smaller genomes, between two and three gigabases, something researchers say was key to their evolution.

Comparing the vampire squid’s genome to contemporary cephalopods, the team found that the vampire squid’s chromosomes more closely resembled those of squids, suggesting that the ancestors of all cephalopods were more squidlike than octopuslike. When they split off from their ancestors some 300 million years ago, octopuses underwent a sort of chromosomal fusion and mixing, resulting in smaller genomes, fewer chromosomes, and likely contributing to the evolution of specialized appendages. Rather than the emergence of new genes, researchers said, it’s this chromosomal rearrangement that drove the evolution of octopuses.

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It’s a fascinating glimpse into the evolution of some of the most mysterious creatures on Earth. Who knows what secrets they’ll share with us next.

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Lead image: © Citron / Wikimedia Commons

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Jake Currie

Posted on December 2, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Health

- Why Stress Sparks Hair Loss, According to Mice

- This “Cinderella Sense” May Be Tied to More Than 130 Disorders

- Here’s Why Some Insomniacs Can’t Sleep

- The Benefits of Social Media Detox

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Why Stress Sparks Hair Loss, According to Mice

Dead hair cells might confuse the immune system and lead to chronic shedding

By Molly Glick    December 4, 2025

If you’ve ever watched your locks pool in the shower drain during a particularly taxing time of your life, you’re not alone—stress-driven hair loss is highly common. Yet scientists are still untangling precisely how stress impacts our bodies, including quickly regenerating tissues like hair follicles, which are more vulnerable to sudden shifts in the body.

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Stress is linked to two hair loss disorders: telogen effluvium, a usually temporary condition that can cause significant hair shedding, and alopecia areata, an autoimmune disease that is often chronic. To learn more about how such conditions emerge, scientists induced stress in mice, which are frequently studied to understand more about hair growth and loss, and observed how their hair follicles responded.

This quickly ramped up the sympathetic nervous system, which coordinates the “fight-or-flight” response to perceived threats. These nerves then released loads of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, which in excess can kill rapidly multiplying cells in the hair follicle, a finding reported in the journal Cell.

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Read more: “Why Are Marine Mammals Losing Their Hair”

This damage was temporary, the authors noted, because it didn’t affect the stem cells that help sprout new hair. But upon a closer look, the scientists observed that stress drives a further phenomenon: In mice, the body seemed to see the inflamed or dead hair follicles as unwelcome visitors. This released a floodgate of immune reactions. T cells, which work to shield the body from disease, “now see hair follicles as a foreign object they should attack,” said study author Ya-chieh Hsu, a stem cell scientist at Harvard University, in a statement.

This onslaught could wreak more long-term damage—the hyped-up T cells may continue to strike hair follicles when animals face stress in the future, the scientists noted. If similar processes are underway in human bodies, it could explain how alopecia areata emerges, and why most people with the condition experience relapses throughout their lives.

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The trigger behind autoimmunity “remains one of the greatest mysteries,” the authors wrote in the paper, but this paper could help scientists further untangle how environmental factors, including stress, contribute. “You always need a trigger, and the trigger is not necessarily genetics,” Hsu said in the statement.

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Lead image: Jahin934 / Shutterstock

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Molly Glick

Posted on December 4, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

This “Cinderella Sense” May Be Tied to More Than 130 Disorders

Researchers give a whiff of why smell matters to health

By Molly Glick    December 3, 2025

A critical sense linked to a whole host of diseases has long lurked right under—or rather within—our noses.

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While doctors often check patients’ hearing and eyesight, it’s far less common to test people’s sense of smell. But one’s “smell health” is potentially linked to more than 139 conditions that manifest throughout the body, including Alzheimer’s disease, congestive heart failure, and Parkinson’s disease, according to a review recently published in Clinical Otolaryngology.

The COVID-19 pandemic has drawn more attention to olfactory dysfunction, which refers to smell loss or an altered sense of smell, but the authors noted that cases are likely underdiagnosed. “The sense of smell has lagged behind the senses of sight and hearing in terms of its perceived importance and remains the Cinderella sense,” they wrote.

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The authors cite the fact that olfactory dysfunction currently affects around 22 percent of people globally, and it’s particularly prevalent among men and people over the age of 60. Most often associated with aging, olfactory dysfunction can also be caused by upper respiratory infections like COVID-19, head trauma, or chronic sinus inflammation. Some sufferers report it as a side effect of certain medications, like some drugs that treat high cholesterol.

Read more: “The Doctor Will Sniff You Now”

Regular screening for olfactory dysfunction is crucial because it can lead to early detection of certain diseases. For example, partial or full loss of smell can occur more than four years before the motor symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, the paper points out. The nose may signal neurodegenerative conditions years before other signs emerge because damage may commence in parts of the brain associated with smell before such deterioration causes more systemic problems.

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Olfactory dysfunction might also be linked to a 10-year risk for stroke and long-term risk for congestive heart failure, a finding in older adults who reported they were otherwise in good health. More broadly, smell health seems to strongly predict mortality in older adults.

A good sense of smell is also essential for healthy eating: People with smell and taste disorders tend to have diets higher in calories, fat, and added sugar, which can lead to nutritional deficiencies and obesity.

Ultimately, scents are crucial for our overall well-being, the paper emphasized. Individuals with olfactory dysfunction experience high rates of eating disorders, depression, and social isolation. That’s because smell is inextricably linked to our enjoyment of food, social communication, and avoiding harms like spoiled food and smoke.

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The authors urged that smell “should be promoted as an essential pillar of health.” They recommend educating healthcare providers around the globe on olfactory dysfunction, ramping up related research to identify treatments, and increasing access to smell testing.

After all, the nose knows a lot more about our health than you might think.

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Lead image: Rijksmuseum / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on December 3, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Here’s Why Some Insomniacs Can’t Sleep

Downshifting from the noise of the day is easier for some than others

By Bob Grant    December 3, 2025

We’ve all been there. Lying awake in our beds, unable to shed the worries and stresses of the day or days to come when we should be peacefully drifting off to dreamland. For some of us, this is an unfortunate nightly ritual.

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New research shows that people with chronic difficulties getting to sleep may suffer from a disruption in the brain’s ability to transition from aroused, daytime problem solving to necessary, nightly downtime, a 24-hour cycle. In short, the brains of insomniacs fail to disengage at the appropriate hour, continuing to process the concerns of the day well past bedtime.

A team of sleep scientists from universities in Australia and the United States published their findings in Sleep Medicine.

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The researchers monitored 32 older adults—16 healthy sleepers and 16 insomniacs—over the course of 24 hours. During this period, the participants were isolated in beds without environmental or behavioral signals to alert them to time of day. This dimly-lit setup, in effect, meant that the volunteers’ brain activity—which the scientists assessed hourly through checklists that captured data on the quality and controllability of their thoughts—was influenced exclusively by the internal, circadian rhythms that pulse through us all.

Read more: “How Your Body Knows What Time It Is”

By observing these different sleepers, the scientists found that they all had natural peaks of brain activity in the afternoon and valleys in the early morning hours. But people who had trouble drifting off to sleep failed to transition effectively between these two states. “Unlike good sleepers, whose cognitive state shifted predictably from daytime problem-solving to nighttime disengagement, those with insomnia failed to downshift as strongly,” said University of South Australia clinical psychologist and co-author Kurt Lushington in a statement. “Their thought patterns stayed more daytime-like in the nighttime hours when the brain should be quietening.”

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The problem, Lushington and his colleagues suggested, could be that the insomniacs’ circadian rhythms were shifted by hours. “Our study shows that in insomnia, this disengagement is blunted and delayed, likely due to circadian rhythm abnormalities,” Lushington added. “This means that the brain doesn’t receive strong signals to ‘power down’ at night.”

Some of the limited number insomniacs in the study did display distinct trait-like differences in thought structure, with high levels of sequential thinking—which typically indicates step-wise problem solving and activates the brain’s language and decision-making centers but can be indicative of depression and anxiety—dragging on into sleeping hours. But the abnormalities in circadian rhythms suggested by the findings open the door to more tailored interventions for people whose minds don’t stop racing once their heads hit the pillow. “These include timed light exposure and structured daily routines that may restore the natural day-night variation in thought patterns,” said University of South Australia sleep psychologist and co-author Jill Dorrian.

Whatever keeps any of us from entering the restorative kingdom of sleep on a nightly basis, it’s good to know that there are scientists out there probing the rhythm of our thoughts for clues to help us get some shuteye.

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Lead image: Blueastro / Shutterstock

Bob Grant

Posted on December 3, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Benefits of Social Media Detox

Could a break from the liking, following, and subscribing salve the mental health of young people?

By Bob Grant    December 1, 2025

After a week stuffed with family gatherings, long travel days, and most likely hours spent on personal devices fluttering between social media platforms, many of us may feel the need for a break. And according to recently published research, a break—specifically from social media—may be just the tonic to ease a host of negative mental health symptoms.

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Study participants who engaged in a one-week social media detox, reducing their use of Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, and X, self-reported lessened symptoms of anxiety, depression, and insomnia, according to scientists from Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston and the University of Bath in the United Kingdom. The researchers published their findings in JAMA Open Network. More than 290 volunteers, who ranged in age from 19 to 24 and typically otherwise spent about two hours a day on social media platforms, participated in the weeklong reduction. Interestingly, the observed reported benefits didn’t require a full abstention—participants just cut back usage to about half an hour per day.

Read more: “Is Facebook Luring You Into Being Depressed?”

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Reducing social media use is not a panacea to address true mental health ailments, of course. Such a detox “certainly would not be your first-line or your only form of care,” study co-author John Torous, a Harvard University psychiatrist, told The New York Times. The study also doesn’t indicate how lasting such mental health benefits might be. But the research does add to a growing body of findings that suggest even such brief breaks could be beneficial to mental health.

The authors of the paper also point out that the nature of a person’s social media use, rather than the absolute quantity of time spent on social media, seems to be a more important determinant of how it leaves one feeling. “Interventions may be more effective if they target reducing problematic engagement rather than focusing exclusively on overall reduction in use,” they write in the paper.

Even for folks who aren’t feeling symptoms of anxiety, depression, or insomnia, a little more time spent eating leftovers with loved ones and a little less lamenting a lack of Instagramable vacation plans likely can’t hurt. And the result could provide another bounty: The participants in the study gained an average of nine hours of their lives back from the platforms, just across the detox week. Think of all of the extra holiday shopping!

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Lead image: Flash Vector / Shutterstock

Bob Grant

Posted on December 1, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

History

- Crick and Watson Did Not Steal Franklin’s Data

- Did Volcanoes Spark the Black Death?

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Crick and Watson Did Not Steal Franklin’s Data

Matthew Cobb’s 3 greatest revelations while writing his book Crick: A Mind in Motion

By Matthew Cobb    December 4, 2025

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Working in Cambridge, James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix in early 1953, while Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, researchers at King’s College London, were also trying to crack the structure. Franklin was about to leave King’s and DNA work all together, while Wilkins was preparing to focus his mind more closely on the problem once Franklin left. It’s widely believed that Watson and Crick stole Franklin’s data and that this enabled them to make their breakthrough.

The idea can be traced back to Watson’s page-turning but unreliable memoir, The Double Helix, in which he describes seeing X-ray diffraction images at King’s in January 1953 and feeling excited about them. He does not say who made those images (although he does say that Wilkins had been repeating some of Franklin’s observations), but most people believe that this was one of Franklin’s images despite a lack of reliable evidence for this.  Even if the image had been so decisive, surely Franklin—an expert—would have realized this herself.

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With Nathaniel Comfort (who is writing a biography of Watson), I discovered that in January 1953, Franklin suggested Crick talk to a colleague, who had an informal report of the work she and Wilkins were doing at King’s, if he wanted to learn more about her findings. There is no indication that she was concerned about sharing her results.

CLOSE READING: Matthew Cobb says that the now widespread assumption that Francis Crick and James Watson stole Rosalind Franklin’s data to make their momentous discovery about the double-helix structure of DNA is based on non-existent evidence and isn’t borne out by the rest of the facts. Photo by Chris Schmauch.

Interviews with Crick from the 1960s and a close reading of the Watson and Crick research papers show that the actual process of making the breakthrough did not involve using any of Franklin’s data. Instead, the pair spent a month fiddling about with cardboard shapes corresponding to the component molecules of DNA, using the basic rules of chemistry. Once they had finally, almost by accident, made the discovery, then they could see that it corresponded to Franklin’s data.

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Franklin was not hostile to the pair—she continued to share her data and ideas with both men and subsequently became very close friends with Crick and his wife, Odile. She regularly stayed at their Cambridge home, went to their notorious parties and went to the theatre with Odile. Later, after her cancer diagnosis, she convalesced with the Cricks, twice. There are some charming letters from Odile that I quote in the book, describing their friendship.

In 1947, Crick set out his twin ambitions—to understand the nature of life, and of the human brain. With his work on molecular biology, he made huge strides toward achieving that first ambition; in 1977 Crick settled in California, working at the Salk Institute, with the aim of understanding consciousness. Although he made no single decisive breakthrough—we still do not understand how consciousness works—he played a decisive role in creating modern neuroscience.

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First, he used his reputation and influence to argue for a focus on precise anatomy—the origin of today’s huge projects to map animal brains and, eventually, the human brain.

If the image had been so decisive, surely Franklin would have realized this herself.

Then, in the 1980s he was closely involved with the cognitive scientists and computer scientists who developed something called Parallel Distributed Processing—the distant precursor of today’s AI systems. He argued for fusing computer models of behaviour with precise anatomical knowledge to gain insight into how nervous systems work, and collaborated closely with AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield, who in 2024 shared the Nobel Prize for their work.

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Above all, working with Christof Koch, he set out a materialist approach for investigating consciousness—much of today’s interest in the topic can be traced back to Crick’s pioneering advocacy and insight.

Although this contribution has largely been forgotten, before the turn of the millennia, his role was widely recognized. He regularly published articles and think-pieces in Nature, the leading scientific journal, and in 1994 he wrote a hugely successful popular book about his ideas, The Astonishing Hypothesis, which helped to shape the thinking of both scientists and the public about the nature of consciousness.

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One aspect of Crick’s life that even his close collaborators did not know of was his fascination with poetry. He even tried his hand at writing verse—some of it was dreadful, but other attempts, quoted in my book, were pretty good.

His closest relationship with poetry came with the work of Michael McClure. In 1959, Crick bought a copy of one of McClure’s early works—Peyote Poem—in City Lights Bookstore in San Francisco. This described the psychedelic effects of chewing peyote; Crick did not know what this was, but he was struck by McClure’s writing and pinned the long poem in the hall of his Cambridge home.

In the early 1970s, he got a chance to meet McClure, who was by now quite well known—“the Prince of the San Francisco poetry scene,” said one observer—and the two struck up a close friendship (Crick had also experimented with LSD by this point). McClure would send Crick early versions of his poems and his essays; Crick would give his opinion, which McClure sometimes accepted, changing his work as a result. Their letters—scattered in archives around the world—reveal an intimate and unusual friendship.

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For the next three decades the two men exchanged visits and letters, which reveal an emotionally charged, subjective side to Crick that might seem to contradict his materialist approach to science. But, in fact, his approach to science was not strictly logical, but full of fun and sudden, intuitive glimpses into facets of reality that were previously hidden. Understanding his interest in poetry, and in McClure’s work in particular, sheds light on Crick’s character and on his science.

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Lead image: Maryna Olyak / Shutterstock

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Matthew Cobb

Posted on December 4, 2025

Matthew Cobb is a professor emeritus at the University of Manchester. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology and genetics from the University of Sheffield. He is the author of seven books including: Crick: A Mind in Motion, As Gods: A Moral History of the Genetic Age, The Idea of the Brain, and Life’s Greatest Secret. He lives in England.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Did Volcanoes Spark the Black Death?

New research points the finger for precipitating Europe’s most deadly pandemic at scores of massive eruptions

By Bob Grant    December 4, 2025

Human history is pockmarked with periods of death and destruction on unimaginable scales. Of these calamitous epochs, one stands out: The Black Death. The mid 14th century scourge killed tens of millions of people in Europe, Asia, and Africa and changed the course of history—marking the tail end of the Middle Ages and ushering in the cultural reawakening of the Renaissance by disrupting society, the feudal system, and economies across the continent.

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Researchers have long known the Black Death’s central villain: the bacterium Yersinia pestis, which caused the bubonic plague that swept through towns and villages with a mortality rate of up to 60 percent. Experts also know this microbial agent was spread by fleas, borne on the backs of rodent pests and maybe domestic animals, and passed between humans through the air and bodily fluids. But historians have had a tougher time recreating the sequence of events that initially started the devastating pandemic.

Now, a pair of scientists have found new clues hidden in tree rings. By looking at these rings in the Spanish Pyrenees—as well as details in historical accounts of the time—they suggest that heightened volcanic activity sometime around 1345 may have sparked a famine, kicking off the sequence of events that eventually led to the Black Death raging through Eurasia from 1347 and 1353. They published their findings today in Communications Earth & Environment.

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“We looked into the period before the Black Death with regard to food security systems and recurring famines, which was important to put the situation after 1345 in context,” said Martin Bauch, historian of medieval climate and epidemiology at the Leibniz Institute for the History and Culture of Eastern Europe and co-author, in a statement. “We wanted to look at the climate, environmental, and economic factors together, so we could more fully understand what triggered the onset of the second plague pandemic in Europe.”

Read more: “The Volcano That Shrouded the Earth and Gave Birth to a Monster”

Here is the model Bauch and his colleague Ulf Büntgen, a dendrochronologist at Cambridge University, propose. As yet unknown volcanic eruptions ejected huge amounts of ash and gases into the atmosphere around 1345, causing drops in annual temperatures that persisted for several years. The cross sections from living and relic trees that the researchers studied had “blue rings,” denoting abnormally cold and wet summer growth seasons, in 1345, 1346, and 1347. Additional accounts from the time considered by Bauch and Büntgen tell of abnormal cloudiness and dark lunar eclipses, further hints of volcanic activity. This sustained cooling could have caused widespread crop failure across the Mediterranean.

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The resulting food shortages drove merchants in the maritime republics of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa to increase imports of grain from the Mongols living around the sea of Azov in 1347. Along with shipments of grain coursing across established trade routes came plague-infested fleas. Once Y. pestis and the fleas that carried it landed in Europe, the pathogen jumped to rats, mice, and perhaps domesticated animals. Eventually the disease hopped to humans, and people began transmitting it in densely packed population centers. The rest is a dark part of history.

“For more than a century, these powerful Italian city states had established long-distance trade routes across the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, allowing them to activate a highly efficient system to prevent starvation,” said Bauch. “But ultimately, these would inadvertently lead to a far bigger catastrophe.”

From this newly proposed picture of the Black Death’s roots, Bauch and Büntgen, suggest a lesson for current humans. “Although this unique spatiotemporal coincidence of many influences seems rare, our findings emphasise the increased likelihood of zoonotic infectious diseases to suddenly emerge and rapidly translate into pandemics in both a globalized and warmer world, with COVID-19 just being the latest warning sign,” they write.

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Continuing to study the intricacies of history’s most devastating episodes could help us avoid repeating mistakes made in the wake of natural disasters.

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Lead image: Fresco, known as the “Triumph of Death,” attributed to Buonamico Buffalmacco; photo by Martin Bauch

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Bob Grant

Posted on December 4, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

Microbiology

- The Air In Hospitals and On Airplanes Is Cleaner Than You Think

- Tiny Volcano-Dwelling Creature Breaks Heat Record

MICROBIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Air In Hospitals and On Airplanes Is Cleaner Than You Think

These crowded spots may not be the airborne pathogen cesspools we fear

By Devin Reese    December 4, 2025

We humans stuff ourselves into tight quarters for various reasons. Sometimes we pack by the dozens into airliners bound for Boca. Other times, we’re forced into close proximity as we sit in hospital waiting rooms.

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Especially on the heels of a global respiratory disease pandemic, being in such crowded spaces can induce anxiety. But is the air circulating through airplanes and hospitals swimming with airborne pathogens or other toxic ick, as our imaginations would sometimes have us believe?

According to researchers studying the air quality in those two common proxies for human sardine cans, it’s not so bad.

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New findings published in Microbiome, showed the presence of diverse, and mostly benign, microbial communities that were remarkably similar between hospitals and airplanes. The few pathogenic microbes, such as Escherichia coli, were in low densities and not indicative of active infections. However, the 23 types of antibiotic-resistant genes that showed up in both samples, linked to major classes of antibiotics like gentamycin and streptomycin, were grim evidence for the rise in antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections.

The 407 distinct microbes detected by a team of researchers led by Northwestern University scientists had largely come from people’s skin. These included the harmless bacteria, Staphylococcus epidermidis and Cutibacterium acnes. While the thought that we’re continually breathing in others’ skin microbes is a bit unsettling, it’s also to be expected.

Read more: “Why Germs Love Our Collective Amnesia”

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“Indoor air looks like indoor air, which also looks like human skin,” said Northwestern synthetic biologist and co-author Erica Hartmann in a statement. As Hartmann and her colleagues from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health and the Argonne National Laboratory stated in the paper, humans naturally carry around 10^12 microorganisms on their skin, which become airborne as we shed millions of skin cells per day.

While airplane and hospital air teeming with harmless skin bacteria may be relieving or distressing, depending upon who you ask, the methods the research team used to generate these findings were undeniably resourceful. The scientists gathered data from discarded facemasks used by air travelers and healthcare professionals to learn more about indoor air quality at their study sites.

“We realized that we could use face masks as a cheap, easy air-sampling device for personal exposures and general exposures,” Hartmann added.

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The COVID-19 pandemic inspired a spate of research on airborne microbes. But they’re difficult to sample, since air is a medium that’s continually in motion, carrying around minuscule, low-mass microbes such as viruses, bacteria, and fungi. It’s like trying to sample moving needles in a haystack. Instead of directly assessing the airborne microbial community, researchers extracted microbes from face masks that had been worn by people in planes or hospitals to gauge microbial loads in those environments.

Using a “shotgun metagenomics” approach, Hartmann and colleagues extracted DNA from the outside of 22 disposable face masks. Travelers wore masks on domestic and international flights, while hospital workers wore masks for the duration of a shift, then mailed them in sterile bags to Harmann’s lab. Unworn face masks served as study controls.

In addition to better characterizing the microbial milieu in some of the places where humans crowd in together, the research pioneered a way that face masks can be repurposed to study air quality in enclosed environments.

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Lead image: Zubada / Shutterstock

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Devin Reese

Posted on December 4, 2025

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

MICROBIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Tiny Volcano-Dwelling Creature Breaks Heat Record

The fire amoeba challenges assumptions about what complex life needs to survive on Earth

By Kristen French    December 1, 2025

Some like it hot. Really hot. But the prize goes to a tiny squirmy creature known as the fire amoeba of the Cascades, or Incendiamoeba casadensis. It is the most heat-loving eukaryotic organism on Earth.

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Scientists recently discovered the hot-headed, single-celled organism in hot springs in Lassen Volcanic National Park and noted that it grows and divides at temperatures of up to 145 degrees Fahrenheit. In fact, this microscopic heat seeker doesn’t even start growing until ambient temperatures reach beyond 107 degrees.

Scientists recently described the creature in a new preprint, and their findings challenge established notions about the kinds of conditions complex life needs to thrive—and about where and how it can live.

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While most Earthly organisms, including humans, do best at temperatures of around 68 degrees Fahrenheit, some lifeforms make their homes in more fiery climes—inside sizzling volcanic vents, scorching geothermal pools or blisteringly dry deserts. But these extremophiles are typically primitive prokaryotes such as bacteria and archaea, which lack nuclei and organelles.

Read more: “The Animals That Exist Between Life and Death”

Eukaryotes do possess nuclei and organelles, however, and they are subject to rupture at high temperatures—which is why this little fire amoeba is such a marvel. To find out how much heat the fire amoeba can actually endure and how it survives, the scientists collected samples from the hot springs where they found the creature and took them back to the lab. First, they tested growing them in flasks at 17 different temperatures, from 86 to 147 degrees Fahrenheit.

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The fire amoeba does have its limits, they found. Beyond those temperatures, at around 151 degrees Fahrenheit, the newly described organisms grew protective cysts, allowing them to enter dormancy. And at 176 degrees, the amoebas called it quits.

The scientists also studied the creature’s genome and compared it to the genomes of other amoebas. What they found is that the fire amoeba has extra quality control and repair mechanisms, including special proteins that can sustain heat shock and extra enzymes that break down damaged proteins. It also has more genes involved in DNA repair and in sensing changes in the environment, such as rising temperatures.

The scientists predicted that other heat-loving amoebas may await discovery—so the fire amoeba might not hold the hottest crown for long.

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Lead image: Gianfranco Vivi / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on December 1, 2025

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

Neuroscience

- Rabies Virus Helps Map Psilocybin’s Brain Altering Effects

- How the Breath Guides Memory

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Rabies Virus Helps Map Psilocybin’s Brain Altering Effects

The deadly pathogen is adept at jumping between neurons, making it an ideal tracer to reveal how connections change after a dose of psilocybin in mice

By Bob Grant    December 11, 2025

Psychedelic mushrooms have attracted quite a bit of interest from researchers lately. Recent research has hinted both at the effectiveness of psilocybin, the psychoactive compound in psychedelic mushrooms, in treating clinical depression and at the ways that the hallucinogenic compound works to temporarily remodel the human brain.

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But exactly how psilocybin wields its mind-altering magic on a neural level remains mysterious. Now, researchers have co-opted defanged rabies viruses to help map the changes that the psychedelic molecule makes in mouse brains.

They suggest that psilocybin works by weakening feedback loops that typically fuel negative thinking in a brain’s outer layer and by increasing the connectivity of brain circuits that translate sensory perception into action. The international team of scientists from China, Hong Kong, and the United States recently published their findings in Cell.

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Read more: “What Is Your Brain Doing on Psychedelics?”

Psilocybin administered to mice seemed to affect much of the rodents’ brains. “This is really looking at brain-wide changes,” said Cornell University biomedical engineer and co-author Alex Kwan, in a statement. “That’s a scale that we have not worked at before. A lot of times, we’re focusing on a small part of the neural circuit.”

Kwan and his colleagues constructed that brain wide map by hooking psilocybin to two viruses, one of which was a rabies virus that had been genetically engineered to only infect and spread to designated neurons in the mouses’ brains. Capitalizing on the rabies virus’s ability to jump across neuronal synapses—part of why the pathogen is so deadly in nature—the team could trace the march of psilocybin across the brain as it led to neuronal changes that introduced more synapses into the organ.

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The authors admit that such rabies tracing does have limitations. The virus could spread to neighboring neurons using a non-synaptic route, they wrote, and of course a mouse brain is very different from that of a human.

But the findings do offer tantalizing clues, and potentially useful therapeutic insights, into how psilocybin changes brains.

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Lead image: Saska RF / Shutterstock

Bob Grant

Posted on December 11, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How the Breath Guides Memory

Remembering is timed to the rhythms of our lungs

By Kristen French    December 8, 2025

Breath is our body’s metronome, ticking from our first gulp of air at birth to our last exhale when we depart the Earth. Recently, scientists have begun to discover that this fundamental rhythm is also connected to many of our most critical cognitive and neural faculties, including memory.

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But how does the connection between memory and breath work? Using EEG, a group of European scientists set out to answer this question. Their results detail an unexpected choreography: Memory retrieval, they found, is timed to the rhythm of respiration. People remember better if they receive a cue as they inhale while the memory itself seems to materialize on the out breath. They published their results in The Journal of Neuroscience.

For the experiment, the scientists taught 18 individuals to associate 120 images with verbs. The team—from Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich in collaboration with colleagues from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin and the University of Oxford—subsequently asked study participants to recall the word-image pairs both before and after a 2-hour nap. While they were doing the recalling, the scientists recorded their breathing and their brain activity with EEG.

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Read more: “Your Memories Are Like Paintings”

In the EEG recordings, the scientists found two brainwave signatures associated with successful remembering, and each was timed with a different stage of the breath. The first, a quieting of alpha and beta activity, was linked with preparation for memory retrieval, and corresponded with the in breath. The second signature was associated with the memory itself, and timed to the out breath.

In some people the synchrony was tighter between memory and breath, the researchers found, and these individuals were better at remembering. “Respiration is a natural pacemaker for memory processes, highlighting how closely our bodies and brains interact,” said Thomas Schreiner, study co-author and a psychology researcher at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, in a statement.

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Could the findings help people remember things better in everyday settings? That’s a subject for future study, said co-author and Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich graduate student Esteban Bullón Tarrasó. The current results only apply to recently learned material, he notes, so further investigation could look into how the breath affects older memories. “However, the underlying mechanisms suggest that respiration also plays a role there.”

After all, breath is one of the oldest rhythms, so it makes sense that it might help us travel back in time.

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Lead image: Billion Photos / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on December 8, 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.

Paleontology

- Hobbits May Have Been Victims of Climate Change

- Millions of Years Ago These Animals Shaped the Arabian Sea

- You Don’t Need a Big Brain to Fly

- An Ancient Earthquake Might Have Unleashed a Sea Turtle Stampede

- Living Large: Giant Anacondas Blew Up 12 Million Years Ago

- Behold the Biggest Dinosaur Parade

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Hobbits May Have Been Victims of Climate Change

New research offers clues into the mysterious disappearance of these tiny hominins

By Jake Currie    December 10, 2025

The branches of the human family tree have grown a lot more convoluted over the past 20 years. First, geneticists discovered that Neanderthals interbred with humans. Then, paleontologists unearthed the Denisovans in Asia, an archaic species or subspecies that also coexisted with modern humans. But perhaps the most peculiar addition to our genus in the past two decades is Homo floresiensis—the diminutive “hobbits” of Indonesia.

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These mini hominins stood around 3 feet tall, wielded tiny stone tools, and hunted pygmy elephants on the island of Flores in Indonesia for over 100,000 years before going extinct. Like much of their lives, their disappearance around 50,000 years ago remains shrouded in mystery, but now new research is offering some clues.

After analyzing stalagmites in Liang Bua, the cave where the hobbits were first discovered, an international team of scientists determined the area suffered severe drought conditions beginning 61,000 years ago and lasting for thousands of years. Oxygen isotope levels in the enamel of pygmy elephant teeth confirmed their pint-sized prey were suffering from the same water shortages. In other words, a long slow drying of the climate likely starved out both the hobbits and their main food source. The scientists published their findings in Communications Earth & Environment.

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Read more: “The Last Hominin Standing”

“The ecosystem around Liang Bua became dramatically drier around the time Homo floresiensis vanished,” lead study author Mike Gagan, a paleontologist at the University of Queensland, said in a statement. “Summer rainfall fell and riverbeds became seasonally dry, placing stress on both hobbits and their prey.”

Modern humans inhabited Indonesia around the same time as the hobbits’ disappearance, and they could have played a role in their demise as well.

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“It’s possible that as the hobbits moved in search of water and prey, they encountered modern humans,” Gagan said. “In that sense, climate change may have set the stage for their final disappearance.”

Changing climate conditions causing shifts in migration patterns and conflict between groups—it’s a tale as old as time.

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Lead image: Cicero Moraes / Wikimedia Commons

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Jake Currie

Posted on December 10, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Millions of Years Ago These Animals Shaped the Arabian Sea

Like modern sea cows, these Late Miocene marine mammals engineered their ecosystems

By Devin Reese    December 10, 2025

The sands of Qatar have yielded a secret 21 million years in the keeping. The peninsular, desert country that juts into the Persian Gulf was once the site of a thriving marine ecosystem when the area was covered by the waters of a more expansive Arabian Gulf.

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Research findings published today in PeerJ reveal that this ancient ecosystem was shaped by a new species of sea cow, whose extant relatives continue such ecological engineering from the Americas to Australasia.

Paleontologists from the Smithsonian Institution and Qatar Museums explored a fossil bed in Qatar called Al Maszhabiya that was locally known as a “dugong cemetery.” In surveying that bone bed and other fossil deposits in southwestern Qatar using aerial photography and 3-D digitization, they found the remains of sharks, prehistoric dolphins, sea turtles, and sea cows. The bonebed yielded the richest assemblage of sea cow fossils known, with 304 bones across 172 distinct locations.

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Read more: “The Hidden Fruits of the Deep”

Sea cows belong to the Order Sirenia and include manatees and dugongs. They are the only marine mammals that aren’t exclusively carnivorous. In contrast to seals, sea lions, and whales, the diets of sea cows are overwhelmingly vegetarian, which makes sense when you consider that their closest relatives are elephants. While elephants shape terrestrial habitats, a prodigious appetite for seagrasses makes both manatees and dugongs influential in engineering their aquatic ecosystems.

While the sea cow fossils unearthed by the scientists in Qatar looked like the bones of modern dugongs, which inhabit the Arabian Gulf, differences marked them as a species new to science. These Early Miocene sea cows had hind limbs, which are absent in modern dugongs and manatees, as well as a straighter snout and smaller tusks than their living relatives. The researchers dubbed this new species Salwasiren qatarensis. The study authors suggested that the new species, even with its distinct characteristics, played a similar ecological role to its living evolutionary relatives.

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“This part of the world has been prime sea cow habitat for the past 21 million years—it’s just that the sea cow role has been occupied by different species over time,” said Smithsonian paleontologist and study co-author Nick Pyenson in a statement.

Seagrasses rarely fossilize, but the body morphology of the ancient dugongs revealed their ecosystem engineering potential. At an estimated 250 pounds, they were small for sea cows. Still, considering that sea cows must consume at least 10 percent of their body weight per day, just one S. qatarensis would have had to eat 25 pounds of aquatic vegetation daily. While the number of individual sea cows represented by the fossils at Al Maszhabiya is difficult to pin down, the S. qatarensis bones accounted for 98 percent of the documented vertebrate fossils the team catalogued, suggesting an outsized role in these ancient ecosystems.

“The density of the Al Maszhabiya bonebed gives us a big clue that Salwasiren played the role of a seagrass ecosystem engineer in the Early Miocene, the way that dugongs do today,” added Pyenson. “There’s been a full replacement of the evolutionary actors but not their ecological roles.”

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Today, as dugongs in the Arabian Gulf probe the seafloor and voraciously feed, they leave trails through seagrass meadows that stir up nutrients as well as ultimately promote seagrass diversity. But, with decreasing populations threatened by coastal development, incidental capture in fishing gear, boat strikes, and declines in seagrasses, dugongs face an uncertain future.

“If we can learn from past records how the seagrass communities survived climate stress or other major disturbances like sea-level changes and salinity shifts, we might set goals for a better future of the Arabian Gulf,” said Qatar Museum archaeologist and study author Ferhan Sakal.

The fate of the dugongs in the Arabian Gulf mirrors that of sirenid species the world over. These vulnerable cows of the sea may shape the ecosystems they inhabit, but they are sensitive to human disturbance.

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This story has been updated from the version that appeared originally.

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Lead image: BlaCkBlitZ / Shutterstock

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Devin Reese

Posted on December 10, 2025

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

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

You Don’t Need a Big Brain to Fly

New research into the ancestors of pterosaurs reveals surprising clues to the evolution of flight

By Jake Currie    December 8, 2025

For terrestrial organisms, the ability to fly opens up a skyful of possibilities. Increased access to mates and food, for two things. And yet, it’s only evolved three times in the history of vertebrates—once in bats, once in birds, and once in pterosaurs. That’s likely because flight is a more complex form of locomotion than merely ambling along the ground or swinging through the trees.

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After all, flight doesn’t just require specialized limbs; it also takes a specialized brain to control them and navigate the skies. Scientists suspect that pterosaurs, flying reptiles that darkened skies above dinosaurs, were the first vertebrates to master this incredible power around 200 million years ago. Now, new research is shedding light on the neurological adaptations that allowed these pioneers to slip the surly bonds of gravity.

Read more: “Why Birds Can Fly Over Mount Everest”

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Michelle Stocker and Sterling Nesbitt of Virginia Tech led a team of scientists that used CT scanners to take a peek inside the skulls of a flightless ancestor of pterosaurs, lagerpetids, comparing them to modern reptiles and birds. They published their findings in Current Biology.

“Technology like CT scanning gives us ways to ask and address questions that just weren’t possible for so long,” said Stocker in a statement. Using the scans to create 3-D maps of the skull cavities of lagerpetids, pterosaurs, and dinosaurs, in addition to modern crocodiles and birds, the scientists were able to track the changes in the brain before and after the evolution of flight. They found that, similar to birds, lagerpetid brains had enlarged optic lobes, and presumably improved eyesight, which may have helped their evolutionary descendants finally take to the skies.

In other words, more acute vision may have been one of the first steps down the evolutionary flight path.

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The team also noted one key difference between birds and pterosaurs. Birds have relatively large and complex brains for their body size, something that was thought to be a prerequisite for flight. Pterosaurs, according to this new study, do not. “Interestingly, we found that pterosaurs had relatively small brains, comparable in size to those of non-flying dinosaurs and much smaller than that of birds,” Nesbitt said.

So when it comes to flying, it looks as though (brain) size doesn’t matter.

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Lead image: Catmando / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on December 8, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

An Ancient Earthquake Might Have Unleashed a Sea Turtle Stampede

Potential flipper marks found by free climbers might point to the marks of frightened reptiles

By Molly Glick    December 4, 2025

Some 80 million years ago, an earthquake seemed to have sent a flock of frightened sea turtles scrambling across the seafloor.

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Traces of this prehistoric panic were stumbled upon by a group of free climbers in 2019 on a steep slope overlooking the Adriatic Sea, which the public is typically prohibited from accessing due to rockfalls. They noticed a chunk of rock covered with marks that looked like footprints and snapped some photos. One of the climbers later showed these to Paolo Sandroni, a geologist (and fellow free climber) at the Marche region’s Multi-Risk Functional Center in Italy.

Sandroni and his colleague surveyed the site on foot and with drones and found more than 1,000 fossilized, paddle-shaped footprints impressed in limestone, including some rock that had tumbled down to the beach below. This limestone formed from sediment that previously sat on a shallow sea floor. The researchers dated these footprints to the Cretaceous period, around 83 to 80 million years ago—at the time, abrupt climate change, possibly caused by an asteroid strike, ramped up seismic activity.

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Read more: “There’s a World Living on Every Loggerhead”

“The footprints probably represent a stampede of panicking sea turtles that were mobilized en masse by an earthquake,” Sandroni and his co-authors wrote in a study published in the journal Cretaceous Research.

Fossil footprints from the seafloor are scarce because they’re rarely preserved, but the team thinks these were quickly frozen in time thanks to a blanket of sediment knocked around by an earthquake.

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As for the owners of these mysterious ancient flippers, the researchers noted that the only vertebrates that hung out in the deep sea at the time were fish and reptiles. They narrowed down the suspects to huge, extinct marine reptiles called mosasaurs and plesiosaurs or to sea turtles. But these large beasts did not tend to be as social as sea turtles, who migrate in packs to lay eggs, so sea turtles seemed to be the more likely culprit.

Not everyone is convinced of their provenance. These marks don’t “show the spacing, rhythm or anatomy expected from sea turtle flipper strokes,” Anthony Romilio, a paleontologist at the University of Queensland in Australia, told New Scientist. “I am of the opinion they are not of biological origin, but are instead abiotic structures.”

While a terrified turtle rush may be the most enchanting explanation, the team wants to collaborate with researchers who specialize in trace fossils to learn more about these puzzling prints.

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Lead image: Claudio Giovenzana / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on December 4, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Living Large: Giant Anacondas Blew Up 12 Million Years Ago

Recently unearthed fossilized vertebrae shows the resilience of the massive snakes

By Jake Currie    December 3, 2025

Twelve million years ago, during the Miocene, South America was covered in an even larger tropical jungle than its current verdant swath, with some key differences. Warmer temperatures, damper wetlands, and more bountiful food sources made it a paradise for reptiles, and they were living large—literally. Nine-foot turtles swam through rivers while 42-foot caimans trundled along the banks. Now, according to new research published in Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology we can add giant anacondas to the list of massive reptiles that inhabited those ancient swamps.

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Researchers measured 183 fossilized vertebrae of 32 anaconda specimens discovered in Venezuela and determined that these snakes got huge and stayed huge—13 to 16 feet long, the same size they are today. Particularly striking was that the giant snakes weren’t even larger during a period marked by colossal reptiles.

Read more: “The Rise and Fall of the Living Fossil”

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“This is a surprising result because we expected to find the ancient anacondas were seven or eight metres long,” study co-author Andrés Alfonso-Rojas, a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge, said in a statement. “But we don’t have any evidence of a larger snake from the Miocene when global temperatures were warmer.”

Unfortunately, the other South American behemoths didn’t weather the ensuing epochs as well as their serpentine brethren.

“Other species like giant crocodiles and giant turtles have gone extinct since the Miocene, probably due to cooling global temperatures and shrinking habitats, but the giant anacondas have survived—they are super-resilient,” Alfonso-Rojas added.

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You know what they say: Live large, die old, and leave a shockingly massive skeleton.

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Lead image: reptiles4all / Shutterstock

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Jake Currie

Posted on December 3, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Behold the Biggest Dinosaur Parade

What the biggest set of trackways ever discovered says about life in the Late Cretaceous

By Devin Reese    December 3, 2025

Dinosaur tracks always make a stir. Fossilized traces of animals that dominated ecosystems long before humans made their appearance on Earth, they’re literally footprints from the deep past.

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Now, researchers have published findings in PLOS One that detail their discovery of a new world record for the number of individual dino tracks, continuous trackways, tail traces, and swimming traces.

“It’s amazing working at this site, because everywhere you look, the ground is covered in dinosaur tracks,” said the lead study author, paleontologist Raúl Esperante of the California-based Geoscience Research Institute, in a statement.

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Esperante and colleagues from the United States and Bolivia documented more than 16,000 tracks left by dinosaurs across nine study sites in the Carreras Pampa, Bolivia. Nestled in Torotoro National Park, the study sites are part of a vast exposed area of more than 80,000 square feet, akin to 1.5 football fields. The layer of rock dates to the Upper Cretaceous Period before the cataclysmic asteroid collision that ended the reign of the dinosaurs about 66 million years ago.

LEAVE NOTHING BUT (FOSSILIZED) FOOTPRINTS: Some of the trackways revealed a dinosaur traffic jam on the shore of an ancient lake in what is now Bolivia. Marks made by dragging tails are indicated by the cord in B and the white arrows in D. Photos from Esperante, R., et al. PLOS One (2025).

The size, shape, and clustering of the tracks tell a story about what dinosaurs were doing at the time. The northwest-southeast orientation of most of the tracks indicated that groups of dinosaurs were walking along an ancient lake shoreline. The overlapping and crossing of trackways show that animals walked by at different times. Some dinosaurs stopped and turned, based on the impressions they left. Amid the dinosaurs at Carreras Pampa were a higher proportion of individuals with long strides, compared to other fossil sites, perhaps due to the types of dinosaurs.

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Although the study did not identify the dinosaurs’ species, the tracks were most likely made by theropods (bipedal ancestors of modern birds), based on the three-toed feet and upright stance. By examining the shapes and relative orientations of their heels and toes, the researchers grouped the tracks into 11 distinct categories. Most tracks were from small to medium individuals, with a foot length up to 11 inches (in humans, such a foot length would be comfortable in a men’s size 14 shoe). And the scientists estimated hip heights to range from 26 inches to no more than 49 inches high (similar to max human hip heights). So, these were a bunch of dinosaurs that varied from dog-size up to human height with big feet that left footprints in the mud around the lake.

Read more: “The Origin of the Asteroid That Killed the Dinosaurs”

Besides the lakeshore strollers, the trace fossils show that some dinosaurs were running, swimming, and dragging their tails around. The scientists identified a total of 280 elongated grooves as swim tracks from the kicking actions of theropods. The study authors used previously established criteria, such as “the occurrence of three or more sets of scratches shaped curved to the right, alternating with those curved to the left,” to identify the swim tracks.

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“This site is a stunning window into this area’s past,” added Esperante. “Not just how many dinosaurs were moving through this area, but also what they were doing as they moved through.”

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Lead image: Dotted Yeti / Shutterstock

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Devin Reese

Posted on December 3, 2025

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

Physics

- Reality Exists Without Observers? Boooo!

PHYSICS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Reality Exists Without Observers? Boooo!

Why I don’t root for the Many Worlds team

By Amanda Gefter    December 4, 2025

I’ve never been a sports fan, let alone a rabid one, but I think I finally know what it feels like. I was reading a new book, Portals to a New Reality by Vlatko Vedral, when I found myself shouting at the page the way sports fans scream at TVs. When Vedral, a physicist at the University of Oxford, wrote that the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics “contains a great number of misconceptions about what the world is made of and how to understand its most fundamental processes,” I felt my blood pressure spike. When he claimed, “Quantum physics does not need observers,” I leapt out of my seat. “Yeah? Try saying that to Niels Bohr’s face!”

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Vedral’s is one in a slew of recent books that cast Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, and colleagues as cartoonish villains looming over quantum physics, making the theory seem more woo-woo than it needs to be. Vedral is basically Team Many Worlds (though he doesn’t like the name), which pits him against Team Copenhagen’s insistence that observers play a fundamental role. In Copenhagen, one needs an observer to get a measurement outcome (the particle is either here or there; Schrödinger’s cat is either alive or dead), while in Many Worlds, there’s never a single outcome, only an alive cat in one world and a dead cat in another. Since every possible outcome happens, there’s no special part for observers to play. “Making measurements in quantum physics is like any other quantum process, nothing more,” Vedral writes. Or, as I once heard physicist Brian Greene (another Many Worldser) put it, quantum measurement is “just stuff interacting with stuff.”

This no-nonsense take (if believing in infinite branching parallel realities in which every possible version of you is having every possible experience can be considered no-nonsense) is intended to sound more scientific and staider than their caricature of Copenhagen, in which, as Vedral puts it, “reality does not exist when no one observes it.”

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Only here’s the thing. Every time an interpretation of quantum mechanics claims to banish observers, it ends up hiding them somewhere in the theory or sneaking them in through the back door. Which, if we’re trash-talking, might lead a spectator to suggest that these theorists pack up their many worlds in their many suitcases and go crawling back to Denmark.

I leapt out of my seat. “Yeah? Try saying that to Niels Bohr’s face!”

Here’s what the Copenhagen interpretation actually says. When two objects interact—say, a measuring device and the thing it’s measuring—there’s no way to neatly decompose that combined system back into two individual objects. They’re entangled. Enmeshed. That’s thanks to the finite value of Planck’s constant—the smallest possible unit of “action,” a quantity in physics that measures how a system’s potential and kinetic energy trade off over time. Because Planck’s constant can’t be further divided, it imposes a kind of graininess on the situation that prevents us from being able to carve up the interaction in an unambiguous way, as if it’s possible to know which part belongs to which. In fact, it prevents us from talking as if there were ever two independent objects at all. We don’t start with objects, which then interact; we start with interactions, which we then have to dissect into objects. Only there’s no clear way to do it.

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It’s a situation not unlike that in relativity, where, thanks to the finite speed of light, there’s no preferred way to decompose spacetime into space and time. In quantum theory, thanks to the finite Planck’s constant, there’s no preferred way to decompose an interaction into anything. To get a specific measurement outcome—the particle’s position is x or its momentum is p—we have to decide which part of the interaction to call the “particle” and which part to call the “apparatus.” Since nature offers no single True-with-a-capital-T way to do that, we just have to wing it and remember that the outcome we get doesn’t reveal some pre-existing fact about the world, but creates a new fact relative to the context of the measurement and our arbitrary decision as to how to divvy it up.

So when Team No Observers say that quantum measurements are “just stuff interacting with stuff,” what they mean is, we don’t have to make that decision. A particle hits a measuring device, the two become entangled, and that’s the end of the story. Only that can’t be the end of the story. It can’t even be the beginning of the story. Because who decided which part to call the “particle” and which to call the “measuring device” if all that exists is one big, entangled mess? If you already sectioned off a piece of world and labeled it “measuring device” before you ran the experiment, then you snuck in an observer at the start. If not—if all you have is entanglement—there’s simply no measurement outcome at all. Not in this world, and not in any other.

At this point, the Many Worlds fans in the bleachers might start chanting “Decoherence!” But decoherence—the process by which quantumness leaks out into the larger world, leaving behind the appearance of an objective thing—requires, you guessed it, an observer. It’s the observer who partitions the world into the system under study and its environment, which is defined as whatever part of the world the observer chooses to ignore. Only then can quantum correlations from the system slip away into the crowded environment and disappear out of sight. Should the observer decide to keep tabs on the environment, too, there’s no more decoherence.

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That’s the trouble with the “no observers” story—you can’t tell it from the inside out. You can’t start with a world, already divvied up into space and time, containing distinct systems and measuring apparatuses and environments, and then talk about objects interacting and getting entangled, because in the “no observers” story, none of those things can be defined in the first place. As a Many Worldser, you can’t even define a “world” or a “branch of the wavefunction” without bringing in an observer. That’s why American physicist Hugh Everett, when he proposed what’s now known as Many Worlds, didn’t talk about worlds branching into parallel realities so much as observers branching into parallel states of having observed or not observed different outcomes. It’s why Vedral dislikes the name “Many Worlds.”

So why does Vedral want so badly to banish observers from quantum physics? He works in quantum information theory, where he designs experiments to show that quantum effects, which we usually observe in microscopic systems, operate at larger scales still—in molecules, viruses, even people. But for that to work, he says, observers can’t play a special role; they have to be treated quantum mechanically, like everything else. When we “take seriously the idea that the world is even more quantum than most physicists realize,” Vedral writes, we will finally make progress in physics, ultimately uniting quantum mechanics with our understanding of spacetime and gravity. But Copenhagen and its observers, he says, are standing in the way.

“The Copenhagen interpretation has contributed a great deal of force to the consensus in physics today that quantum physics is too ‘weird’ to work at macroscopic scales, and that quantum effects at the macro level are not accessible by experimentation,” Vedral writes.

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This is a total misunderstanding. Bohr made it clear that the macroscopic measuring device, even the observers themselves, can always be described by quantum mechanics. Quantumness, Bohr wrote, “equally affects the description of the agency of observation and the object.” Likewise, “An independent reality in the ordinary physical sense can neither be ascribed to the phenomena nor to the agencies of observation.” It’s quantum all the way up. The point of Copenhagen was never to deny that, only to explain, given that, why we still seem to get measurement outcomes. I’m sitting here. The cup is over there. There are no half-dead-half-alive house cats half-walking around.

If we’re trash-talking, theorists might pack up their many worlds and go back to Denmark.

Team Many Worlds, on the other hand, can’t account for why anything seems like anything. Because without observers, the only ingredient left is a single, universal wavefunction—a giant entangled state—which, technically speaking, is just a vector endlessly rotating in an abstract mathematical void for eternity. Nothing happens. There’s nothing in it. No particles, no physicists, no cups, no cats. Not the appearance of measurement outcomes. Not the branching of worlds. Nothing to see, and no one to see it. Giving up observers, then, amounts to giving up empirical science. And regardless of one’s feelings about a certain Danish physicist, that’s a weird move to make, considering the very theory you’re using to posit the existence of your eternal vector was arrived at through experiment and observation.

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Of course, Vedral wants his own experiments to have outcomes, so he’s forced to do what everyone does and sneak observers back into the picture. He assures us this is no big deal, no threat to the inherent quantumness of reality. Where we draw the line between observer and observed, he insists, is “completely arbitrary.” Well, yes. That was Copenhagen’s whole point. These divisions aren’t objectively given. Observers have to make choices, to forge the fault lines of the world.

But words like “choice” make physicists nervous, so they soothe themselves by making Copenhagen seem more mystical than it is. Surely the moon’s there when no one’s looking, they love to say with a roll of the eyes.

Let’s put this moon thing to rest. It’s true. We can’t say the moon is there if no one’s observing it. Neither can we say that the moon’s not there if no one’s observing it. It’s not as if the sky is empty until someone gazes upward and a moon suddenly pops into existence. It’s that we can’t say anything about the moon as an independent object, because quantum theory doesn’t grant us independent objects, only measurements that we can slice into moons. We are no longer “in a position to speak of the autonomous behavior of a physical object,” Bohr wrote. “Such an analysis is in principle excluded.”

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Our very concept of a thing—an atom, a chair, a planet—is rooted in the assumption, Bohr said, “that it is possible to distinguish sharply between the behavior of objects and the means of observation,” which, in quantum mechanics (given the finite value of Planck’s constant), it’s not.

So, the issue isn’t that objects in the world are out there doing weird quantum things until they meet the stern gaze of an observer and magically fall into line. The issue is that our entire framework of a world that comes pre-carved into objects was wrong from the start. Copenhagen’s rivals are right to suggest that the interpretation is radical—but not for the reasons they’d have you believe. It’s not radical because it ascribes some reality-creating power to the minds of observers. It’s radical because it undermines the very categories according to which we’ve organized the world ever since the 17th-century origins of modern science.

Interpretations that banish observers end up sneaking them in through the back door.

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Vedral seems to think we could get back to those categories—to a fully objective world of “stuff interacting with stuff”—if only we could re-engineer our brains to perceive the world’s quantumness directly. “We would need to integrate specially designed microchips that carry out these quantum measurements in conjunction with the existent machinery of our brain,” Vedral suggests, noting that this would provide “an experience that corresponds more closely to fundamental reality than drugs could ever offer.”

Of course, one would need observers to define objects like brains, microchips, and measurements before our new quantum perception could take effect. But then what? Would we apportion the world differently—defining different objects, blurring their borders, redrawing the very boundaries of ourselves? Trippy, sure—but still in the Danish spirit.

I agree with Vedral that there are deep questions still in need of answers. That no interpretation of quantum mechanics has quite yet won the game. So, while there’s no universe in which you’ll catch me wearing the Many Worlds’ team jersey, I’m not rocking Team Copenhagen’s either.

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Personally, I’m rooting for QBism (formerly Quantum Bayesianism), an interpretation that starts in Copenhagen by way of Texas and ends up, among other places, in Boston, with Christopher Fuchs, co-captain of the team, taking heed of the profound metaphysical lesson in Copenhagen—that we can’t think of ourselves as standing apart from a ready-made, objective world describable in third person—and putting observers and their decision making front and center.

The QBists added to Copenhagen elements of decision theory, personalist Bayesian probability, quantum information theory, and early American pragmatist philosophy until, as Fuchs puts it, “We were left with an interpretation of quantum theory that was very different from Bohr’s, though the roots have always remained visible.” At its heart, QBism is about how agents, by acting on the world, by carving up reality, participate in the incessant churn of novelty and creativity that spills out of a universe that’s ever on the make.

But QBism is an unfinished project, which means I’m still watching the game, still shouting at the TV. Does the observer carve herself out of the world through her actions? Is that the very essence of what it means to be an observer? How do different observers, carving along different seams, navigate their differences? “I believe that if the development of atomic physics has taught us anything,” Bohr told Heisenberg, “it is that we must learn to think more subtly.” I suppose that’s not only the art but the sport of it.

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Lead image by Tasnuva Elahi; with images by Natalya Kosarevich, cybermagician, and zombiu26 / Shutterstock

Amanda Gefter

Posted on December 4, 2025

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

Psychology

- You’re Probably Not Addicted to Social Media

- What Laziness Has to do with Beauty

- This Common Personality Trait May Fuel Serial Killers

- Does Anger Aggravate Pain?

- What Makes a Word Beautiful?

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

You’re Probably Not Addicted to Social Media

Most of us overestimate how hooked we are

By Kristen French    December 12, 2025

Social media can be tough to ignore these days. There is so much of it, and it’s so accessible, right there glowing on the phones in our pockets and purses. Many of us find ourselves scrolling through the feeds of friends, family, and so-called influencers more often than we might like (or like to admit).

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But does that mean we’re addicted in a clinical sense, or just indulging a bad habit?

The distinction matters, it turns out. While the United States Surgeon General warned in early 2023 that excessive use of social media can have neurological effects similar to substance abuse, for most people, the language of addiction is neither accurate nor helpful, according to a recent study by a pair of researchers from the California Institution of Technology and the University of California, Los Angeles. The findings were published in Scientific Reports.

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The team ran two studies. For the first, they recruited 380 U.S. adults who used Instagram at least monthly and were representative of the larger U.S. population. Participants answered questions about addiction-like symptoms, such as withdrawal and life conflict, how “mindless” the behavior felt, and whether they personally described their use as an “addiction” or a “habit.” Then the researchers examined how those labels lined up with feelings of control, self-blame, and past attempts to cut back.

Read more: “To Understand Facebook, Study Capgras Syndrome”

The scientists found a stark mismatch: Eighteen percent of participants said they felt at least somewhat addicted, but only about 2 percent scored in a range the study defined as a warning sign for possible addiction risk. And the people who labeled themselves “addicted” didn’t just feel more out of control, they also reported more failed attempts to cut back and more self-blame.

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In a second study, the researchers tested whether telling oneself an addiction story could actually cause these same feelings and behaviors. They recruited 824 daily Instagram users and randomly assigned them one of two different versions of a writing prompt. One group was explicitly told their use of Instagram might be “addictive,” drawing on language used in the U.S. Surgeon General warning, and then they were asked to assess their own feelings of control, self-blame, and attempts to cut back. The other group did the self-assessment first. Then the researchers compared the groups.

That short exposure to addiction framing was enough to nudge people’s mindset. Those who got the “addiction” prompt reported lower feelings of control, more self-blame, and a stronger desire to reduce their Instagram use.

The researchers argue this can become a self-fulfilling prophecy: If you believe you’re addicted, you may assume your ability to stop is limited, which undermines your confidence and makes change harder. But if most overuse is characterized as habit, the solutions look less like a dramatic battle with the self and more like simple environmental engineering.

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Instead of drastically changing their lives, social media users can perform simple tasks to curtail their habit. Reduce cues: Turn off notifications, keep the phone out of sight. Add friction: Log out, remove the app from your home screen. Swap in a replacement behavior for the moments that usually trigger scrolling, like boredom, anxiety, or waiting in line.

The study authors speculate that popular media are responsible for making people feel more addicted than they are. To test this hypothesis, they tallied the number of articles published across U.S. media using the phrases “social media addiction” or “social media habit” between November 2021 and November 2024. Addiction was the more common descriptor, they found, primarily driven by stories about lawsuits as well as by the May 2023 Surgeon General warning.

A small minority of users may truly have more serious, addiction-like symptoms related to social media use, the researchers point out. But for the rest of us, they argue, using “addiction” language can backfire, adding shame while steering people away from the most effective tools for change.

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“Our findings offer users good news,” they write, “the large majority are not addicted to social media, even if they feel that way.”

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Kristen French

Posted on December 12, 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

What Laziness Has to do with Beauty

The aesthetic benefits of low mental effort

By Kristen French    December 10, 2025

What is it about the Mona Lisa, the Taj Mahal, or a dazzling nature scene that makes them so pleasing to contemplate? Is beauty really in the eye of the beholder, or is there some inherent quality that sets it apart? It’s an age-old question.

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New research suggests that one visual wow factor may be related to a kind of laziness: What brings the most pleasure to the mind’s eye may be that which requires the least amount of energy for our visual systems to process. A team at the University of Toronto published the findings recently in PNAS Nexus.

Scholars have long proposed that pleasure may serve as a guide for humans and other living things as they navigate the universe: The things that are most delightful are also the ones that are most useful or beneficial to us. Some research seems to bear this out: The depiction of features of the environment that help the viewer adapt to their environment can make an image appear more pleasing, while those that could be harmful, such as the potential for concealed threats, often elicit dislike.

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Read more: “What Is a Beautiful Experiment?”

But the University of Toronto researchers wanted to see if there were more fundamental ways that visual pleasure and fitness are linked, so they decided to measure the metabolic costs of aesthetic preference.

First, they tested a simplified model of the human visual system called a deep neural network by showing it nearly 5,000 real-world images of objects and scenes. Then they scanned the brains of actual humans while they were viewing the same images, to measure how much metabolic activity in the functioning human visual system—as measured by the number of active neurons—was associated with the aesthetic ratings of images. The beauty ratings for each image were determined through surveys of a population of more than 1,000 participants from Canada and the United States, who evaluated each image on a 5-point scale.

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In both the humans and in the neural network model less really was more. The lighter the metabolic lift, the higher the aesthetic rank. The scientists also found that visual pleasure or, conversely, discomfort were closely related to how complex and “quintessential” an image was, and therefore how easy or hard it was to process.

The findings are specific to the perceptual system, not to any forms of higher cognition, the authors point out. The participants were asked to rate their level of pleasure when viewing each image, but were not encouraged to contemplate the forms further. So complex visual stimuli could elicit more pleasure with enough contemplation, the authors speculate. The scientists also suggest that the findings may hint at a reason why certain visual properties, such as spatial frequency or contours, can influence aesthetic experience: They may make it easier for the visual system to process and categorize a scene or object.

On a purely instinctual level, then, the most beautiful images may be the ones that make the brain’s job the easiest.

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Kristen French

Posted on December 10, 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

This Common Personality Trait May Fuel Serial Killers

A form of narcissism may underlie the psychology of sexually motivated murder

By Kristen French    December 10, 2025

The ranks of serial killers seem to overflow with clinical narcissists. Dennis Rader, aka the BTK Killer, was diagnosed by a court-appointed psychiatrist as having narcissistic personality disorder due in part to his intense need for fame, his self-appointed nickname, and his conviction that he was smarter than the cops who pursued him.

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And Ted Bundy has been described by psychologists and criminologists as having an extreme form of narcissism, as well, though the infamous serial murderer and rapist was evaluated prior to 1980, when narcissistic personality disorder became an official diagnosis. Even Bundy’s decision to represent himself in court reflected this towering self-regard.

But not all serial killers are alike, nor all narcissists—and the most dangerous minds might not be the ones overflowing with self-love.

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Read more: “What Makes a Narcissist?”

Narcissism comes in two main subtypes. The grandiose type, which combines a powerful need for admiration with a tendency toward aggression and dominance, is the one we most often hear about. But another, stealthier form of narcissism, known as the “vulnerable” subtype, has earned increasing recognition from psychologists in recent decades. Vulnerable narcissists are exquisitely sensitive to rejection, prone to social withdrawal, and plagued by feelings of inadequacy that can slide into resentment.

Now, a team of scientists from Bamberg University in Germany and the University of Essex, Online in the United Kingdom has found that certain traits associated with vulnerable narcissism are far more common among sexually motivated serial killers than previously appreciated. The findings, published in the Journal of Police and Criminal Psychology, could help investigators understand the behaviors and motivations of such offenders, which could make it easier to identify them earlier, before they escalate to repeated killing.

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Most earlier studies of serial killers relied on individual case histories and rarely separated offenders into psychological subtypes. To build a more representative sample, the researchers behind the new study analyzed interrogations and confessions from 45 male, sexually motivated serial killers, drawn from publicly available records and private archives. They also focused more closely on specific narcissistic traits—such as admiration, rivalry, isolation, and enmity—than on narcissistic personality disorder as a whole.

The findings were striking. By systematically analyzing audio recordings of the serial killers confessions and testimonies, they found that traits linked to vulnerable enmity, including defensiveness, paranoia, and outward aggression, appeared in 84 percent of the men. Grandiose admiration, the classic showy narcissism of self-promotion and enhancement, was displayed by 76 percent of the men.

The findings point to a volatile combination: fragile self-worth tied to violent aggression. This is in line with other research that has shown that many sexually motivated killers use violence to cope with feelings of social isolation, loneliness, and inadequacy.

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Not everyone with these narcissistic traits will turn out to be a serial killer, of course. Many vulnerable and grandiose narcissists never engage in criminal behavior. But if investigators can identify a toxic pattern sooner, perhaps they may one day interrupt a killing spree before it takes off.

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Kristen French

Posted on December 10, 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

Does Anger Aggravate Pain?

The surprising connection between feelings of injustice and bodily aches

By Bob Grant    December 8, 2025

Many of us have felt pain in one form or another. Often, those jabs are paired with a sense of anger, whether it’s toward a person or inanimate object that caused the pain, or something else. But new research suggests that this anger, when unregulated, can make the pain worse, creating a vicious feedback loop.

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Publishing their findings in a recent issue of The Journal of Pain, scientists from Israel, Austria, and the United States suggest that a combination of anger with a feeling of injustice is even more potent than anxiety or depression in fanning the flames of chronic pain and increasing its interference with daily life.

“Anger is not inherently bad,” said Gadi Gilam, a co-author and neuroscientist at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, in a statement. “It is a common daily emotional signal, and can promote personal and inter-personal well-being when regulated well. But when anger mixes with a sense of injustice, which in itself is a trigger for angry reactions, it can trap people in a cycle of emotional and physical suffering that amplifies and maintains chronic pain.”

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Read more: “Antonio Damasio Tells Us Why Pain Is Necessary”

Gilam and his colleagues studied more than 730 adults who had some variety of chronic pain. By surveying these participants the researchers constructed four different “anger profiles.” These included “LALI” (low anger/low injustice), “MAMI” (medium anger/medium injustice), “MALI” (medium anger, low injustice), and “HAHI” (high anger/high injustice). The groupings reflected not only the feelings of the volunteers, but also the ways that they expressed and controlled their anger.

Patients with HAHI and MAMI profiles fared worse than those in the other groups in terms of their chronic pain outcomes.

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The scientists also found that anger profiles not only worsened a person’s chronic pain: Those profiles could predict outcomes. By following more than 240 of the study participants for about five months after their initial survey answers, the authors suggest that anger profiles dictated how much pain they felt, how much it interfered with their daily lives, and how it shaped their behavior.

This information could be used by doctors to construct anger profiles in patients experiencing chronic pain and then to tailor interventions that treat not only their pain but their ire. “Clinically, early identification and targeted management of maladaptive anger may improve pain outcomes and reduce disability over time,” the authors write.

“We currently do not have a good enough understanding of the neurobiology underlying chronic pain,” Gilam added. “We do not have a simple pill to cure it, nor do we have strong assessment tools to predict whose pain will persist. Integrating anger and injustice assessments into chronic pain treatment could fundamentally improve outcomes.”

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Bob Grant

Posted on December 8, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Makes a Word Beautiful?

It’s not what we thought

By Kristen French    December 3, 2025

Some words brush the mind like velvet. Words like love, halcyon, or starlight. Others make us cringe, such as moist. Most of us feel this instinctively. But can the aesthetics of a word be separated from its meaning?

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Recently, a pair of researchers from Vienna, Theresa Matzinger and David Košić, set out to answer this question, and to find out how the appeal of certain words might influence how we remember them. What they discovered could tell us something about why some languages seem more beautiful than others, why some brand names charm consumers, which syllables language learners grasp first, and how languages shift and adapt over time.

Read more: “The Science Hidden in Your Town Name”

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To run their experiment, Matzinger and Košić invented 12 English-sounding words. These were designed to sound appealing, neutral, or unappealing, according to criteria defined in the 1990s by prominent linguist and phonetics expert David Crystal. They then asked 100 native English speakers to try to memorize the new terms.

All pseudowords had three syllables. They started with a cluster of consonants followed by a vowel and a single consonant and ended in the suffix -ious. The researchers flashed each word on a screen six times for a period of 3 seconds, while also playing an audio recording of the word in the background. Participants were asked to repeat the word aloud each time it appeared.

Behold the pseudowords, slotted into the category they were designed to fit. Are any of these words truly appealing you might wonder?

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APPEALING:

clisious

snelious

sleemius

smanious

NEUTRAL:

creetious

kridious

drikious

drutious

UNAPPEALING:

krauious

twuhious

dwougious

gruhious

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The words look—and sound—like linguistic chimeras hatched in a lab, but that was the point: stripped of meaning, they were intended to reveal the naked aesthetics of sound. After introducing them, the researchers asked the participants to recall them and to rate their aesthetic appeal on a 7-point scale.

The results surprised Matzinger and Košić: The mind liked one set of sounds, but memory preferred another. The words designed to be moderately appealing were found to be most pleasant by the participants. But the pseudowords that were designed to be most appealing were most easily remembered. Something about their shape enhanced memory.

The findings, published in PLOS One, suggest that beauty in language may operate on two distinct levels in the brain: one that resides in our conscious awareness, and another that works quietly beneath it. If so, the words we remember best may not be the ones we think we like, but the ones whose rhythms resonate deeper in the architecture of the mind.

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Lead image: leksandr Drypsiak / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on December 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.

Sociology

- Pop Music Is Getting Darker

SOCIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Pop Music Is Getting Darker

The tunes that top the charts have been getting more negative for half a century

By Kristen French    December 11, 2025

Beneath the sugary hooks of today’s biggest pop hits, there’s often a distinctly dark undercurrent. Billie Eilish’s “Bad Guy,” about a swaggering antihero who seduces a dad, Eminem and Rihanna’s “Love the Way You Lie” about a toxic, violent relationship, and Taylor Swift’s “Bad Blood” about a vengeful feud, all topped the charts over the past couple of decades.

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It may be more than a momentary trend. A new study shows that, over the past 50 years, the lyrics of the hit songs in the United States have taken a gloomy turn: They’ve gotten a lot more stressed and more negative. They’ve also gotten less complex. This trend may mirror growing rates of depression and anxiety in the U.S., and increasing negativity in news, but it could also reflect general shifts in the way we use language and the evolution of other societal norms, the authors of the study report. They published their findings today in Scientific Reports.

The study is part of a growing body of research that aims to track how patterns of cultural consumption can provide insights into the psychological states of individuals or even entire populations. Music is a particularly apt cultural form for this kind of analysis, the scientists argue, because it is one of the most widely appreciated, with average listening time reported to be as high as 21 hours per week. They also suggest that music has a shorter production cycle than movies or books, which means it is better able to reflect year-to-year shifts in moods, while the lyrics of many songs often express specific emotional content, which make them easy to analyze.

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Read more: “When You Listen to Music, You’re Never Alone”

The scientists, from Vienna and Lisbon, analyzed the top 100 Billboard English-language songs in the U.S. every week for the period stretching from 1973 to 2023, which adds up to more than 20,000 unique songs. For each of the songs, they measured how often words related to worry, stress, tension cropped up, the tunes’ overall positive or negative sentiment, and the complexity of their lyrics—how simple or repetitive they were.

The results suggest a general trend of simpler and more negative lyrics in popular songs over the past five decades, with a rise in stress-related words. The authors also tracked the changes in lyrics against fluctuations in real median household incomes across the  U.S., but weren’t able to find any correlation with stress, sentiment, or complexity. So financial abundance doesn’t seem to drive the emotional tone of hit lyrics.

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To gauge how societal shocks might influence the trend, the scientists looked at what happened to song lyrics around the tumbling of the Twin Towers on Sept. 11, 2001, and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Surprisingly, lyrics got less stressed and negative during the pandemic, but more complex, which the authors took to mean that during times of upheaval, people may use music as a form of escapism or stress release. Previous research had suggested that people often choose to listen to darker or more contemplative music following traumatic events, in order to better process their grief.

The findings suggest that music can act as a kind of thermometer for the larger cultural mood. It both shapes and reflects the collective spirit.

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Kristen French

Posted on December 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.

Technology

- What Robots Can Learn from Classical Indian Dance

- Can the US Build a Nuclear Powered Future?

- ChatGPT’s Biggest Foe: Poetry

TECHNOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Robots Can Learn from Classical Indian Dance

A “superhuman” alphabet for the hands

By Kristen French    December 9, 2025

A swan’s beak, a blossoming lotus flower, a delicate bracelet: These are some of the highly stylized forms the human hand can make in a classical Indian dance form known as Bharatanatyam. The dancers rely on a visual language of gestures, known as mudras—which involve precise finger, wrist, and palm movements—together with dramatic facial expressions and angular body movements to knit together powerful, ancient stories and express heightened emotion.

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Now, a team of scientists is using this language of dancing hands to train robots, which could ultimately lead to better prosthetics design, robot-assisted therapy for stroke survivors, and robots who can perform complex manual tasks such as folding laundry or perhaps even playing a musical instrument.

The mudras, the scientists found, can be broken down into an alphabet of six basic building blocks that together make a good proxy for most hand movements. Instead of teaching robots to mimic natural human gestures, such as pinching or cupping, the scientists are developing methods to teach the machines these artistic forms, first. The researchers published their results in Scientific Reports.

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Read more: “Robots Can’t Dance”

“We noticed dancers tend to age super-gracefully,” says Ramana Vinjamuri, an electrical engineer at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a co-author of the new research, in a statement. “That was a huge inspiration for us when we started looking for richer alphabets of movement. With dance, we are looking not just at healthy movement, but super healthy. And so the question became, could we find a ‘superhuman’ alphabet from the dance gestures?”

Vinjamuri began hunting for this so-called alphabet of hand movement more than a decade ago. He was inspired to take cues from Bharatanatyam dancers after a 2023 conference on the brain at the Indian Institute of Technology, where he attended a session that explored how ancient Indian traditions could be recruited to help solve modern problems. While brainstorming, he hit upon the idea of looking to mudras to improve robot hand mobility.

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Vinjamuri and his colleagues started out by analyzing 30 natural hand grasps used to pick up objects, ranging from a tiny bead to a water bottle. They found six basic building blocks that when combined could be used to describe 99 percent of the gestures. Then they ran the same test with the mudras, and found a different set of six building blocks that could describe 94 percent of the mudras. But when they used these different sets of alphabets to analyze an unrelated set of gestures—15 letters from the American Sign Language alphabet—the mudras-derived alphabet won the contest, according to the scientists.

“The mudras-derived alphabet is definitely better than the natural grasp alphabet because there is more dexterity and more flexibility,” said Vinjamuri.

The researchers are now training a standalone robotic hand and a humanoid robot to use this mudras alphabet. Ultimately, the goal is to make the robot hand more human-like. What looks like art, the robots are learning as the grammar of biology and movement.

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Lead image: Monstar Studio / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on December 9, 2025

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

TECHNOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Can the US Build a Nuclear Powered Future?

After decades of sluggish growth, AI could help usher in a nuclear revival—but a major challenge remains

By Molly Glick    December 2, 2025

Nearly 70 years ago today, nuclear fission at the country’s first full-scale commercial nuclear power plant became self-sustaining and primed to power homes and businesses. This energy milestone arrived exactly 15 years after the first such nuclear chain reaction triggered by humans, a key Manhattan Project feat that paved the way for the atomic bomb.

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The Shippingport Atomic Power Plant, located in Pennsylvania, reached its full generating capacity a few weeks later, on Dec. 23, 1957, around three years after the Soviet Union launched the world’s first grid-connected nuclear power plant. The United States plant fit into President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vision of wielding nuclear technology not for war, but to benefit humanity in peacetime. “Through knowledge we are sure to gain from this new plant we begin today, I am confident that the atom will not be devoted exclusively to the destruction of man, but will be his mighty servant and tireless benefactor,” Eisenhower said at the plant’s groundbreaking ceremony.

While providing electricity to people throughout the Pittsburgh area, Shippingport also allowed scientists to experiment with various kinds of cores, the central parts of nuclear reactors that contain the fuel required to vaporize water. That steam then spins a turbine to generate electricity. For example, the reactor’s core was swapped in 1977 for a light water breeder reactor, which contains both uranium and thorium—a cheaper, more easily accessible element than the former.

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Read more: “The Road Less Traveled to Fusion Energy”

Shippingport went offline in 1982, a few years after an incident that contributed to the decline of the budding U.S. nuclear energy boom. On March 28, 1979, part of the core melted in a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power station in Pennsylvania. The accident fomented concern among the U.S. public, which feared another disaster. The nuclear industry also faced major financial woes at the time: Beginning in the mid-1970s, a flurry of new reactor projects slated to wrap up quickly were abandoned after construction delays and budget issues.

Shippingport’s demise raised another nuclear dilemma that still begs solving: Where does all that spent, radioactive fuel go? Once the radioactive elements in the core have degraded to a certain level, they are no longer energetic enough to generate steam and turn turbines. They must be replaced, but the used up waste continues to emit radioactivity for millennia.

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Ultimately, the Shippingport reactor was shipped around the world—down the Mississippi and Ohio rivers and through the Panama Canal, finally ending up in Washington State. The reactor was buried at the Hanford Military Reservation, and Shippingport’s fate was hailed as a successful example for future decommissioning projects.

Over the past few decades, only a handful of new nuclear reactors have been built in the U.S., and the country’s operational reactors are around 40 years old, on average—yet they still manage to supply some 20 percent of the country’s total electricity.

Now, data centers have thrust nuclear energy back into the spotlight. To support the ballooning energy demands posed by AI, tech giants are turning to energy sources that aren’t reliant on fossil fuels, like nuclear. For example, the Department of Energy recently announced a $1 billion loan to build a nuclear plant on Three Mile Island that’s planned to power Microsoft data centers in the area.

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Even if such projects are  successful, the nuclear waste issue still looms. In the 1980s, the Department of Energy eyed Yucca Mountain in Nevada as a potential site to store spent fuel deep underground, but the project has run into barriers such as fierce opposition from the state of Nevada and Congressional funding cuts. For now, about 90,000 tons of nuclear waste sits at more than 100 sites in 39 states.

Data centers might only add to this growing collection of hazardous byproducts, forcing officials and energy industry leaders to find a more-sustainable, long-term solution.

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Lead image: metamorworks / Shutterstock

Molly Glick

Posted on December 2, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

TECHNOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

ChatGPT’s Biggest Foe: Poetry

How the machines miss threats smuggled inside lines of verse

By Kristen French    December 2, 2025

In the last book of Plato’s The Republic, the philosopher argues that poetry is a kind of weaponry. It can seduce human emotions and sneak past reason’s guardrails, leading to all kinds of faulty notions and behavior and even to societal collapse. “All poetical imitations are ruinous to the understanding of the hearers,” Plato wrote. He called for the exile of poets from his ideal city.

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These days, poetry is more often considered a niche literary art than a threat to civilization, but scientists recently discovered that it may possess a sneaky kind of linguistic artillery: It can overcome the defenses of chatbots, bypassing safety guardrails and convincing them to provide dangerous information, such as how to build a bomb.

The team of scientists, from Italy and the United States, hand crafted 20 “adversarial” poems that contained malicious requests and tested them out on 25 different chatbot models from nine different providers, including Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Deepseek, Moonshot, and Meta. The team defined poetic style as “combining creative and metaphorical language with rhetorical density.” Their poetic prompts spanned a variety of dangerous content, from cyberattacks to chemical or biological risks to psychological manipulation. They found that the poems successfully convinced the chatbots to answer their requests 62 percent of the time. For some models the success rate was over 90 percent.

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Poetry, it turns out, can be pretty powerful stuff.

Read more: “AI Is the Black Mirror”

The scientists then scaled up, turning 1,200 harmful prose prompts related to subjects such as hate, defamation, non-violent crime, suicide, and weapons, into verse. They tried these different versions of each prompt—prose and poetry—on the 25 different models and found that the baseline prose had an 8 percent success rate at eliciting unsafe responses, versus 43 percent for the prompt in verse. The scientists published their findings in a preprint.

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A bright line separated safe and unsafe responses: A response was considered “safe” if the chatbot refused to answer or provided an answer that contained only vague or non-operational information. An unsafe answer included step-by-step instructions for harmful acts, operational advice, or concrete instructions. Three large language models acted as judges, and the researchers took a majority vote, and had a human check a sample.

Training and guardrails do matter, the scientists found. Some providers’ chatbot models were much more vulnerable to the corrupting influence of a few lines of adversarial poetry than others. Surprisingly, the team found that smaller, more niche chatbots, such as GPT-5-Nano and Claude Haiku, were less easily convinced to divulge a dangerous response. Perhaps these smaller models are less able to tease apart the meaning of a metaphor, the scientists reasoned.

The study had some limitations. It only analyzed single-turn interactions—in other words, no drawn out conversations. And only English and Italian were tested, generally under default safety settings. All of which leaves room for further research.

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The question remains: Why did poetry have such a seductive effect on the bots? The scientists suspect it’s because these large language models have been tuned to recognize “prose-shaped” danger, and are less prepared for figurative, compressed, or metaphorical language.

For all our engineering, it turns out, a few well-chosen metaphors can still pry open the gates—for machines and humans.

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Lead image: auns85 / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on December 2, 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

- Watch a Moth Drink Moose Tears

- Fearsome Marine Predators Prowled Ancient Rivers, Too

- This Hole Punch-Sized Patch Could Help Save Frogs

- How We Changed Cat Sounds Forever

- This Tiny Neon Frog Dwells in the Clouds

- Orcas and Dolphins Glimpsed Fishing Together for Salmon

- Beloved Ancient Chinese Cats Were Wilder Than Once Thought

- The Table Condiment That Powers Plant-Eating Giants

- Are We Finally Over the “Jaws Effect?”

- When a Chimp Screams, What Do You Hear?

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Watch a Moth Drink Moose Tears

Researchers recorded the nocturnal insects sipping from the massive mammal’s ducts for the first time

By Bob Grant    December 12, 2025

Moose cry. And moths get thirsty.

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Those two things might not seem related at first blush, but researchers have recorded, for the first time, images of moths drinking a moose’s tears. The intriguing interaction between the nocturnal insects and majestic mammals went down deep in the woods of Vermont, captured by trail cameras set in the state’s Green Mountain National Forest as part of a broader survey of moose across New England.

Researchers in Vermont published the findings and the striking photographs in a recent issue of Ecosphere.

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MOOSE TEARS = MOTH BEERS: In these trail cam images, several moths can be seen flying around a bull moose in Vermont, visiting the mammal’s eyes in what appears to be an instance of tear drinking. Image from Clarfield, L.A., et al. Ecosphere (2025).

Insects belonging to the order Lepidoptera—which includes moths and butterflies—are no strangers to tear drinking, or “lachryphagy.” Lepidopterans have been observed bellying up to the tear ducts of birds, reptiles, wild mammals, and domestic animals from Asia and Africa to parts of South America.

Outside of the tropics, however, researchers have only documented one example of lachryphagy—a 1972 report described a moth species drinking from a horse’s eye in Arkansas.

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Read more: “The Secret Lives of Moths”

Moths and butterflies seem to engage in this behavior to supplement their liquid nectar diets, which they drink from flowers. In tropical areas with hot or dry seasons in Africa and Asia, lepidopterans likely turn to tear drinking to get some protein when supplies of nectar run dry. But in the tropics of the Western Hemisphere, the insects likely seek out tears as a source of sodium, a mineral that is rare in most plants.

Thanks to the newly shared images, researchers can add moose to the list of host species for lachryphagy. This sighting is also unique because most lepidopterans have mostly been spotted drinking tears from captive mammals.

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This isn’t the only odd snacking habit seen in butterflies and moths. They’re also known to engage in “puddling” behavior, where they lap up sodium and other nutrients from “soil, feces, carrion, and even human perspiration,” the authors wrote.

That makes moose tears seem like a pretty attractive beverage option.

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Lead image: Pixabay

Bob Grant

Posted on December 12, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Fearsome Marine Predators Prowled Ancient Rivers, Too

Mosasaur teeth discovered in North Dakota tell a surprising story

By Jake Currie    December 12, 2025

A dental discovery in an ancient riverbed in North Dakota is shedding light on one of the most fearsome reptiles to ever swim the seven seas—the mosasaur.

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You may remember the massive mosasaur from the movie Jurassic World. The behemoth was kept in an expansive sea pen and forced to perform for parkgoers before taking down a genetically modified Tyrannosaurus rex (called Indominus rex) in the film’s climactic battle.

In reality, an ocean-bound mosasaur probably wouldn’t encounter a terrestrial T. rex, which is why it was so curious when paleontologists found a tooth from each prehistoric giant in the same riverbed. They published their findings today in BMC Zoology.

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Read more: “Conjuring Imaginary Creatures”

Both the mosasaur tooth and the T. rex tooth (as well as a nearby jawbone from an ancient crocodilian) were a similar age, about 66 million years old. So the scientists were able to compare the chemical compositions of the remains, measuring ratios of different isotopes of oxygen, strontium, and carbon. Their results pointed to a startling conclusion: The former owner of the mosasaur tooth lived in a freshwater habitat.

“Carbon isotopes in teeth generally reflect what the animal ate. Many mosasaurs have low ¹³C values because they dive deep,” study co-author Melanie During, a paleontologist at Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, said in a statement. “The mosasaur tooth found with the T. rex tooth, on the other hand, has a higher ¹³C value than all known mosasaurs, dinosaurs, and crocodiles, suggesting that it did not dive deep and may sometimes have fed on drowned dinosaurs.”

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Rather than these 36-foot-long marine predators suddenly deciding to swim up the river for a snack, scientists believe their environment shifted around them. During the Cretaceous Period, when mosasaurs lived, North America was split in two by a vast saltwater sea covering the prairies. As the Cretaceous drew to a close 66 million years ago, this saltwater sea was gradually diluted by an influx of freshwater that eventually settled on top of the heavier saltwater, forming a stark separation between the two. As the waters around the mosasaur changed, they adapted to their new river home.

This shift from saltwater to freshwater isn’t unheard of in the animal kingdom; it’s been observed in river dolphins, saltwater crocodiles, and some shark species that transition between the two environments. Still, imagining a predator the size of a bus idly paddling up an inland river is a spine-tingling mental picture.

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Lead image: Christopher DiPiazza

Jake Currie

Posted on December 12, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

This Hole Punch-Sized Patch Could Help Save Frogs

A new, non-invasive method to track amphibian hormones may reveal how the creatures weather rising threats in the wild

By Molly Glick    December 12, 2025

As animals around the world contend with climate change, disease, and human destruction of their ecosystems, amphibians are particularly vulnerable. As of 2023, around 41 percent of amphibian species around the globe were classified as threatened—a higher proportion compared with mammals and birds. These creatures have thin, permeable skin, making them less able to regulate their temperature than other animals and more susceptible to compounding risks like infections and pollution.

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One particularly nasty disease called chytridiomycosis, which is caused by fungus, has devastated amphibians practically everywhere but Asia—it’s thought to have aided in the decline of more than 500 species and wiped out 90.

To gauge the well-being of amphibian populations, it’s crucial to keep an eye on their hormone levels. Hormones help them reproduce and adapt to stress, two key factors in ensuring a species’ survival. But amphibian endocrine systems have remained elusive because it’s difficult to monitor them in a non-invasive way. Using needles to take blood samples, for instance, can be an extremely stressful experience for these sensitive creatures.

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Read more: “A Model Toadlet”

Now, scientists from Australia have proposed a more comfortable and convenient alternative: patches less than a centimeter in diameter to temporarily stick on their skin. They tested these patches on male Blue Mountains tree frogs, which they collected from Dharawal National Park in Australia, by applying them to the amphibians for just 60 seconds at a time. The team used these patches to continuously monitor testosterone concentrations over 12 hours in the frogs after boosting their levels of the hormone with medication.

The researchers concluded that “dermal patches are a viable, non-invasive tool for monitoring biologically relevant changes in amphibian steroid hormones,” the authors wrote in the study, which was published in Frontiers in Conservation Science. Further studies should test the approach with other types of hormones and species, the authors noted.

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“This is a big step forward in helping us understand frog biology and improve conservation efforts,” said paper co-author Alicia Dimovski, an ecologist at La Trobe University, in a statement.

Dimovski said she now hopes that conservation programs can harness these tiny stickers when breeding amphibian species. They could also be used to better understand amphibians’ reproductive systems and track their reproduction in wild populations—research that could help aid their survival amid myriad dangers.

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Lead image from Dimovski, A.M., et al. Frontiers in Conservation Science (2025).

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Molly Glick

Posted on December 12, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How We Changed Cat Sounds Forever

The soft rumbles seem to reveal more about a feline than their meows, and it’s probably thanks to humans

By Molly Glick    December 11, 2025

You can learn a lot about a cat by its purr—less so its meow.

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The former is more closely associated with a feline’s distinct identity, researchers based in Italy and Germany suggested. They reached this conclusion by performing statistical analysis of cat calls with methods initially designed for automatic speech recognition in humans.

Unique vocal signals seem to have helped drive the evolution of crucial social processes, such as forming groups and recognizing relatives, among many animal species. While scientists have done plenty of studies on distinct vocal patterns across larger groups of animals, it’s unclear whether different individuals in the same species produce their own special sounds.

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Domestic cats offer a prime candidate to investigate this question—they live in close social groups, and have developed a rich library of sounds. Overall, scientists have documented up to 21 distinct vocalization types produced by domestic cats. After spending millennia with human caregivers, they seem to have modified their meows specifically to catch the attention of their owners.

Read more: “How to Tell a Leopard from Its Roar”

To hear what cats had to say, the research team studied hundreds of sounds from 21 cats that were recorded in homes and animal shelters in Berlin, Germany. They recorded cats while they sought human attention to capture meows and while they received pets and scritches to capture purrs. Ultimately, the scientists were able to statistically match up to around 64 percent of meows and 86 percent of purrs to the correct cat, suggesting that purrs work more effectively as cat ID cards. The team reported its feline findings in Scientific Reports.

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“People pay most attention to meowing because cats mainly use these vocalizations toward us,” said paper co-author Danilo Russo, an ecologist at the University of Naples Federico II in Italy, in a statement. “But once we examined the acoustic structure closely, the even, rhythmic purr turned out to be the better cue for identifying individual cats.”

Russo and his colleagues also compared the domestic cat noises to archived recordings of wild cats, including jungle cats, African wildcats, and cougars. They found that the domestic cats “have much more variable meows,” the authors wrote in the paper.

“Living with humans—who differ greatly in their routines, expectations, and responses—likely favored cats that could flexibly adjust their meows,” said paper co-author Mirjam Knörnschild, a bioacoustician at the Museum of Natural History in Berlin. “Our results support the idea that meows have evolved into a highly adaptable tool for negotiating life in a human-dominated world.”

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They emphasized that the clearer individual signatures found in purrs don’t necessarily aid in communication, and they might simply result from anatomical differences. Purrs are thought to involve specific muscle contractions, among other mechanisms. But unique purrs could help cats recognize their buddies when conditions in their environment make it tough to use other cues, like smell and vision.

Meows, meanwhile, may no longer aid in cat-to-cat communications because humans seem to have contributed to “weakening consistent identity signals” within these sounds. In fact, wild cats rarely meow, highlighting the extent that we’ve molded the behavior of our beloved feline friends.

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Lead image: Fuzzy Rescue / Pixabay

Molly Glick

Posted on December 11, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

This Tiny Neon Frog Dwells in the Clouds

Researchers recently discovered an extremely small frog species in Brazil

By Molly Glick    December 11, 2025

A strikingly orange frog that fits on a pencil tip lives among the clouds in Brazil. Scientists encountered the newly named species, Brachycephalus lulai, in the cloud forests that cloak the Serra do Quiriri mountain range in the south of the country. B. lulai only measures up to a little over a half-inch long—female individuals are longer than males—making it among the tiniest four-legged creatures on the planet. The species was named after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Brazil’s current president.

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The international team of scientists spent years tracking down wee amphibians in the Brachycephalus genus, which live in a limited range among leaf litter in the Brazilian Atlantic Forest. Their colors vary from neon orange to more muted, green-tinged hues.

RAINBOW CONNECTION: Brachycephalus species come in a wide range of hues, including highlighter orange. Image from Bornschein, M., et al. PLOS One (2025).

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The researchers said they found this petite species thanks to its distinctive mating call, groups of two brief pulses of sound that differ from the songs of other local members of the genus. After analyzing the frog’s skeletal structure and DNA to confirm it is an undiscovered species, the researchers identified B. lulai’s closest relatives as two species that also live in the Serra do Quiriri. The frog findings were published in PLOS One.

The team proposes that B. lulai be considered a species of Least Concern of extinction, due to a lack of serious threats to the frog and the current health of its environment. And as the local climate continues to grow wetter and cloud forests grow, they noted in the paper, so do the homes of Brachycephalus species. But some members of the genus do have particularly tiny ranges and face the risk of extinction. The authors hope to promote conservation efforts to ensure the survival of B. lulai and its petite relatives.

Read more: “The Queer Lives of Frogs”

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“We seek to encourage the expansion of conservation initiatives focused on the Atlantic Forest as a whole, and on Brazil’s highly endemic miniaturized frogs in particular,” they wrote in the paper.

To this end, they said they hope to create a wildlife refuge in the Serra do Quiriri area to protect B. lulai and its relatives, and ensure that the unique ecosystem is regularly monitored—helping these mini frogs continue to thrive among the clouds.

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Lead image: Luiz Fernando Ribeiro

Molly Glick

Posted on December 11, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Orcas and Dolphins Glimpsed Fishing Together for Salmon

Combining brain and brawn, the two marine mammals may hunt collaboratively

By Devin Reese    December 11, 2025

Dolphins, with their exceptional echolocation abilities, are skillful at catching fish. But some fish, like Chinook salmon, are too big for them to capture and swallow whole.

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In the first recorded instance of hunting cooperation between dolphins and orcas, a new study published today in Scientific Reports describes how dolphins benefit from associations with orcas, which catch Chinook salmon, carry them to the surface, and break them into smaller pieces.

Killer whales (Orcinus orca) that live along the coast of British Columbia feed almost exclusively on big, adult Chinook salmon, which can weigh as much as 30 pounds. Pods of Pacific white-sided dolphins (Lagenorhynchus obliquidens) have been observed swimming near the killer whales. An individual dolphin needs about 20 pounds of food per day, a daily diet that the marine mammals typically fill out with smaller prey fish, such as sardines, herring, and capelin.

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TEAMWORK FOR MARINEWORK: Orcas trail a single dolphin (topmost animal in this image) off the coast of British Columbia, where researchers observed the two species engaged in what might be collaborative hunting. Image courtesy of the University of British Columbia (A. Trites), Dalhousie University (S. Fortune), Hakai Institute (K. Holmes), Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (X. Cheng).

Since both dolphins and killer whales are known to use coordinated hunting strategies to round up and capture prey, scientists figured that their proximity to each other off the coast of British Columbia was coincidental. Perhaps both the killer whale pod and the dolphin pod were homing in on fish-rich areas but not competing due to their distinct diets, the researchers reasoned.

But the team was surprised when they tracked nine killer whales around Vancouver Island. Collecting data using a variety of methods—aerial drone footage, photography from the research boat, customized multisensory tags that captured 3-D dive data while recording vocalizations and collecting underwater video from whales’ perspectives—the researchers learned that killer whales were frequently following dolphins around.

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Read more: “The Story of a Lonely Orca”

In total, the scientists recorded 25 instances of killer whales changing course after encountering dolphins. Four of the tracked killer whales, plus three nontagged whales, were recorded interacting with dolphins. When the killer whales caught and shared Chinook salmon with each other, dolphins stayed nearby, in at least one case, scavenging on the scraps of fish. There was no evidence of the killer whales trying to chase the dolphins off.

The dolphins appeared to get a free meal out of the arrangement and perhaps protection from other killer whale pods, which sometimes prey on the dolphins.

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But what might the orcas get from such a cooperative hunting strategy? In the paper, the study authors hypothesize that the arrangement “may improve the ability of killer whales to detect Chinook.” When the killer whales changed course to stay near dolphins, they might have been eavesdropping on dolphin echolocation. Killer whales echolocate during hunting, too, but two sets of echoes may be better than one in locating targets.

Further study may confirm whether this truly qualifies as cooperative hunting.

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Lead image: Courtesy of the University of British Columbia (A.T rites), Dalhousie University (S. Fortune), Hakai Institute (K. Holmes), Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (X. Cheng)

Devin Reese

Posted on December 11, 2025

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Beloved Ancient Chinese Cats Were Wilder Than Once Thought

People in ancient China grew a millennia-spanning friendship with wild felines long before domestic cats came on the scene

By Molly Glick    December 9, 2025

The precise origins of domesticated cats have puzzled generations of scientists. Recently, genetic analysis pinpointed North African wildcats as the most likely direct ancestor of the feline friends that now share our homes and steal our hearts. That study also indicated that early domestic cats spread across the globe far later than previously thought.

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But this pet picture gets even more complex: Long before the cats we know and love today evolved, some human communities may have formed friendships with wildcats that never morphed into house cats. This includes people in what’s now Europe more than two millennia ago.

A new study suggests this also seems to be the case for early Chinese farming settlements, where people lived near the native leopard cat for around 3,500 years. An international team of scientists published a genetic analysis of feline remains from Chinese archaeological sites in Cell Genomics.

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Read more: “The Mystery of the Cave Cats”

Previously, researchers thought that 5,400-year-old cat remains found at a human settlement in what’s now western China belonged to domestic cats, but later genetic studies found these remains belonged to leopard cats (Prionailurus bengalensis).

These wee cats are native to various parts of Asia. Some scientists have suggested that domestic cats got to China during the Han Dynasty, which spanned 202 B.C. to 220 A.D., according to a bone found in the ancient capital of Chang’an City that’s now located in China’s Shaanxi Province—but it’s tricky to tell bones from domestic and wild felines apart with the naked eye.

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Now, to clear up the confusion surrounding Chinese cat history, researchers studied genetic information extracted from 22 ancient cat bones from China dated between 3500 B.C. and 1800 A.D. These remains comprised nearly all of the small cat remains dug up from archaeological sites across China.

The study’s conclusions rewrite the history of cats in the region. For example, the researchers found that bones from around the Han Dynasty period didn’t in fact belong to domestic cats. This means that fully domesticated cats may not have arrived in China until around 1,400 years ago, likely carted around by Silk Road merchants. The authors noted that domestic cats seem to be one of the most recent imports to China, as Eurasian domesticated animals like goats, sheep, and cattle appeared between about 3000 and 2000 B.C.

Instead, they tied feline remains from some earlier human villages to leopard cats. These kitties seem to have bonded with people by gobbling up small rodents, which rid farms of pests. This intimate and mutually beneficial relationship is documented in ancient Chinese art, including paintings and plates.

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Unlike the domestic cats now inextricably woven into people’s daily lives, the study pointed out that the relationship between humans and leopard cats eventually tapered off and the creatures retreated to their natural habitats. This coincided with the Han Dynasty’s collapse amid chillier and drier conditions, reduced farming yields, and social unrest.

The findings suggest that domestic cats only came on the scene six centuries later via traders—the winning feline species to claim the hearts of the Chinese people, and communities around the world.

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Lead image: Soumyajit Nandy / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on December 9, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Table Condiment That Powers Plant-Eating Giants

Some parts of Africa lack megaherbivores—salt scarcity in the environment could explain why

By Bob Grant    December 9, 2025

Plant-eating animals need to get crafty to get the salt they crave. Because sodium is relatively rare in nature and plants don’t tend to concentrate salts, herbivores get the stuff wherever and however they can. Elephants in Kenya, for instance, frequent caves to munch salt-rich rocks, and pachyderms in the Congo excavate riverbeds for subterranean sodium deposits. Most African herbivores have found other ways to maximize their sodium intake, gathering at salt pans across the continent or focusing on the saltiest snacks in their habitats.

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Now, researchers have suggested that some parts of Africa have relatively few megaherbivores, such as elephants, rhinos, and giraffes, because those areas do not have enough salt to support the massive animals. The international team of scientists published their results today in Nature Ecology & Evolution.

Animals need salt to survive: Sodium acts as a molecular pump, shuttling essential components into and waste products out of cells. It aids in the transmission of electrical signals along neurons and regulates water balance on the cellular level and throughout the body.

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Read more: “Were These Caves Licked Into Place?”

While carnivores get plenty of sodium from the blood and meat of their prey, herbivores have to scrounge salt from their typically sodium-poor plant diet. Salt deficiencies can be especially problematic for large-bodied herbivores, which need loads of salt to fuel their massive bodies and function properly.

“In Africa, sodium availability varies over a thousandfold in plants,” said study co-author Andrew Abraham, an ecologist at City University of New York, in a statement. “This means that in many areas, wild herbivores simply cannot get enough salt in their diet.”

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Abraham and his colleagues compiled high-resolution maps that indicated the distribution of sodium in plants and grasses across sub-Saharan Africa. Then, they overlaid these maps with densities and distributions of sodium in herbivore dung across the same area.

The researchers found an area of West Africa that seemed to lack high numbers of the largest land animals on Earth. This may have been owed, at least in part, to plant sodium scarcity in this area. “West Africa is a very productive region, but there aren’t many megaherbivores there,” said study co-author Chris Doughty, an ecoinformatician at Northern Arizona University. “We think that a lack of sodium, likely combined with other factors such as overhunting and soil infertility, plays an important role in limiting their numbers.”

Across their broad study area, the scientists noted this correlation between areas of salt scarcity to lower numbers of large herbivores.

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The findings could have major implications for conservation efforts in Africa and beyond. Humans have shifted natural sodium distributions from activities including drilling boreholes, introducing artificial salt licks, salting roads, and mining, the authors wrote. This might free up more sodium to herbivores, and thus “may enable higher herbivore population densities in certain [sodium]-poor areas,” which could disrupt long-standing ecological dynamics, with effects rippling through these disturbed ecosystems.

Additionally, many areas protected for native species are in sodium-poor landscapes. So large herbivores targeted by conservation efforts may be limited in how much their populations can recover in those ecosystems. This could lead to clashes between these large beasts and the humans that share these areas. “If animals can’t get enough sodium in their natural habitats, they may come into conflict with people on their quest to satisfy their salt hunger,” Abraham added.

It appears that conservation efforts that target the planet’s largest animals should come with a pinch of salt.

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Lead image: Langeweile / Pixabay

Bob Grant

Posted on December 9, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Are We Finally Over the “Jaws Effect?”

Most people in a recent survey saw sharks as neutral, coinciding with a global treaty to protect declining species

By Molly Glick    December 5, 2025

The movie Jaws has been terrifying moviegoers since it hit theaters 50 years ago. Now, the reputational damage the horror film inflicted on actual sharks may be beginning to wane.

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In several studies on public perceptions of sharks over the past decade, participants tended to report moderate to high levels of fear, often linking sharks with words like “blood” and “death.” This highlights a prevalent misconception, given that shark attacks on people are extremely rare around the globe. But a new paper paints a more complex picture of humans’ evolving attitudes toward sharks.

In an online survey of 371 people, mostly from Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom, more than two thirds of respondents used neutral terms to describe sharks, according to results published in the journal Wildlife Research. Scientists from the University of South Australia asked the participants to describe sharks using just three words. The most common answers were “teeth,” “ocean,” and “predator.”

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Read more: “The Shark Whisperer”

The researchers used various techniques to analyze the emotional motivation behind more than 1,000 submitted words. For instance, the team divided the words into categories, such as shark conservation and benefits to humans, that they labeled as positive, neutral, or negative. The majority of words—67.5 percent—fell in neutral categories. The neutral terms included “teeth,” “ocean,” and “surfing.” Meanwhile, 17.5 percent were considered positive, like “majestic” and “cute,” and 15.3 percent were considered negative, including “blood” and “killer.”

The researchers also ran the words through a sentiment analysis algorithm, which linked around 30 percent of them to fear—with  the second most prevalent emotion, joy, tied to about 17 percent of all submitted words.

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“The findings highlight that public perceptions of sharks are more nuanced than the stereotypical ‘menacing predator’ narrative often seen in the media,” said study co-author Brianna Le Busque, an environmental scientist at the University of South Australia, in a statement.

Still, the paper has limitations. This was a relatively small sample size, and the majority of participants were female and in their 20s.

The short text responses examined in this study could offer a more convenient alternative to the interviews commonly used to glean public opinions on wildlife and conservation, the authors noted. These methods can require a lot of time from researchers and participants and can prove expensive.

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Scientists are continuing to refine their understanding of people’s views toward sharks, and similar work regarding all sorts of species lacks standardized measurements. But it’s crucial to track this information, because public opinion bolsters conservation policy, and unpopular efforts can fail to take off or backfire.

This work is particularly urgent surrounding sharks. They have been long overlooked in conservation, and more than 37 percent of shark and ray species are threatened with extinction—due in large part to overfishing. But recently, our finned friends did get some good news: More than 100 governments voted to protect shark and ray species with falling population numbers, perhaps another sign of increasing goodwill toward these once-maligned creatures.

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Lead image: Hermanus Backpackers / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on December 5, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

When a Chimp Screams, What Do You Hear?

The calls of our closest living evolutionary cousins still hit an ancient target in the human brain

By Kristen French    December 5, 2025

When you listen to a jungle ape whooping through the canopy what do you hear? If it’s a chimp who’s responsible for the cacophony, it may trigger an ancient form of recognition, flickering below your conscious awareness.

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Such are the findings of a new study from researchers at the University of Geneva: They observed that chimp calls light up pockets of a special voice-sensitive region of the human brain, known as the temporal voice area (TVA), which had been thought to respond only to the voices of our own kind. The results suggest that certain voice recognition abilities may be shared across species and predate human language.

“When participants heard chimpanzee vocalizations, this response was clearly distinct from that triggered by bonobos or macaques,” said study co-author and University of Geneva neuroscientist Leonardo Ceravolo in a statement.

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Four primate species were enlisted for the study: humans, chimpanzees, bonobos, and rhesus macaques. Ceravolo and his colleagues gathered 18 vocalizations from each of the four apes and randomly presented them to 23 human participants, asking listeners to play a sort of auditory guess-who, identifying which species was behind each cry. They also monitored the participants’ brains with MRI while they were listening and analyzed the calls using statistical modeling to understand how they differed acoustically.

Read more: “The Cosmopolitan Ape”

The participants’ brains lit up when processing the calls of the chimps, their TVA regions responding more readily to the chimp sounds than to those of any of the other non-human primates. The researchers also found that positive social calls from chimps, but not bonobos, were acoustically most similar to positive human voices. The findings echo previous research that suggests the communication patterns of bonobos, our more peace-loving evolutionary cousins, evolved separately over time, even though we are genetically as close to bonobos as to chimps.

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The primate vocalizations consisted of single calls or call sequences and included both threat and distress calls and positive social calls. The 15 chimpanzee individuals were recorded in the wild in the Budongo forest, Uganda, while the 10 bonobo individuals were recorded in the wild in the Salonga National Park in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The 16 rhesus macaques were recorded in the wild from semi-free monkeys on Cayo Santiago, Puerto Rico.

Previous studies have looked at how human brains respond to both primate and cat calls, but before now, no research has observed specific cross-species responses in the human TVA, the researchers point out. Future work may tease apart the acoustic fingerprints that set chimp calls apart from those of bonobos.

“We already knew that certain areas of the animal brain reacted specifically to the voices of their fellow creatures,” added Ceravolo. “But here, we show that a region of the adult human brain, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, is also sensitive to non-human vocalizations.”

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It seems the call of the wild is still lodged deep inside the human brain.

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Lead image: Fabrom / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on December 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.

Table of Contents

Nautilus: 2025 Dec 13

Anthropology

Top Roman Military Officers Loved Their Pet Monkeys

How Monogamous Are Humans Actually?

Astronomy

Was the Earth Created by a Supernova Shockwave?

This Black Hole Blasts Cosmic Wind at 130 Million Miles Per Hour

Exploding Stars Like We’ve Never Seen Them

A Speed Camera for the Universe

Satellite Photobombing Is Disrupting Space Telescope Astronomy

We Finally Know the Time of Day on Mars

The Secret Busy Lives of Small Icy Moons

Economics

How to Actually Combat Economic Inequality

Environment

A Warming Arctic May Be Changing Polar Bears’ DNA

How Many Insects Fill the Air on a Typical Summer Day in the US?

How to Really Convince People to Prepare for Climate Disasters

Potential Deep-Sea Mining Site Harbors Scores of New Species

A Rare “Fairy Lantern” Finally Comes to Light

Is the Drought in the Southwest Permanent?

Evolution

Is the Secret to Long Life Freedom From Procreation?

What an Ancient Sheep Reveals About a Bronze Age Plague

Genetics

Vampire Squid Genome Offers Glimpse Into Octopus Evolution

Health

Why Stress Sparks Hair Loss, According to Mice

This “Cinderella Sense” May Be Tied to More Than 130 Disorders

Here’s Why Some Insomniacs Can’t Sleep

The Benefits of Social Media Detox

History

Crick and Watson Did Not Steal Franklin’s Data

Did Volcanoes Spark the Black Death?

Microbiology

The Air In Hospitals and On Airplanes Is Cleaner Than You Think

Tiny Volcano-Dwelling Creature Breaks Heat Record

Neuroscience

Rabies Virus Helps Map Psilocybin’s Brain Altering Effects

How the Breath Guides Memory

Paleontology

Hobbits May Have Been Victims of Climate Change

Millions of Years Ago These Animals Shaped the Arabian Sea

You Don’t Need a Big Brain to Fly

An Ancient Earthquake Might Have Unleashed a Sea Turtle Stampede

Living Large: Giant Anacondas Blew Up 12 Million Years Ago

Behold the Biggest Dinosaur Parade

Physics

Reality Exists Without Observers? Boooo!

Psychology

You’re Probably Not Addicted to Social Media

What Laziness Has to do with Beauty

This Common Personality Trait May Fuel Serial Killers

Does Anger Aggravate Pain?

What Makes a Word Beautiful?

Sociology

Pop Music Is Getting Darker

Technology

What Robots Can Learn from Classical Indian Dance

Can the US Build a Nuclear Powered Future?

ChatGPT’s Biggest Foe: Poetry

Zoology

Watch a Moth Drink Moose Tears

Fearsome Marine Predators Prowled Ancient Rivers, Too

This Hole Punch-Sized Patch Could Help Save Frogs

How We Changed Cat Sounds Forever

This Tiny Neon Frog Dwells in the Clouds

Orcas and Dolphins Glimpsed Fishing Together for Salmon

Beloved Ancient Chinese Cats Were Wilder Than Once Thought

The Table Condiment That Powers Plant-Eating Giants

Are We Finally Over the “Jaws Effect?”

When a Chimp Screams, What Do You Hear?