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Anthropology

- Did Humans or Climate Push the Neanderthals Over the Edge?

- How Christianity Redrew Ancient Nubian Tattoos

ANTHROPOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Did Humans or Climate Push the Neanderthals Over the Edge?

A new model of what went down in one of the Neanderthals’ last holdouts

By Molly Glick    December 22, 2025

Around 40,000 years ago, a band of early humans rolled into the Iberian Peninsula, an area of Europe thought to have been a late Neanderthal holdout.

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Researchers aren’t entirely sure what went down next. Past genetic studies suggest Neanderthals and early humans interbred in some regions, including eastern Europe and southwestern Asia, but it’s unclear whether this transpired on the Iberian peninsula, too.

To learn more about potential Iberian run-ins, as well as patterns of migration on the peninsula, a team of scientists from the University of Cologne in Germany ran a series of simulations that incorporated ancient climate data, along with archaeological evidence of Neanderthal and human presence at sites throughout the region.

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Read more: “The Human Family Tree, It Turns Out, Is Complicated”

The scientists ran the model through several different scenarios: an early extinction of Neanderthals, a small Neanderthal population highly vulnerable to extinction, or longer Neanderthal survival that would enable them to mingle with our ancestors. Evidence of past climates, gleaned from sources including bogs and marine sediment, helped determine whether a specific region over a certain time period would be suitable for humans or Neanderthals. The time period was characterized by dramatic swings between cold and warm temperatures.

In each of the scenarios the researchers simulated, the Neanderthals were imperiled by climactic shifts. But there was still a small chance that the species might have maintained stable populations long enough to mate with humans. Overall, the model estimated a 1 percent chance of genetic mixing between the two species and a total of around 2 to 6 percent of all Neanderthals and humans possessing genes from both species. The findings were reported in PLOS One.

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This fraternization was most likely to occur in the northwest of the Iberian peninsula, the model suggested. Here, modern humans might have settled in before the Neanderthals disappeared.

In future research, the team hopes to incorporate more information to make the simulations more realistic, including data on animals that could have served as prey—offering clearer insights into the possible interbreeding between our ancestors that survived and the ones that vanished.

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Lead image: Alicia G. Monedero / Shutterstock

Molly Glick

Posted on December 22, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ANTHROPOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Christianity Redrew Ancient Nubian Tattoos

Markings on remains unearthed from modern-day Sudan suggest that the religion’s rise influenced the design and application of body ink

By Molly Glick    December 15, 2025

Over the past 5,000 years, tattoos have served as symbols of identity and life experiences, among other traditions—they’ve even been used to treat ailments including arthritis. Scientists have unearthed evidence of tattoos on human remains from more than 50 archeological sites around the world, from ancient Peru to China. These include locations in the Nile River Valley in northeastern Africa, which the Nubian people have called home for millennia.

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Researchers have studied ancient Nubian tattoos since the 19th century, but more recent technologies that capture images in wavelengths invisible to the naked eye have illuminated intriguing new details from these markings. Now, researchers based in the United States and United Kingdom have harnessed these tools and traced how the rise of Christianity in the Nile River Valley influenced tattooing practices by the seventh century A.D.

The team surveyed 1,048 samples of human remains spanning 350 B.C. to 1400 A.D. from three sites located in the north of modern-day Sudan. At one site, known as Kulubnarti, Christian-era remains mostly from 650 to 1000 A.D. had “remarkable skin preservation” that the authors wrote “allows a more detailed determination of the significance and ubiquity of tattoo practices,” according to a paper published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Kulubnarti sat near what’s now the Egyptian border and served as a genetic and cultural melting pot.

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ANCIENT INK: A reconstruction of markings found on the forehead of a 3-year-old female from the Kulubnarti site that date back to around 657 to 855 A.D. From Austin, A., et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025).

The researchers identified tattoos on remains from 27 individuals, the majority of whom were under 11 years old and from the Kulubnarti site. More than one in five people from this site had tattoos, which were primarily located on the forehead, cheeks, or temples, and incorporated patterns of dots and dashes that often formed diamonds or squares. They may have been formed with a single puncture from a knife, instead of needles, as was a common practice in the region during the pre-Christian period. During that time, dotted diamond patterns across people’s bodies and crisscrossed patterns on people’s hands appeared to be common in Nubian tattoo art.

The Kulubnarti remains revealed that, as Christianity arrived in the region, tattooing “focused on highly visible locations on the face and used tools, patterns, and techniques that could be employed quickly,” the authors noted. Because young Nubian children were the most common recipients of tattoos, it may have been tricky to keep them still and apply particularly intricate designs. These shifts could have transpired as early as the seventh century A.D. The Kulubnarti markings examined in the new paper may be the oldest recorded examples of the Christian tattoo traditions now practiced in Ethiopia, Sudan, and Egypt—there, cross tattoos on the forehead often “mark Christians permanently as believers,” the authors wrote.

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Read more: “This Mummy’s Tattoos Are Better Than Yours”

It’s also possible that the tattoos were used in medicinal contexts. Due to their positioning on the head and their prevalence among young children, among other factors, the authors suggested that they were used to treat headaches or high fevers—common symptoms of malaria, a condition that has been documented in that region for centuries and is currently most severe in children under 5 years old. Ethnographic research from the 20th century has also highlighted various medicinal applications of tattoos in North Africa.

The authors hope more researchers take a close look at ancient tattoos, which can be easy to miss without the right techniques—this team was the first to identify these markings on remains of people from Kulubnarti. Even more millennia-old markings may be hiding in dig sites and anthropological research collections, waiting to be discovered.

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Lead image: From Austin, A., et al. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2025).

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Molly Glick

Posted on December 15, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Arts

- The Nautilus Winter Reading List 2025

ARTS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Nautilus Winter Reading List 2025

Ten books we loved to start your new year off right.

By Nautilus Editors    December 19, 2025

Isn’t reading books just the best thing in the world? Especially when discontent reigns outside our winter windows. We think so! Nothing picks up our spirits and makes us feel more alive than the brilliant insights the best science writers deliver into the cosmos, nature, and ourselves. Nautilus was thrilled this year to feature either excerpts from the 10 books below, interviews with the authors, or original writing from them. We can’t recommend their 2025 books with more enthusiasm and holiday cheer.

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1. Human Nature: Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet by Kate Marvel

HarperCollins Publishers

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The Earth scientist gets personal in one of the most original and emotionally moving books on climate change we’ve ever read.

Read a Nautilus feature on Marvel, “You Have Never Felt Climate Change Like This.”

2. Crick: A Mind in Motion by Matthew Cobb

Hachette Book Group

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This masterful biography reveals the many sides of the Nobel laureate who co-discovered the molecular shape of DNA, sought to crack the hard problem of consciousness, loved poetry, and tripped on LSD.

Read Matthew Cobb’s 3 Greatest Revelations while writing Crick.

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

W. W. Norton & Company

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Philosopher Agnes Callard told Nautilus that in high school she didn’t want to interpret ancient Greek philosopher Socrates, “I wanted to be Socrates.” In captivating prose, Callard embodies Socrates to drill home the point that the path to a fuller life is a rocky road through provoking others who provoke us.

Read an excerpt on Nautilus, “The Pretense of Political Debate.”

4. How to Change a Memory: One Neuroscientist’s Quest to Alter the Past by Steve Ramirez

Princeton University Press

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When neuroscientist Ramirez sunk into grief over the death of his mentor, his academic research got more real than he could imagine. His personal story makes the science in How to Change a Memory even more riveting.

Read a Nautilus interview with Ramirez, “He Erased Memory in Mice. Then Thought About Erasing His Own.”

5. Strata: Stories from Deep Time by Laura Poppick

W. W. Norton & Company

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Journalist Laura Poppick journeys back through time to mine the geologic and fossil layers for stories of Earth’s history. It’s a transformative journey for readers and her. “Any field of science can spark awe and wonder, but I have found that Earth history can go a step further by offering a deep source of solace and grounding,” Poppick told Nautilus.

Read an excerpt on Nautilus, “The Stories Rocks Tell Us.”

6. The Call of the Honeyguide: What Science Tells Us about How to Live Well with the Rest of Life by Rob Dunn

Hachette Book Group

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The ecologist spotlights a remarkable range of ecosystems across the globe to impress on us the mutual interdependence of all species, including us.

Read an excerpt on Nautilus, “We Owe It All to Figs.”

7. The Arrogant Ape: The Myth of Human Exceptionalism by Christine Webb

Penguin Random House

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Primatologist Christine Webb argues in prose that never lets it foot off the gas that feeling superior to animals is the human worldview at the root of all environmental evil. “Seeing ourselves clearly—not as rulers, but as participants in a larger web—is one of the most urgent scientific and moral challenges of our time,” she told Nautilus.

Read Christine Webb’s 3 Greatest Revelations while writing The Arrogant Ape.

8. Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean: An Environmental History of Our Place in the Solar System by Dagomar Degroot

Harvard University Press

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Space exploration doesn’t distract us from urgent Earthy issues; it helps us solve threats to Earth, like CFCs shredding the ozone layer. One of the most fascinating histories of space exploration we know.

Read Dagomar’s Degroot 3 Greatest Revelations while writing Ripples on the Cosmic Ocean.

9. Seven Decades: How We Evolved to Live Longer by Michael Gurven

Princeton University Press

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Sanitation and modern medicine may get the credit for human longevity today, but anthropologist Michael Gurven explains that’s not the whole story; human evolution itself built us to last about 70 years.

Read Michael Gurven’s 3 Greatest Revelations while writing Seven Decades.

10. Bird School: A Beginner in the Wood by Adam Nicolson

Macmillan Publishers

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Literary historian and nature writer Adam Nicolson allows us to see nature anew, just as he does, as he embarks on a late-in-life journey to learn about the birds in Sussex Weald, the “damp and tree-thick country” in England that he and the birds call home.

Read an excerpt on Nautilus, “Why I Became a Birdwatcher.”

Lead image: Diki Yuliandri / Shutterstock

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Nautilus Editors

Posted on December 19, 2025

Astronomy

- This Big Space Sandwich Broke a Record

- Saturn’s Rings Are Thicker Than We Thought

- Did a Rogue Planet Bring Order to Our Solar System?

- Monster Stars Roamed the Cosmos at the Dawn of Time

- These Baby Stars Have Mysterious Companions

- Cosmic Collision Caught on Camera

- Titan May Not Host a Massive Ocean After All

- How Earth’s Atmosphere Reached the Moon

- Astronomers Observe Spacetime Whirlpool for the First Time

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

This Big Space Sandwich Broke a Record

A particularly massive and chaotic baby planetary system captured in exquisite detail

By Molly Glick    December 23, 2025

This image might look a bit like a radioactive hamburger floating in space, but you’re actually gazing at the biggest planet-forming disk ever seen around a young star. The disorderly disk has a diameter of almost 400 billion miles, or around 40 times the diameter of our entire solar system.

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The size of the disk, and the fact that it is oriented with its edge facing the Earth—which blocks the central star’s glare—made it possible for NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope to capture it in great detail with visible light: Wisps of dust and gas extend farther above and below the disk than ever observed in similar systems.

Nicknamed Dracula’s Chivito, the peculiar planetary nursery was only recognized as a protoplanetary disk in 2024, and it sits around 1,000 light-years-from Earth. The name is a nod to two researchers who helped discover it, who hail from Transylvania and Uruguay—there, the chivito sandwich is the national dish.

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Read more: “Visit the 7 Most Extreme Planets in the Universe”

New insights from this unique look at Dracula’s Chivito were recently published in The Astrophysical Journal.

“The level of detail we’re seeing is rare in protoplanetary disk imaging, and these new Hubble images show that planet nurseries can be much more active and chaotic than we expected,” said Kristina Monsch, an astrophysicist at the Center for Astrophysics, Harvard & Smithsonian, in a statement.

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Another odd detail in the Dracula’s Chivito image: Monsch and her co-authors only observed longer, antennae-like filaments of gas and dust on the northern side of the disk. “We were stunned to see how asymmetric this disk is,” said paper co-author Joshua Bennett Lovell, an astronomer at the Center for Astrophysics. This strange feature suggests that “dynamic processes, like the recent infall of dust and gas, or interactions with its surroundings, are shaping the disk,” according to the statement.

Protoplanetary disks are cosmic nurseries for planets. They form from the leftover dust and gas surrounding baby stars. The researchers suggest that Dracula’s Chivito resembles a bigger version of our own infant solar system, containing enough ingredients to spawn several gas giants like Jupiter. Ultimately, this space sandwich could help reveal new secrets about the formation of planetary systems like ours.

“Hubble has given us a front row seat to the chaotic processes that are shaping disks as they build new planets—processes that we don’t yet fully understand but can now study in a whole new way,” Lovell said.

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Lead image: NASA, ESA, STScI, Kristina Monsch (CfA); processing: STScI/ Joseph DePasquale

Molly Glick

Posted on December 23, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Saturn’s Rings Are Thicker Than We Thought

New research points to a wide band of particles, invisible to telescopes

By Jake Currie    December 23, 2025

NASA’s Cassini space probe orbited Saturn for 13 years, when, with its mission complete, it entered a controlled descent, burning up in the ringed planet’s atmosphere. Before its fiery demise, however, Cassini took 1,690 samples of cosmic debris, measuring their chemical composition with its onboard Cosmic Dust Analyzer. Researchers are still studying the data, and a new study published in The Planetary Science Journal is shedding light on Saturn’s most famous feature: its majestic rings.

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Viewed from the side, Saturn’s rings appear razor-thin relative to its immense size, kind of like a wide-bored compact disc (remember those?). But this most recent study indicates they’re quite a bit thicker than previously thought.

Read more: “When Earth Had Rings”

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Within the cosmic dust samples collected by Cassini, scientists discovered particles with the same chemical composition as the rings (mostly magnesium and calcium), but located as far as three Saturnian radii (112,000 miles) above and below the plane of the rings. In other words, there are particles from Saturn’s rings floating in a wide band around the planet, invisible to a telescope.

How did they get there? One theory is that they were pulled in by Saturn’s gravity, a scenario researchers said was unlikely since they didn’t match the chemical makeup of dust found farther out in the Saturnian system. Instead, scientists believe they were propelled outward from the rings themselves by micrometeoroid strikes. Micrometeoroids are quite common in space, and a series of simulations performed by researchers confirmed this scenario as the most likely reason for the particle dispersal pattern.

As scientists continue to study Cassini’s data, we’ll learn more about Saturn’s rings—and not a moment too soon. Other data collected by the late space probe indicates the rings may be gone in a scant 300 million years.

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Lead image: NASA/JPL/Space Science Institute

Jake Currie

Posted on December 23, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Did a Rogue Planet Bring Order to Our Solar System?

New models suggest a celestial bypasser left us with the current orbital lineup

By Jake Currie    December 22, 2025

A wandering stranger blowing into town, disrupting everyone’s lives, and forever changing the shape of the future is a familiar Hollywood trope, but it might also be the story of our early solar system.

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For years, astronomers have puzzled over how the planets in our solar system settled into their current positions. The orbits of the largest planets—Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune—were once clustered closer together before a reshuffling gave them a little more breathing room, and changed their order, to boot. But what set this upheaval in motion?

New research from the Laboratoire d’Astrophysique de Bordeaux and the Planetary Science Institute offers a possible explanation—a rogue planet or brown dwarf. Astronomers Sean Raymond and Nathan Kaib (from those two institutions respectively) ran 3,000 computer simulations to determine what kind of celestial flyby would result in our current solar system.

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Read more: “A Step-by-Step Guide to Our Solar System’s Demise”

Together the two researchers simulated visits by objects as small as Jupiter and as large as 10 of our suns passing by our sun at distances of between one and 1,000 astronomical units (one astronomical unit is the distance from the Earth to the sun). The astronomers found that only twenty of the simulations—around 1 percent—produced our solar system’s current orbital architecture. Objects that were too massive or too close ripped planets away or wildly distorted their orbital paths, while objects that were too small or too far away were too weak to change anything at all.

The astronomers determined that if a heavenly body swinging by was responsible for reordering the young solar system, it must have had a mass between 3 and 30 times that of Jupiter, which is equivalent to the size of a large planet or brown dwarf.  It would have  flown by at a distance from the sun of around 20 astronomical units—some 1.86 billion miles—close enough to shake things up without disrupting the fledgling planetary system altogether.

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If not for this mysterious visitor, the night sky would look a little bit different.

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Lead image: Mp152 / Wikimedia Commons

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Jake Currie

Posted on December 22, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Monster Stars Roamed the Cosmos at the Dawn of Time

“A bit like dinosaurs on Earth—they were enormous and primitive”

By Jake Currie    December 19, 2025

A star becoming a black hole happens in the same way as Ernest Hemingway described going bankrupt: “First it happens gradually, then all at once.” The gradual part of the process can take a lot longer than the time it takes to drain a bank account—billions of years in some cases. That’s why astronomers were puzzled when they found evidence that supermassive black holes existed less than a billion years after the Big Bang.

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In order for the timeframe to make sense, the stars that collapsed to form these black holes would’ve had to have been gargantuan—1,000 to 10,000 more massive than our sun. Now, for the first time, scientists have found direct evidence that these monster stars roamed the cosmos during the dawn of the universe. They published their findings in the Astrophysical Journal Letters.

“These cosmic giants would have burned brilliantly for a brief time before collapsing into massive black holes, leaving behind the chemical signatures we can detect billions of years later,” co-author Daniel Whalen, a cosmologist at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom, said in a statement. “A bit like dinosaurs on Earth—they were enormous and primitive.”

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Read more: “The Black Sheep of Black Holes”

Whalen and his colleagues used the James Webb Space Telescope to study GS 3073, a galaxy with a black hole at its center, 12 billion light-years away from Earth. Examining the chemical signature of GS 3073 showed an intriguingly high ratio of nitrogen to oxygen, an elemental fingerprint the team says is characteristic of a monster star.

“Our latest discovery helps solve a 20-year cosmic mystery,” Whalen said. “With GS 3073, we have the first observational evidence that these monster stars existed.”

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Using computer simulations, the team recreated the evolution of these supermassive stars into supermassive black holes. According to their model, the stars first burn helium in their cores, which produces carbon. Then, the carbon leaks into the star’s surrounding shell, where hydrogen is burning. Next, the carbon combines with hydrogen to produce nitrogen, which is carried by convection currents throughout the star. Finally, this nitrogen-rich material escapes into space.

The models also show what happens when the star becomes a black hole. Instead of exploding, these stellar monsters skip going supernova and collapse directly into a supermassive black hole (the “all at once” phase).

These recent findings offer a fascinating glimpse into a period of time astronomers refer to as the “Cosmic Dark Ages,” when the furnaces of newly born stars first forged the elements that make up the rest of our universe—us and our Earth included.

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Lead image: Nandal et al

Jake Currie

Posted on December 19, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

These Baby Stars Have Mysterious Companions

The Gaia telescope peeked through gas and dust to pick out the possible beginnings of new planets around infant stars

By Molly Glick    December 19, 2025

This cosmic baby photo collection contains 31 young star systems, images captured by the Atacama Large Millimeter Array in Chile. In the bottom right corner, you’ll find a simulation of our own solar system at just 1 million years old. The infant stars at the center of these systems formed from large clumps of super chilly dust and gas that buckled under their own gravity. Over many millennia, this material spins into disks with dense, sizzling centers that morph into stars.

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The surrounding disks are known as protoplanetary disks, and scientists think that the leftover gas and dust within them globs together to create planets. But all that material in the way makes this possible phenomenon tricky to observe.

With the European Space Agency’s Gaia telescope, astronomers cut through the noise to discern potential planet formation around these growing stars. Gaia was able to pick up on the “wobble” or gravitational pull of a planet on a star. The telescope could also detect the pull of other types of objects that orbit a central star, known as “companions.”

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Read more: “Before There Were Stars”

Gaia data has already illuminated the companions dancing around older stars. Now, researchers have used the same method to hunt down companions and planets around fledgling stars, findings reported in an article that’s set to be published in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

The cyan symbols in these images refer to the estimated locations of companions within these star systems. These buddies may include additional stars, objects with a planet-like mass, and brown dwarfs, or objects that are bigger than planets but smaller than stars. In the image of our solar system, the cyan symbol represents Jupiter’s orbit.

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Out of a sample of 98 young star systems, an international team of scientists “detected subtle motions that suggest the presence of unseen companions” in these 31 systems, according to a statement.

Gaia was retired this past March, but powerful tools like the James Webb Space Telescope can inspect the inner disks of these young star systems to illuminate the first baby steps of new worlds.

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Lead image: SO, ESA/Gaia/DPAC, M. Vioque et al.

Molly Glick

Posted on December 19, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Cosmic Collision Caught on Camera

Astronomers witnessed the aftermath of not one but two collisions in space

By Jake Currie    December 18, 2025

With the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) continuing to grab headlines, it’s easy to forget the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) is still zipping around Earth, monitoring the stars. First launched in 1990, the telescope has witnessed quite a bit in its 35-year life, and recently, it captured a never-before-seen astronomical event—the aftermath of two cosmic collisions.

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An international team of astronomers aimed the HST at Fomalhaut, the brightest star in the constellation Piscis Austrinus, surrounded by a dusty cloud and orbited by a potential exoplanet, Fomalhaut b. The particularly bright Fomoalhaut b has puzzled researchers for years as they’ve struggled to determine if it’s an actual exoplanet or just a larger cloud of dust. When they took a peek in 2023, they made a startling discovery. Fomalhaut b had vanished. Instead, they found another bright spot in a different part of the system.

So what happened? The astronomers now believe the disappearing Fomalhaut b was never an exoplanet at all, rather it was a cloud of dust they’re now calling Fomalhaut cs1. The mystifying appearance of the other bright spot, Fomalhaut cs2, is another cloud of cosmic debris. Incredibly, both are the remnants of smashups between small rocky bodies called “planetesimals” (a portmanteau of “planet” and “infinitessimal”). They published their findings today in Science.

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“Spotting a new light source in the dust belt around a star was surprising. We did not expect that at all,” co-author Jason Wang, an astrophysicist at Northwestern University, said in a statement. “Our primary hypothesis is that we saw two collisions of planetesimals—small rocky objects, like asteroids—over the last two decades.”

Read more: “Mario Livio on 25 Years of Hubble”

It’s an incredibly rare occurrence to observe once, let alone twice, and it suggests the planetesimals zooming through Fomalhaut’s dust cloud are engaged in a game of cosmic billiards.

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“Theory suggests that there should be one collision every 100,000 years, or longer. Here, in 20 years, we’ve seen two,” study co-author Paul Kalas of the University of California, Berkeley, said. “If you had a movie of the last 3,000 years, and it was sped up so that every year was a fraction of a second, imagine how many flashes you’d see over that time. Fomalhaut’s planetary system would be sparkling with these collisions.”

Because planetesimals are the building blocks of planets, astronomers believe this new research will help shed light on how planets form. The next step? Get a better picture of Fomhault’s chaotic crash zone using better equipment.

“Due to Hubble’s age, it can no longer collect reliable data of the system,” Wang added. “Fortunately, we now have the JWST. We have an approved JWST program to follow up this planetesimal collision to understand the new circumstellar source and the nature of its two parent planetesimals that collided.”

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Whether it’s exoplanets or space telescopes, it’s always out with the old, in with the new.

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Lead image: NASA, ESA, STScI, Ralf Crawford (STScI)

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Jake Currie

Posted on December 18, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Titan May Not Host a Massive Ocean After All

But the moon’s slushy interior could still harbor pockets of life-sustaining water

By Jake Currie    December 17, 2025

Beneath Titan’s foggy atmosphere, liquid methane rains down, forming lakes on the frozen surface. In fact, Titan is the only other body in our solar system known to have liquid on the surface. Analyzing data from NASA’s Cassini space probe, scientists were hopeful that there might be liquid water beneath its icy shell as well. Initial observations of Saturn’s planet-like moon showed significant smushing and stretching as it traveled its elliptical orbit—a good sign of a vast interior ocean, slumbering beneath the ice. And that raised hopes that Titan hosted life.

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But research published today in Nature is throwing cold water on the hidden ocean theory. “The deformation we detected during the initial analysis of the Cassini mission data could have been compatible with a global ocean, but now we know that isn’t the full story,” University of Washington planetary scientist and study co-author Baptiste Journaux said in a statement.

Read more: “Why We Might Not Find Life on Titan”

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To arrive at this new conclusion, researchers looked at the timing of Titan’s smushing and stretching and determined it lagged behind Saturn’s peak gravitational pull by about 15 hours. If Titan’s icy shell was hiding a purely liquid ocean, its shape would change much more quickly.

So what does Titan’s interior look like? With this new data, scientists believe it’s much more viscous, made up of slush, ice, tunnels, and pockets of melt water surrounding its rocky core.

With no ocean, you might think scientists’ hopes of finding life on Titan were dashed. Instead, they’re more optimistic than before.

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“Instead of an open ocean like we have here on Earth, we’re probably looking at something more like Arctic sea ice or aquifers, which has implications for what type of life we might find, but also the availability of nutrients, energy, and so on,” Journaux added.

Smaller pockets of liquid water—some of which could reach a balmy 68 degrees Fahrenheit—can concentrate collections of life-sustaining nutrients, improving the odds simple organisms could evolve.

Titan might be freezing cold, but the search for life there is heating up.

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Lead image: NASA

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Jake Currie

Posted on December 17, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Earth’s Atmosphere Reached the Moon

And what this might mean for colonizing other worlds

By Jake Currie    December 16, 2025

There’s a mystery lurking on the dusty surface of the moon, one that was uncovered during the first Apollo missions—particles from Earth, including water, found in lunar soil. Now, scientists think they may have cracked the case of how they got there.

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Studying the first samples of moon dust (also known as “regolith”) from the Apollo missions, scientists discovered curious traces of water, carbon dioxide, helium, argon, and nitrogen. Some of these elements may have been pushed to the moon from Earth by solar winds, but the high levels of others, such as nitrogen, puzzled researchers. How did particles from Earth’s atmosphere end up on the moon?

A team led by scientists from the University of Tokyo offered a possible explanation in 2005. The particles escaped Earth’s atmosphere billions of years ago, the scientists said, due in part to our young planet’s weak magnetic field. However, research into iron-rich rocks unearthed in Greenland has since shown Earth’s magnetic field was just as strong 3.7 billion years ago as it is today.

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Read more: “The Moon Smells Like Gunpowder”

Now, new research from the University of Rochester, published in Nature Communications Earth and Environment has posited a possible answer. By combining data from regolith samples, solar wind, and Earth’s magnetic field, scientists devised computer simulations to test two different scenarios: An “early Earth” model featuring a weak magnetic field and a strong solar wind, and a “modern Earth” model featuring a strong magnetic field and a weak solar wind.

Surprisingly, the modern Earth scenario proved to be the best match for the particle levels in lunar regolith. But why? Scientists believe that once charged particles were knocked loose by solar wind, Earth’s magnetic field acted as a kind of guide, transporting them to the moon like a cosmic conveyor belt.

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This new finding has important implications for both our own planet and our hopes to colonize others. First, the long-term particle transfer between the Earth and our moon means there could be a record of our planet’s early atmosphere deposited in lunar regolith. Secondly, the presence of water and other elements conducive to life could lower the barrier to developing a human presence on the moon and beyond.

“Our study may also have broader implications for understanding early atmospheric escape on planets like Mars, which lacks a global magnetic field today but had one similar to Earth in the past, along with a likely thicker atmosphere,” study co-author Shubhonkar Paramanick, an astrophysics graduate student at the University of Rochester, said in a statement. “By examining planetary evolution alongside atmospheric escape across different epochs, we can gain insight into how these processes shape planetary habitability.”

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Lead image: University of Rochester / Shubhonkar Paramanick

Jake Currie

Posted on December 16, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Astronomers Observe Spacetime Whirlpool for the First Time

This theoretical phenomenon was discovered after being predicted by Einstein more than a century ago

By Jake Currie    December 15, 2025

Einstein’s general theory of relativity comes with a lot of consequences that can best be described as “weird.” Now, for the first time, astronomers have directly observed one of those weird consequences—a whirlpool in the very fabric of spacetime caused by a rapidly spinning black hole.

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Every so often, an unlucky star wanders into the maw of a black hole where, just like everything else, it gets “spaghettified”—stretched and shredded by immense gravitational forces. Known as a “tidal disruption event” (TDE), this star-eating phenomenon is a messy affair, with leftover stellar material forming a disk and jets of matter erupting into space at a blistering pace.

By measuring the radio waves and X-rays emanating from the disk and the jets of just such a tidal disruption event (called AT2020afhd), astronomers discovered they were wobbling, and wobbling in unison. Essentially, the massive black hole at the center of the TDE was spinning in such a way that it dragged spacetime with it, creating a vortex. They published their findings recently in Science Advances.

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Read more: “Why It’s Hard for Black Holes to Get Together”

Called the Lense–Thirring precession after the two Austrian physicists who first mathematically described it over a century ago, it’s a phenomenon that’s been theoretical until now. “Our study shows the most compelling evidence yet of Lense-Thirring precession—a black hole dragging space time along with it in much the same way that a spinning top might drag the water around it in a whirlpool,” study author Cosimo Inserra from Cardiff University said in a statement.

“It’s a reminder to us, especially during the festive season as we gaze up at the night sky in wonder, that we have within our grasp the opportunity to identify ever more extraordinary objects in all the variations and flavors that nature has produced,” he continued.

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In other words, there’s a lot of weird stuff out there in space, just waiting to be discovered.

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Lead image: NASA

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Jake Currie

Posted on December 15, 2025

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Communication

- The Most Beautiful Science of the Year

- The Psychedelic Scientist

COMMUNICATION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Most Beautiful Science of the Year

Insights from Nautilus in 2025

By Nautilus Editors    December 24, 2025

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

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Einstein’s view was an inspiration for “More Than a Feeling,” a Nautilus article this year by Sean B. Carroll, in which the evolutionary biologist portrays a wonderful world of scientists who found their callings in the emotion of awe. That spirit, too, drives our journalism and essays, and as 2025 winds down, we look back at some of the beautiful insights and writing that defined Nautilus this year.

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On a sticky, late-spring night in parts of the eastern United States, you might witness one of the wonders of the animal kingdom: a constellation of hundreds of fireflies blinking in unison.

Illustration by Mathias Ball

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We needn’t get down to neurons and base pairs and biochemicals to be reminded of our animalness. Sometimes it’s as simple as a 4-year-old Homo sapiens standing in quiet stillness, mouth agape, gazing up at the towering Barosaurus and Allosaurus in the foyer of the American Museum of Natural History, momentarily unaware of the buzz of other humanity around her.

Maybe the emergence of beings like us is not hindered by hard steps but is simply slow. Perhaps the universe is teeming with alien civilizations—or will be before very much longer.

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Illustration by Cornelia Li

In the beginning, I was chasing Peter Putnam the fantasy, a forgotten janitor who’d discovered the structure of the mind. But the deeper I read, I found myself thinking, Wait, did a forgotten janitor seriously discover the structure of the mind?

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Bullie was the most caring in the group. Whenever someone else was ill, she would sit with her and comfort her. Bram and Wezel had the strongest friendship. There was just the two of them after their friends had died, and they did everything together: eating, sleeping, pottering about like an old married couple. Bullie, Bram, and Wezel were three of the 25 ex-laboratory mice with whom I lived between 2020 and 2023.

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Jackson Pollock’s paintings look like beautiful accidents.

As I walked through the freezer room, I continued to think about my dad’s brain, nestled in a shelf among other frozen brains, and my fear gave way to a strange mix of wonder and sadness. The once active neurons that fired electrical and chemical signals from axons to dendrites inside the crevices and folds of the left frontal lobe, home to the language center, were now quiet. The memories produced in the hippocampus were now frozen. These parts worked in concert to convert my dad’s experiences into the language of more than 4,000 essays and book reviews, two novels, and a memoir about his life as a New York Yankees fan.

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Illustration by Jorge Colombo

Built on the foundations of conservation and science, shaped by industry and politics, wolf reintroduction is a huge and messy paradox, a noble intention to save the wolf soaked in the wolf’s own blood.

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To stay alive in an Ice-Age environment, early humans would have needed cultural and physical traits foreign to their ancestors in Africa. Analysis of ancient DNA suggests these early humans adapted to their icy surroundings with physical traits passed on by their former mates: Neanderthals.

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It appears that moons actually might represent the most robust habitats in the galaxy.

Illustration by Maria Fedoseeva

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It’s impossible to know exactly when each of the five mutations happened. When, deep in my marrow, one thing after another went awry, and divided my life. Like all people who have been ill, my life is split into Before and After. The mutations must have happened in the Before, because that’s how leukemia works.

Asclepius was a Greek demigod and physician was said to have learned the secret of bringing the dead back to life from a snake. Christianity took pains to suppress the cult of Asclepius and demonize serpents, in scripture and art, which is one of the reasons humans learned to hate snakes.

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One evening, a full moon hung over the rainforest. Amid the sounds of monkeys, grasshoppers, and the shamans’ chants to forest spirits, Bruce Damer saw madre ayahuasca. He asked her, “Would you like to do this? How about we join together and travel and try to figure out how we were all born?”

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It was a hot day, and it smelled warm, resinous, homey, and alive. Even in that small patch of forest, each tree—piñons and junipers, bristlecone pines, and cypress—smelled distinctive, each plant had its own olfactory fingerprint, and together they created a complex and resonant symphony of a very particular smellscape.

Chris Lemons, a saturation diver from England, is in the rare position of having witnessed his own death.

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Philosophers are grappling with the idea that life and death may not be the only states of being in which organisms can exist.

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Across dinner tables, disciplines, and research sites, stories converged on a clear and sobering reality: Antarctica’s ice knows no politics, yet it faithfully records the consequences of our choices.

Today, spiritualism and mainstream science having parted ways, physicists have proposed a new way to “see” into a new dimension—by looking deep into the hearts of collapsed, dead stars that have been behaving strangely.

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Illustration by A. Kendra Greene

A few more miles and the atmosphere turns golden, rays diffuse and refracted, a sepia glow. By the time we are moving past downtown L.A., it does not matter that the windows are up. A headache is starting. I feel the change of the air in my lungs. The diminishing. The tightening. The hurt. The light outside is stunning, though, gorgeous, the way an ice storm is a kind of guilty pleasure—so beautiful and so terrible, so patently disaster or the precipice before.

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The human body is a wonder of adaptations. Our skin’s blood vessels swell to expel excess warmth. Sweat glands release droplets of water that free heat as they evaporate. But what happens when the cells inside our bodies get too hot?

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Chris Warren, aka the Echo Thief, sits in a chair in the center of his sound lab and sings. Each note hangs in the air, layering onto the next like a cake and building into a complex chord, creating a rich cathedral of sound.

Today, the anchoveta still swim, though in fewer numbers, and the seabirds still wheel above them. But their future, like ours, depends on whether we will grind them into meal until none remain, or whether we will let them remain what they have always been: the living silver of the sea.

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Illustration by Myriam Wares

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Perhaps no other animal is capable of being annoyed at a loved one’s irritating habit, then feeling sadness at the thought of how someday that habit will be remembered with affection and regret. What is more important, though: the differences between how humans and other animals understand death, or the similarities? To me it is the latter. The common essence of life’s preciousness and the finality of its loss.

Declining vaccination rates might paradoxically be a consequence of vaccines’ incredibly successful and safe track records: Most people alive today have no first or even secondhand experience with many of the illnesses before vaccines were available.

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According to myth, ghostly blue lights often called will-o’-the-wisp can trick travelers wandering through cemeteries or wading through wetlands, leading them off track and toward their doom.

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Lightspring / Shutterstock

As we enter the age of increasingly sophisticated human-chatbot interactions, preserving the uniqueness of our individual intellects may be the most important challenge humanity faces.

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On the Kenyan reserve, I felt melancholic knowing that when Fatu and Najin died, northern white rhinos would be gone forever. But thinking about the ordeal they’ve been through, the Jurassic Park-like efforts to resurrect their species, and the kinds of lives their offspring might lead, I was left to reflect on something else that Thom van Dooren, an environmental philosopher, said to me. “It bears considering whether it is better to just let the animals go extinct.”

I feel you, universe.

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Lead collage by Tasnuva Elahi; with illustrations by Jorge Colombo, Mathias Ball, Cornelia Li, Deena So Oteh, Tara Anand, Myriam Wares, Ellen Weinstein; photos by James Wills, Jan Zwilling and an image by Lightspring / Shutterstock.

Nautilus Editors

Posted on December 24, 2025

COMMUNICATION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Psychedelic Scientist

High on ayahuasca, Bruce Damer saw how life on Earth began. He may very well be right.

By Mattha Busby    December 16, 2025

Bruce Damer had the audience under his Gandalf spell. He was giving a keynote speech in a grand hall at Breaking Convention, a psychedelic-consciousness conference in Exeter, England, in April 2025. Tall and slender, very much bearded, and sporting two large gold hoop earrings, one on either side, Damer looked exactly like you would expect a sexagenarian psychedelic professor to look. A boyishly enthusiastic speaker, he said a psychedelic trip had transported him through time to face a deep trauma.

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“If you believe in a ‘mother ayahuasca’ or a healing force, I was allowed to experience my conception and birth and be in my mother’s belly,” Damer said. His birth mother had given him up because she and his father were too poor to raise him. Ayahuasca had released him from the pain. “Being in the belly, I could feel her love, and it healed,” he said.

“As a result of the clarity and the opening of the blockage that had been this sort of knot in my belly, my whole system opened wide,” Damer continued. “And I thought for a moment, I could potentially travel through time to a place where I’ve been working on the question of how life began, the birth of us all.”

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As Bruce Damer sees it, psychedelic experiences can lead to scientific breakthroughs.

In psychedelic science, a field dominated by scientists who are loath to be pigeon-holed as too woo-woo, Damer, 63, has become a cult figure by wearing his woo on his sleeve. His adoptive mother described him as “in his own world” when his new parents brought him home. And he has been his own thinker ever since. His science cred is sound: a Ph.D. in computer science from University College Dublin in Ireland, former relationships with Xerox and NASA, and papers published in journals like Astrobiology. Currently he is a research associate in the Department of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

The debate around the psychedelic renaissance has been dominated by claims that hallucinogens like psilocybin, LSD, and ayahuasca reach deep into the brain and ease anxiety, depression, and PTSD, especially when coupled with psychotherapy. A steady stream of studies has validated the compelling anecdotal reports, and the laws prohibiting the use of psychedelics are—bit-by-bit in parts of the world—being liberalized as people increasingly turn on, tune in, and feel better.

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But Damer contends psychedelics hold potential for more than addressing the mental health crisis. He is driven by the belief that psychedelic drugs can crack open the minds of scientists and other problem-solvers. In 2023, he founded the nonprofit organization the Center for MINDS (Multidisciplinary Investigation into Novel Discoveries and Solutions). Its philosophy: “Psychedelics and other consciousness practices may be our greatest underutilized tool for sparking paradigm-shifting breakthroughs.”

Damer is convinced ayahuasca sparked his own paradigm-shifting breakthrough. In the field of biogenesis, the study of the origin of life, leading scientists maintain life originated 4 billion years ago in the chemical stew of hydrothermal ocean vents. Damer’s hallucinogenic vision showed him life began in freshwater terrestrial hot springs. The “hot-spring hypothesis” for the origin of life, Damer told his audience at the psychedelic conference, “caused a paradigm shift in the science of astrobiology.”

Not long before Damer took the conference stage, he walked me through his long, strange trip in science and psychedelia. We sat in the sunshine on a second-floor deck adjoining the conference hall. Damer drank “functional” mushroom coffee (supposedly medicinal) from a vendor in the exhibition hall so slowly that I could imagine him counting the milligrams of caffeine in each gulp to titrate the doses. “If I drank it all in one go, I’d go to the moon,” he said to me. Damer grew up in Kamloops, a small town in British Columbia, but has spent much of his life in California. He spoke with a nasally West Coast accent that had a whimsical, poetic tilt.

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Damer said he considers himself mildly autistic and that he avoided psychedelics until his mid-30s to respect his low tolerance to psychoactive substances and the sanctity of his “eggshell mind.” He long feared that psychedelics could “mess up the machinery that I already have.” But looking back, he considers that “a typical nerd’s” approach to psychedelics. “Oh, I’m doing just fine,” he would tell himself. “I’m writing whole huge code bases. I don’t want to corrupt my system.”

THE TRIPPER AND THE BIOCHEMIST: Bruce Damer and David Deamer at Fly Geyser, a geothermal site in Nevada, where the pair conducted origin-of-life research in 2021. Photo courtesy of Bruce Damer.

Damer studied computer science at the University of Victoria before graduating with a postgraduate degree in electrical engineering from the University of Southern California in 1987. The computer software he wrote in the late ’80s included functionality for a mouse for Xerox, which gave him the chance to work on some of the first graphical interfaces. He went on to found one of the first post-Iron Curtain software labs in Prague, Czechia, in 1991.

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Damer established himself as a cyberspace forerunner and helped accelerate the development of early metaverse worlds like The Palace and Digital Space Traveler, one of the first social VR environments where people met as avatars, spoke via voice chat, and manipulated virtual objects in real time. He also began collecting computers en route to having 10,000, stored in a barn in the Santa Cruz Mountains in California, which today is a computer museum called DigiBarn.

This trailblazing work brought Damer into the orbit of Terence McKenna, an ethnobotanist and psychedelic mystic whose teachings are considered lore for psychonauts, and they began corresponding in 1997. Just months before his untimely death from brain cancer at age 53 in 2000, McKenna delivered Damer a giant bag of psilocybin mushrooms. “It was Terence inviting me to hyperspace,” Damer said.

Damer traveled to a hot spring in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains and on the first evening, Damer ate a couple of grams worth—an average dose—and had closed-eye visions of geometric patterns. But he wanted to experience hyperspace, so he then consumed the entire bag of more than 15 grams; a huge dose. “Instantly, you’re gone,” Damer said. “There’s no body, there’s no world, you’re in a void. It was a fantastic experience, but it was hugely terrifying in the beginning. I sang my way through.”

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“Suddenly I was more alive, like the light of life was on.”

In the year 2000, Damer achieved one of his dreams and began working as a contractor for NASA. As a child, he experienced “visual downloads” of life in space, which he drew up into illustrations and sent to the space agency. He spent nine years across 25 different contracts designing spacecraft, helping to construct a telerobotic lunar base and simulating space missions in 3-D, including the first reference design for a crewed mission to an asteroid.

As he spent time with the inner circle of the psychedelic research elite and helped manage the late Timothy Leary’s estate, Damer increasingly wondered if tripping could open the doors of perception to life’s origin. He had been pondering the origin of life since he was 14, when he was hiking through the sage brush hills near his home, and spied a mariposa lily emerging from the thawing ground. As he began considering how such beauty could sprout from a simple bulb after a long and sometimes harsh winter, the almost transcendent moment triggered far more than a botanical curiosity.

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“I crouched down to study this complex, emergent thing, and I wondered, where did it all come from?” Damer said, recalling his teenage self. “I felt excited that I found the question that really fascinated me: How did life itself begin?” He resolved to one day answer this totemic question. “I felt, ‘I’ve got a mission.’ ”

In 2013, his mission had liftoff.

That year, Damer camped in the Amazon, in a remote retreat center in eastern Peru. Inside a wooden maloca—a wooden teepee shaped structure—and guided by Indigenous shamans, Damer spent days drinking the foul-tasting ayahuasca, a brew of two hallucinogenic Amazonian plants.

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One evening, a full moon hung over the rainforest. Amid the sounds of monkeys, grasshoppers, and the shamans’ chants to forest spirits, Damer saw madre ayahuasca. He asked her, “Would you like to do this? How about we join together and travel and try to figure out how we were all born?”

Before he knew it, Damer experienced a vision of himself sling-shotting back through his life, conception, and witnessed “a sperm swimming backward into various ancestors.” He was pulled backward through 4 billion years of evolutionary time until he reached a dense microbial cloud. He burst through the vapor and arrived in a harsh Hadean landscape; a hot, volcanic world with freshwater hot springs filled with a primordial soup under a sky streaked with meteors and chemical haze.

There, he invited the madre to help him become a protocell—a simple version of a cell, composed of polymers—large molecules that are a blend of simpler ones. Damer became this protocell at the edge of a hot spring, a shallow, sun-bathed pool that experiences constant cycles of wetting and drying. Inside this form, he felt the wobble of one of the polymers. The sensation felt like a chemical system was booting up. In the vision, he watched himself split, merge, dry out, and rehydrate. “My body was this undulating, amphiphilic sac just stretching out in front of me,” Damer said.

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A large part of the sac suddenly detached and a set of neon polymers appeared. Damer screamed as he spotted a dying polymer inside the sac, visibly closing as it floated away. But that only seemed to give his own sac more vitality as he watched how the polymers undulated. “Suddenly I was more alive, like the light of life was on,” he said.

IN THE FIELD: Bruce Damer has repeatedly done field experiments at geothermal sites to test his visions of how life on Earth began, including at Fly Geyser in Nevada, where he collected water samples in 2021. Photo courtesy of Bruce Damer.

For months afterward, Damer attempted to decrypt the otherworldly scene. Then, in December 2013, during an ethereal breathwork practice—perhaps ironic as there was no breathable oxygen on the Hadean Earth in the beginning—he entered a state of reverie. He realized, he said, the dissolution of the polymers inside the protocells “was a necessary step to the first living, reproducing cells.”

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Biological life could never get started if the protocells continued to divide and their contents floated away. But Damer imagined millions of protocells huddled together. When a division failed and a protocell disgorged its polymers, they would be absorbed and conserved in the surrounding molecular soup. In his reverie, Damer witnessed the protocells nestled together, “with the walls between them fusing and forming a new layered phase,” he said.

In his vision, Damer said, he “watched systems of selected polymers perform the first functions of biology, including catalyzing reactions, storing information, and making copies of other polymers.” This took place in different parts of a pool and among interconnected pools. Damer reasoned the different pools “would provide a variety of resources and different selective environments,” enough to build a heritable, early genome.

“Selection was the sole hand at work and it was a powerful force, entirely sufficient to create life and all of its progeny, including us,” Damer said.

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Back in 1871, Charles Darwin—12 years after publishing On the Origin of Species—wrote to his close friend, botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker. Darwin proposed that the “first production of a living organism” may have been conceived “in some warm little pond.”

Just under 70 years later, in 1953, an experimental stimulation to replicate the supposed conditions of the prebiotic Earth was undertaken in a glass flask by chemist James Miller and Nobel laureate Harold Urey. The resultant study, published in Science, documented how amino acids and other complex organic molecules could form from simple ones.

At some point, far more complex information-bearing molecules—RNA and DNA—had to emerge from the primordial soup and begin copying themselves. That catalytic leap is at the crux of origin-of-life science.

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Most research since the Miller-Urey era is effectively split into two rival camps about where that chemistry could have occurred. One argues for deep-sea hydrothermal vents: mineral-rich, energy-loaded environments where alkaline fluids and porous rocks could have concentrated organic molecules and driven early metabolic reactions. The other points to Damer’s place, terrestrial hot springs, whose constant cycles of wetting and drying, experiments have shown, can knit molecules into longer polymer chains. This theory is championed chiefly by biochemist David Deamer, a biologist and research professor of Biomolecular Engineering at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

Damer’s ayahuasca vision was clearly primed by Deamer. Years before his experience in the Amazon, Damer had read Deamer’s work. The two met in person in 2009 when Deamer read a magazine article about Damer’s gargantuan collection of computers, including a six-ton Cray supercomputer. He was fascinated that one man could own a living evolutionary tree of computation. He invited him to dinner at his home in Santa Cruz County. After dinner, Deamer took Damer into the next room where he had a 24-chamber system to hydrate and dry environments to model the beginning of life.

In the vision, he watched himself split, merge, dry out, and rehydrate.

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Soon after, they held fortnightly meetings at Deamer’s home. “Bruce and I are a good team because my professional background is in chemistry and my research involves chemical and physical reactions, and Bruce’s background involves big picture scenarios,” Deamer told me. However, they constantly faced a stumbling block over how polymers could fuse and evolve. That process required a “kinetic trap,” a steady state in which the synthesis of polymers exceeded their decomposition.

Then came Damer’s vision. “I drew it out, and I wrote pages of notes to Dave on email,” Damer said. “He wrote back, ‘You found it. You found a kinetic trap. This is the way the polymers can get more complex and not break down.’ It was the eureka moment for me.”

In 2015, Damer and Deamer co-published their first paper together in Life, an open-access journal. The paper describes how hot-spring pools dry and refill, concentrating organics, polymerizing them, and packaging them into protocells. Their hypothesis spurred a 2017 Scientific American cover story: “The New Origins of Life: Did volcanic hot springs harbor the first living organisms?”

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Never content, Damer traveled to Rotorua, a geothermal park in New Zealand, to test the theory. He prepared vials with the ingredients needed to assemble strands of RNA, and used a pipette to run wet-dry cycles to test whether cycled hot spring water would react to produce life. “A bunch of geologists said it would never work,” Damer told me. “I did four cycles, dried the vials down and took them home. And it worked. There was large productivity of yields of RNA polymers.” Five years after seeing a hot spring in his ayahuasca vision, he said, “I found such a pool.”

After these experiments, Damer and Deamer published their magnum opus in 2020, “The Hot Spring Hypothesis for an Origin of Life,” for the cover of the journal Astrobiology, advancing the hypothesis that life didn’t begin in hydrothermal ocean vents but was spawned on terrestrial Earth.

For years, Damer didn’t dare risk “coming out of the psychedelic closet,” he said. He didn’t want to risk losing science grants or alienating journal editors by publicizing that his insight into dissembling protocells stemmed from tripping on ayahuasca. But with the publication of his and Deamer’s “Hot Spring Hypothesis,” he felt his standing in the science community was secure.

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In 2022, at a conference on psychoactive drugs held by Dennis McKenna, the late Terence McKenna’s brother, Damer spoke for the first time about how he “employed ‘these medicines’ for my own science.” He called his presentation “High Time for Science” and said he hoped his ayahuasca experience could inspire others to see psychedelics as “elixirs of discovery.”

SKETCHES OF GENESIS: Bruce Damer translated his psychedelic-inspired visions into these sketches of how life could have originated and evolved in terrestrial hot springs; to the right, a protocell in the process of budding.

In a subsequent essay of the same name, Damer spelled out the history of employing psychedelics in science. One example came from the 1960s when engineer Willis Harman had 27 people, including engineers, physicists, and mathematicians, take LSD and undergo tests of creativity. Harman wrote the psychedelic trip for the scientists inspired “creative problem-solving,” particularly in the “illumination phase,” and their creative high lasted for weeks afterward.

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Damer expanded his survey with references to Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the molecular shape of DNA, and Steve Jobs, who experienced new insights while high on LSD. He mentioned perhaps the most famous tripping scientist of all, Kary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize in 1993 for inventing the polymerase chain reaction technique. PCR allows scientists to make millions of copies of a specific segment of DNA from just a tiny sample, which turned out to be a key to sequencing the human genome. Mullis credits LSD with enabling the greater mental flexibility that contributed to his breakthrough. “Would I have invented PCR if I hadn’t taken LSD? I seriously doubt it,” he said in 1994. “I could sit on a DNA molecule and watch the polymers go by. I learned that partly on psychedelic drugs.”

In the essay, Damer delved into recent neuroscientific experiments that offer theories of how psychedelics unlock creativity. He cited research by psychopharmacologist Robin Carhart-Harris and theoretical neuroscientist Karl Friston, who propose psychedelics unwire the brain’s prior beliefs and assumptions. The liberated brain is free to absorb new sensory experiences, which, the scientists write, “increases the potential for ‘out of the box’ ideas, novel ideas, and new perspectives.”

David Deamer laughed. “I don’t interact with Bruce on his pharmaceutical adventures.”

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Glowing testaments to psychedelics as elixirs of discovery can quickly dissolve into magical thinking. And neuroscience deemed to offer evidence of how psychedelics rewire the brain for novel insights is being met by research that says not so fast: Differences in brain scans of trippers and non-trippers are inconclusive. Damer himself is aware that psychedelic reveries must be anchored in hard science. In “High Time for Science,” he wrote, with a splash of poetry, “The transcendent beauty of an equation that defines the structure of the universe, or a chemical cycle that has the power to initiate life must land in the proscribed, bland language of peer-reviewed journal articles and testable hypotheses.”

The two sides of Damer, the psychonaut and the scientist, endear him to Deamer. When I asked Deamer what he thought of Damer’s travels in psychedelia, he laughed. “Oh, I don’t know anything about that. That’s a separate part of Bruce’s life. I don’t interact with Bruce on his pharmaceutical adventures. He knows it changes your brain for a little while, and might make you more creative, but I left that behind in my college career. I tried LSD. And I said, ‘I don’t like my brain doing these things. I like my brain just as it is.’ ”

Deamer, though, had to admire Damer’s trip through the looking glass. “We don’t know how consciousness works,” Deamer said. “Nobody does. Maybe there is stuff that can be discovered by psychedelic experiences.” Deamer and Damer are alike. “Bruce and I are in love with ideas,” Deamer said. “We’re in love with the universe and the mysteries around us. Some human minds just love ideas. They love things happening in their brain. They’re paying attention to it. They’re putting things together and getting new insights. We’re doing psychedelics with our brains.”

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The reality is Deamer and the psychedelics-inspired Damer may very well be right about the origin of life on Earth. They may never win over scientists like Nick Lane, an evolutionary biochemist at University College London, who argues life needed the singular mix of physics and chemistry in hydrothermal ocean vents to originate. As recently as 2024, Lane and chemist Joana C. Xavier of Imperial College London explained in Nature that the wet and dry cycles of hot springs, key to Deamer’s and Damer’s hypothesis, could not lead to “the network of hundreds of reactions that keeps all cells alive.”

However, biologist Jack Szostak, a Nobel laureate, whose lab at the University of Chicago focuses on the origin of life, told me it’s likely that life did begin in volcanically active regions or impact craters on Earth’s surface. “Deep sea hydrothermal vents are not a plausible site for the origin of life,” he said. “Geothermally active areas,” he added, “are attractive because they do provide the environmental fluctuations needed to drive the primordial cell cycle.” Synthetic biologist Kate Adamala, from the University of Minnesota, who builds artificial protocells to probe how life might have first taken shape, agreed. “I’m on Team Dave and Bruce,” she said.

Presented with either criticism or praise of his origin-of-life theory, Damer remained as sanguine as ever. “You’re never going to have a complete understanding of the origin of life on the early Earth, because we just can’t reproduce the exact conditions,” he said. Of course, he believed the hot springs hypothesis would stand the test of time.

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Regardless of what time does tell, Damer’s charm will live on. His willingness to entertain the possibility that meaningful scientific insight might emerge from altered states of consciousness has opened a door that few researchers dare approach—a door which he boldly stepped through. Psychedelics are like telescopes that bend the path of light to bring faraway objects into sight, Damer said. “They are a metaphor for shaping the lens of the mind. Suddenly new things come into view.”

Lead photo: Bruce Damer at Breaking Convention, a psychedelic-consciousness conference, 2025. Credit: James Wills.

Mattha Busby

Posted on December 16, 2025

Mattha Busby is a freelance journalist covering drug and psychedelic culture, among other topics. His work has appeared in Wired, Rolling Stone, and Esquire.

Environment

- Tasting Tomorrow

- How All Those Forever Chemicals End Up on Your Plate

- Is the Mistletoe That inspires Holiday Smooching A Menace to Trees?

- Why Does My Lettuce Go Bad so Fast?

- Eat Your Molecules

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Tasting Tomorrow

Can we eat local on a warming planet?

By Jonathon Keats    December 26, 2025

In the Mexican city of Puebla, every family has a recipe for tinga. There might be disagreements about whether the stew should be made with chicken or beef, and some might quibble about the chipotle peppers, which can be smoked or sweet. But every poblano knows to serve tinga with corn tortillas. Last November, I was offered something different. The tortillas were made with teff flour from Ethiopia.

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At the same meal, I also ate tamales, another Mexican staple, conventionally filled with corn masa. The dough I tasted had a similar texture, but not quite the same flavor, because it was made with Ethiopian chickpeas.

I admit that I was not an innocent bystander. In fact, I was an instigator of this culinary experiment, one of dozens I’ve co-organized worldwide. Tasting Tomorrow (as we’ve dubbed it) is an attempt to figure out how heritage cuisine might withstand the impact of climate change, and how peoples from Mexico to Spain to India might cope with the stresses and strains on traditions that literally and figuratively sustain them.

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Is it the flavor? The texture? The way it’s served at a family gathering?

Nearly a decade ago, I started exploring the kinds of infrastructure that hold communities together. At the time, concern about extreme weather was mostly directed toward bridges and tunnels. Although these will certainly be imperiled in the future—and some have already crumbled—my focus has been on cultural infrastructure, the customs and rituals that help people live meaningful lives and relate to each other. I’ve come to believe that these qualities will ultimately matter more than feats of engineering, because they’re the foundations of cooperation. And none of these customs are more universal—or more primal—than food.

Heritage cuisines are highly vulnerable to global warming because their core ingredients are adapted to historical weather conditions. Maize is indigenous to Mexico. The corn in tamales and tortillas was first consumed because it was readily available. As the climate changes, those staples are unlikely to grow where they have in the past, at least without technological interventions that could redouble troubles, such as diverting rivers for irrigation. Shipping customary crops from afar exacts another environmental cost, equally steep, since transportation requires energy, typically in the form of fossil fuels. In other words, the global challenges of food and water insecurity are especially profound in terms of familiar foods and the sense of security they provide.

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At the University of Maryland and North Carolina State University, my colleagues Matt Fitzpatrick and Rob Dunn have developed a method known as climate analogue modeling to forecast changes to natural ecosystems. Their models use the United Nations’ IPCC data to predict future climates based on geography. Based on predictions of the weather in many locations 70 years in the future, they’ve identified locations today with equivalent weather conditions. The information is useful for conservation efforts—and future foodways.

MEXICAN FOOD REMIX: On the Mexico City campus of the Tecnológico de Monterrey, faculty experiment with alternative versions of traditional Mexican dishes using ingredients from Yemen, such as eggplant and bulgur. Yemen is a climate analogue for Mexico City. Photo by Isra Bistrain.

To see the future of San Francisco, look to Tangiers, Morocco. Saudi Arabia provides a good approximation of the Iberian Peninsula of Spain in seven decades. Nagaland, in the far northeast of India on the border of Myanmar, is anticipated to have the climate of the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa province of Pakistan, close to the border of Afghanistan. And Ethiopia is a reasonable proxy for Puebla. Seasonal temperatures and rainfall are both salient factors. San Francisco is expected to be more than 6 degrees Fahrenheit warmer and 13 percent wetter in winter. Puebla is expected to be nearly 8 degrees Fahrenheit warmer and 4 percent drier in summer.

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These predictions necessarily make myriad assumptions about political decisions. Indeed, the forecasts might motivate policy changes if presented in ways that people can experience in the present—notably, in the food they eat. Tasting Tomorrow is motivated by mitigation as much as adaptation. Substituting ingredients from climate analogue locations, we’re trying to figure out how to maintain culinary traditions in the future. But we also want people to let people taste the differences for themselves, something that cannot be done with raw data.

In Puebla last November, nearly 30 locals gathered at the Museo Urbano Interactivo to argue about what makes a dish like tinga uniquely poblano. Is it the flavor? The texture? The way it’s served at a family gathering? Based on these criteria, they cooked new versions of tinga incorporating ingredients we imported from Ethiopia, seeking to retain the qualities they most valued. They also made Ethiopian versions of tamales, cemitas, and mole de pollo, all of which were served at a community gathering. For a city as traditional as Puebla, the response was astonishingly positive. We didn’t get run out of town. The manager of a local restaurant quietly took note of the recipes.

Unfortunately for the future of the planet, the cheese was delicious.

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Collaborating with local people is the crux of Tasting Tomorrow. Their tastes and traditions guide every decision. In Nagaland, for instance, Indigenous cooks tried replacing wild rice with millet from Pakistan. (Responses were mixed. “Perfectly soothing,” said one. “I didn’t enjoy it,” another retorted.)

We’ve also worked with award-winning restaurants. During the Dubai Future Forum a couple years ago, we partnered with a chef from the Iberian Peninsula on a version of Manchego cheese, substituting the usual sheep’s milk with camel’s milk from the Gulf. At a ticketed dinner, elite guests digested a future that is highly probable unless people in their position take action. (Unfortunately for the future of the planet, the cheese was delicious.)

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The simultaneous need for mitigation and adaptation presents a paradox, since success of the latter diminishes the urgency of the former. Although Tasting Tomorrow does not resolve this paradoxical situation, I have witnessed the impact of putting unfamiliar ingredients in people’s hands, and encouraging them to try foods that are just noticeably different. The effect is to activate their sense of agency. A small choice, such as the decision to stuff a tamale with chickpeas instead of maize, initiates a cascade of larger considerations. Participants recognize that they have options, and experience the power of creativity to make the most of a bad situation.

Recently in San Francisco, the city I call home, I’ve begun to take the opposite approach, seeking to meet the paradox from the other end. I’ve started to distribute packets containing seeds to grow tangerine plants, a staple crop in Tangiers, one of San Francisco’s climate analogues. Each packet is printed with instructions directing the recipient to retain the seeds as a form of insurance for future generations, in case climate change continues unabated. The envelope in which they’re sealed is presented as a challenge to everyone living in the present: What actions are people willing to take to alter the planetary climate trajectory, ensuring that the packet will never need to be opened?

I still have a hankering for those teff tamales, but the seed packets feed a different part of the imagination. As important as it may be to collectively cook up palatable futures, it’s also essential that we communally hunger for a tomorrow that tastes like today.

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Lead image: Barak Shrama

Jonathon Keats

Posted on December 26, 2025

Jonathon Keats is an experimental philosopher, artist, and writer. He is currently a fellow at the Berggruen Institute, a research fellow at the Long Now Foundation, a research associate at the University of Arizona, principal philosopher at Earth Law Center, and an artist-in-residence at Hyundai, the SETI Institute, and Flux Projects. His most recent book is You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future. He is currently writing a field guide to more-than-human governance.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How All Those Forever Chemicals End Up on Your Plate

Apex predators and people may get the highest doses

By Molly Glick    December 23, 2025

After teeny ocean organisms pick up lingering forever chemicals swirling in water, these man-made substances travel up the food chain—from, say, krill, to anchovies, to the tuna that we place in our grocery carts.

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These chemicals, also known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances or PFAS, are used in more than 200 categories of manufactured products. They’re valued for their water-repelling abilities and heat resistance—but they also stick around in soil, air and water across the globe and don’t degrade over time due to their super strong chemical bonds. Scientists have documented PFAS in the environment in regions as remote as Antarctica.

Now, scientists have found that concentrations of some PFAS double on average each time the substances creep up one rung of the food chain, findings reported in Nature Communications. These increases seem to occur when animals absorb the compounds quicker than they can metabolize or expel them.

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An international team of scientists analyzed how PFAS moved across more than 100 food webs spanning land and water. Gathering data from 64 studies, they conducted the first meta-analysis of data on PFAS accumulation across food chains around the world. The researchers hoped to clear up inconsistencies in past research, which has pointed to both minor amounts of PFAS accumulating in some food webs and massive build-up in others.

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

The researchers traced levels of 72 different types of PFAS, and found that increases from one rung of the food chain to the next depend on the substance. For example, F-53B, a chemical used to manufacture some machine parts, showed the highest average increase—around three-fold from prey to predator. F-53B was designed as a less toxic alternative to a substance that’s restricted or banned in many countries. But like several of these new alternatives, its concentration multiplied as it stepped up the food chain at a greater rate than the predecessor.

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“Given what we know about PFAS toxicity from other studies, these extreme accumulation rates in top predators suggest serious health risks,” said paper co-author Lorenzo Ricolfi, a Ph.D. student who studies PFAS contamination at the University of New South Wales in Australia, in a statement. “This creates a cascading ecological risk: apex predators face disproportionately high exposure even in relatively low-contaminated environments.”

Scientists have linked PFAS exposure in humans to a whole host of conditions, including liver disease, kidney disease and cancer, but no definitive evidence that it causes these diseases exists yet. Still, PFAS have been detected in blood samples taken from people and animals around the world.

Ricolfi and his co-authors hope this research helps propel changes in policy governing the kinds of PFAS that accumulate most between predator and prey, especially the unregulated chemicals examined in the paper. And with these results, they’re particularly concerned about the newer chemicals brought to market to substitute for banned ones.

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“Urgent research into health impacts of these new chemicals is needed before they become as ubiquitous and problematic as the PFAS they’re replacing,” Ricolfi said.

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Lead image: William Buelow Gould / Wikimedia Commons

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Molly Glick

Posted on December 23, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Is the Mistletoe That inspires Holiday Smooching A Menace to Trees?

Study shows that parasitic mistletoe doesn’t hurt host trees in Oregon

By Devin Reese    December 22, 2025

For reasons that aren’t entirely clear, people started kissing under mistletoe in 18th century England. Perhaps because mistletoe stays evergreen throughout the year, flourishing while trees are dormant, it was considered a symbol of fertility long before the smooching tradition began.

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But paradoxically, mistletoe, comprising more than 100 species in the family Viscaceae, is a parasitic plant that’s thought to kill host trees and produce poisonous berries. The sticky coating on its seeds allows it to adhere to branches, from where it taps food and water from the bark. However, a study accepted for publication in Northwest Science reports that mistletoe in Oregon didn’t have negative health effects on oak trees.

Researchers from Oregon State University and the Oregon Department of Forestry used the urban forests in western Oregon cities as a natural laboratory to investigate the effects of western oak mistletoe (Phoradendron villosum) on non-native oaks. They collected data from 227 trees on mistletoe abundance and tree characteristics, including height, age, and condition.

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Read more: “The Ancient Wisdom Stored in Trees”

The results yielded no observable connection between mistletoe infestation and tree health. “Of the 42 trees with greater than 20 mistletoe plants in their crowns, none was in poor condition, one was moderate and 41 were in apparently good condition,” explained study author Dave Shaw, an OSU Extension Service forest health specialist in a statement.

So, at least for nonnative trees in urban settings in Oregon, mistletoe doesn’t appear to be a menace. Furthermore, “Western oak mistletoe is probably a benefit to wildlife in urban forests,” added Shaw. Its berries are toxic to humans, but favored by western birds, including bluebirds, who disperse their seeds. In their paper, the study authors cite other studies showing that mistletoe can foster higher bird diversity and abundance.

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The researchers also acknowledge instances of Oregon native white oak trees suffering negative health effects from heavy, long-term mistletoe infestations, so a nuanced approach to managing mistletoe is warranted.

In the meantime, smooch on!

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Lead image: Lithiumphoto / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on December 22, 2025

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

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Why Does My Lettuce Go Bad so Fast?

What happens when nature has a leaky raincoat

By Kristen French    December 22, 2025

There are few things less inspiring to the salad enthusiast than limp, slimy lettuce. Those contaminated greens don’t just look and smell bad—they can also make you sick. But why do bunches of romaine, mesclun and butterhead so quickly lose their perk and spoil before they can make it to the bowl?

A team of scientists based in Spain recently set out to solve this riddle using high-resolution imaging and chemical analysis techniques. They decided to focus specifically on romaine lettuce, as it tends to wilt and spoil more quickly than other kinds of lettuce, testing plants grown from seedlings in the lab.

The scientists hypothesized that spoiled greens might have something to do with nature’s raincoat: The leaves, flowers, stems and fruits of most plants are covered in a waxy water-resistant layer made of fats known as a cuticle. Previous research had shown that, at the nano-scale—a thousand times tinier than the width of a human hair—the cuticles of rose petals and olive leaf hairs have an uneven texture. Certain cells in the cuticle, known as pavement cells, are relatively uniform. But a second type, known as guard cells, are not, consisting of some water-loving patches and other water-repellant ones.

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Read more: “Fruits and Vegetables Are Trying to Kill You”

To test their hunch, the scientists analyzed the romaine leaves when they were fresh and after they had been carefully dried and found no meaningful differences between the two. But they did discover high concentrations of tiny, water-attracting patches clustered around the pores on both sides of the romaine leaves. These pores, known as stomata, allow the plant to breathe, exhaling water and inhaling carbon dioxide for photosynthesis.

The high density of these water-attracting patches in romaine lettuce makes it easier for water droplets to stick around, the scientists propose. This provides prime real estate for microbes, and potentially accelerates water loss, opening the door to contamination and spoiling. The team published their findings in the journal Physiologia Plantarum.

What exactly these water-loving patches do for the plant is still not entirely clear, the scientists point out, and will require further research. They may help plants absorb moisture from rain or dew, adapt to dry or humid environments, or shuttle around gases and moisture.

It may turn out that very features that allow your lettuce to breathe and adapt also make it go limp in your fridge.

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Lead image: Hawk777 / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on December 22, 2025

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

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Eat Your Molecules

By Kevin Berger    December 18, 2025    Illustration by Ellen Weinstein

Food, food, food. Eat salmon, just not farmed. Wine is good for you. No, it’s not. Fasting boosts your immune system. Check that, it gives you migraines. Cottage cheese is the best protein. What do you mean you don’t like kale? It fights cancer. No, really, ice cream protects against diabetes. Blueberries are the best antioxidant. Whatever that is. Vitamin supplements do nothing. Omega-3s in anchovies boost your memory.

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Oh, never mind.

Here’s Albert-László Barabási, a professor of network science and physics at Northeastern University, who studies the molecular makeup of food. “We have absolutely no clue what’s in our food.”

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Illustration by Ellen Weinstein

Barabási and food scientist David Wishart are on a mission to identify the “dark matter” of chemical compounds in food. They estimate an average food item contains 20,000 to 50,000 compounds. Their goal is to magnify the hidden environment that surrounds us, infiltrates our food and affects our health, for better and worse.

Indeed, the mix of food and the environment is the focus of this section. Our writers reveal what we can learn about ourselves today from the fact our hominin ancestors were once prey. They explain what’s likely to be cooking when our planet is on broil. And they brush away the negativity to explain how the environment brings out the many pleasures of eating in the here and now.

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Bon appétit.

Kevin Berger

Posted on December 18, 2025

Kevin Berger is the editor at large of Nautilus.

Evolution

- What Does Evolutionary Age Have to Do with a Species’ Extinction?

- When We Were Lunch

EVOLUTION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Does Evolutionary Age Have to Do with a Species’ Extinction?

Younger species of sharks and rays were more likely to die out

By Devin Reese    December 22, 2025

An old debate centers around what makes species vulnerable to extinction. Traditionally, the evolutionary age of a species was considered independent of how long it had been on Earth. Recently, evidence that age of a species affects its extinction risk has challenged this Law of Constant Extinction. In particular, in a new study, researchers at the University of Zurich (UZH) refuted the Law of Constant Extinction for sharks and rays.

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The researchers reconstructed the diversification of neoselachians (the group that includes modern sharks and rays) by modeling data from 20,000 fossils dating to the past 145 million years. “We were particularly interested in identifying when, over the past 145 million years, large numbers of new species emerged or disappeared, and how this can be explained,” said first author Kristína Kocáková of UZH’s Department of Paleontology in a statement.

The model turned up six periods of high shark and ray extinctions, of which four were previously unknown, including the longest-lasting one at the end of the Eocene 33.9 million years ago. The findings highlight the vulnerability of the neoselachians over evolutionary time, with lots of speciation and species turnover.

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Read more: “The Shark Whisperer”

The models also showed that extinctions were age-dependent, no matter the intensity of the extinction period. Newer species were more likely to go extinct than older ones, regardless of whether the extinction was caused by an asteroid or another factor. “If a species had existed for only about four million years, it was more vulnerable than one that had been around for 20 million years,” explained Kocáková.

Why would younger species be more likely to go extinct? The researchers suggested that younger species could be disadvantaged by smaller ranges and/or population sizes when extinction drivers strike. With an apparent selective pressure against young species of sharks and rays throughout deep time, age emerged as a persistent predictor of extinction risk.

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Over their long history of ups and downs punctuated by multiple intense extinction events, neoselachians have been on a downward trend. The number of new species hasn’t made up for the species losses over the past 40 to 50 million years, according to the study findings.

“Modern sharks and rays have already lost much of their evolutionary potential and have now also come under pressure from humans,” concluded coauthor Dr. Daniele Silvestro from ETH Zurich. “Understanding their past helps us recognize how important it is to protect the species that still exist today.”

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Lead image: Wonderful Nature / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on December 22, 2025

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

EVOLUTION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

When We Were Lunch

How being food for other animals has made us into the humans we are today

By David P. Barash    December 18, 2025

Alone in a canoe, Val Plumwood was gliding along a channel in tropical Australia’s Kakadu National Park in 1985 when a huge crocodile rammed her. She paddled to the shore as fast as she could, but the crocodile struck the canoe again and again. A thought flashed through Plumwood’s mind: “I am prey.” She grabbed hold of an overhanging tree, hoping to escape onto land.

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“Before my foot even tripped the first branch, I had a blurred, incredulous vision of great toothed jaws bursting from the water,” Plumwood wrote. “Then I was seized between the legs in a red-hot pincer grip and whirled into the suffocating wet darkness.” The crocodile rolled Plumwood underwater, trying to drown her.

“The roll was a centrifuge of boiling blackness that lasted for an eternity, beyond endurance, but when I seemed all but finished, the rolling suddenly stopped. My feet touched bottom, my head broke the surface, and, coughing, I sucked at air, amazed to be alive. The crocodile still had me in its pincer grip between the legs. I had just begun to weep for the prospects of my mangled body when the crocodile pitched me suddenly into a second death roll.”

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Plumwood surfaced only to be dunked for the third time by the crocodile. But when the croc rolled her above the water yet again, he briefly loosened his jaws, and she managed to scramble to a muddy bank and claw her way up it. After hours of painful struggle through the bush, a park ranger heard her cries for help and, remarkably, she was rescued.

Humans with their laughably blunt teeth and soft bodies are ill-equipped to defend themselves.

Plumwood was an eco-philosopher, deeply attuned to the connectedness of human beings with the natural world. Her survival allowed her to give the rest of us one of the most riveting accounts of what it means to be prey.

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“I glimpsed a shockingly indifferent world in which I had no more significance than any other edible being,” Plumwood wrote. “The thought, ‘This can’t be happening to me, I’m a human being. I am more than just food!’ was one component of my terminal incredulity. It was a shocking reduction, from a complex human being to a mere piece of meat.”

We may not think about being prey today because humans are the most successful predator on Earth—except for those occasional times when we’ve been taken down by a grizzly bear, lion, hyena, crocodile, or python. Yes, python. As recently as 2024, an Indonesian farmer, reported missing the day before, was exhumed from inside a 16-foot python. (After killing their victims by suffocation, these huge constrictors can dislocate their jaws and swallow a person whole, even if that prey item is larger than the reptile’s head.) But hominins, which includes us, have been prey for most of our existence, dating from when we broke from other primates 7 million years ago, a troubled predator-prey relationship that didn’t end just because we became human.

Being the hunted has left a deep impact on our personal and collective memories, with imprints that have, in the language of evolutionary biology, been “conserved,” not only in modern mythology but possibly in our genomes as well. It likely drove our ability to control fire, develop ever-more deadly tools, find security in social groups, even walk upright and speak. It also had its downsides: Our innate sense of fear, compounded by stress, which can waylay our bodies and brains, likely evolved from us being mere pieces of meat.

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It wasn’t always thus in the annals of human-evolution research. A drive to kill other animals (as well as each other) was considered key to our past and present. “Man the Hunter” and even “Man the Murderous Cannibal” were ascendant evolutionary tropes when it came to hypothesizing about our earliest inclinations, in popular as well as scholarly thought.

This perspective was largely initiated by the South African anthropologist Raymond Dart, famous for having discovered a species of Australopithecus (Australopithecus africanus), which lived 3 million to 2 million years ago. Dart’s hyperventilating insistence on our murderous, war-prone prehistoric inclinations was reflected in such influential writings as The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man (1953), and which inspired popular (and grossly misleading) books such as Robert Ardrey’s African Genesis (1977).

VAL & BIRUBI: Val Plumwood survived a crocodile attack in 1985 and gave us one of the most riveting accounts of what it means to be prey. The Australian eco-philosopher died from a stroke in 2008. Here she cuddles her foster wombat, Birubi. Courtesy of Plumwood Inc.

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Dart also discovered an A. africanus skull designated the “Taung child,” who died at age 3 or 4. Dart dramatically proclaimed the child to have been an early victim of human murder and cannibalism. Subsequent analysis by anthropologist Lee Berger in 2006 revealed that the skull shows talon marks around the eye sockets as well as indentations on the base of the skull consistent with injuries incurred by nonhuman primates who are carried off and eaten by eagles and other large predatory birds.

Nonetheless, the perspective of our ancestors being vicious predators—perpetrators instead of victims—was enthusiastically adopted, in part because it was consistent, as Washington University anthropologist Robert Sussman argues, with “a basic Judeo-Christian ideology of man being inherently evil, aggressive, and a natural killer.” Sussman points out that “to some degree it still dominates much thought by the public as well as professionals.”

Of late, however, the scientific balance has been shifting, partly inspired by the 2005 book, Man the Hunted, in which Sussman and anthropologist Donna Hart pointed out that most primates are prey rather than predators, a pattern seen in A. africanus like “Lucy” and her descendants.

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“The crocodile had me in its pincer grip and pitched me suddenly into a death roll.”

Sussman and Hart noted that A. afarensis was an “edge species,” inhabiting borderlines between trees and savanna, likely reverting to the former to sleep and to escape from huge ground-dwelling predators, which were roughly 10 times more abundant than they are today. These included cave lions, dire wolves, hyenas as big as bears, and bears as enormous as North American short-faced bears, which stood 11 feet tall on their hind legs. Tree-climbing ability would likely have been key to survival in such a tough neighborhood.

Moreover, recent fossils have been suggestive that our ancestors were on the menu for animals, although as with nearly all such data, the sample sizes are small. There’s OH-8, a Homo habilis specimen dated at 1.8 million years old, discovered by the Leakeys in Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania, and whose left foot and detached leg show extensive tooth marks from a crocodile. Plumwood’s experience, it appears, wasn’t unique. Ditto for another victim—labelled OH-35—who was evidently dismembered by one or more crocs, and whose other skeletal parts had been chewed by a leopard-sized carnivore. (It’s also possible, of course, that these early meals involved scavenging on carrion rather than killing live prey.)

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In 2025, scientists from the Institute of Evolution in Africa, Rice University, and the Archaeological and Paleontological Museum of Madrid published computer analyses of Homo habilis fossils (OH-7 and OH-65) that showed with “unprecedented reliability” that our ancestors of 2 million to 1.5 million years ago were food for leopards. The authors argue the new finding is significant because Homo habilis, who made stone tools and ate meat, has long been regarded as the turning point from prey to predator in our evolutionary history. In fact, they write, Homo habilis was “still more prey than predator,” and “unable to fend off top predators from their kills.”

Photo by ambquinn / Shutterstock

Where does this leave us today, experiencing our predator-free lives? We’re a peculiar species, in our anatomy no less than our intellectual accomplishments. Paleoanthropologists have been at pains to figure out how some of our notable traits evolved. Rebranding ourselves as hunted rather than exclusively hunter can help explain those key traits.

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Take upright posture. Standing on two vertical pillars while nervously scanning the horizon would have given prehumans a literal leg-up when it came to providing an early warning system. After all, it wasn’t just leopards and those saber-toothed terrors that stalked our early environments, but also dire wolves and a whole slew of other fearsome potential perps. Of course, standing upright might have made us more visible to these dangerous predators, but it also could have provided an opportunity to intimidate them. Even today, hikers who encounter a cougar are advised to make themselves as big as possible, to stand up tall, wave their arms, and shout. Did the savanna ring with the yells of our terrestrial antecedents?

Then there are tools. It used to be thought that those much-lauded big brains of ours were a prerequisite for using and, more so, making them. No longer. In the 1960s, Jane Goodall made the pioneering discovery that chimps not only use sticks to fish for termites, but they first smooth them by stripping away twigs and leaves. Fossil evidence shows that stone tools were constructed and employed as long ago as 3.3 million years (when ancestral hominin brains weren’t particularly impressive). It’s clear that our forebears were not only stone chippers but also makers of obsidian-tipped javelins around 280,000 years ago, as well as being likely stick sharpeners, the latter first appearing about 300,000 to 400,000 years ago, apparently whittled by early Neanderthals and Homo heidelbergensis. Tools and weapons certainly helped our predecessors fill their bellies and maybe defend against other hominins. But what about also defending themselves to keep from filling the bellies of their predators?

Once we consider the likely impact of being preyed upon by other creatures no less than preying upon them, many other fundamental human traits take on new meaning. Early communication by gesture and words? Quite likely helpful when it came to group cohesion, sharing information as to food sources along with water holes during drought, achieving social dominance, and the like.

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Oxford University’s Robin Dunbar has made the case that speech originated as cohesion-generating social gossip. But don’t ignore the payoff of being able to broadcast a prompt heads-up when a predator appears.

Photo by Thomas Marx / Shutterstock

Today, many animal species, from birds to primates, use remarkably precise alarm calls to warn of danger. Vervet monkeys employ three different kinds, each predator-specific: one for snakes (the monkeys look down), one for eagles (up), and one for big cats (clamber into the trees). Would early humans have been less vocally accomplished? Is it unreasonable to hypothesize that predator warning calls were among the first verbalisms used by our hominin ancestors? Imagine yourself back in those early days: What would you consider more important, sharing a bit of gossip or being warned that a saber-toothed cat is around the corner?

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And consider fire. Undoubtedly beneficial when it comes to cooking our own food, making tough carbohydrate-based plant matter as well as animal protein more digestible, nutritional payoffs that, as anthropologist Richard Wrangham has proposed, may have set the stage for our rapid brain development. Imagine our great, great Homo erectus grandparents sitting cozily around a mid-Pleistocene fire, roughly 1 million years ago, cooking dinner and swapping lies. Isn’t it likely that one thing that made those fires so cozy is that they probably kept predators away?

Even our lauded intelligence and cooperative sociality, which doubtless evolved for many different reasons, would also have been more than trivially useful for hominids and hominins when it came to outsmarting, or at least surviving, our hungry natural predators. (Quick note: “hominid” refers to any member of the great apes—gibbons, orangutans, chimps, gorillas, and humans, as well as their fossil ancestors, while “hominin” refers more narrowly to species in the direct human line. So, all hominins are hominids, but not vice versa.)

Like most of our primate relatives, human beings with their receding jaws, laughably blunt teeth, and soft bodies, are ill-equipped to defend themselves bodily. Here’s where sociality pays off. A consistent pattern is that relatively defenseless animals are especially likely to live in groups, which facilitates collective defense as well as providing more eyes, ears, and noses to detect danger and sometimes to visually confuse predators when numerous potential victims suddenly disperse. Notably, every species of diurnal, terrestrial primate is group-living. That includes us.

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Some years ago, I was hiking solo in the North Cascades of Washington state when I was surprised to see an odd-looking mammal, strangely flattened horizontally and walking in the snow with a curious rolling motion. A wolverine! It was the first and only time I’ve seen one in the wild. To my subsequent embarrassment, rather than reach for my camera, I reached for my ice ax. Granted that wolverines are known pound for pound to be among the most ferocious mammals, allegedly sometimes chasing grizzlies off a carcass. But they rarely weigh more than 30 pounds and have never been known to attack a human being. What possessed me?

John Byers, a professor of biology at the University of Idaho, spent decades studying pronghorns, the fastest terrestrial creatures in North America. Noting there currently aren’t any super-fast predators in North America, Byers hypothesized in his book, Built for Speed, that the dazzling velocity of these animals (incidentally, they’re not really “antelopes,” but a kind of goat) is due to them being haunted by the “ghosts of predators past,” now-extinct dire wolves and oversized cats. We’re similarly haunted, which probably explains why a trained biologist gave in to a momentary sense that I was somehow at risk: haunted by the ghosts of predators past.

Photo by Stu Porter / Shutterstock

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The impulse to fight or flee is deeply ingrained in our biology by way of a response system involving the amygdala (the brain’s “fear center”) and the hypothalamus, which, among other things, encodes memories of other fear-inducing events, providing context as to whether a current situation warrants special attention. And there’s our crucial adrenocortical axis, a neuroendocrine feedback loop that leads to the release of cortisol, a highly adaptive response to stress.

Neurobiologist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky has been especially effective in pointing out that stress is the body’s natural response to predators. Stress is “designed to save your neck” in hairy situations by channeling all the energy in your body to fighting or fleeing, Sapolsky has told Nautilus. That’s awfully important “when somebody is very intent to eat you.”

The problem is predator-free modern humans trigger stress in themselves. “That’s the distinctive thing that does us in—that’s not what stress evolved for,” Sapolsky said. “It evolved for dealing with a short-term crisis, yet we turn it on for 30-year mortgages. That’s where you pay the price. There’s virtually no organ system in your body that’s not thrown out of kilter in some way by chronic psychological stress.”

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Ultimately, we can take a healthy lesson from our evolutionary history as prey. Plumwood, who died of a stroke in 2008, wrote that her crocodile encounter italicized for her the reality that she was very much a part of a shared world.

“It is a humbling and cautionary tale about our relationship with the Earth, about the need to acknowledge our own animality and ecological vulnerability,” Plumwood wrote. The assumption that “animals can be our food, but we can never be theirs,” has disconnected us from the world in which we evolved and continue to inhabit together. We are “animals, positioned in the food chain,” sometimes on top, sometimes not: eater as well as eaten.

Lead image: Kamal15 / Shutterstock

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David P. Barash

Posted on December 18, 2025

David P. Barash is an evolutionary biologist and professor of psychology emeritus at the University of Washington. His most recent book is The Soul Delusion.

Geoscience

- Why Is Spain Spinning?

- Is Earth’s Core Like an Onion?

GEOSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Why Is Spain Spinning?

It isn’t because the Iberian Peninsula is dizzy

By Bob Grant    December 18, 2025

Spain is spinning.

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In fact, The whole Iberian Peninsula, which includes Portugal, is slowly rotating clockwise, according to new research published in Gondwana Research.

Scientists from Italy and Spain studied the movements of tectonic plates that drift slowly on the face of the Earth—rubbing, and grinding, and colliding, and diving, and separating, and apparently spinning. Specifically, the research team wanted to better understand the features and forces that occur at the interface between the Eurasian plate that underlies most of Europe and Asia and the African plate, which contains most of Africa. Those two plates interact across a vast distance, and one part of that boundary, just south of the Iberian Peninsula, has resisted clear characterization by geologists for many years.

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Researchers know that the two massive tectonic plates are moving slowly toward each other—at a pace of less than a quarter inch per year—but the plate interface that underlines Iberia is complex. “Until now we didn’t know exactly what that boundary was like in that environment, and what geodynamic processes are taking place is under discussion,” said co-author Asier Madarieta, a geologist at the University of the Basque Country, in a statement.

Read more: “What Happens to Google Maps When Tectonic Plates Move?”

So Madarieta and his colleagues combined satellite and earthquake data to get a better picture of the geological stresses deforming and straining the crust overlying the plates near that boundary. And that picture indicated that the Iberian Peninsula was performing a glacially slow, clockwise pirouette.

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Here’s how it works. The crust that lies just east of the Straits of Gibraltar is being deformed by the African and Eurasian plates smashing into one another. This alleviates some of the strain that would otherwise deform the Iberian Peninsula crust. But to the west of the Straits of Gibraltar, the peninsular crust is being pushed from the southwest as the two massive plates collide, the team of scientists explained. This induces the rotation.

Aside from inspiring whimsical alliteration, the findings could help pinpoint faults and folds in the crust, the movement of which may spark earthquakes. The methods the scientists used could also be applied to other, poorly-characterized areas of the Earth’s crust to help predict temblors.

As our world turns, it’s comforting to know that scientists are working to better understand the dynamic nature of the ground under our feet.

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Lead image: zelvan / Shutterstock

Bob Grant

Posted on December 18, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

GEOSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Is Earth’s Core Like an Onion?

Chemical layering deep inside may explain weird seismic wave behavior

By Devin Reese    December 16, 2025

Earth has been compared to an onion, with layers of atmosphere, crust, mantle, and interior. If you metaphorically peel off one layer, you may find one underneath with its own unique physical properties. Now, a study published in Nature Communications asserts that even Earth’s inner core might justify the onion analogy.

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University of Münster geochemist Carmen Sanchez-Valle led research to explain the odd behavior of seismic waves as they pass through Earth’s inner core. Researchers had observed that earthquake sound waves don’t behave as expected in Earth’s inner core. There, starting about 3,200 miles beneath our feet, they travel 3 to 4 percent faster when they’re parallel to Earth’s rotation axis than when they’re in the equatorial plane.

These deviations in wave behaviors, or “anisotropy” in seismic jargon, get more extreme as waves move deeper through the inner core. A leading hypothesis for anisotropy holds that when seismic waves may encounter organized crystals of iron alloy in Earth’s structured center, the waves literally deform the materials that make up the core.

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Read more: “The First Good Glimpse of the Earth’s Mantle”

Previous studies have provided evidence that, although the Earth’s inner core is mostly made of iron, with a small bit of nickel, its density implies some lighter elements in alloy with the iron-nickel crystal structure. Based on experimental work to see which combination of elements yields the estimated density, the researchers synthesized the materials of Earth’s core as a mixture of iron with small amounts of silicon and carbon.

To test the leading hypothesis, they mimicked the extreme conditions at Earth’s core, which required some extremely specialized equipment, appropriately dubbed the Extreme Conditions Science beamline PO2.2. Although it sounds like science fiction, the equipment pressed the alloy samples between two diamond anvils with flattened tips—heating them to about 1500 degrees Fahrenheit and compressing them to about 1 million times atmospheric pressure.

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“The diffraction patterns were analyzed after the experiment to derive plastic properties—specifically, yield strength and viscosity—of the iron-silicon-carbon alloys,” to see how readily the alloys deformed, explained co-author and University of Münster geoscientist Efim Kolesnikov in a statement. In modeling how waves would move through the compressed sample versus pure iron, Kolesnikov and colleagues found that the deviant wave behavior could be responding to a gradient in the materials that make up the core.

Deeper into Earth’s core, the percentage of iron is thought to increase, in essence forming layers with different properties, depending on the amounts of silicon and carbon present. Anisotropy might scale with these onion-like layers, concluded Kupenko.

So, the layering of iron alloyed with silicon and/or carbon in Earth’s inner core may explain seismic wave behavior that has intrigued researchers for decades. Our planet is still revealing its surprising complexity after more than 4.5 billion years.

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Lead image: Johan Swanepoel / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on December 16, 2025

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

Health

- How to Taste More Intensely

- Can True Love Help to Heal a Diseased Heart?

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How to Taste More Intensely

A tasting boot camp appeared to boost people’s taste buds

By Molly Glick    December 23, 2025

If you can’t detect subtle hints of chocolate in wine or hazelnut in caviar, don’t fret. We might be able to intensify our tasting abilities with training, researchers suggest. Take sommeliers, for example—they seem to refine their palettes over time through experience, rather than possessing particularly powerful senses from the start.

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But can anyone learn  to sharpen their taste buds? In a small 2022 study, researchers at Toho University in Japan reported that they helped people boost their ability to identify the four basic tastes—sweetness, saltiness, sourness and bitterness. The team first measured each participants’ taste thresholds, or the lowest concentration of a given taste that they could perceive. Then, they repeatedly exposed them to higher and lower concentrations of these substances to improve their sensitivity, asking them to correctly identify which unlabeled substance they tried until they got them all correct.

Now, some of the same scientists say this protocol can elevate a person’s ability to discern different qualities of sweetness.

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Read more: “This Meal Might Bring You to Tears”

With a group of 40 healthy adults, the team began by determining how much glucose, fructose, sucrose, maltose and lactose each person needed in order to taste it. Then, over three consecutive days, participants were repeatedly asked to memorize and correctly identify the different types of sweetness at concentrations lower and higher than this minimum. The training continued until they could accurately guess the mysterious substances at both these higher and lower concentrations. In each case, the individuals were eventually able to learn to taste different gradations of sweetness at smaller doses.

“Even subtle differences within the same taste quality can be discerned through taste training,” the authors wrote in their paper, which was published in Chemical Senses. “This result appears to validate the idiom ‘a discerning palate.’”

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The recent study does come with limitations—the sample size was small, for instance, and the researchers didn’t test how participants’ dietary preferences affected their taste sensitivity.

But with more research, this type of training could be used to treat taste disorders, which lack highly effective treatments. It may also help older individuals who develop anorexia as their sense of taste declines, among other aging-related issues that affect food intake.

It might not take years of wine-sniffing to become a flavor expert—a few days of taste boot camp might be enough.

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Lead painting by Philips Gijsels / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on December 23, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Can True Love Help to Heal a Diseased Heart?

How robust intimate relationships affect cardiac patients

By Kristen French    December 16, 2025

Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle believed that the heart was the command center of the body and the soul. Not just a mechanical blood pump, but the seat of emotion and intellect. Modern science eventually reassigned those latter functions to the brain. Still, the heart has clung to its reputation as love’s headquarters.

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Now, scientists are looking at whether love can actually affect the health of the heart, supporting healing when trouble strikes. Scientists from the University of Ottawa Heart Institute reviewed a dozen randomized controlled trials that evaluated couples-based interventions for heart disease. These trials, published through May of 2025, involved more than 1,400 patient-partner pairs. Instead of focusing solely on the patient, these programs looped in their partners to capture data and make improvements in lifestyle factors such as diet, exercise, medication management, and stress.

Involving intimate partners made a difference: More than three fourths of the studies showed couples’ interventions were more successful than patient-only interventions at getting patients to make healthier choices, such as quitting smoking, sticking with exercise, or taking medications correctly.

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Read more: “Can You Die From a Broken Heart?”

But the signal fizzed out when it came to actual cardiac outcomes: Sometimes they improved, and sometimes they didn’t. Mental health effects were mixed, too. Some studies showed reduced depression or anxiety for patients and their partners, but many found no significant differences. And relationship quality didn’t budge in the three trials that measured it. The findings were published in the Canadian Journal of Cardiology.

This gap in the results is part of the point, the scientists argue. Outcomes didn’t improve across the board when couples were recruited to the effort because not all relationships are made equal. Relationship quality makes a difference, and should be the focus of future work, they suggested.

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“Considering the well-established literature highlighting that relationship quality impacts heart health, it is surprising that such a limited number of studies have targeted relationship quality in their interventions,” said co-author Heather Tulloch, a psychologist at the University of Ottawa Heart Institute, in a statement. “Sometimes heart disease brings couples closer together, but often it’s a challenge for the relationship and both people in it. We’ve learned over the years that cardiac events do not only happen to the patient, but to the couple.”

For cardiac rehabilitation, they propose a “stepped care” approach—brief relationship education for even the most devoted partners, targeted relationship-enhancement support for couples under strain, and referral to specialized couples therapy when distress runs deeper.

The takeaway is less “love heals the heart” and more “recovery is rarely a solo sport.” Partners can be powerful advocates in the day-to-day choices that keep hearts beating steadily. But if we want the relationship itself to get healthier, it must be treated like part of the patient.

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“To improve heart health, we must treat the patient’s heart and nurture the relationship,” said Tulloch.

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Lead image: Anatolir / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on December 16, 2025

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

History

- An Ancient Fingerprint Among Clues to a 2,000-year-old Invasion of Denmark

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

An Ancient Fingerprint Among Clues to a 2,000-year-old Invasion of Denmark

Previously unexamined, “remarkable” evidence could help scientists track down the unsuccessful attackers whose boat was thrown in a bog

By Molly Glick    December 16, 2025

More than 2,000 years ago, a mysterious band of attackers descended on an island called Als off Denmark’s coast. Locals seem to have successfully fought back against the marauders and dumped one of their boats—chock-full of weapons—into a bog to celebrate their defeat of the invaders.

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Remnants of this ancient battle were unearthed in the 1880s by people digging for peat in the Hjortspring bog on Als. Researchers excavated the invaders’ boat in the 1920s and recovered nearly half of it, which provided enough material for a full reconstruction. This ancient wooden plank boat is the only intact vessel of its kind ever discovered in Scandinavia, and it resembles boats depicted around a millennium earlier in Bronze Age rock art.

The bog boat still begs a major question: Where did the invaders actually invade from, and when? Researchers have offered a few guesses to solve this maritime mystery, suggesting the invading party came from the nearby island of Funen, or even the northern coast of Europe. The weapons found within the boat look like those used throughout northern Europe during the period, though wooden containers on board resemble ancient ones previously found in countries including modern-day Denmark, Germany, and Sweden. As for attaching a date to the artifacts, the chemicals previously applied to the boat make it unfeasible to perform radiocarbon dating on the wood, though some wooden fragments have been found nearby in the bog that were dated back to the fourth or third centuries B.C.

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DUST FOR PRINTS: A fingerprint could lead scientists to the suspects of the failed attack on Als. Video by Lund University.

Now, a team from Sweden and Denmark have drawn compelling hints from bits of the boat that haven’t yet been studied by scientists—caulking and cord materials. They found that the caulk was composed of animal fat and pine pitch, according to a paper recently published in PLOS One. Yet Denmark didn’t have many pine forests at the time, a key detail that might illuminate the identities of these vanquished warriors.

The pine pitch could’ve arrived to areas near Als through trade, but this finding could also mean that the boat was constructed east of Denmark somewhere along the shores of the Baltic Sea, where there were more pine forests at the time. That means the invaders may have traveled hundreds of miles, possibly from parts of Poland or Sweden, for example, the authors suggested. Carbon dating of the cords and caulk also pointed to origins in the fourth or third centuries B.C., confirming earlier estimates.

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Read more: “We Need to Talk About Peat”

That wasn’t all the researchers found—they also encountered a partial human fingerprint in the caulking material. “This remarkable fingerprint provides a direct link to the ancient seafarers who used this boat,” the authors wrote. It’s tricky to discern who left this impression because “these ridge sizes fall within average distributions for both adult male and females as well as for juvenile adults, making it difficult to say much about the individual who produced the print.”

If the attackers indeed came from a far-off land, they noted, this means that the Als invasion was planned in advance and highly organized. This suggests that political battles raged throughout Scandinavia long before the Viking period that was characterized by raucous raids.

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Now, the authors want to sample potential traces of DNA from the caulking to learn more about the seafarers, and they hope the new findings can “open the door to finally solving the mystery of the boat’s provenance.”

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Lead image: Boel Bengtsson

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Molly Glick

Posted on December 16, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Math

- Ancient Math Hidden in Oldest Known Floral Pottery

MATH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Ancient Math Hidden in Oldest Known Floral Pottery

Bowls from the Halafian culture of Mesopotamia suggest people used art to enumerate their rapidly changing world

By Molly Glick    December 15, 2025

If you take a close look at the pottery bearing some of the oldest known plant art, you can find the buds of mathematics—advancements that seem to have emerged millennia before the invention of writing or formal numeric systems.

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It’s difficult to track humanity’s development of mathematical skills before writing or numbers came onto the scene, but art can offer some promising hints. Early ancient art mostly consisted of relatively straightforward depictions of animals and humans, but later works represent a critical shift in which people began to exhibit more complex visual flair and an increasing grasp of geometry.

This includes sophisticated pottery from the Halafian culture of northern Mesopotamia, a society of farmers. A team from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in Israel analyzed ancient botanic illustrations found on Halafian pottery from 29 archeological sites spanning 6200 to 5500 B.C. to learn more about these floral findings.

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EARLY GEOMETRY: Researchers found carefully designed symmetrical arrangements of flower petals on Halafian pottery. Image from Garfinkel, Y., et al. Journal of World Prehistory (2025).

“These vessels represent the first moment in history when people chose to portray the botanical world as a subject worthy of artistic attention,” the study authors, Hebrew University archeologists Yosef Garfinkel and Sarah Krulwich, said in a statement. “It reflects a cognitive shift tied to village life and a growing awareness of symmetry and aesthetics.”

By closely inspecting more than 700 pottery fragments adorned with plant motifs, Garfinkel and Krulwich noticed a fascinating pattern: They found floral bowls with petals arranged into geometric sequences of 4, 8, 16, 32, and 64, findings reported in the Journal of World Prehistory.

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Read more: “Finding the Color of an Empire”

“The ability to divide space evenly, reflected in these floral motifs, likely had practical roots in daily life, such as sharing harvests or allocating communal fields,” Garfinkel added.

This suggests that these pieces of pottery were more than pretty possessions—they helped people make sense of their surroundings and think through complicated tasks. This unfolded thousands of years before the world’s first known writing system, cuneiform, emerged in Mesopotamia around 3000 B.C.

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“These patterns show that mathematical thinking began long before writing,” Krulwich said. “People visualized divisions, sequences, and balance through their art.”

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Lead image: Osama Shukir Muhammed Amin FRCP(Glasg) / Wikimedia Commons

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Molly Glick

Posted on December 15, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Microbiology

- The Problem With Vaccination Shortfalls in Livestock

- These “Living Rocks” Are Living It Up

- The Dark Matter of Food

MICROBIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Problem With Vaccination Shortfalls in Livestock

Global rates are too low to prevent disease spread

By Devin Reese    December 25, 2025

Farm animals are attacked by a whole slew of pathogens—from the bacteria causing anthrax to the virus causing avian flu. Louis Pasteur derived the first live vaccines for animals in the 1850s, yet we’re still fighting global infections that threaten to take down livestock and spill over to humans. Because farm animals share close quarters, their transmission rates are high, leading to deadly outbreaks. Case in point: the recent uptick of lumpy skin infections in cattle, prompting the French government to deploy its army to help stem the spread with vaccinations.

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A new study published yesterday in PNAS collated global disease and vaccination data for the 104 diseases most common in cattle, poultry, and pigs. A collective of researchers from universities and One Health organizations in the United States, France, Switzerland, and Belgium aimed to gather systematic data on global vaccination coverage to expand prevention and control of livestock diseases. They pooled information from the last 20 years’ worth of country-wide reports on vaccination programs and stats from World Animal Health System, a global reference for animal diseases.

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

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Spanning more than 200 countries and territories, the study homed in on the top 11 diseases most targeted by official vaccination programs. The results revealed vaccination shortfalls across the board. In cattle, vaccination rates are 16.64 percent for foot and mouth disease; 33.80 percent for lumpy skin disease; 11.57 percent for anthrax, and 7.93 percent for rabies. In poultry, vaccination coverage is 16.71 percent for infectious bronchitis and 17.62 percent for an extremely contagious disease called Newcastle. And in pigs, the rates are 6.56 percent for classical swine fever, 4.96 percent for anthrax, and 8.08 percent for rabies.

Looking at which countries were most affected by each disease relative to their vaccination rates, they identified places where preventative measures most need bolstering. The weakest links in the global vaccination chain were in India and Argentina for cattle diseases; China and Russia for pigs; and China, Brazil, and Iran for poultry. In China, for example, estimated anthrax cases in pigs for 2025 totaled 118, against a worrying backdrop of only one percent vaccine coverage.

The researchers concluded that current vaccination rates for livestock might not be sufficient to prevent diseases that threaten food security and humans, noting that “global vaccination trends in at-risk regions have remained relatively stagnant over time.” As for solutions, they argued that integrating all the available evidence on disease transmission and vaccination rates in livestock will provide a baseline from which to make improvements toward better global health.

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Lead image: PeopleImages / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on December 25, 2025

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

MICROBIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

These “Living Rocks” Are Living It Up

Unassuming ancient microbe communities are surprisingly skilled at storing away lots of carbon

By Molly Glick    December 19, 2025

You might think you’re looking at a bunch of mossy rocks, but you’re actually gazing at some of the world’s oldest living creatures—and they’re doing great.

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Communities of microbes gobble up dissolved minerals in water and turn them into these solid, rock-like structures called microbialites. Researchers have found fossilized microbialites that are around 3.7 to 3.5 billion years old, which might represent the oldest organisms found on Earth.

Around a billion years after that, microbialites may have transformed our planet forever—researchers think that photosynthesizing cyanobacteria building these structures injected oxygen into Earth’s atmosphere and oceans for the first time. This unique ability enabled them to dominate the planet until more organisms adapted to oxygenated living. Today, microbialites dwell in aquatic environments around the globe, including the super salty Shark Bay in Australia and freshwater lakes in Canada.

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Read more: “When Did Life on Earth Begin?”

Researchers want to better understand how microbialites transformed the world’s carbon cycle and geological evolution many millennia ago, but it’s hard to glean such insights from fossils. To see how these creatures interact with their environment today, an international team of scientists inspected microbalites along the southeastern coastline of South Africa. These sites, with water full of calcium seeping from coastal sand dunes, provide uniquely tough conditions for life.

MARVELOUS MICROBES:  A cross-section of a quickly growing microbialite found on South Africa’s coast. Photo by Thomas Bornman.

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This work revealed that microbialites are far more than living relics, the team reported in Nature Communications. They grow remarkably quickly even in inhospitable environments, the researchers found, sequestering plenty of carbon along the way—the microbialites they studied take up the equivalent of up to about 3 pounds of carbon dioxide per square foot each year. Picture a tennis court-sized area locking away as much carbon dioxide as three acres of forest annually.

“These ancient formations that the textbooks say are nearly extinct are alive and, in some cases, thriving in places you would not expect organisms to survive,” said study co-author  Rachel Sipler, a marine biogeochemist at the Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences in Maine, in a statement. “Instead of finding ancient, slow growing fossils, we’ve found that these structures are made up of robust microbial communities capable of growing quickly under challenging conditions.”

Sipler and her colleagues were also surprised to learn that the microbialites sucked up roughly as much carbon during the night as during the day, which revealed that “the microbes are utilizing metabolic processes other than photosynthesis to absorb carbon in the absence of light, similar to how microbes living in deep-sea vents survive.”

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Now, these mysterious living rocks offer compelling clues into both the Earth’s evolution and the future of carbon sequestration in a warming world.

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Lead image: Rachel Sipler, Bigelow Laboratory for Ocean Sciences

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Molly Glick

Posted on December 19, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

MICROBIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Dark Matter of Food

Exposing the chemicals that affect our health and behavior

By Elena Kazamia    December 18, 2025

As I swirled and sniffed the red wine in my glass, I felt relieved I didn’t smell any corpses. There was a hint of blackberries—the way the whole bush of the ripe fruit smells after a summer rain, earthy and slightly tart—but mercifully no wisps of decaying flesh or urine. Unfortunately, knowing the wine contained the chemicals cadaverine, spermine, and putrescene, responsible for the rancid smell of bodily effluents and rot, somewhat spoiled the experience.

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I learned about this gruesome trio of chemicals in wine from FooDB, the world’s largest database of the chemical composition of foods, launched in 2011 by David Wishart, a professor of computing and biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Canada. It’s an incredible project, designed to deliver healthy new insights into the interactions of food, the environment, and us.

Plenty is known about key compounds in food responsible for nutrition, but they represent only a tiny fraction of the molecular makeup of food—less than 10 percent, estimates Wishart. The rest is “nutritional dark matter,” a term coined by Albert-László Barabási, a professor of network science and physics at Northeastern University.

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“We started digging and realized we have no clue what’s in our food.”

“The tantalizing thing about dark matter is you never know whether this obscure compound may in fact be the reason why a food is particularly healthy, or particularly bad for you, or why it produces certain effects or behaviors,” Wishart told me recently. “Our guess is that an average food item probably has 20,000 to 50,000 compounds.”

For the past two decades, Wishart and Barabási have been on a mission to identify those compounds in foods. The compounds include the natural molecules in food and those absorbed from the environment.

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“Just like a magnifying glass can focus light from the sun into a pinpoint spot, food focuses its chemicals and the external environmental effects—microbes, weather, insects, man-made processing chemicals, colorants, preservatives—that go into growing, harvesting, or processing food into a single edible morsel,” Wishart said.

To date, FooDB lists more than 70,000 chemical compounds in food. For example, the FooDB entry for cherry tomatoes lists 3,977 compounds and pasta 4,049. Since its launch, FooDB has identified approximately 40,000 previously unknown compounds. “We have just scratched the surface,” Wishart said.

Photo by Danijela Maksimovic / Shutterstock

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Mining the deep chemicals in food, Barabási explained, began with the drive to capture the scale of their nutritional value, “Ten years ago, we started to look at nutritional databases like the USDA’s, and we were shocked to realize they only follow 150 molecules,” he said. “But we started digging further and realized we have absolutely no clue what’s in our food.”

Barabási and Wishart argue that focusing only on a handful of nutrients, most of which are energy sources, nutrition science has ignored important regulators of health. Sugars, fats, and proteins build and power our bodies, but we are also sensitive to the finer ingredients in food. In eye-opening detail, the two scientists are revealing the complex ways those ingredients shape our metabolic function and health.

I asked Wishart for an example, and he started me off with some good news. The Mediterranean Diet, it turns out, is not hype. It has chemical support.

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A chemical called 3,3-dimethylbutanol is believed to be responsible for the health benefits of consuming olive oil, grapes, and raisins, all staple ingredients of the Mediterranean Diet. This chemical prevents a group of gut bacteria from successfully digesting a group of chemicals called cholines in fats and red meat into an “atherotoxin” called trimethylamine N-oxide, or TMAO, which is elevated in the blood of patients suffering from cardiovascular disease.

“So, this obscure food metabolite has a preventative effect for heart disease by acting on certain enzymes for certain bacteria that certain people have,” Wishart said. “This might explain what’s called the French paradox, which is why people in France can eat fatty foods and have very low heart disease rates.”

Only about 5 percent of diseases seem to have a genetic component. The other 95 percent is the environment.

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Wishart’s analysis is also showing that some ballyhooed food ingredients do, in fact, nothing. Flavonoids, a group of polyphenols, highly abundant in red wine, have long been hailed as defenders of good health. They are strong antioxidants, which in a test tube means they will react quickly with corrosive compounds, diffusing their potential for cellular damage. It was hypothesized that antioxidants must be counteracting the negative effects of red meat consumption. “But it turned out that the polyphenols are not bioavailable. You can eat them, but they just basically are inert, and they go right through you,” Wishart said.

Another telling example is fiber. While a diet high in fiber is generally considered healthy, it can worsen symptoms for individuals with irritable bowel syndrome, a common condition lacking a known clinical cause. An estimated 25 to 45 million people in the United States suffer from it.

Some of the early discoveries identified butyric acid as the chemical that is partly responsible for the health benefits of eating fiber, including its role in preventing cancer. Butyric acid is produced by a special group of gut bacteria that digest the fiber and must be made inside the body to confer its health benefits, Wishart explained. But the same group of bacteria can also stimulate an inflammatory immune response, if bile salts—produced by the liver in response to cholesterol—are elevated. Simply looking at “fiber”—the main structural ingredient—would in both cases have missed the point. It is the dark matter metabolites in how fiber is digested, Wishart said, that are causally linked to its health benefits and IBS.

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Photo by Danijela Maksimovic / Shutterstock

Digestion itself is another step in the process of how food shapes our health and moods. “The range of things that are produced by food or a combination of food in the gut is really intriguing,” Wishart said.

He pointed to two compounds, cresyl sulfate and indoxyl sulfate, which emerge in the gut from digesting the amino acids, tyrosine and tryptophan, famously elevated in turkey, fish, meats including lamb and pork, and other proteins like soy. Normally the compounds are secreted in urine, but, Wishart explained, they can exist in the blood and form toxins.

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“Those can damage the heart, the kidneys, the liver,” Wishart said. “If they get into the brain, they cause depression and anxiety. So, we’re now starting to see this association between food and mood and how these really obscure compounds can have profound effects on a person’s behavior.”

People heading into their senior years should be especially mindful of what they eat, as food toxins produced can accumulate more dangerously. “As you get into your 50s and 60s, you need to be careful,” Wishart said. “A lot of the barriers that your body has created to prevent food chemicals from acting adversely break down. The blood-brain barrier starts to break down. The gut barriers start to break down. And so, these toxins start leaking into your bloodstream or into your brain. So, it’s time to be quite careful and aware of what’s in food. We’re dealing with a more delicate system.”

The food scientists are turning up timeless insights into evolution. At some point, most of the food we consume was alive. The chemicals that make up the bodies of plants, animals, and fungi, reflect the needs and lifestyles of these species before they arrived on our plate.

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Because of plants’ sedentary lifestyle, Barabási said, they lean on the language of chemicals for communication and defense. Some polyphenols are signaling molecules, a list of instructions that regulate the plant’s growth hormones, while others are potent insect poisons. The chemical vocabulary of plants is advanced, precise, and highly evolved, reflecting millennia of co-evolution between them and the various herbivores that consume them. Given that with every bite of a vegetable, we are ingesting the entire dictionary of chemicals the plant evolved, it is perhaps unsurprising that most of these slip right through—they were not intended for us.

Photo by Danijela Maksimovic / Shutterstock

Or not entirely intended for us. By looking more closely into the chemical composition of food, the scientists have found that our bodies have evolved to recognize some of the more obscure plant chemicals and their derivatives.

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For example, Wishart said, our cells contain an “aryl hydrocarbon receptor,” which largely manages our bodies’ immune response to toxins. The receptor is found in every tissue and organ in our bodies and can kick off a range of inflammatory cascades. But in the intestine, it also responds to indole-3-carbinol, a plant derivative produced during the digestion of collard greens and kale. When indole-3-carbinol binds the receptor here, a protective mechanism is kicked in, which strengthens the gut’s physical barrier. Over the long term, this decreases the risk of developing colon cancer.

Not all food scientists are tantalized by the hunt for nutritional dark matter. One is Kevin Hall, formerly of the National Institutes of Health, who left the agency citing censorship over his research into the risks of ultra-processed foods. Hall is the author, with health journalist Julia Belluz, of the 2025 book, Food Intelligence: The Science of How Food Both Nourishes and Harms Us. They feature Wishart in the book and gently chide him for his hyperfocus on food chemistry. “If you’re a wine lover, you might not want to have a glass with David Wishart. He sees the ancient beverage, all food really, differently from most people, in what is sometimes an uncomfortable level of detail.” The authors portray the search for nutritional dark matter as ultimately reductive. “Taking food apart and analyzing its chemicals takes them out of context, not only from their original structures, but from their social, environmental, and health context,” they write.

It’s a fair criticism in a book that puts its spotlight on the social systems that incentivize cheap, calorie-dense, ultra-processed foods that overwhelm human biology and make it extremely difficult to choose healthy diets.

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But in fact, Wishart and Barabási are sketching a big picture of the environment. While they are exposing the chemical depths in food, and their role in metabolic function (for better and worse), they are refining the portrait of the chemicals that food acquires from the environment, including pesticides, microplastics, and preserves. By the summer of 2026, Wishart expects to have a detailed portrait of 1,000 chemicals that form a connection between food and the environment.

How, exactly, the seemingly bottomless trove of chemicals in food affects our health remains an investigation for the ages. As they amass data, Wishart said, the search seems ever more imperative. Both he and Barabási compared the hunt for nutritional dark matter to the Human Genome Project. The more scientists learned about genes and their functions, the more they realized that genes weren’t the main cause of diseases. “Only about 5 percent of diseases seem to have a genetic component. The other 95 percent is the environment,” Wishart said.

Ultimately, the food scientists said, bringing the chemical makeup of what’s on our plates into the light will provide a wide new lens on the environment’s impact on our health. It’s never good to be left in the dark.

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Lead image: Danijela Maksimovic / Shutterstock

Elena Kazamia

Posted on December 18, 2025

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

Neuroscience

- The Silver Lining in Disappointment

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Silver Lining in Disappointment

It triggers a reaction in the brains of mice that helps them change their behavior

By Kristen French    December 17, 2025

Disappointment stings. But this feeling may be more useful than you might think. It seems to help mice change their behavior so that they can avoid similar outcomes in the future, a skill essential to survival for many living things.

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Scientists from the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST) Graduate University have found that disappointment actually triggers specific changes in the brains of mice that predict adaptive behavior. The findings, which were published in the journal Nature Communications, could help scientists understand a variety of diseases and disorders, from addiction to obsessive compulsive disorder to Parkinson’s disease.

“The brain mechanisms behind changing behaviors have remained elusive, because adapting to a given scenario is very neurologically complex,” said co-author Jeffery Wickens, head of the Neurobiology Research Unit at OIST, in a statement. “It requires interconnected activity across multiple areas of the brain.”

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Read more: “Where Is My Mind?”

Wickens and his colleagues trained mice to navigate a virtual maze, meting out a sugary reward when the rodents were successful. They then switched the route, so the mice lost the sweet treat. Using an advanced imaging technique known as two-photon microscopy, they monitored the release of neurotransmitters in the mouse brains in real time as they navigated the maze.

When the goodie the mice had come to expect suddenly went poof, the scientists observed acetylcholine flooding the striatum, a part of the brain associated with movement and reward. The greater the release of neurotransmitter, the more likely the mice were to change their behavior, trying out new routes through the maze. This wasn’t the case, however, during the training phase when they made a wrong choice—only after they had learned to expect the sugary treat.

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To confirm their findings, the researchers then turned off the acetylcholine source in the mice—by delivering a specific receptor to their brains using a virus and then activating it—and tried the experiment again. Without the deluge of acetylcholine saturating their brains, the mice were far less likely to hunt for alternative ways to solve the maze when the game changed.

“Our results demonstrated the importance of acetylcholine in breaking habits and enabling new choices to be made,” said co-author Gideon Sarpong, a neuroscientist at OIST.

Previous work had already shown that brain cells that release acetylcholine were involved in behavioral flexibility, but exactly how this worked was unclear. The findings could help scientists better understand the specific roles the neurotransmitter plays in certain neurological disorders.

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Maybe this knowledge could even help lessen the bitter sting of disappointments, making feelings of defeat just a little sweeter.

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Lead image: Simple Line / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on December 17, 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

- The Taste of Prehistory

- Eat Like a Neanderthal

- The Feathery Dinosaurs That Couldn’t Fly

- Ancient Bee Nests Hiding in Regurgitated, Fossilized Bones

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Taste of Prehistory

Three recipes our Neanderthal cousins might have enjoyed

By Bridget Alex    December 23, 2025

Imagining Neanderthal cuisine, we approached chef Josh Lewin, cofounder of Juliet restaurant in Somerville, MA, who has also concocted dishes inspired by Classical Rome. “What’s 50,000 years more?” said Lewin when invited to collaborate on cooking up Neanderthal meals. The following recipes were created in conversation with Lewin.

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Shanidar Barley Salad

To start our culinary time-travel, an appetizer. This vegetarian-friendly dish was inspired by roughly 50,000-year-old plant remains unearthed from Shanidar Cave in what is now Iraq. Based on pollen in the sediments, Neanderthals in this mountainous region enjoyed a pleasant environment with walnut trees, oaks, and wild relatives of chicory and lettuce growing nearby. From the fossilized plaque of a Shanidar Neanderthal’s teeth, archaeologists extracted starch grains and phytoliths—microscopic mineral deposits that vary in shape by plant species. These botanical bits indicate that Neanderthal chomped date fruits, pea or chickpea-like legumes, and cooked grains resembling wild barley. (An older layer at the same site yielded a 70,000-year-old charred lump, thought to be a grain and legume pancake.)

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Ingredients

From the original pantry:

1/2 cup dates, chopped

1/2 cup walnuts, chopped

1 cup chickpeas

1 cup pearl barley

3 cups water

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Modern additions:

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 small onion

1 teaspoon cumin

1/4 teaspoon cinnamon

Salt and paper to taste

1 dollop yogurt to finish

Method

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1. Bring barley, water, and salt to boil. Reduce heat and simmer for 25-30 minutes until tender.

2. In a medium pan, cook olive oil and onions for 5-7 minutes. Add walnuts, chickpeas, spices, and dates. Continue sautéing until the dates soften, about 1-2 minutes.

3. To serve, mix with barley and more olive oil. Allow to cool. Finish with a dollop of plain yogurt.

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Iberian Roast Rabbit

This recipe derives from the culinary traces of Neanderthals who roamed the Iberian Peninsula roughly 120,000 years ago. During this period, frigid Ice Age conditions lulled, and Europe experienced a temperate climate similar to today’s. The ingredients featured in this dish—rabbit, pine nuts, and olives—were discovered at Bolomor Cave, a site perched in a narrow valley a few miles from Spain’s Mediterranean coast. Within the roughly 8-inch sediment layer deposited during this warm phase, researchers excavated bones from at least 80 rabbits. Burn marks and breaks indicate the arms were roasted, and the legs were broken down for marrow. Analyses of pollen from the same layer have revealed many edible species in proximity, including trees that produce wild pine nuts and olives. To transform these ingredients into a modern meal, Chef Josh’s team of professional cooks added olive oil, wine, herbs, and contemporary conveniences like a stovetop.

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Ingredients

From the original pantry:

1 whole rabbit, cut into 6-8 pieces

¾ cup olives, roughly chopped

⅓ cup pine nuts, toasted

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Modern additions:

¼ cup olive oil

1 medium shallot, finely minced

3 cloves garlic, finely chopped

1 tablespoon fresh rosemary, chopped

1 tablespoon fresh thyme leaves

2 bay leaves

½ cup dry white wine

2 cups vegetable broth (plus more as needed)

Salt and black pepper

Method

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1. Warm olive oil in a heavy, oven-safe pot over medium heat. Add shallot and garlic, letting them soften slowly.

2. Combine thyme and rosemary in a food processor with a pinch of salt until a paste forms. The salt works as an abrasive to bruise the hard herbs and release moisture. For a more authentic experience, pull out that mortar and pestle or go outside and get a rock. Rub the paste all over the rabbit pieces. Add to the pot of garlic and shallots, along with bay leaves. Season with pepper to taste. Sauté gently until the meat is golden brown.

3. Pour in the white wine to lift the caramelized bits from the pan, then stir in olives and toasted pine nuts.

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4. Add broth to nearly cover the meat. Cover and cook gently over low heat—or in a 325°F oven—for about one hour, until the meat yields easily to touch. If the liquid runs low, replenish it as needed, imagining the slow patience of a meal tended by fire.

5. Remove the lid and let the sauce thicken slightly. Taste for salt and acid balance. Serve warm with a drizzle of its juices.

6. Serve warm with a drizzle of its juices.

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Spy Cave Sheep Stew

Facing the other extreme of climate, Neanderthals who inspired this dish lived roughly 45,000 years ago through severe cold in what is now Belgium. Studies of the region have shown wild mouflon sheep—the protein in this dish—were abundant through this period. At a site known as Spy Cave, Neanderthal dental tartar held DNA from these sheep and fungi as well as starches resembling water lily bulb and sorghum.

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Imagining a moment of hygge against Ice Age cold, Chef Josh and his team created a stew of mushrooms, water lily, and lamb to be ladled over sorghum pilaf.

Photo by Bob Grant

Ingredients

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From the original pantry:

1 lb lamb, cut into bite-size pieces

1 cup sorghum

1 cup wild mushrooms, roughly chopped

1-2 water lily bulbs, peeled and thinly sliced (or substitute mild root vegetable if unavailable—water lily is slightly starchy like parsnip or celery root but with a milder flavor)

Modern additions:

2 tablespoons olive oil (divided)

1 small onion, finely chopped

2 garlic cloves, minced

1 teaspoon ground cumin

½ teaspoon ground coriander

½ teaspoon smoked paprika

1 teaspoon rosemary (fresh or dried)

1 cup vegetable stock

Salt and black pepper, to taste

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Method

1. Bring 2 cups of water to a boil, add the sorghum and a good pinch of salt, and cover. Simmer about 1 hour, until tender and nutty. Drain any remaining liquid and keep warm—this is the earthy base for the stew.

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2. In a small pan, warm 1 tablespoon olive oil over medium heat. Sauté the sliced water lily bulbs (or substitute root vegetable) for 5–7 minutes, until golden and tender. Set aside.

3. In a large heavy pot, heat the remaining tablespoon of olive oil over medium-high heat. Season the lamb with salt, pepper, and rosemary. Brown on all sides, 5–7 minutes, until richly golden brown.

4. Add onion, garlic, and additional spices to the pot and cook until soft. Stir in mushrooms.

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5. Add vegetable stock and the sautéed water lily bulbs. Lower the heat and simmer gently for 30 minutes, or until the lamb is tender and the broth has deepened. Taste and adjust seasoning.

6. To serve, spoon the stew generously over the warm sorghum. The grains absorb the broth’s warmth, an echo of the sustenance that carried Ice Age humans through long winter nights.

To learn more about the inspiration behind these recipes, read “Eat Like a Neanderthal.”

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Lead photo by Bob Grant

Bridget Alex

Posted on December 23, 2025

Bridget Alex is a science journalist and anthropologist based in Somerville, MA. Her writing has appeared in outlets including Discover, Science, and Archaeology. She is also a lecturer at Harvard University.

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Eat Like a Neanderthal

Science-inspired recipes to help you dine like our evolutionary cousins

By Bridget Alex    December 23, 2025

Roughly 120,000 years ago, in what would someday be Spain, a group of Neanderthals prepared their supper. That night’s menu did not feature mammoth, or any other big game.

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Instead, as dusk descended, some individuals tended tortoises, crackling belly-up on the fire. Others used flint knives to quarter rabbits for roasting and marrow. A pack of youngsters returned to the cave, perhaps with a haul of chestnuts and hackberries they had picked downslope. Scraps from that night’s feast mingled with remains from many meals left in their cave-dwelling—destined to be unearthed by archaeologists at the turn of the 21st century.

Researchers studying this site, known as Bolomor Cave, recovered bones from about 30 different animals from one layer of debris. Examining the location of butchery nicks, burns, and bite marks on the bones, the scientists have gleaned ways Neanderthals prepared the various delicacies—tortoises roasted shell down, rabbits sectioned so that their hindlimbs could yield marrow and forelimbs roasted meat, and so forth. Pollen found in the same layer indicates a bounty of edible plants, including wild relatives of strawberry, carob, and olive surrounding the cave, all within sediments likely accumulated 124,000 to 119,000 years ago.

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Evidence remains spare for thoughtfully composed, Neanderthal-made dishes.

The variety of foods and preparation methods at Bolomor defies a longstanding misconception about Neanderthal diets: For decades, many scholars insisted that our evolutionary cousins were carnivores, preying on Ice Age animals like woolly mammoth and giant deer. According to this view, such a narrow, meat-dependent diet contributed to the species’ demise. Neanderthals went hungry when their game became scarce due to changing climate or the arrival of more skilled hunter-gatherers, Homo sapiens.

Now, researchers who grant Neanderthals greater dietary breadth outnumber those who don’t. Neanderthals “lived over an enormous stretch of time, over quite a wide area,” says University of Glasgow archaeologist Karen Hardy. They “adapted what they liked eating to what was available.”

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With their status as quintessential carnivores dissipating, Neanderthals are now known to have tapped diverse natural resources—date palm, pigeons, legumes, crabs, and more—rendered into meals with forethought and culinary skill. The accruing evidence still falls short of a Neanderthal cookbook, but new finds (culinary and beyond) reveal these Stone Age peoples were far more sophisticated in their tastes and traditions than once thought.

Evolving from earlier human species, Neanderthals were roaming Europe by roughly 200,000 years ago. Their kind inhabited a panoply of habitats and an expanse from Iberia to Siberia and into Southwest Asia. During the Ice Age’s harshest spells, some Neanderthal communities trudged across frozen grasslands, tracking herds of prey. Other groups, who enjoyed the temperate climes that came with warmer episodes woven through the Ice Age, probably munched strawberries and took dips in the sea.

Despite their long-held residence across much of Eurasia, Neanderthals disappeared about 40,000 years ago. The reason or reasons why they went extinct remains disputed. Over the years, researchers have blamed everything from a super-volcano to carnivore competition to turf wars with H. sapiens—who happened to settle in Europe about 10,000 years before Neanderthals’ demise.

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Overly rigid diets has been another fatal flaw perennially ascribed to Neanderthals. “Huge amounts of animal bones have been found at Neanderthal sites, and these have been interpreted quite correctly, probably, as food,” says Hardy. Consequently, through much of the 20th century, Neanderthals were cast as dedicated carnivores focused on large game—the bones of which weather the millennia more easily than those of small animals such as tortoises and hares. Likewise, detecting traces of fruits, nuts, and other plant-based perishables is much more difficult than uncovering, say, a fossil mammoth bone bearing marks of butchering with stone tools.

Wild game is notoriously lean. But maggots pack plenty of fat.

In the early 2000s, the idea of exceptionally meaty Neanderthal diets was seemingly supported by stable isotopes analysis—a then-cutting-edge method in archaeology that compares isotopes, atoms with the same number of protons but different numbers of neutrons, in fossilized remains. Because the neutron count alters an atom’s mass, various isotopes move through reactions with differing ease, so their levels can reflect the diet, environment, and other characteristics of an individual when they were alive. Of particular use for diet are ratios of nitrogen isotopes, which shift with each step of the food chain: Animals who subsist on a diet heavy in plant materials have lower ratios of nitrogen-15 to nitrogen-14 than those whose diets are high in meat, for example. Researchers found that Neanderthal bones yielded high 15N/14N ratios, on par with those measured in the bones of carnivores, such as lions and wolves—but this result too was misleading.

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As the methodology matured, its practitioners realized other factors, such as cooking food, can shift those nitrogen isotope values. Some researchers also questioned whether nitrogen in bones disproportionately reflects the animal protein in a person’s diet. “The initial idea that Neanderthals were high-level carnivores, which is completely incorrect, was then consolidated and supported by this slight misreading or misuse of the stable isotope analysis,” says Hardy, a scholar who studies how past humans used plants for food, medicine, and crafts.

Plus, Neanderthals probably could not have survived as long as they did eating lion-like amounts of meat. Considering their large brains, hardy physiques, and physically active lifestyles, Neanderthals needed between 3,100 and 6,700 calories daily, according to estimates made by Hardy and others. (For comparison, professional rugby players with similar builds and BMIs as Neanderthals consume between 2,400 and 4,400 calories per day.) Of those calories, only up to about 35 percent could come from protein—that’s about 300 grams or seven chicken breasts. Any more protein, in living people and presumably Neanderthals, would overtax the liver, leading to a buildup of ammonia and amino acids in the blood. To meet their caloric needs, Neanderthals must have regularly eaten carbohydrates, found in plants, not meat.

The notion that big game dominated Neanderthal diets, however, persists in the popular imagination and among some scholars—despite a couple decades of mounting evidence for plant and small animal fare as core ingredients on the Neanderthal menu. To discover botanical remnants, archaeobotanists like Hardy just had to search for the right traces in the right places.

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Starch grains, pollen, and other botanical bits have survived, charred in fires, smeared onto stone tools, and even embedded in tartar on Neanderthal teeth. Analyses of this fossilized plaque have found starches from date palm, tubers, wild relatives of grains like barley, and more. “That’s kind of undeniable evidence of food, or it’s as close as we can get,” says Rebecca Wragg Sykes, archaeologist and author of Kindred: Neanderthal Life, Love, Death, and Art.

Other ingredients in Neanderthal meals remain harder to prove, but their consumption may have left clues. “There are these invisible paleo-menu items that should be considered,” says Melanie Beasley, a biological anthropologist at Purdue University.

To really get a sense of what life in the past was like, try some Neanderthal recipes yourself.

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Attempting to understand Neanderthals’ carnivore-like nitrogen ratios, Beasley stumbled onto one of those invisible items: maggots. For a study published in 2025, she analyzed nearly 400 fly larvae, plucked over two years from carcasses decomposing at a forensic research center in Tennessee.

The maggots gave nitrogen ratios much higher than the carcasses they were munching; a human who routinely ate those maggots along with the rotten meat would develop higher nitrogen values than someone who ate just the meat. Plus, the plump fly larvae would offer a nutritional perk: Wild game is notoriously lean, with its fat mostly concentrated in bone marrow and grease. Neanderthals may have struggled to get enough of this essential nutrient from hunks of meat. But maggots pack plenty of fat.

Although many societies regularly snack on maggots and other insects, the critters rarely appear on plates in the United States or Europe. Perhaps that is why past researchers studying Neanderthal foods—scholars primarily from the U.S. and Europe—didn’t consider insects when trying to make sense of the isotope data. “It comes back to our lack of imagination, depending on what culture you grow up in,” says Wragg Sykes. “Whatever food is not familiar to you, you don’t necessarily look for that.”

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The (metaphorical) Neanderthal pantry may indeed have been diverse and well-stocked. But evidence remains spare for thoughtfully composed, Neanderthal-made dishes. Maybe they gnawed on wild boar and chomped mushrooms but never thought to stew the foods together.

The best direct evidence that might be used to reconstruct Neanderthal cuisine comes from a lump of charred food, recovered from 70,000-year-old sediment layers excavated in northern Iraq’s Shanidar Cave. When researchers viewed the specimen under a microscope, they recognized edible wild grasses and crushed seeds of a legume such as lentil. The ancient morsel suggests Neanderthals mashed the ingredients into something like a pancake, probably roasted on a rock positioned near a fire.

Other indicators of Neanderthal culinary skills, such as boiling, require extrapolation. Scientists have never found evidence of ceramic pots at a Neanderthal dig site, but the extinct humans could have heated food in water using baskets, birch bark vessels, or animal skins—perishable containers that would have decomposed long ago. Though vanished, these cooking implements are nevertheless suggested by indirect clues: Some starch grains stuck in Neanderthal plaque bear telltale deformities caused by boiling or near-boiling water. And, alongside an ancient lake in what is now Germany, researchers recently uncovered bones from more than 170 mammals, smashed into tens of thousands of pieces, most fragments smaller than a pinky’s width. Larger bone pieces probably were broken for marrow, while these tiny bits served another purpose: Neanderthals likely boiled the bits to render their grease, for a much-needed fat supply 125,000 years ago, archaeologists concluded in a 2025 Science Advances paper.

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In 2020, researchers reported finding what could be the world’s oldest surviving string—an eyelash-length twisted fiber, stuck on a stone tool used by Neanderthals between 41,000 and 52,000 years ago. Though it’s unknown how this particular twine was used, its existence means Neanderthals could have crafted textile clothing, bags, nets, mats, or even boats, say the scientists. To make the string, it seems Neanderthals stripped the inner part of tree bark, soaked the fiber for days, and then twisted, folded, and spun the strands into a three-ply cord. Similar ingenuity went into their preparation of birch tar, a natural glue derived from tree bark, likely used to attach stone points to wooden spears. According to a 2023 analysis, Neanderthals distilled tar from rolled-up bark, buried under a campfire—the hot, low-oxygen conditions needed to prepare the adhesive just right.

Both the birch tar and string resulted from multi-step processes, which researchers doubt any one individual could have invented on their own, in one go. Years of tinkering and perfecting probably led to protocols, which were then shared across the community and years.

“If we understand and accept that they were able to assess quality and experiment with different materials for technological reasons, then it makes complete sense that you would be doing that for dietary purposes as well,” says Wragg Sykes.

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Knowing Neanderthals had this potential, they may well have made recipes from a wealth of ingredients they are presumed to have consumed: tortoises and tubers, greens and boiled grease, mammoths and maggots. Passed down over generations, those meals might have spawned regional tastes and traditions. Perhaps a gastronomic trip through Neanderthal times would have offered tastes as complex and varied as a culinary tour put on by H. sapiens. At the very least, it seems an overly restrictive diet did not usher Neanderthals’ demise.

Lead image: leehak / Shutterstock

Bridget Alex

Posted on December 23, 2025

Bridget Alex is a science journalist and anthropologist based in Somerville, MA. Her writing has appeared in outlets including Discover, Science, and Archaeology. She is also a lecturer at Harvard University.

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Feathery Dinosaurs That Couldn’t Fly

Close inspection of “exceptionally preserved” fossils suggests that some dinosaurs shed their ability to take off

By Molly Glick    December 17, 2025

Ostriches, kiwi birds, and penguins are among the tiny sample of birds that can’t lift their wings (or flippers) and fly. Now, scientists have identified a feathered dinosaur that also seems to have lacked this skill.

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This creature belongs to a lineage of feathered dinos called pennaraptorans, who came onto the scene around 160 million years ago. They’re distant ancestors of today’s birds, and the only dinosaur lineage known to live through an extinction event around 66 million years ago that killed off up to roughly three-quarters of all the world’s animals.

Scientists have long sought to understand how flight emerged in dinos, but some species make this task complicated. Scientists can’t tell whether this ability evolved once or multiple times in   pennaraptorans. Plus, some of them might not have flown at all, including a taxon called Anchiornis—scientists have debated whether these ancient creatures did indeed flap through the skies.

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Read more: “Unraveling the Evolution of Flight”

To help settle this question, an international team of scientists analyzed rare, “exceptionally preserved” fossils from the species Anchiornis huxleyi, which were discovered with feathers intact. They closely inspected nine of these specimens from what’s now eastern China to learn about how the dino molted—in this process, feathers grow for a few weeks before they’re shed and replaced.

Today, birds that depend on flight to survive “molt in an orderly, gradual process that maintains symmetry between the wings and allows them to keep flying during molting,” said lead study author Yosef Kiat, an ornithologist and feather expert at Tel Aviv University in Israel, in a statement. “In birds without flight ability, on the other hand, molting is more random and irregular.”

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Kiat and his colleagues noticed that the Anchiornis fossils showed evidence of chaotic molting—the feathers had an uneven color pattern that hints at a “gradual replacement of flight feathers without a fixed or predictable sequence and often lacking symmetry between the two wings,” they noted in a paper published in Communications Biology.

These feathers might have served another purpose besides flight, but future research with biomechanical models could offer more detailed insights into these mysterious appendages and contribute to scientists’ evolving understanding of dino plumery. According to the new findings, they do suggest that some species perhaps gained and lost the ability to fly during their evolution.

“Feather molting seems like a small technical detail—but when examined in fossils, it can change everything we thought about the origins of flight,” Kiat said. “Anchiornis now joins the list of dinosaurs that were covered in feathers but not capable of flight, highlighting how complex and diverse wing evolution truly was.”

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Lead image: From Kiat, Y., et al. Communications Biology (2025)

Molly Glick

Posted on December 17, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Ancient Bee Nests Hiding in Regurgitated, Fossilized Bones

A cave in the Dominican Republic has revealed the first recorded instance of bee larvae tucked into fossils

By Molly Glick    December 16, 2025

Tens of thousands of years ago, some particularly crafty ancient bees decided to take advantage of the food scraps puked up by owls.

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These cleverly recycled remains were discovered in the Cueva de Mono cave in the south of what’s now the Dominican Republic. There, researchers have encountered fossils mainly from rodents, but also some from birds, sloths, and reptiles. This hodgepodge of remains from more than 50 species may have been carried in by predatory birds like owls, who regurgitated pellets containing bones from their prey.

Paleontologist Lazaro Viñola Lopez, who excavated remains from the cave while a doctoral student at the Florida Museum of Natural History, was cleaning possible owl meal leftovers when he observed something odd—sediment lodged in some specimens looked like wasp cocoons. Viñola Lopez and his colleagues scanned these bones to create 3-D images, and noticed that the sediment actually resembled the mud nests that some bee species make today.

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EASTER EGGS: Weird bits of sediment discovered in ancient mammal bones turned up an unprecedented surprise: bee nests. From Viñola López, L., et al. Royal Society Open Science (2025).

They found these concealed cradles in an interesting mix of bones, including part of an extinct sloth’s tooth and bone cavities from the skulls of an extinct rodent. Some nests included bits of pollen snacks for bee babies to consume.

These findings mark the first recorded instance of bees laying eggs in bones, according to a paper published today in Royal Society Open Science. The ancient bees seem to have crafted these tiny nests—each smaller than a pencil eraser—by combining their saliva with dirt. These clandestine structures were built sometime within the past 50,000 years, the researchers estimated, a period known as the late Quaternary. The cozy confines may have kept the bee larvae safe from predators like wasps.

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Many bees dig holes in the ground to lay eggs, but these insects may have turned to the cave due to a lack of topsoil on the surrounding limestone terrain. The scarce soil that does exist is washed into caves, where the bees would have encountered plenty of nest real estate.

Read more: “High Mountains, Ancient Shells, and the Wonder of Deep Time”

Viñola Lopez and his collaborators didn’t find any fossilized bees in the nests, but the warm, humid cave environment likely degraded these remains. This means the researchers couldn’t identify which species these insects hailed from.

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It’s possible that this mysterious bee species still lives on today, though most of the bones in the study belonged to animals who have vanished. It appears that generations of bees and owls called the cave home at the time.

“This discovery shows how weird bees can be—they can surprise you,” Viñola López, now at the Field Museum in Chicago, said in a statement. “But it also shows that when you’re looking at fossils, you have to be very careful.”

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Lead image: Viñola López, L., et al. Royal Society Open Science (2025)

Molly Glick

Posted on December 16, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Psychology

- Americans Don’t Seem to Enjoy Negotiating

- How to Tell if Someone’s Really Listening

- This Meal Might Bring You to Tears

- Which Country Is Most Narcissistic?

- Does Your Personality Put You At a Higher Risk of Dying?

- What Makes Someone Good at Reading the Room?

- Science Says … Laughter Is Contagious

- We Overestimate the Prevalence of Online Trolls

- The 3 Ways We Read Between the Lines

- The Emerging Science of Being Hangry

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Americans Don’t Seem to Enjoy Negotiating

Even when they have to pay more to avoid it

By Kristen French    December 23, 2025

Negotiation is a useful skill in life. It can help you get a better deal for yourself—whether at work, in the used car lot, or when you’re buying that guitar from the sketchy guy on Craigslist. But Americans, it turns out, may not really enjoy negotiating.

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Negotiation expert David Hunsaker says he was strolling through a market in Tel-Aviv, Israel, recently while attending a conference, when he noticed that neither he nor any of his colleagues tried to haggle for a better price. Hunsaker, a professor of management at the Kelley School of Business in Indiana, started to wonder: If even negotiation scholars are reluctant to try to cut a deal, what about the average person? That curiosity inspired a research project.

Hunsaker and his colleagues were not outliers. In a series of five studies with a total of 5,881 American participants, the team found that most people avoided negotiating most of the time—even when that avoidance came with a price. Their findings also suggest that aversion to negotiation among Americans has more to do with fear of conflict or social stigma than with bad money math or laziness.

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“Our work focuses on how much individuals are willing to sacrifice, or even pay, to avoid negotiating altogether,” Hunsaker said in a statement. Hunsaker and his co-authors published their results in the journal Negotiation and Conflict Management Research.

In the first study, the researchers asked participants if they had ever passed up a chance to negotiate, and how often they thought they would tend to skip it. On average, people said they failed to negotiate about half the time when they had the opportunity to do so, and women were more likely to avoid negotiating than men.

Read more: “Why Your Brain Hates Other People”

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In a second study, the researchers wanted to learn whether a certain threshold of savings would spur people to negotiate. Participants were asked to imagine buying electronics at different prices: $20, $200, $2,000 and $20,000. Then they were told to calculate how much they would have to save before negotiating seemed worth it. In general, people did not think about this trade-off in fixed dollar amounts, but in percentages: for most people, negotiating was only something they would consider if they could get a discount of roughly 21 to 36 percent.

In a third study, the scientists sought to figure out whether people would pay extra just to avoid negotiating. About half of the respondents said they would pay some amount. When asked more specifically about a $20,000 car purchase, people said they would pay on average around $1,000 extra to avoid negotiating. For a $2,000 car, they would pay closer to $230.

To see if little nudges could change the calculus, the researchers tried two tactics: First, they asked participants to think about their hourly wage, which had no effect. In a separate experiment, they asked participants to consider buying a couch on Craigslist. Half of the participants also were told that negotiating was the norm: That 80 percent of Americans negotiate when purchasing an item on Craigslist. This did have a moderate positive effect on the participants’ reported willingness to haggle.

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The study had some limitations. For one, all the participants were from the United States. The researchers chose this country as their point of focus because of its prevailing culture of individualism and self-advocacy, but follow-up work could test whether similar patterns hold in cultures with “different norms around confrontation, hierarchy, and relationship maintenance,” they write.

All the studies were also conducted online, which could have introduced certain biases. And the studies measured only intent to negotiate, as opposed to actual negotiating behavior.

Still, Hunsaker and his colleagues hope the project can serve as a starting point for improved understanding of negotiation and its benefits, including empowering individuals and organizations to “realize more value, equity, and agency in their interactions,” they write in the paper.

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Hunsaker also offered some tips for low-conflict negotiation. First, do your research so you know your options ahead of time. Second, leave room for concessions. If you want to pay a certain amount for something, offer a little bit less at first. And finally, focus on relationships, not on victory.

“People that go into negotiation with a winning mindset end up burning bridges or hurting feelings,” said Hunsaker. “The people you most often negotiate with will be repeat customers or longtime clients. If you burn those bridges, you will miss out on deals later,” he said. So listen, and build trust while you haggle.

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Lead image: Foxy Fox / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on December 23, 2025

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

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How to Tell if Someone’s Really Listening

The eyes adjust to help us focus as we chat

By Kristen French    December 22, 2025

The eyes are the windows to the soul, it is said. They may also betray how much effort we are using to concentrate on our conversation partners. When listening to spoken language requires more effort, we hold the blinks and keep our eyes peeled, a trio of Canadian scientists recently discovered.

“We wanted to know if blinking was impacted by environmental factors and how it related to executive function,” said  Pénélope Coupal, a researcher at the Laboratory for Hearing and Cognition at Concordia University in Montreal, in a statement. “For instance, is there a strategic timing of a person’s blinks so they would not miss out on what is being said?” The answer appears to be yes.

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Coupal and her colleagues analyzed eye-tracking data from a previous experiment where people listened to spoken sentences in quiet versus noisy environments, counting how many times they blinked before, during, and after the sentences. The participants blinked fewer times during the sentence than before or after it, they found. And the noisier the environment, the less they blinked.

Read more: “How Your Brain Decides Without You”

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The scientists also collected blink data from a second experiment that had already been completed using different lighting conditions and found that it had no effect on blinking frequency. This suggested that people were suppressing their blinks due to listening effort, not due to trouble seeing or discomfort with lighting. A potential explanation: Blinking briefly interrupts attention, so the brain may strategically delay blinks when taking in important auditory information, much in the same way it does during visual tasks.

The findings, published in the journal Trends in Hearing, suggest that blink rates could help researchers  track cognitive function in the lab and in the real world.

In the study, fewer blinks didn’t translate to less comprehension of one’s conversational partner—it just indicated that someone was putting in greater effort to listen. Blink frequency didn’t appear to have any links to pupil dilation metrics, another method used to measure listening effort. This means blinks could capture a separate aspect of cognitive effort.

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The study had a few limitations. The scientists counted blinks manually, which is time-consuming and somewhat subjective. Also, the listening task was pretty simple. Blink counts might change in real-world contexts where conversation is more complex or when the listener suffers from hearing loss, the scientists point out.

But if the results hold up, they suggest that the harder the sentence, the longer the stare.

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Lead image: Iren_Geo / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on December 22, 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 Meal Might Bring You to Tears

Experimental psychologist Charles Spence on how our senses shape how we eat

By Kristen French    December 22, 2025

Most of us would say we taste food with our tongues. Charles Spence has spent decades showing that we eat with our eyes, our ears, our fingertips, even our emotions.

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An experimental psychologist at Oxford University, Spence has learned that when we sit down for a meal, all of our senses come to the table, and some of them have unexpected effects. Heavier cutlery, for example, makes a meal more pleasurable, he has found, and flavors in space are often duller. Foods that sound better taste better, too: In his infamous “sonic chip” experiments, he found that the louder the crunch of your Pringles potato chip, the fresher it tastes, work that won him a 2008 Ig Nobel Prize (which celebrates real science with a side of humor).

Spence has also explored the ways our senses shape our palates in numerous books. In Gastrophysics: The New Science of Eating, he presents a tour of all of the strange invisible forces that color eating and explains why your brain is the real chef. In The Perfect Meal: The Multisensory Science of Food and Dining, he and his colleague Betina Piqueras-Fiszman map the entire multisensory ecosystem of dining. And in Sensehacking: How to Use the Power of Your Senses for Happier, Healthier Eating, he recommends ways to employ colors, sounds, and scents to reduce stress and better your quality of life.

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Spence’s newest line of research connects biophilia to flavor: How glimpses of green, a whiff of cedar, or the call of a seagull can change what we choose to eat and how we think it tastes. Many high-end restaurants have begun experimenting with building the eating experience around nature-related sensory elements, such as sounds and smells and tactile pieces, sometimes to dramatic effect.

We caught up with Spence shortly after his trip to a cloud forest outside of Bogotá, Colombia, where he’d been eating breakfast, lunch, and dinner outdoors—so long as it wasn’t raining. We talked about why a single word on a menu can make a dish sell out, why certain culinary experiences leave diners in tears, and why rosé tastes better on a beach in Provence than back home in your kitchen on a Monday night. Also why the simplest dishes are still the most delicious.

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY: Experimental psychologist Charles Spence at Kitchen Theory in London, enjoying a mulled wine cocktail with a “bubble smoking gun,” an edible bubble that bursts when you sip, releasing the aroma of ginger in a cloud of smoke. The element of visual theater and the edible bubble are meant to enhance flavor perception, tricking the brain into thinking you can taste the smell. “This is a modernist take on Xmas,” Spence writes in an email. “Ginger is a warming winter spice, but often dissipates, hence captured in the bubble.” Photo courtesy of Kitchen Theory.

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In your work you often talk about the Provençal rosé paradox. Can you explain what it tells us?

We all feel like we can really just taste our food and drink. None of us feel in the moment that the atmosphere, the environment, the nature does something to us or to our judgments. That’s why I always start with the Provençal rosé paradox. Northern Europeans go on their summer holidays to the Mediterranean quite often. It’s warm and sunny on the beach, and the food and wine taste wonderful. And everyone brings some back home to share with friends and family on a cold winter’s night. And it just doesn’t taste the same.

You say, “well, maybe it got shook up in the airplane or got cold. That’s what’s spoiled it.” But I think the wine’s exactly the same. Your mood and environment are different. Everyone holds within them the belief that I can really taste the gin and tonic in my glass or the Doritos on my plate, but the research shows it’s influenced by the softness of the chair I’m sitting on, or the dimness of the light. And why is it that the rosé tastes so good on vacation? Is it the sound of the seagulls? Is it the warm sun, is it the relaxation in your mood? Well, that’s all subject for experimentation, investigation. I think all of those things matter.

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You recently began looking at the relationship between food and biophilia, the idea that humans are innately attracted to nature and natural forms. What inspired you?

When the biophilia research first came out decades ago, it was kind of flimsy. All these studies aimed to show that going out into nature is beneficial, regardless of the sense with which you experience it—sight, sound, smell, touch, taste. But by the time I revisited the literature in 2021 for my Sensehacking book, the studies had gotten so much more rigorous. And it really seemed to show that exposure to nature has amazing effects.

Around the same time, a number of chefs began doing immersive dining through projections and sound effects and smells. These chefs could have created any kind of immersive environment, Mars or being under the water, but all of them seemed to choose to recreate nature: The sounds of the sea, the smell of the salty sea air, forest scenes. Chef Jozef Youssef of Kitchen Theory in London has a mushroom dish that involves projecting greens onto the table, the sounds of the forest, the smell of the earth after it rains, and a plate made from a slice of tree trunk. So it got me thinking, maybe these things are connected. Maybe intuitively the chefs have figured out that by recreating nature, it both emphasizes the natural source of the ingredients, but it also has an effect that helps to improve the diners’ well-being.

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Now we have research showing that the blues or greens of water, the color or scent of flowers, even birdsong, can make food taste better and make it easier to tell flavors apart. We’ve even got experiments suggesting that nature soundscapes and water soundscapes will nudge people to make more sustainable food choices, and leave less food waste. The presence of warm ambient odors like cedarwood seems to make people eat fewer calories and mixed herb scents make people choose more wholesome things to eat. These findings could have implications for vending machines, frontline sales, even self-help.

A recent meal included a course of rice pudding that makes 60 percent of his diners cry.

What are ways architects and designers could use this to support healthy eating?

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Bringing nature into the built environment. Interestingly to me, you might think that it has to be real nature, real birds and real plants, not staring at the screensaver that’s got a nature scene or at a plastic plant. But all the research I can find says they’re just as good. Since digital nature is as efficacious as real nature, we can start to caricature digital natural environments or plastic natural environments to have more of the stuff that’s good for us. And this works for any of the senses. Through hearing, anything that includes nature sounds or water sounds, but the more naturalistic the bird song the better, and the more bird varieties the better. Through touch, a rough surface or a textured surface rather than a smooth one.

You mention the nature-inspired sensory elements many chefs are using in their restaurants. For some people it seems these sensory elements have surprising emotional effects. There is one immersive dish called Sound of the Sea, served at chef Heston Blumenthal’s The Fat Duck restaurant in Bray, in the United Kingdom, that features the sounds of the sea and birds played through a conch shell on the table. The visual presentation of the dish is designed to look like the seashore. The dish consistently makes people cry. And I wondered, why would an experience like that make someone tearful?

That seaside dish is not the only one that makes people cry. I came across a chef in Milan, formerly a filmmaker, named Federico Rottigni. He’s got a restaurant called Sensorium, that offers a multisensory dining experience where the meal engages all five senses—sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell—to tell a cohesive narrative story. He cycles the theme of his menu every year or so. And a recent one is ayahuasca, albeit without the hallucinogens, which included a course of rice pudding that makes 60 percent of his diners cry or feel like crying.

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When I met him, he said to me, “I didn’t plan my dish, my menu this way. None of my previous menus have had this effect. I don’t really know what’s going on. But this one dish, people are crying and as a chef, I’ve no idea what’s going on.” And so we have been doing experiments for the past year in his restaurant with 100 diners who have the full multisensory experience. And then you get a questionnaire: Did you cry tonight? Which course did you cry for? How much did you like that dish? And then we tested 100 people without some of the multisensory bits and pieces, and asked how often did you cry. And then 100 delivery drivers are given a bowl of rice pudding. Of course, the delivery drivers don’t feel like crying.

Taste consciousness research doesn’t really exist. But it should.

No one will cry when they walk into a restaurant for the first dish. So you need to settle, need to relax a bit. It’s more likely later in the meal that you might cry than at the beginning. So this rice pudding dish is number six out of 10 courses. And the emotional trajectory of the story being told through the meal is a kind of Cinderella story. And at that rice pudding stage of the meal, the emotional trajectory of the story has gone from things really bottoming out to the final ascent. You’ve got nostalgia and it comes with low-frequency vibrations, these very low-frequency sounds that you can’t hear, but when they’re happening you’re more aware of your body. All together it creates an extraordinary response. We’ve got the data and the graphs and the results, but we haven’t published it yet.

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We used to use the science of the senses to make things taste better: sweeter without more sugar, or saltier, but all within the known taste universe. But now can we deliver extraordinary things you’ve never tasted before: dishes that make you cry, feel awe, or get a shiver. So what’s going on when people cry over their food? It could be an aesthetic “Aha” moment, the kind that you might feel in Rothko’s chapel, that release of tension that you get in art—and that maybe you get in this dish—where everything falls into place.

Are these multisensory experiences really bringing nature into the dining room, or is this more of a high-tech hack? Are there risks to having these digital technologies integrated into the way that we eat, in terms of alienating us from our food and from each other at meals?

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Yes, definitely. I think from the research, the single biggest factor determining how much food one consumes seems to be whether the TV was on. The more distracting the program, the more entertaining the program, the more we consume. Researchers have subsequently shown very similar effects with digital devices. I’ve never had a digital phone and hopefully never will have one, but to see that sort of alienation and separation of people in the restaurant and the young couples and they’re both on the phones and neither of them are there with the food. So the multisensory technologies could either have a similar effect or it could enhance the experience. So it could go both ways.

For a while, there was a theme restaurant craze, but all the technology was there to distract you with lights and sounds, like the simulated tropical thunderstorm at the Tonga Room & Hurricane Bar in the Fairmont hotel in San Francisco. In the 1970s, this kind of entertainment only meant one thing: The food is crap. Now chefs are really trying to enhance the food with these sensory atmospheres created through technology. But it must always be a danger that the technology will just distract.

If we play low-pitched music, it brings out the bitterness in chocolate.

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You’ve worked with philosophers over the years as well—how do you think the distinctly multisensory experience of food relates to our own sense of reality?

When I was first an undergraduate here, I started doing philosophy and psychology, and then dropped philosophy because it was too hard. But it’s always been something of interest. Taste consciousness research doesn’t really exist. But it should. And if my consciousness is on the TV show or Instagram or something, then am I not conscious of these other things like taste? How do we make people more mindful of food? Because the more sensations you get from a food experience, the sooner you are sated, and then the less you’re going to consume. Modern technology distracts our consciousness to something else so we’re not aware of the sensations.

I have been lucky to work with philosophers in the past to try and get straight the distinction between tasting, smelling, and the experience of flavor. Currently, I am working with other philosophers on the question of whether chemesthesis—the burn of chili and the pungency of ginger and pepper—should really be treated as a separate sense from taste. For me, flavor is so intriguing both because it has been so little studied from a philosophical perspective, and because many of the questions that it throws up are so challenging to address conceptually.

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What else are we learning about how our other senses impact how we experience taste?

We have found that sweet tastes are high-pitched and bitter tastes are low pitched. If we play low-pitched music, it brings out the bitterness in chocolate. If we play high-pitched tinkling sounds such as wind chimes it brings out the sweetness. There’s also a kind of overlap in how we talk about emotions and foods that spills over into our experience of it. We’ll say someone has a sweet smile or sweet personality, and research shows that if you look at somebody with a smiling face, things taste sweeter. If you look at somebody crying, things tend to taste more bitter.

What is the most delicious dish you have eaten recently?

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A study just came out that suggests diners always want something new. Fusion food, or global cuisine, or molecular gastronomy. I go to a lot of these Michelin star restaurants, in a number of different countries, from Latvia to Poland, and I can see that there’s a lot of technique there. They’re technically well done, interesting maybe—but delicious, we’ve lost that I think. We lose it by focusing on everything else. My brother and I always come back to this dish, which is from the River Café in London, a famous Italian restaurant. It’s just 10 kilos of pork shoulder or pork leg roasted for 24 hours in the oven, with lots of fennel seeds, lots of crushed garlic, a bit of chili, olive oil, and that’s it. And that is one of the most delicious things around. I made it last Christmas because my father got too old to remember how he used to make pork and people up the street were saying, “What’s that smell?” After all these hours the flavors just meld and do something magical. Something fabulous happens. There’s nothing fancy about it.

When was the last time you had a meal in nature?

At my brother’s restaurant on a Sunday, on the outskirts of Oxford. He’s got an organic kitchen garden restaurant called the Worton Kitchen Garden. We ate there in the greenhouse, but had to walk through the garden to get to our table.

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Do you ever use your brother’s restaurant as a kind of a lab?

Yeah, in some cases, for ideas. Not that he necessarily listens to my advice! He has one dish called the Crispy Duck Salad, which he introduced for Chinese New Year, but then it just stayed because it was so successful and everyone wants it and loves it, but why? Is it the sensory word crispy? He’s got no idea. It’s just the bestselling thing he’s ever put on the menu and can’t take it off. So that’s an experiment we’ll probably do, an online survey with two versions of the menu. One with Crispy Duck Salad and another with Chinese-Style Duck Salad or something like that. We talk about what impact the smell of the peppers in the restaurant has on whether the diners will order it. And some days he sells out of lobsters and crabs and other days no one orders them. So is that the weather or is it the smell in the air? So there’s always ideas for experiments.

Lead image: Master1305 / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on December 22, 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

Which Country Is Most Narcissistic?

It’s not the United States

By Kristen French    December 19, 2025

Accusations of narcissism are so rampant today in popular culture that the term may be on the road to losing all meaning. But in our era of self-absorbed social media, some psychologists report that the trait—meant to describe someone who is low on empathy and inflated with self-regard—may be on the rise, particularly among young people, particularly in the West.

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Recently, a team of scientists set out to determine what demographic and cultural factors actually count when it comes to the prevalence of narcissism. The results were surprising. For one thing, the team discovered that narcissism may feature more widely across cultures than they had thought, though the demographics were similar everywhere they looked.

But they also found that, contrary to expectations, the United States did not top the list of most narcissistic nations. Instead, the researchers deemed Germany the most narcissistic, followed by Iraq, China, Nepal, and South Korea. The least narcissistic countries on the list were Serbia, Ireland, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, and Denmark. They published their results in the journal Self and Identity.

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Read more: “What Makes a Narcissist?”

“We found that there were differences across cultures, including that people from higher GDP countries were more narcissistic, but the degree to which younger adults were narcissistic compared to older adults didn’t matter much on what country you were from,” said co-author William Chopik, a Michigan State University psychology researcher, in a statement.

To take the global temperature on narcissism, the authors analyzed data from more than 45,000 people in 53 countries, focusing specifically on a classic form of narcissism known as the grandiose type, which features self-promotion and attention seeking as well as darker features such as competitiveness and disparaging others. The team then tried to map these traits onto factors such as age, gender, perceived social status, and two features of national culture—how collectivist or individualistic a country is and its GDP per capita.

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One of the most surprising findings was that narcissism was not limited to high-income or individualist countries, but was a fixture in many diverse cultures. In fact, collectivist countries, such as China and Nepal, were often found to be high in narcissism, particularly the status-seeking and admiration-craving kind. Perhaps it is a trait that helps people navigate complex social hierarchies, the scientists theorized.

People in higher-income countries also ranked relatively high in narcissism, which surprised the study authors, who had expected that lower-income countries might more frequently reward the kind of competitiveness common in narcissism. The scientists hypothesized that the reason for this is that people in high-GDP countries are often more prone to obsession with status and prestige.

Another unexpected finding: Culture rarely had any impact on the basic underlying demographic factors—being young, male, and high status—that predicted higher rates of narcissism. That means that while cultures may differ in terms of their average levels of narcissism, the kinds of people who tend toward the trait are pretty much the same the world over.

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For the young, narcissism can play an important role in the development of autonomy, identity, and self-esteem, the authors point out. “These traits might manifest as heightened self-esteem, a strong desire for personal success, and a tendency to seek social recognition and validation,” they write. “As people age, however, their focus tends to shift from personal growth to prosocial engagement, potentially leading to a decline in narcissistic traits.”

More men than women were also found to be narcissistic, a finding they attributed to societal expectations. In many cultures, men are socialized to be more assertive and dominant, traits that align with certain aspects of narcissism.

In the end, narcissism appears to be shaped by universal human drives, not specific cultural and time-bound historical forces, the authors note. That’s good news and bad news. It means our current cultural moment may not be more conducive to self-absorption, but it also means that the trait isn’t likely going anywhere. It’s part of who we are as a species.

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Kristen French

Posted on December 19, 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.

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Does Your Personality Put You At a Higher Risk of Dying?

Taking stock of your foibles could extend your life

By Kristen French    December 19, 2025

The study of personality type is probably as old as humankind. Ancient Greek scholar Hippocrates chalked up differences in temperament to imbalances in the body’s constituent fluids, the four humors—blood, yellow bile, black bile, and phlegm.

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Today, we have the so-called big five personality traits, developed by psychologists in the 1990s: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. But what, if anything, do these personality traits have to do with our health? One group of researchers took this question to a logical extreme, asking how they might influence our risk of death.

To answer that question, they analyzed pre-existing data about the big five personality traits of more than a half million people across four continents, representing in aggregate almost 6 million total years of life, and more than 40,000 deaths. Some traits were clearly more closely associated with early death than others. They published their findings in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

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“Our work shows that how we think, feel and behave is not only linked to life satisfaction and social relationships, but also to how long we live,” co-author Máire McGeehan, a psychology researcher at the University of Limerick, said in a statement.

Read more: “How to Tell If You’re Dead”

According to their results, higher neuroticism—anxiety, worry, and emotional instability—may be associated with earlier death, but this effect seems to be stronger in younger people. Higher conscientiousness, or a tendency to be organized and self-disciplined, on the other hand, was associated with lower risk of death. So was extraversion, a preference for social engagement and activity, though primarily in Australia and North America. Openness and agreeableness didn’t have much impact either way.

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“It is important to emphasize that these effects are similar in size to those of commonly considered public health determinants, such as socio-economic status,” said McGeehan.

There are all kinds of ways personality could influence our health and risk of death, the researchers point out, given documented links between personality and health behaviors, coping processes, stress responses, and other biological processes. A person’s neuroticism and conscientiousness, for example, might influence whether they smoke or exercise regularly, try drugs, schedule preventive health screenings, have a healthy diet, or drink a lot of alcohol. Personality traits have also been linked to specific biological and clinical markers of inflammation, hormonal balance, and cardiovascular health, all of which are critical to longevity, they note. And in fact, the associations they found between risk of death and neuroticism and conscientiousness were partly accounted for by health-related factors such as smoking and cardiovascular health—the effect size was reduced when these factors were taken into account.

But why would extraversion help only Australians and North Americans stave off the cold grasp of death? The authors suggest it may have something to do with how particular cultures reward different kinds of behaviors. In more individualistic cultures, for instance, it could lead to greater social integration and higher economic rewards.

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Particularly, given these cultural differences, one limitation of the study is that it only included samples from the United Kingdom, Europe, North America, Australia, and Japan, and so primarily represented high income countries with predominantly white populations. Countries in Asia, Africa, and South America were excluded. Future studies could extend the analysis to these other parts of the world and also look at how personality changes over one’s lifetime influence mortality risk, they suggest.

Fortunately, plenty of research suggests personality is not as static as we once thought. So the results don’t doom anyone to a fixed fate, but they could help some people find a better way to behave—and live.

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Lead image: Credit: Rawpixel.com / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on December 19, 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.

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What Makes Someone Good at Reading the Room?

Those who have this special skill may be better at weighing ambiguous cues

By Kristen French    December 18, 2025

When you walk into a room of people, do you instantly catch the vibe? Can you quickly scan faces and catch the hidden meaning behind the shape of a brow or the twitch of a smile, feel the undertow of emotion when a conversation shifts? Or do other peoples’ meanings and intentions frequently elude you?

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Not everyone is equally good at picking up social cues in a given environment, a skill colloquially known as reading the room. Recently, scientists from the University of California, Berkeley, and Japan’s National Institute of Information and Communications Technology in Osaka, set out to understand why.

Across three studies, the researchers found that individual differences in the ability to pick up nonverbal cues stem from idiosyncrasies in the way different people gather, weigh, and integrate facial and contextual information from the environment.

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Read more: “How to Tell If You’re a Jerk”

Those who are really good at reading social cues, they found, are able to quickly engage in complex calculus, assessing the relative clarity or ambiguity of different cues so that they can give more weight to the ones with the most obvious meaning. Those who are less good at it, however, try to keep it simple and give equal weight to every piece of information they perceive. The scientists published their findings in Nature Communications.

“We don’t know exactly why these differences occur,” said Jefferson Ortega, a psychology Ph.D. student at the University of California, Berkeley and co-author of the study, in a statement. “But the idea is that some people might use this more simplistic integration strategy because it’s less cognitively demanding, or it could also be due to underlying cognitive deficits.”

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To do their experiment, Ortega’s team asked 944 volunteers to guess at the mood of a person in a series of videos, including Hollywood movies, documentaries, and home videos gathered from YouTube. The researchers made the backgrounds in some of the recordings blurry, while others had hazy faces and clear context, in order to isolate the influence of different kinds of information people might use to make their assessments. In a third set of videos, the context and faces were both clear.

Ortega and his colleagues expected that most people would use a method of inference known as Bayesian integration, where they weigh the ambiguities in a set of cues. But only 70 percent of the participants did this. The other 30 percent chose to average cues, no matter how clear or ambiguous they were.

“It was very surprising,” Ortega said. “The computational mechanisms—the algorithm that the brain uses to do that—is not well understood. That’s where the motivation came for this paper. It’s just an amazing feat.”

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Something you can think about next time you have to quickly read the room.

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Kristen French

Posted on December 18, 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.

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Science Says … Laughter Is Contagious

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha

By Kristen French    December 18, 2025

There are few things more delightful in life than a giddy, runaway laugh shared with a friend. When the mood strikes, chuckles can become contagious. But sometimes these bouts of hilarity bubble up at just the wrong moment, when social mores call for solemnity and a straight face. Anyone who has found themselves giggling during a funeral, for example, knows how difficult it can be to tone down their tittering.

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Recently, a research team at the University of Göttingen decided to investigate what strategies humans can use to keep our laughter under wraps when situations demand seriousness. Some approaches work better than others, they found, but everything works less well when other people around us are guffawing. They published their results in Communications Psychology.

“Hearing another person laugh made it much harder to control laughter,” said co-author Anne Schacht, a Göttingen University psychologist, in a statement.  “This just goes to show how strongly our emotional reactions are affected by the presence of others and how deeply humans are social beings.”

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Read more: “Why Is That Funny?”

The subject of laughter regulation has gotten very little scientific attention, Schacht and her colleagues note, though plenty of research has addressed other types of emotional management, including both negative emotional states such as anger and sadness and positive emotions such as happiness and pride.

To fill this gap, the scientists ran three separate experiments with a total of 121 study participants. The volunteers were asked to listen to 100 jokes read by two men and two women—the readers were asked to recite the jokes in an amused and enthusiastic tone, but not to laugh—and to rely one of three approaches to keep a straight face: distracting themselves with a large busy illustration in which objects were hidden, focusing on keeping their facial expressions under control, and reinterpreting the jokes so that they felt un-funny.

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To measure how well these strategies worked, the scientists used a technology called facial electromyography to record tiny muscle movements involved in smiling and laughter invisible to the naked eye. They also created a smile index to quantify combined activity from certain facial muscles. Laughter in particular involves muscles around the mouth, eye, and brow—including the zygomatic major, the orbicularis oculi, and the corrugator supercilii. To see how the volunteers felt about the jokes, they asked them to rate their funniness on a scale of 1 to 5.

In all three experiments, the jokes were the same, but the conditions were a little bit different. In the first experiment, the participants were asked to either reappraise the jokes or control their facial muscles. In the second, they were told to distract themselves with the illustration. In the third, they were asked to use self-suppression exclusively. In the first two, the participants were alone, but in the third, the scientists fed in video laugh tracks.

What the scientists found is that distraction and suppression do the best job of quieting the funny facial muscles, while rethinking the jokes mainly made the participants feel differently about how humorous they were. Suppression also worked less well with the best of the jokes, and did not affect funniness ratings.

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But the funniest if least surprising finding was that listening to a laugh track made the jokes feel more hilarious and made it harder for participants to control their own amusement.

All of which is to say, laughter really is contagious.

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Kristen French

Posted on December 18, 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.

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We Overestimate the Prevalence of Online Trolls

This misconception can prompt us to feel pessimistic about our peers—and the world

By Molly Glick    December 17, 2025

Social media often feels like a minefield—dodging spiteful and incendiary posts when you’re simply trying to, say, scroll through cute cat photos or seek out Reddit advice on vacuum cleaners.

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Fortunately, the internet isn’t necessarily brimming with trolls. People actually tend to vastly overestimate their prevalence, according to online survey results recently published in PNAS Nexus.

Stanford University researchers asked more than 1,000 adults in the United States about their perceptions of the social media trolls behind “severely toxic” comments, which were defined as “hateful, aggressive, and disrespectful” posts that could encourage people to exit an online discussion. The study volunteers were recruited strategically so that the participant pool mirrored proportions of certain demographics, including gender and race, reported in the 2020 U.S. census.

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Read more: “Why Your Brain Hates Other People”

Participants estimated how many Reddit users post severely toxic comments—on average, people guessed that number to be about 43 percent. In reality, this figure is closer to around 3 percent, a study presented at the 2023 Association for Computing Machinery Web Conference found. Survey respondents also speculated on the share of Facebook users that circulate fake news, proposing 47 percent on average. But the reality is around 8.5 percent, according to a 2019 Science Advances paper.

Meanwhile, survey respondents were nearly right on the money when guessing the portion of all Reddit postings that are churned out by trolls. They proposed on average that around 38 percent of all Reddit comments—toxic or not—come from these mischievous users, when the reality is closer to around a third, or more than 559 million comments over the 2023 study’s year-and-a-half duration.

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The research team also shared accurate data on toxic social media users with some participants, and they reported feeling more positive and more likely to believe that “the character of their fellow U.S. citizens was in less moral decline” than the participants who weren’t given the true information. This group was also more likely to recognize that most people don’t want harmful content to go viral on social media.

“This particular, widely held misperception about social media toxicity can have serious consequences, leaving participants feeling negatively, with higher pessimism about the moral state of their fellow citizens, and with more pluralistic ignorance about how much others desire harmful online content,” the authors wrote.

But this potentially perilous mismatch can be fixed, they noted, by “teaching people that social media can overrepresent the views of vocal accounts that post disproportionately often.”

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So don’t let your conspiratorial uncle, or any other troll, cloud your conception of your favorite platforms—and humanity more broadly.

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Molly Glick

Posted on December 17, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

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The 3 Ways We Read Between the Lines

How humans infer meaning from spoken language is more complex than we thought

By Kristen French    December 16, 2025

A simple chat with a neighbor on the street may last only long enough to make you a few minutes late to work. But it still requires a lot of complex brain power to pull off.

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To really catch the meaning of what a conversation partner is saying, you’ll have to infer the unspoken, hidden meanings lurking behind the words. That may mean deciphering metaphors about brewing storms or black sheep, detecting irony or white lies, getting dad jokes, or listening for changes in inflection. In lengthier chats, your brain may have to do all of that.

In the scientific literature, this sort of inference is known as pragmatic language ability, but scientists have not understood much about how it works. New research from MIT cognitive neuroscientist Evelina Fedorenko and her colleagues shows that these so-called pragmatic language abilities can be grouped together into three categories based on the kinds of inference they require, and that these categories may have similar underlying neural processes. They published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Read more: “Talking Is Throwing Fictional Worlds at Each Other”

“Pragmatics is trying to reason about why somebody might say something, and what is the message they’re trying to convey given that they put it in this particular way,” said Fedorenko, who runs a lab at MIT’s McGovern Institute for Brain Research, in a statement.

To gather their intelligence, the scientists tested 376 study participants on an 8-hour battery of 20 nonliteral comprehension tasks—involving subjects such as irony, indirect requests, polite deceits, metaphor, and humor—to try to detect individual differences in performance.

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They found that different participants’ strengths could be grouped into the following categories: grasping social conventions, interpreting intonation, and making causal inferences based on knowledge of the world. They then replicated their findings in 400 new participants, and also found that general intelligence and auditory processing abilities did not affect the results.

“Language is about getting meanings across, and that often requires taking into account many different kinds of information—such as the social context, the visual context, or the present topic of the conversation,” Fedorenko added.

Understanding social conventions, the authors point out, requires reasoning about others’ mental states and helps people maintain rapport and “save face.” Irony, for example, has been argued to allow a speaker to express a negative viewpoint without imposing on the other person. Intonation allows a speaker to express emotional states and to convey nuances in meaning. And reasoning about the world is obviously a critical skill in many life situations.

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In future work, the researchers said they want to use brain imaging to see whether the three categories correspond with activity in specific brain regions.

The findings could help clinicians understand why some people with conditions such as autism have trouble with certain components of communication, and help scientists design behavioral and brain imaging studies that can better tease apart how nonverbal communication works.

They want to bring the unspoken word into the spotlight.

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Lead image: OneLineStock / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on December 16, 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

The Emerging Science of Being Hangry

Your ability to tune into your body’s internal signals shapes hunger-driven mood swings

By Kristen French    December 15, 2025

When our stomachs are empty, we may get cranky or snap at the people around us. We’re hangry, we may exclaim, to excuse our mischief. But what’s really going on when this storm of hunger and anger hits?

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The term hangry was likely first used in 1918 (in a letter by journalist and writer Arthur Ransome), but it has swept popular culture in recent decades, featured in everything from a Snicker’s ad to an Olympic snowboarder’s viral tweet.

Scientists are only now beginning to catch up. One thing they haven’t fully understood is how this close relationship between anger and hunger works in the brain: Do drops in glucose levels in the blood trigger changes in mood through subconscious or conscious processes?

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To answer this question, a team of German researchers recently tracked how glucose levels, feelings of hunger, and mood interacted in 90 healthy adults over a period of four weeks. The scientists gave participants glucose monitors to wear and asked them to regularly answer questions about hunger, satiety, and mood via a smartphone app.

The results suggest that hangriness is indeed real: The more hungry participants were, the worse their mood.

Read more: “You Are What Your Ancestors Didn’t Eat”

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But surprisingly, the researchers found that hunger-related shifts in mood depended on conscious sensing of the body’s internal state, not unconscious processes. In other words, it’s all about how your brain interprets the signals coming from your gut.

“When glucose levels drop, mood also deteriorates. But this effect only occurs because people then feel hungrier,” explained co-author Kristin Kaduk, postdoctoral researcher at the University Hospital for Psychiatry and Psychotherapy in Tübingen, Germany, in a statement. “In other words, it is not the glucose level itself that raises or lowers mood, but rather how strongly we consciously perceive this lack of energy.”

Separately, Kaduk and her colleagues also found that the participants who were better able to read their own bodily signals, a sense known as interoception, seemed to experience fewer mood swings, though not higher average mood. Differences in metabolic health—such as body mass index and insulin resistance—didn’t play much of a role in this pattern. They published their results in eBioMedicine.

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The researchers suggest that the study may point to a larger relationship between metabolic sensing, interoceptive accuracy, and mood disorders. The human body needs food to survive, of course. Glucose supplies energy for essential processes, including mental health. And links between metabolic issues and mood disorders have often cropped up in the research. Poor interoception has also been linked to higher body mass index.

“Many diseases such as depression or obesity are associated with altered metabolic processes,” said Nils Kroemer, co-author of the study, psychiatrist and research professor of medical psychology at the University of Bonn. “A better understanding of how body perception and mood are related can help improve therapeutic approaches in the long term—for example, through targeted training of interoception or non-invasive stimulation of the vagus nerve, which connects the organs to the brain and influences interoception.”

Interoception is something you can get better at, through mindfulness, deep breathing, body scans, and efforts to link sensations to emotions, research suggests. Perhaps with a little consistent practice, you can head off your next episode of hangriness.

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Lead image: Blueastro / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on December 15, 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

- Parachute Science Continues to Prevail in Global South Biodiversity Studies

SOCIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Parachute Science Continues to Prevail in Global South Biodiversity Studies

The privilege of describing new species is skewed to Global Northerners

By Devin Reese    December 18, 2025

More than a million species have been described by science, yet experts predict that they add up to less than 15 percent of the total species on Earth. That leaves a lot of species to be discovered and named.

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Most new animal species are turning up in the “Global South,” a loosely defined group of less industrialized countries in Latin America, the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia. But a new study in Proceedings of the Royal Society B reports that scientists in more industrialized countries are taking the lead in publishing new species descriptions.

It’s not surprising that, under historic colonial rule, costly scientific exploration expeditions were conducted mainly by Europeans. Many of the Global South countries are former European colonies, and access to scientific careers was limited for residents of those countries. Typically, foreign researchers “parachuted” in (visiting for limited periods of time to collect and catalog nature). While local people are known to have guided European explorers to the natural biota of their regions, those locals rarely received recognition for their work, much less being credited as coauthors in the scientific literature.

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Read more: “Why Do Taxonomists Write the Meanest Obituaries?”

Science was conducted this way for generations, and the trend continues into the 21st century, according to Brazilian researchers from the State University of Campinas, the Federal University of Paraíba (UFPB), and the Federal Institute of Education, Science, and Technology of Piauí. The researchers mined scientific literature from 20 years (2003 through 2022) of published work for new species descriptions. Focusing on terrestrial mollusks—such as snails and slugs—a total of 3,272 new species were described during that period, of which more than two thirds (68 percent) inhabit the Global South. Still, Global South researchers participated in only a third of the new descriptions, while Global North researchers were listed in more than three quarters of publications announcing the discoveries.

Clearly, “parachute science” is still alive and well, the authors argue, with most species descriptions in the Global South excluding resident researchers from publication of the findings. Even when resident researchers were included, they served as first authors only 27.3 percent of the time. The United States leads the pack when it comes to new species discoveries abroad that don’t include any resident researchers.

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This parachute approach, while capitalizing on the heftier academic resources available in the Global North, does not reflect the best science. The new study determined that the rigor of the research is raised by the inclusion of at least one resident researcher from the country where a new species is discovered. In-country scientists bring expertise and perspectives that can’t simply be parachuted in.

“‘Parachute’ science is a practice that harms not only local researchers, but also science in general. Less robust studies may have their results invalidated in the future,” said UFPB study coordinator and ecologist Mario Moura in a statement. “This may delay conservation efforts, which require accurate and stable information.”

So, at least for the identification of new mollusk species, it’s high time to support international collaborations that benefit from a synergy of knowledge, skills, and resources both local and abroad.

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Lead image: creativebucket / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on December 18, 2025

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

Zoology

- One of World’s Rarest Cats Has Finally Resurfaced

- What a Mosquito’s Lunch Tells Us About the Ecosystem

- The Stream Animals Thriving After a Megafire

- These Fatal Gauntlets Kill Thousands of Endangered Seabirds Every Year

- Tiny Hints of Soldier Stomach Troubles in Roman Britain

- How Animals Navigate Darkness

- These Butterflies Change Visual Systems with Seasons

- The Fishy Inspiration Behind a Bold, Tandem Space Mission

- Italian Bears Softened by Centuries of Human Proximity

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

One of World’s Rarest Cats Has Finally Resurfaced

Behold the first sightings of a flat-headed cat in Thailand in 30 Years

By Devin Reese    December 26, 2025

A strange looking Southeast Asian cat went missing in Thailand about 30 years ago. The flat-headed cat (Prionailurus planiceps) is unmistakable with its long, flattened forehead and short, tubular body. Other odd features include webbed toes for getting around in their preferred habitat of wetlands and peat swamps. Despite their diminutive size (just half the size of a house cat), flat-headed cats rank as apex predators in their boggy ecosystems, feeding on fish, shrimp, and perhaps small birds and rodents.

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The last detection of a flat-headed cat in Thailand was in 1995, contributing to its 2008 classification as IUCN Endangered. Now, thanks to camera trap surveys, flat-headed cats have once again been spotted in southern Thailand. Their rediscovery was reported today by Thailand’s Department of National Parks, Wildlife, and Plant Conservation (DNP) and Panthera Thailand, a global wild cat conservation organization.

Based on images from the largest ever camera trap survey of the species, flat-headed cats were spotted 13 times in 2024 and16 times in 2025 in Thailand’s Princess Sirindhorn Wildlife Sanctuary. A mother with cubs was also documented, indicating a reproducing population. Only about 2,500 flat-headed cats are thought to exist throughout their Southeast Asian range.

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Read more: “Your Cat is Listening to You”

“This is a landmark moment for Thailand and a powerful reflection of our long-standing commitment to conservation,” explained Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Suchart Chomklin, who added that “the flat-headed cat’s resurgence is a well-timed reminder that when we safeguard our natural heritage, we safeguard our nation’s wild habitats and future.”

The finding comes just in time for today’s National Wildlife Protection Day in Thailand, celebrated annually on December 26th.

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“Uncovering the existence of a species once thought lost in the region highlights the dedication and effectiveness of DNP officials in protecting border forests and preserving rare wildlife populations despite challenging political and social circumstances that make conservation work difficult,” said Thailand’s DNP Director General Mr. Atthapol Charoenchansa.

But the work isn’t over, as continued threats to flat-headed cats include land conversion for agriculture and housing, hunting, pollution, and disease spread from domestic animals.

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Lead photo: A rare image of a Flat-headed Cat (Prionailurus planiceps) at night, Kinabatangan River, Sabah, Borneo, Malaysia. Credit: Sebastian Kennerknecht/Panthera.

Devin Reese

Posted on December 26, 2025

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What a Mosquito’s Lunch Tells Us About the Ecosystem

A clever trick borrowed from Jurassic Park

By Devin Reese    December 24, 2025

Traditional animal surveys are cumbersome—days and weeks of tromping around in the field looking for animals and signs of their presence in tracks, scrapes, and scats. But entomologists at the University of Florida have found a way to survey vertebrate animals from just a few drops of mosquito blood.

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A paper published in Scientific Reports describes how analysis of mosquito blood can yield an estimate of vertebrate species assemblages that rivals traditional sampling methods. A companion paper, also in Scientific Reports, provided the results of using the technique in Central Florida’s Deluca Preserve. “They say Jurassic Park inspired a new generation of paleontologists, but it inspired me to study mosquitoes,” explained study author Lawrence Reeves in a statement.

Recalling the Jurassic Park trope of recovering dinosaur DNA from fossilized mosquitoes, he wondered whether mosquitoes could really yield information about the vertebrates in their ecosystems.

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Read more: “Parasites Are Us”

Over eight months, Reeves and his University of Florida colleagues, led by graduate student Hanna Atsma, collected tens of thousands of mosquitoes, including 21 species, from the DeLuca Preserve. Using DNA barcoding, a sample of 2,051 mosquito meals were analyzed. The results brought to light a whopping 86 vertebrate species that had been bitten by mosquitoes—from bald eagles to coyotes to toads to gopher tortoises. Not many vertebrates appeared to have escaped the mosquitoes, although Florida panthers, which are extremely rare, didn’t show up in the sample.

In evaluating the mosquito blood analysis (MBA) results, the researchers led by postdoc Sebastian Botero-Cañola found that they outperformed conventional sampling methods, depending on the season. During the dry season, when mosquitoes are absent or at low densities, conventional sampling methods were superior. But during the wet season when mosquitoes come out in force, the MBA technique was as good as surveys in assessing total vertebrate diversity.

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“I am acutely aware of the disdain humans have for mosquitoes,” explained Reeves, “but in their ecosystems, they play important roles, and we show here they can help monitor other animals to help conserve them or to inform how we manage ecosystems.”

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Lead image: SILVIA MAQQ / Shutterstock

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Devin Reese

Posted on December 24, 2025

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Stream Animals Thriving After a Megafire

Oregon fish and amphibians are surprisingly resilient

By Devin Reese    December 23, 2025

With climate change bringing higher temperatures and irregular rainfall, wildfires have been ravaging the West Coast of the United States in recent years. A history of limiting natural fires has caused buildups of dry brush that ignite into particularly potent blazes—“megafires.” Human survival takes priority in wildfire responses, with impacts on wildlife, such as stream animals that may experience aftereffects of fire in scorched watersheds, taking a backseat.

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A new study by scientists in Corvallis, Oregon, found, surprisingly, that many fishes and amphibians fared remarkably well after megafires. “Our work looked at the three years following megafires in western Oregon and suggests that fishes are thriving and amphibians are persisting,” said Oregon State University postdoc and study co-author Allison Swartz in a statement.

Swartz and collaborators from OSU, the National Council for Stream Improvement, Inc., the U.S. Forest Service’s Pacific Northwest Research Station, and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency surveyed 30 watersheds on the western slope of the Cascades. These conifer ecosystems in the shadow of the mountains receive abundant rainfall, making them home to diverse assemblages of fishes, frogs, salamanders, and crayfish. The watersheds selected for the study encompassed a range of fire history, including the nearly half-million acres burned by megafires in 2020.

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Read more: “Wildfires are Changing Animal Evolution”

The team expected to find lower densities of aquatic animals in more severely burned stream systems, particularly where timber had been salvaged, which is known to alter the dynamics of streamside runoff.

Instead, the results showed that total densities of vertebrates were higher in streams that drained the most scorched watersheds. There were some species-level reductions, such as lower frog densities in areas with lots of timber salvage.  But, overall, stream vertebrate populations had weathered the changes well.

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“Despite experiencing high-severity megafires, vertebrate assemblages and populations seem to be buffered from fire-induced changes if adequate physical habitat and food availability are maintained post-fire,” concluded Swartz.

The researchers point out that co-existing with new, climate change-induced fire regimes requires not only taking care of humans but also considering the effects on native fauna. In their study of Cascade streams, some of the extreme events that can follow high-intensity fires, such as landslides, had not occurred. But more research on how wildfires change watershed ecosystems is warranted.

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Lead image: Nuria PhotoStock / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on December 23, 2025

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

These Fatal Gauntlets Kill Thousands of Endangered Seabirds Every Year

Study maps the deadly areas where birds cross paths with fishing vessels

By Devin Reese    December 19, 2025

Commercial ocean fishing has come a long way, from historic hand gathering by coastal communities to fleets of enormous ships that now trawl the oceans. Thousands of miles of fishing nets and long lines bristling with hooks deployed daily capture billions of pounds of seafood.

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But their efficiency comes at a cost—the bycatch of nontarget species—because fishing gear is largely nonselective. The incidental capture of large animals such as marine turtles and dolphins is well documented, but a new study published in Biological Conservation drives home the bycatch dangers for seabirds.

“A major cause of rapid population decline for migratory albatrosses and petrels is fisheries bycatch, which occurs when the birds are caught or entangled on pelagic longlines with thousands of baited hooks,” study co-author Kylie Scales, a marine ecologist at the University of the Sunshine Coast in Australia, said in a statement.

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Scales and colleagues from Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom focused on the Antipodean albatross (Diomedea antipodensis antipodensis), an endangered species that only breeds every two years on select New Zealand islands. Like other albatrosses, the Antipodean has a huge wingspan that allows it to forage by diving for fish and squid over thousands of miles of open ocean.

Read more: “The Wisdom of Gay Albatrosses”

The researchers combined data from fishing vessel tracking with data from satellite tracking of 192 albatrosses. By integrating these two streams of data across age class, sex, and season, they mapped where the birds most frequently interacted with fishing gear, then used oceanographic data to characterize those locales.

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“We found the most intense risk zones occur in our winter, among juvenile and female albatrosses, in a latitudinal band near the Tropic of Capricorn from 25 to 40 degrees south of the Equator,” said Scales.

In identifying bycatch risk hotspots, marine ecologists can recommend geographically targeted mitigation measures, which include specially equipped fishing lines that scare birds away; weighted fishing lines that sink down in the water column; and fishing lines set at night when many large seabirds are not active.

“Currently, only one of three mitigation measures is mandated in this zone,” said study co-author Ho Fung Wong, a graduate student at the University of the Sunshine Coast.

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An estimated 50,000 to 75,000 seabirds are known to be killed by ocean longline fisheries each year, so this approach to delineating risk zones could help protect populations of vulnerable species.

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Lead image: Oscar Thomas / Wikipedia

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Devin Reese

Posted on December 19, 2025

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Tiny Hints of Soldier Stomach Troubles in Roman Britain

Sediment from a Roman military settlement revealed traces of parasites that trigger gastrointestinal distress, despite efforts to keep the ancient encampment clean

By Molly Glick    December 18, 2025

Roman soldiers stationed at a fort called Vindolanda in what’s now northern England—not far from the famous Hadrian’s Wall—seem to have run into some pretty severe tummy troubles.

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Previously, scientists have dug up evidence of parasites that wreak havoc on the gastrointestinal system at several Roman military settlements, including archeological sites in Austria, Scotland, and Serbia.

Past excavations at Vindolanda have unearthed all sorts of well-preserved items, including wooden tablets that described military activities at the site. Romans lived there between the first and fourth centuries A.D., and troops from all over Europe spent time there. Vindolanda had multiple bath houses over the centuries, and by the third century occupants sourced water from nearby natural springs through an aqueduct. The Romans at Vindolanda also maintained drains and ditches to dispose of water and waste.

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This infrastructure makes Vindolanda a prime spot to hunt for parasites, which can spread via food, water, and hands contaminated with human feces and infect dozens of people at once.

WHIPPING UP TROUBLE: A whipworm egg dug up in the sediment from Vindolanda. Photo by Marissa Ledger.

To hunt for traces of these pathogens, a team from Canada and the United Kingdom examined sediment from a sewer drain connected to a latrine block at a third-century bath house. They also studied sediment collected from a ditch from the first century, which was part of the fort’s defenses.

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The sediment from both areas contained eggs from parasitic worms called roundworms and whipworms. These infect humans and other animals, and can cause symptoms like diarrhea, pain, anemia, and fever.

They found these eggs in 28 percent of all sediment samples from the sewer drain. In one of these samples, they also identified traces of Giardia duodenalis—marking the first evidence of this parasite in Roman Britain. This ailment, known as giardiasis, is also associated with diarrhea, and can cause dehydration, intense fatigue, and weight loss.

This means that Roman soldiers in the area may have experienced plenty of stomach upset and other nasty symptoms while on duty, according to a new paper published in Parasitology.

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Read more: “What Makes Us Bold”

“While the Romans were aware of intestinal worms, there was little their doctors could do to clear infection by these parasites or help those experiencing diarrhea, meaning symptoms could persist and worsen,” said paper first author Marissa Ledger, a biological anthropologist at McMaster University in Canada, who worked on the paper while a Ph.D. student at the University of Cambridge in a statement. “These chronic infections likely weakened soldiers, reducing fitness for duty.”

While the Romans tried to keep things clean at Vindolanda with latrines and a sewer system, “all parasites recovered are spread by ineffective sanitation,” the authors wrote. In these conditions, the soldiers were also potentially vulnerable to other pathogens that spread similarly, like Salmonella and norovirus—which can also make for highly unpleasant trips to the bath house.

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Compared with the pathogenic finds from military sites like Vindolanda, previous research has suggested that people in larger Roman Britain urban centers, such as York and London, experienced a wider range of parasites, like meat and fish tapeworms. Such differences hint at the importance of myriad “social, cultural, political, and environmental factors that contribute to transmission on a finer scale,” the authors wrote.

No one said guarding Hadrian’s Wall was easy.

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Lead image: Vindolanda Trust

Molly Glick

Posted on December 18, 2025

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Animals Navigate Darkness

Mouse brains perform a clever mechanism to count their steps and keep them on track

By Kristen French    December 17, 2025

The body may know where we’re going before our eyes do, building maps of the world that rely on a kind of internal GPS rather than on landmarks or other visual cues. This process, known as path integration, allows the brain to track each step and turn you make, updating your position in time and space—even in the dark.

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Certain neurons in the hippocampus known as place cells are central to this process in the brain. They activate at specific locations regardless of whether an animal can see their surroundings, relying on internal cues to decide which spots get special consideration. Working together, the neurons fire in patterns that track the passage of time and distance during movement.

A team of scientists from the Max Planck Florida Institute for Neuroscience have recently uncovered new details about how these internal maps work: Rather than using a single internal clock, the brain uses two interacting sets of excitatory and inhibitory neurons in the hippocampus. The researchers published their findings in Nature Communications.

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Scientists have long known that the hippocampus helps animals navigate, and that some neurons fire up at specific places they visit. “However, in environments full of sights, sounds, and smells, it is difficult to tell whether these neurons are responding to those sensory cues or to the animal’s position itself,” explained Yingxue Wang, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Florida Institute of Neuroscience and a paper co-author, in a statement.

Read more: “The Woman Who Got Lost at Home”

To cut through the noise, the researchers worked with mice, whose hippocampal circuits can be recorded and manipulated with great precision. They first trained the mice to run fixed distances along a virtual linear track to reach a reward. The track didn’t feature any obvious landmarks or visual cues, which forced the mice to rely on internal estimates of distance and time. While the mice ran through the course, the researchers recorded activity across hundreds of neurons. Then they used light to mess with certain inhibitory circuits and test how those disruptions shaped the animals’ sense of time and distance.

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Once they had collected the recordings, two distinct patterns emerged. One set of excitatory neurons called PyrUp was activated all at once at the start of movement and then gradually faded, each at its own pace. Taken together, this staggered activity appears to give the brain something to measure against, letting it know how far along the journey the animal has traveled. Another set, known as PyrDown excitatory neurons, showed the opposite pattern, quieting down at the start of movement and then gradually ramping back up. This activity helped mark the start of a new journey, preventing the brain from mixing one trip with the next.

From there, the team used light to silence two kinds of inhibitory neurons in the brain: SST neurons, which help stabilize the brain’s internal timing signals, and PV neurons, which act as a kind of reset button. When these neurons were silenced, the mice misjudged distance or time without changing their running speed. That finding reinforced the idea that PyrUp and PyrDown neurons encode internal measures of time and space, rather than movement itself. Additional control experiments confirmed that the effects weren’t due to motor problems, visual deficits, or altered expectations of reward.

If similar patterns are found in people, they might help explain why people with Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia often become disoriented even in familiar places—and could point toward new therapeutic targets for restoring that lost sense of where we are.

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Lead image: Rudmer Zwerver / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on December 17, 2025

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

These Butterflies Change Visual Systems with Seasons

There’s more than what meets the eye in a color-swapping insect

By Devin Reese    December 17, 2025

Animals are known to change seasonally with their environments. For example, an Arctic fox that sports a snow-white coat in winter sheds to wear a brown-gray summer coat. These changes are triggered by daylight cues that alter the action of foxes’ pigment-producing genes.

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While operating on a different time scale, some butterflies also undergo seasonal changes in their coloration. And a recent study in Functional Ecology shows that color changes are just the tip of the iceberg—in at least one butterfly species, they’re accompanied by shifts in behavior and visual perception.

Researchers from the University of Arkansas and Cornell University studied seasonal changes in buckeye butterflies (Junonia coenia) from Arkansas tallgrass prairies. Because these butterflies live for just a couple of weeks as adults, the changes occur across generations. Buckeyes hatching in summer sport notably lighter-color wings than butterflies hatching in fall. The summer individuals were also known to have higher activity levels and to disperse further than the fall-hatched ones.

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Read more: “Do Butterflies Challenge the Meaning of Species?”

From May to November across three years, the scientists assessed buckeye butterfly coloration, wing pattern, behavior, and activity level. From butterfly heads collected once per month, tissue was removed and sampled for RNA (to determine expression of genes). The results showed differential expression of several genes across seasons. As days got shorter and cooler in September, buckeyes emerged with darker wings and spent more time basking in the sun. Those observable changes were accompanied by shifts in gene expression related to eye pigmentation, circadian rhythms, and temperature stress.

While it’s too early to specify how those genetic shifts manifest in butterfly perceptions, it’s fair to say that there’s more going on seasonally than what meets the eye. “Not only are common buckeye butterflies interacting with their world differently depending on the time of year, but they probably see the world differently at these times of year, too,” University of Arkansas biologist and co-author Grace Hirzel said in a statement.

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Whether or not other animals experience seasonal sensory changes in tandem with changes to their bodies and physiology remains to be determined. But such sensory shifts may explain observed changes in behavior. “Changes in sensory system development like we found in the buckeye may be a common strategy used by many animals to survive shifting seasonal conditions,” added Hirzel.

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Lead image: Dr. Thomas G. Barnes, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / Wikimedia Commons

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Devin Reese

Posted on December 17, 2025

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Fishy Inspiration Behind a Bold, Tandem Space Mission

Remarkable remoras get their time in the orbital spotlight

By Bob Grant    December 15, 2025

I’m a sucker for remoras. The streamlined fish are the ocean’s perfect hitchhiker, honed by millions of years of evolution to catch a ride with some of the sea’s biggest movers and shakers—sharks, whales, rays, even turtles. And now remoras can add another accomplishment to their already impressive resume: They were the inspiration for a space mission that could make autonomous tandem space missions in low Earth orbit.

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Two private space companies recently revealed that they were conducting a test run of what’s called rendezvous and proximity operations (RPO) technology. Essentially, two spacecraft, made by Impulse Space, used software from another space company, Starfish Space, to come within about 4,000 feet of each other as they floated high above Earth. The collaboration, called “Remora” by the companies involved, demonstrated the accuracy of such RPO technology, which could be used to bring two spacecraft in lockstep orbit—remora-like—to autonomously service the multitude of satellites that encircle the Earth.

But back to the watery realm. Remoras likely evolved from more garden variety fish starting about 32 million years ago. Cobia, the closest living relatives of remoras, are free-living and don’t latch onto other marine organisms. But they do provide an interesting model of how remoras may have come about.

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Read more: “How Fishing Could Change the Evolution of Fish”

Cobia look remarkably similar to remoras save for the one thing that makes the latter a champion marine hitchiker—a suction cup positioned on the tops of their heads. That structure most likely morphed through time from a dorsal fin on the remora’s ancestor, an insight definitively proven by researchers in 2012, after naturalists had been suggesting as much since the early 1800s.

That evolutionary innovation helps modern day remoras glom onto all sorts of their fellow oceanic travelers—sharks, whales, turtles, and more—while snapping up their scraps and sometimes picking off parasites. Interestingly, cobia also tend to tag along with larger marine swimmers, such as manta rays, marlins, and sharks. They just don’t employ a sucker to keep hold.

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I for one am glad to see remora get their moment in the spaceflight spotlight in the shallows of the cosmic ocean.

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Lead image: Richard ling / Wikimedia

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Bob Grant

Posted on December 15, 2025

Bob Grant is the deputy editor at Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Italian Bears Softened by Centuries of Human Proximity

In a hotbed of culture, the animals evolved to be less aggressive

By Devin Reese    December 15, 2025

Among Earth’s creatures, brown bears are pretty undesirable to run into as you stroll through the woods. But if you’re hiking through the mountains of central Italy, it might not be so bad.

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It’s not like you could sit down and have an espresso with one, but at least in a small corner of Italy, bears have evolved to become less dangerous than they used to be, according to a study published today in Molecular Biology and Evolution. And the change may have been spurred by humans.

Apennine brown bears (Ursus arctos marsicanus), cousins of grizzly bears (U. arctos horribilis), occur only in the mountains of central Italy. These Italian bears diverged from European brown bear ancestors some 2,000 to 3,000 years ago. As they became geographically restricted to the Apennine Mountains, the central Italian population evolved into a subspecies with distinct characteristics, including tolerance of humans.

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Read more: “How We Really Tamed the Dog”

“One major cause of decline and isolation was probably forest clearance associated with the spread of agriculture and increasing human population density in central Italy,” said the paper’s lead author, evolutionary biologist Andrea Benazzo at the University of Ferrara, in a statement.

Populations of brown bears were squeezed and persecuted by the spread of agriculture and urbanization starting in Roman times. By about 1,500 years ago, the Apennine brown bears were completely isolated from their closest relatives, and their total numbers eventually dipped to only 50 individuals. Limited to a protected area, the Abruzzo, Lazio, and Molise National Park, Apennine brown bears are currently classified as critically endangered.

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Populations of animals that become isolated typically experience reduced genetic diversity and gene flow. But were these genetic changes responsible for the reduced aggression of these brown bears, or was there another force at play? Researchers in Italy and colleagues from France, Brazil, Slovakia, and the United States compared the genomes of 13 Apennine bears to the genomes of brown bears (U. arctos) in Slovakia and grizzly bears in the U.S.

As expected, the Apennine brown bear genome showed the reduced diversity that comes with extensive inbreeding, which corroborated that a population bottleneck had occurred as humans squeezed the bears into a more limited range. Intriguingly, the researchers identified distinct genetic variants in the Apennine bears’ genomes associated with docile behavior in other species, such as dogs and cats. They hypothesized that humans unwittingly exerted selection pressure on this population of bears by killing the more aggressive ones, driving an evolutionary shift toward bears that displayed a higher tolerance for humans.

“Human-wildlife interactions are often dangerous for the survival of a species, but may also favor the evolution of traits that reduce conflict,” concluded geneticist Giorgio Bertorelle, a co-author.

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Ironically, by people selectively culling more aggressive Apennine bears to make room for farms and settlements, the subspecies may have gained a greater chance of survival. The more docile individuals left behind were more likely to survive, mate, and pass on their genes. Despite the loss of genetic variation and the increased accumulation of bad mutations, the tolerant bears could persist in a human-dominated environment.

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Lead image: Bruno D’Amicis/ Molecular Biology and Evolution

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Devin Reese

Posted on December 15, 2025

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

Table of Contents

Nautilus: 2025 Dec 26

Anthropology

Did Humans or Climate Push the Neanderthals Over the Edge?

How Christianity Redrew Ancient Nubian Tattoos

Arts

The Nautilus Winter Reading List 2025

Astronomy

This Big Space Sandwich Broke a Record

Saturn’s Rings Are Thicker Than We Thought

Did a Rogue Planet Bring Order to Our Solar System?

Monster Stars Roamed the Cosmos at the Dawn of Time

These Baby Stars Have Mysterious Companions

Cosmic Collision Caught on Camera

Titan May Not Host a Massive Ocean After All

How Earth’s Atmosphere Reached the Moon

Astronomers Observe Spacetime Whirlpool for the First Time

Communication

The Most Beautiful Science of the Year

The Psychedelic Scientist

Environment

Tasting Tomorrow

How All Those Forever Chemicals End Up on Your Plate

Is the Mistletoe That inspires Holiday Smooching A Menace to Trees?

Why Does My Lettuce Go Bad so Fast?

Eat Your Molecules

Evolution

What Does Evolutionary Age Have to Do with a Species’ Extinction?

When We Were Lunch

Geoscience

Why Is Spain Spinning?

Is Earth’s Core Like an Onion?

Health

How to Taste More Intensely

Can True Love Help to Heal a Diseased Heart?

History

An Ancient Fingerprint Among Clues to a 2,000-year-old Invasion of Denmark

Math

Ancient Math Hidden in Oldest Known Floral Pottery

Microbiology

The Problem With Vaccination Shortfalls in Livestock

These “Living Rocks” Are Living It Up

The Dark Matter of Food

Neuroscience

The Silver Lining in Disappointment

Paleontology

The Taste of Prehistory

Eat Like a Neanderthal

The Feathery Dinosaurs That Couldn’t Fly

Ancient Bee Nests Hiding in Regurgitated, Fossilized Bones

Psychology

Americans Don’t Seem to Enjoy Negotiating

How to Tell if Someone’s Really Listening

This Meal Might Bring You to Tears

Which Country Is Most Narcissistic?

Does Your Personality Put You At a Higher Risk of Dying?

What Makes Someone Good at Reading the Room?

Science Says … Laughter Is Contagious

We Overestimate the Prevalence of Online Trolls

The 3 Ways We Read Between the Lines

The Emerging Science of Being Hangry

Sociology

Parachute Science Continues to Prevail in Global South Biodiversity Studies

Zoology

One of World’s Rarest Cats Has Finally Resurfaced

What a Mosquito’s Lunch Tells Us About the Ecosystem

The Stream Animals Thriving After a Megafire

These Fatal Gauntlets Kill Thousands of Endangered Seabirds Every Year

Tiny Hints of Soldier Stomach Troubles in Roman Britain

How Animals Navigate Darkness

These Butterflies Change Visual Systems with Seasons

The Fishy Inspiration Behind a Bold, Tandem Space Mission

Italian Bears Softened by Centuries of Human Proximity