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Anthropology

- The Poison-Arrow Technology of Our Hunter-Gatherer Ancestors

ANTHROPOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Poison-Arrow Technology of Our Hunter-Gatherer Ancestors

Tipping their arrowheads with poison may have tipped the survival odds in their favor

By Devin Reese    January 7, 2026

In understanding the evolution of humans, archaeologists look back to when our exceptional abilities began. Today, the human capacity to make tools to meet our needs is unprecedented in the animal kingdom. But where did our ingenuity start setting us apart? Inventing spears to enhance hunting prowess distinguished us from other primates—and equipping them with poison arrows was next level. A study published today in Science Advances reports that we reached the poison arrow milestone earlier than previously believed.

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The first definitive evidence of poisoned arrowheads came from the mid-Holocene, in an Egyptian tomb dated to about 4,400 years ago and in a South African cave dating to about 6,700 years ago. In both cases, the arrows had been tipped with toxic plant compounds in what’s considered by the study authors “a hallmark of advanced hunter-gatherer technology.”

But now, researchers from the University of Stockholm and the University of Johannesburg have detected traces of natural poison on five of 10 arrow tips collected from the Umhlatuzana Rock Shelter in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. In the first direct evidence of poison applied to Pleistocene hunting weapons, the discovery backs up the timing of human use of poisoned arrows by orders of magnitude, to about 60,000 years ago.

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“Because poison is not a physical force, but functions chemically, the hunters must also have relied on advanced planning, abstraction, and causal reasoning,” wrote the study authors.

Read more: “The Greatest Journey of All Time”

If you think about it, poisoning arrow tips requires connecting several ideas—that arrows can be flung to kill animals, that certain plant compounds are poisonous to humans and maybe to animals, and that animals will die gradually from them. The plant compound buphanidrine was found on all five arrow tips, and one of them also bore traces of epibuphanisine, both of which come from the Amaryllidaceae family of flowering plants.

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Through a process of deduction, the researchers traced the alkaloid compounds to an endemic South African plant, Boophone disticha, known locally as “gifbol” (which translates to poison bulb). European explorer Carl Thunberg recorded its application in the 1770s by Indigenous hunters in the Cape of Good Hope, southern Africa, to hunt springbok, and today gifbol is recognized in southern Africa as arrow poison. The milky liquid can be used almost straight out of the plant by drying it to a gum-like consistency or heating it over a fire.

The study authors conclude that these Late Pleistocene hunter-gatherers were making their poison from the gifbol root bulb extract, demonstrating a knowledge of plant and prey ecology coupled with lethal technical abilities.

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Lead image: maradon 333 / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on January 7, 2026

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

Arts

- I Turn Scientific Renderings of Space into Art

ARTS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

I Turn Scientific Renderings of Space into Art

Illustrator Luís Calçada walks a fine line between scientific truth and imagination

By Kristen French    January 15, 2026

For many people, Luís Calçada’s imaginative interpretations of the universe are the universe—even if the events they illustrate can’t be observed with the naked eye or happened billions of light-years ago. Calçada works as an illustrator for the European Southern Observatory (ESO) near Munich, where he creates stunning images of cosmic events in flamboyant color, such as one that recently graced the cover of Nature depicting a fiery explosion around a protostar.

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Calçada’s journey into astronomical art began when he spied Contact, a 1985 work of science-fiction by Carl Sagan, as a kid in a bookstore. The cover showed an inky Earth floating in a sea of darkness, a mysterious fingerprint of light emerging out of the milky abyss. Calçada was so struck by that vision that he asked his parents to buy him the book on the spot. After he read it, he devoured all of Sagan’s other books. And that set him on his path.

THE INTERPRETER: Luís Calçada’s images bring the beauty and magic in complex astronomy to life. Courtesy of Luís Calçada

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Calçada started out studying astronomy and physics, but he soon learned that he was more interested in the ways a beautiful image can trigger an emotional tug to understand. So he left astronomy for art. We caught up with Calçada to talk about the relationship between beauty and scientific understanding.

Your images are lush and cinematic. Do you think beauty can ever get in the way of scientific truth?

I think beauty is a trigger for curiosity, because the fascination with something extraordinary—the way a star works, or the explosion of a supernova—makes people want to understand it. Sometimes, when I see people fascinated by more mystical things, or I have conversations with friends about, let’s say, astrology, I’m like, “Why are you fascinated by those topics?” Science alone is so beautiful, and there’s so much magic there.

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SUPERNOVA: This artist’s impression shows a star going supernova. About 22 million light-years away the supernova, SN 2024ggi, exploded in the galaxy NGC 3621. Using the ESO’s Very Large Telescope, astronomers managed to capture the very early stage of the supernova when the blast was breaking through the star’s surface. Credit: ESO / L. Calçada

Have you ever argued with a scientist over artistic license you took in one of your illustrations?

There are a few kinds of scientists here at ESO. When you’re working on a press release, sometimes you get those who are extremely happy with whatever you give them. Because quite often they’re just working on data and code and plots. But when they see a nice interpretation of their data, they’re quite happy.

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But there are other scientists who tend to say, “Oh, but maybe this could be like that.” And sometimes there’s a bit of a struggle to massage them into understanding that what they’re suggesting is actually not relevant for the story, or important for the general audience. Of course, we always want to make these illustrations as true to the science as possible. But it’s our job as communicators to understand what message we want to transmit to people, right? Because sometimes the science is quite clear for us, and for our scientists, but for the audience it’s not. So it’s about what we’re trying to communicate.

GONE ROGUE: Astronomers have identified an enormous “growth spurt” in a so-called rogue planet. Unlike the planets in our solar system, these objects do not orbit stars, free-floating on their own instead. The new observations, made with the European Southern Observatory’s Very Large Telescope, reveal that this free-floating planet is eating up gas and dust from its surroundings at a rate of 6 billion tonnes a second. This is the strongest growth rate ever recorded for a rogue planet, or a planet of any kind, providing valuable insights into how they form and grow. Credit: ESO / Luís Calçada

Can you give me an example of something a scientist wanted to change?

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One recent project comes to mind—the simulated explosion of a star going supernova (published in November of 2025). One of the scientists—he’s a brilliant person—paid too much attention to the details. And we had a lot of back and forth, trying to negotiate some things that shouldn’t go into the illustration and the animation. For example, in this illustration, we see a few things happening at once. In the real world, these things would happen at different timescales. The first outflow from the poles of the exploding star, maybe that would happen very fast. Whereas the other parts of the explosion would happen over seconds. And then the rest of flowing out happens maybe in days, and we’re showing it all in just 20 seconds of animation.

That’s why it’s important for us to always include captions for the images on our website. We send those captions to the journalists, very clearly explaining, this is an artist’s impression. But we also understand that these animations and illustrations have a life of their own. They get reproduced elsewhere on websites, and the caption gets lost. They can sometimes be harmful as well.

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What kind of harm do you think they can cause?

Harmful is probably a strong word. But they can create a false impression about what the universe really looks like. We’ve done so many illustrations of colorful events, but to human eyes, most of the universe is just black, empty. The timescales are also sped up for a lot of these things. Back in the day when I was doing some activities with the general public as an astronomer, when you’re trying to show them things in the telescope, they’re expecting to see this very colorful, dramatic scene. And you’re like, “Can you see it?” And they’re like, “No, I don’t.”

Do your images ever serve as visual hypotheses? Or are they always explanations of a settled idea or a finding that’s been established?

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We try to be very careful about how much these images are guessing. I think the role here is the science, the discovery. And we’re just trying to help the science get to the public. Many times, a nice, colorful, exciting image helps a lot for a finding to get onto the cover of a magazine or in The New York Times.

DISTANT STAR: Reconstruction of the star WOH G64, the first star outside our galaxy to be imaged in close-up. It is located at a staggering distance of over 160,000 light-years away in the Large Magellanic Cloud. This impression showcases its main features: an egg-shaped cocoon of dust surrounding the star and a ring or torus of dust. Credit: ESO / Luís Calçada

How do you balance realism against imagination?

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This one of the exploding supernova actually triggered a bit of a debate. There was some negativity surrounding this particular image, because some people thought it was too realistic looking. And that’s a danger. I saw people complaining. Some people were like, “Why are you showing this? Why are you not showing the supernova itself?” Because the actual supernova image was just a few pixels, so it wasn’t very interesting. What we tried to show is what the astronomers inferred through these complex methods.

The scientists were really happy at how well we portrayed the phenomenon in the end, but it triggered an internal discussion about ways of using these images. Even this week, we had more discussions about future use of AI in our work, ethical issues. Because it’s true that people may start getting fed up with this kind of overflow of bright, colorful images. And our work that’s tightly developed with scientists might get lost in that noise. We have to explore ways of cutting through the noise.

Read more: “The Art of Quantum Forces”

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What are some ways you might do that?

I use Reddit quite a lot, and I saw some people commenting along the same lines, calling it AI slop, and so I kind of pitched in on the conversation. I actually tried to explain a bit about the process with the scientists. It was quite cool to see the surprise in some of the people on Reddit. So maybe what we have to do is to engage in some of those conversations, convey some of the science behind these images.

Because ultimately the goal is communicating the science—not just to make pretty pictures.

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Lead image: This illustration shows what the luminous blue variable star in the Kinman Dwarf galaxy could have looked like before its mysterious disappearance.  A luminous blue variable star some 2.5 million times brighter than the sun. Stars of this type are unstable, showing occasional dramatic shifts in their spectra and brightness. Credit: ESO / Luís Calçada

Kristen French

Posted on January 15, 2026

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.

Astronomy

- Tiny Mars has a Big Impact on Our Climate

- Spaceflight Prematurely Ages Astronauts

- The First Observation of the Fiery Lifecycle of a Massive Solar Storm

- Why Europa Might Not Have Life After All

- How Jupiter and Saturn Dictate Earth’s Oil Deposits

- An Asteroid Impact May Explain Our Lopsided Moon

- Space Exploration Speaks to the Core of Who We Are

- We’re Evolving Beyond This Rock Right Now

- Rogue Planet Weighed for the First Time

- When We Learned Our Universe Is Speeding Up

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Tiny Mars has a Big Impact on Our Climate

New research shows the red planet plays an outsized role in Earth’s climate

By Jake Currie    January 20, 2026

Millions of years ago, an Ice Age began that altered the course of life on Earth forever. Changing ocean currents made the climate in the Horn of Africa drier. There, dense forests grew sparse, becoming isolated amidst the savannas. The arboreal primates that lived there were then forced to traverse the tall grass, putting them at risk of predation.

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For one primate species, this changing landscape represented a crisis—and an opportunity. Over millions of years of evolution, they adapted to their new habitat by evolving the ability to walk upright, freeing their hands to take care of newborns, and eventually, use tools. They were our ancestors. Were it not for this Ice Age, we might not exist. And were it not for Mars, this Ice Age might not exist, according to new research published in Publications of the Astronomical Society of the Pacific.

Ice Ages are caused by periodic changes in Earth’s orbit, the tilt of its axis, and its wobble as it rotates. Called Milankovitch cycles, these changes are governed by the gravitational tug of other planets and affect how much of the sun’s energy reaches Earth.

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Stephen Kane, a planetary scientist from the University of California, Riverside, was initially skeptical that Mars played a large role in the Milankovitch cycles. “I knew Mars had some effect on Earth, but I assumed it was tiny,” Kane said in a statement. “I’d thought its gravitational influence would be too small to easily observe within Earth’s geologic history. I kind of set out to check my own assumptions.”

Read more: “Wild Orbits Prime Planets for Life”

To better understand Mars’ role, Kane turned to computer simulations, modeling Earth’s orbit over tens of millions of years. When Mars was removed from the simulation, the longest Milankovitch cycle wasn’t changed. But somewhat surprisingly, two other cycles vanished completely. In other words, Mars, a tenth of the mass of the Earth, was playing an outsized role in Earth’s climate.

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“The closer it is to the sun, the more a planet becomes dominated by the sun’s gravity,” Kane said. “Because Mars is farther from the sun, it has a larger gravitational effect on Earth than it would if it was closer. It punches above its weight.”

Kane’s research has important implications outside our solar system as well. Planets with periodically eccentric orbits could be more conducive to the evolution of life, due in part to differential temperature gradients in oceans promoting the exchange of organic materials like a “biological pump.”

“When I look at other planetary systems and find an Earth-sized planet in the habitable zone, the planets farther out in the system could have an effect on that Earth-like planet’s climate,” Kane explained.

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Still, Kane can’t help but look at a planet like Mars—which could be humanity’s future—and imagine its impact on humanity’s past.

“Without Mars, Earth’s orbit would be missing major climate cycles,” Kane added. “What would humans and other animals even look like if Mars weren’t there?”

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Lead image: NASA, ESA, and STScI

Jake Currie

Posted on January 20, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Spaceflight Prematurely Ages Astronauts

New research looks at the effects of spaceflight on biological age

By Jake Currie    January 17, 2026

Astronauts’ bodies undergo plenty of stress beyond just the extraordinary g-forces at launch. Microgravity, cosmic radiation, biological clock disruptions, and more all take a toll on space travelers. Now, new research is shedding light on how these invisible stressors can prematurely age astronauts—and how they can bounce back.

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Scientists David Furman and Matias Fuentealba of the Buck Institute took blood samples from four astronauts before, during, and after a 10-day trip to low Earth orbit on the Axiom-2 mission. Working in concert with laboratories in New York City and Saudi Arabia, they developed what they call the “Epigenetic Age Acceleration” (EAA) formula to measure how gene expression and biological age are altered by spaceflight. They published their findings in Aging Cell.

Read more: “Physics Makes Aging Inevitable, Not Biology”

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Overall, the team studied 32 different DNA methylation-based clocks and determined the astronauts’ epigenetic age had advanced almost two years by day seven of their trip, then quickly recovered once they were back on Earth. In fact, younger astronauts showed a biological age that had actually dropped below their pre-flight measurements.

“These results point to the exciting possibility that humans have intrinsic rejuvenation factors that can counter these age-accelerating stressors,” Furman explained in a statement. “Using spaceflight as a platform to study aging mechanisms gives us a working model that will allow us to move toward the ultimate goal of identifying and boosting these rejuvenating factors both in astronauts and in those of us planning on aging in a more conventional manner.”

In the meantime, Furman is studying the effects of microgravity on heart, brain, and immune cells in his lab on Earth, all in an effort to delay our inevitable trip to the final frontier.

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Lead art: DGIM studio / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on January 17, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The First Observation of the Fiery Lifecycle of a Massive Solar Storm

“It’s a milestone in solar physics”

By Jake Currie    January 15, 2026

Solar flares can wreak havoc on Earth, disrupting radio communications, knocking out electricity, and causing satellites to crash. “Even signals on railway lines can be affected and switch from red to green or vice versa,” explained Louise Harra of the Davos Physical Meteorological Observatory. “That’s really scary.”

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Unfortunately, these flares can be difficult to predict. That’s in part because, rather than just sitting idle at the center of our solar system, the sun rotates on its axis once every 28 days, meaning we can only observe solar storms forming on its surface for two weeks before they spin out of view. Or at least that was the case before the European Space Agency (ESA) launched the Solar Orbiter mission in 2020.

Orbiting the sun every six months, this spacecraft keeps an eye on the far side of the sun while researchers on Earth watch the near side. Recently, Harra and Ioannis Kontogiannis of ETH Zurich collected data from both vantage points, observing a powerful solar storm brewing—the strongest in over 20 years—for an unprecedented 94 days. They published their findings in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

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Read more: “The 315-Year-Old Science Experiment”

“This is the longest continuous series of images ever created for a single active region: It’s a milestone in solar physics,” said Kontogiannis. With the Solar Orbiter, the team was able to watch as the magnetic tempest formed, became increasingly complex, flared, and then decayed.

They hope these unprecedented observations will improve the accuracy of solar storm forecasts so that we can better understand—and ultimately better prepare for them—on Earth. While the Solar Orbiter has proved to be indispensable in this mission, scientists still aren’t able to use it to predict how severe solar flares will be, but help is on the way.

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“We’re currently developing a new space probe at ESA called Vigil which will be dedicated exclusively to improving our understanding of space weather,” Harra said. That spacecraft is scheduled to launch in 2031.

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Lead image: ESA / AOES

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Jake Currie

Posted on January 15, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Why Europa Might Not Have Life After All

Europa’s seafloor might be “too quiet” to support life

By Jake Currie    January 14, 2026

With vast oceans of liquid water beneath its frozen surface, Europa, one of Jupiter’s four Galilean moons, represents some of scientists’ best hopes for finding life in our solar system. Unfortunately, a new study published in Nature Communications is throwing icy cold water on those hopes.

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While there’s no concrete consensus on a list of prerequisites for life to evolve on other planets, there are at least a couple of conditions that make it a lot more likely: liquid water and a source of energy. Europa has the first in spades—there’s more water there than there is on Earth—but the second has been something of a question mark.

On Earth, the sun provides energy for almost all life, but deep beneath the ocean lies a self-sustaining ecosystem independent of solar radiation. There, tectonic activity opens hydrothermal vents that gush heat and inorganic compounds. Bacteria use these compounds to make energy, growing in thick mats that in turn provide food for tiny crustaceans and other exotic organisms higher up the food chain. In many ways, it’s like an alien ecosystem here on Earth, and scientists believed it could exist on Europa as well. This new study, however, suggests otherwise.

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Read more: “Will We Know Alien Life When We See It?”

Using what’s known about Europa—its size, the gravitational forces exerted by Jupiter, the makeup of its core, and so on—a team of scientists led by Paul Byrne of Washington University in St. Louis modeled geological conditions on Europa. They concluded that the seafloor is simply too quiet for any geological activity that could sustain life.

“If we could explore that ocean with a remote-control submarine, we predict we wouldn’t see any new fractures, active volcanoes, or plumes of hot water on the seafloor,” Byrne explained in a statement. “Geologically, there’s not a lot happening down there. Everything would be quiet.”

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While the closest moon to Jupiter, Io, is a hotbed of geological and volcanic activity, the more distant Europa is too far for Jupiter’s gravitational tides to roil its subsurface. Additionally, the scientists say, any heat in Europa’s core has long since dissipated.

“Europa likely has some tidal heating, which is why it’s not completely frozen,” Byrne continued. “And it may have had a lot more heating in the distant past. But we don’t see any volcanoes shooting out of the ice today like we see on Io, and our calculations suggest that the tides aren’t strong enough to drive any sort of significant geologic activity at the seafloor.”

Still, the prospect of a cold, lifeless Europa hasn’t completely dashed Byrne’s hopes for finding life elsewhere in our universe. “I’m not upset if we don’t find life on this particular moon,” he said. “I’m confident that there is life out there somewhere, even if it’s 100 light-years away. That’s why we explore—to see what’s out there.”

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Lead image: NASA / Jet Propulsion Lab-Caltech / SETI Institute

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Jake Currie

Posted on January 14, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Jupiter and Saturn Dictate Earth’s Oil Deposits

Jurassic mudstones reveal how the heavens impact Earth

By Jake Currie    January 13, 2026

To put it generously, astrology has yet to meet the scientific burden of proof, but that doesn’t mean everything on Earth is unsusceptible to the position of the planets. New research suggests the heavens play a direct role in one major geopolitical and economic area: the location and size of shale oil deposits.

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You’ve seen a model of the solar system, with all eight planets (R.I.P. Pluto) revolving around the sun in tidy orbits, but things are actually messier than that. Because planets exert a bit of gravitational tug on one another, their orbits can get a bit warped.

For Earth, the pull of Jupiter and Saturn in particular can stretch its orbit into a more oval shape, something that occurs at regular intervals spanning 100,000 years. Known as the Milankovitch cycles for the Serbian astronomer who discovered them, these variations in Earth’s orbit affect how much solar radiation reaches our planet, which in turn affects the climate—and much, much more. New research published in the Journal of Palaeogeography shows these cycles can also affect the deposition of petroleum-rich shale rock.

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Read more: “Why Astrology Matters”

Scientists from China University of Petroleum studying Jurassic mudstones in China’s Sichuan Basin were able to detect Milankovitch cycles in the shale-rich sedimentary rock, deposited in ancient lake beds over tens of millions of years. Periods of high eccentricity resulted in warmer, wetter climates, and deposition of more organic material, while periods of low eccentricity resulted in drier climates, lower lake levels, and less organic material.

They say this new research will help locate shale deposits in continental basins, one of the biggest obstacles to shale oil production for petroleum companies seeking to meet rising global energy demand.

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Maybe astrology was on to something after all.

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Lead image: brian jackson 007 and WhataWin / Shutterstock

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Jake Currie

Posted on January 13, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

An Asteroid Impact May Explain Our Lopsided Moon

The crash might have radically transformed the lunar interior

By Molly Glick    January 13, 2026

Our moon is curiously lopsided—the near and far sides are pretty different.

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The side that’s visible to us has a thinner crust than its neighbor, around 25 miles thick, while the far side’s crust is nearly 40 miles thick. The face visible to us is also covered in huge plains of basalt rock formed from ancient lava flows, while the far side is lighter and dotted with craters, as we discovered in 1959 via images from the Soviet Union’s Luna 3 spacecraft.

Scientists aren’t entirely sure how the two faces took on such different features, but they’ve offered a few possible explanations. Some teams attribute it to the moon’s early days, when it was still an ocean of magma. At the time, the far side might have been much cooler than the near one—it experienced intense heat from our close-by young planet, which was similarly made of sizzling magma at the time. This temperature difference may have sent more crust-forming crystals to the far side.

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Researchers have also suggested that an asteroid impact triggered the moon’s lopsidedness. Now, lunar rock and soil samples seem to support this theory.

Read more: “The Violent Birth of the Moon”

China’s Chang’e-6 mission gathered the specimens from the South Pole-Aitken basin on the far side of the moon, the first samples from this hemisphere ever brought back to Earth. The basin covers almost a quarter of the moon’s surface—with a diameter of more than 1,550 miles, it’s roughly equivalent to the distance from Waco, Texas to Washington, D.C. It’s also incredibly deep, around 6 miles on average. In fact, the South Pole-Aitken basin is the biggest impact crater ever found in the solar system.

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Given the basin’s dizzying depth, researchers wondered whether the crash shifted the makeup of the moon’s interior. A team from the Chinese Academy of Sciences took a close look at four tiny bits of far side basalt rocks, which contain material from the lunar mantle, and compared them with samples from the moon’s near side collected from previous Apollo and Chang’e-5 missions.

They measured the samples’ potassium and iron isotopes, which are atoms of the same element with varying atomic masses due to their distinct number of neutrons. The scientists found that potassium isotopes in the far-side samples were much heavier than the near-side ones, while iron isotopes were only a tad heavier, findings reported in a Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper. While volcanic activity accounts for the differences in iron isotopes, the potassium results suggest some other process at play.

When potassium is heated up and turned into vapor, the lighter atoms evaporate and the heavier isotopes stick around. The scientists think these heavy potassium isotopes indicate that “the [asteroid] collision boiled the moon’s interior,” according to a statement. This may have directed potassium and iron to the moon’s near side, prompting the volcanic activity that now marks its surface.

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To confirm this theory, scientists need to examine additional bits of moondust. But their preliminary finding does suggest that “large-scale impacts are key drivers in shaping mantle and crustal compositions,” the authors wrote.

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Lead image: NASA/JPL-Caltech

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Molly Glick

Posted on January 13, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Space Exploration Speaks to the Core of Who We Are

Astrobiologist Caleb Scharf’s 3 greatest revelations while writing his latest book, The Giant Leap

By Caleb Scharf    January 12, 2026

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We don’t often think of space exploration as something that affects our lives directly, but when you take a closer look, you find it touches almost every corner of our biosphere. Satellite imaging and sensing of the Earth not only produces hundreds of petabytes of data that we utilize to guide everything from farming to city planning, but it has also effectively pumped hundreds of billions of dollars into the worlds’ economies via these unprecedented changes to human decision making. Space-based communications and digital connectivity have transformed societies and industries through the near-instantaneous flow of information from anywhere to anywhere, and satellite global positioning systems have fundamentally altered the nature of movement on the planet via applications like Google maps and point-to-point navigation.

How we act on information collected in space even influences the organization of plant life and wild animal habitats as we monitor foliage health and water availability to decide on land boundaries and river courses. Our space-enabled networks of transport and commerce change where and how we make and move materials and chemicals, impacting organisms’ health and the evolutionary pressures they experience, from giant mammals to the tiniest microbes.

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NATURAL HISTORIAN: Astrobiologist Caleb Scharf argues that a “natural history” of space exploration would “capture the true story of humanity’s effort to break away from its planetary origins.”

The received wisdom about the origins of space exploration is that it was largely driven by the events and aftermath of World War II and the military-industrial complex. But I struggle with this version of history because the ideas and early developments of space exploration existed long before World War II, and it seems as though our species would have eventually taken this step into the unknown anyway.

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A “natural history” approach to space exploration would take into account instead developments in the fields of physics, biology, and evolution to capture the true story of humanity’s effort to break away from its planetary origins.

For one thing, part of the barrier to life escaping a planet is the extreme difference between the energetics of biology and what is needed to climb out of a planetary gravity well. Biology has a low power density—organic life on Earth can generate small amounts of power in relation to its size. It’s frugal. But the most plausible ways to get into space to escape the Earth or enter orbit require a huge amount of focused power. To get around this, life had to first evolve a new trait: the capacity to think and analyze, which enabled it to then build technology and learn the laws of physics.

Space exploration is less a geopolitical caper than a voyage akin to Darwin’s on the Beagle.

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The natural history of space exploration starts with the story of these ideas—the mechanics of movement and gravity—and would examine the transformative power of humanity’s dawning understanding of the laws of motion and the concept of energy. But that natural history is also strongly determined by the actual landscape of the solar system. The specific configurations and characteristics of planets and other bodies has driven the evolution of space exploration. The kind of solar system we live in dictates the types of spacecraft that we’ve had to construct, and all the other infrastructure like communication systems and the mathematical modeling of orbits and trajectories.

In fact, I think that the story of space exploration is less a narrow geopolitical caper than a paradigm-shifting voyage, akin to Darwin’s on the Beagle. That voyage was a complex product of human behavior, technology, and our planet’s natural conditions, and it also helped change our species’ trajectory.

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What if the most probable evolutionary trajectory for life in the universe takes it away from planets altogether? A place like Mars can seem very alluring: When you see scenes from its surface you can fool yourself into thinking it’s like some of the loveliest arid places on Earth, all sand and exquisitely sculpted rocks. But in truth it’s terrible for organisms like us, who evolved in very specific conditions here on our home planet. The same holds for pretty much every other planet in our solar system.

As I studied the challenge of interplanetary life for The Giant Leap, it became clear to me that a more tenable future might lie in building hospitable environments away from planets. These environments, or habitats, might be entirely artificial or crafted from objects like asteroids to have “just-so” conditions of artificial gravity, air, and water. Even their orbital trajectories could be tuned to be safe and perfect for solar energy harvesting and transport access.

This kind of concept is far from new. In the early 20th century, the Russian scientist Konstantin Tsiolkovsky imagined “bublik” (bagel-like) space stations, and in the 1970s ideas like giant cylindrical O’Neill structures were fleshed out. Now we’re getting closer to having the means to try them out, as we fast approach a time where at least one rocket a day is launched into space from somewhere on the planet.

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A critical point to consider, too, is that the resources of the solar system are staggeringly vast, whether in terms of solar power or the materials contained in millions of asteroids. To fully utilize these resources to sustain life it’s probably easier to avoid over-investing in planets. All of which creates possibilities for a dispersal and expansion of living things on a scale beyond anything that came before, turning a species like us from billions into trillions of individuals.

A trillion minds thinking, creating, and exploring across the cosmos—It might require the same kind of cognitive leap that first got us into orbit.

Read an excerpt from The Giant Leap, “We’re Evolving Beyond This Rock Right Now,” here.

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Lead image: Sergey Nivens / Shutterstock

Caleb Scharf

Posted on January 12, 2026

Caleb Scharf is an astrobiologist, author, and recipient of the 2022 Carl Sagan Medal. His latest book is The Giant Leap: Why Space is the Next Frontier in the Evolution of Life.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

We’re Evolving Beyond This Rock Right Now

Life is already busy making its transition to being interplanetary

By Caleb Scharf    January 12, 2026

To understand our strange future, we have to remember that we are a dying species, as are all species on the Earth. But this condition is not just because of the inevitable geophysical and astrophysical changes that will modify and even erase the Earth’s present environments. Our species, like any other, hovers in only a temporary—largely illusory—equilibrium before evolution whisks things along in a churn of divergence, speciation, and extinction. All of this has happened before, and all of this will happen again.

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Early hominins, who provided an opportunity for Homo sapiens to emerge into a distinct form, had their own extensive history across hundreds of thousands of years before dissolving away. Some left their genetic echoes in us all, others perhaps not. For most lifeforms there is a Faustian bargain of sorts. Innovative and complex forms can have their days in the sun before succumbing to evolutionary pressures and being subsumed into or replaced by new glittering creatures. But sometimes an innovation comes along that further modifies the rules of the game itself.

On the face of it, space exploration is such an unequivocally ridiculous trait that for a species to acquire is absurd. Life that has found profound success for 4 billion years by integrating with—and modifying—the systems of a single, wet, rocky planet is now pushing its boundaries into what seems like unspeakably inhospitable terrain. That move is fraught with problems, whether from the constraints of physical laws or the incompatibility of terrestrial ways of living with the energetic needs and damaging forces of the local cosmos.

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Our species, like any other, hovers in only a temporary—largely illusory—equilibrium.

To make any of it work, extraordinary demands are placed on life’s extended augmentations, in the form of robotic systems and engineered materials, as well as the neural systems of human designers and scientists. Missions are assembled that contain millions of physical parts, elaborately synthesized from Earth’s elements that are both abundant and rare. Altogether, these parts can have thousands of functions and are built to extraordinary standards of redundancy and flexibility which anticipate events that may or may not ever be encountered. This is almost antithetical to biological evolution’s frequently thrifty, no-frills efficiency.

Even more absurdly, space exploration has its roots in the non-material, from the symbolic abstractions that people like Isaac Newton and Pierre-Simon Laplace invented to describe the motions and properties of the world. The moment that they formulated mathematical expressions to calculate an orbital path, they took the first steps toward being interplanetary. When Émilie du Châtelet, Mary Somerville, and Emmy Noether crafted their insightful interpretations and far-reaching theorems, they sped up this evolution of the possibilities of evolution, turbocharging it with ideas and clues. Darwin, with his nose deep in Earth’s pungent biosphere, also changed how we think about the world and our path from present to future. He made the present more significant and the future far more open-ended and interesting.

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As our species has explored these ideas, we’ve simultaneously extended life’s tendrils across the solar system and turned the Earth into an enormously scrutinized and digitized world. In doing so, we’ve learned that there are no other planetary environments that match what exists on the Earth. The moon and Mars are fascinating and important way stations, but they are also extraordinarily challenging places for life like us to exist, with their weak gravity and exposed environments. Venus and Mercury present brutal conditions for terrestrial life and materials, except perhaps for the racing Venusian cloud tops, whereas somewhere like distant Titan is so alien that it remains a place solely for machines. There may also be chemically rich, dark oceans inside icy moons and dwarf planets in the outer solar system, but for now they’re barely accessible to us.

Yet life is busy making its transition to being interplanetary right now. It’s very clear that for the past century we’ve been creating a substantial presence outside of the Earth. We are heading outward, learning as we go, and dragging the rest of Earth’s living systems along with us. Through tens of thousands of rocket launches and clever, complicated machines, the evolutionary path of life on Earth has reached an inflection point and a new trajectory. One possible if not probable form of this trajectory is Dispersal, the true nature of which finally comes into view: a synthesis of space exploration’s history, the architecture of the solar system, and the malleable nature of evolution itself, all projected into the future.

New openings for biological evolution will take our species on thousands of new paths.

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Once again, there are lessons from past experiences. When Darwin sailed on the Beagle, from 1831 to 1836, he had an opportunity to see a planet on the cusp of unimaginable change. In the 1830s the total human population was just 1 billion, the cumulative energy use by the technosphere was 25 times less than it is today, and oil and natural gas hadn’t yet become global resources or catalysts of conflict. The estimated extinction rate of species in the 1830s was 10 times less than it is now. Global atmospheric CO_2 concentrations sat at around 284 parts per million, barely changed from 100 years earlier, and far lower than today’s 422 parts per million. Atmospheric concentrations of the potent greenhouse gas methane were around 780 parts per billion, compared to today’s levels of over 1,850 parts per billion—a figure made even more significant because methane has an atmospheric lifetime of just 12 years and persists only because there are human actions that cause it to be constantly released into the atmosphere. Although there were plenty of wars and geopolitical tensions in the 1830s, and across different continents many awful practices of slavery and subjugation continued unabated, truly global conflicts and weapons technology capable of fully rewriting the history of life on Earth were yet to come.

The magnitude of those subsequent changes is reflected in something that the cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin said more than a century later. One of his reflections on being the first human to make a single complete orbit of the Earth, in April 1961, was that “looking at the Earth from afar you realize it is too small for conflict and just big enough for co-operation.” This astute and heartfelt observation was made in a radically different world than Darwin’s. By the 1960s, Earth was filled with interconnected humans pushing up against one another and was a place where nations could now unleash the fury of thermonuclear bombs to wipe all civilizations off the planet.

But if we project a little way into the future, Dispersal could actually turn the human clock back in more positive ways. We know that physical scales and temporal separations profoundly affect complex systems, as they have done for organisms scattered across places like the Galapagos. If our species and other species become spread across the solar system in a Dispersal, we will all begin to disconnect in ways that are far more profound than what happens across Earth’s great oceans and continents. Dilute us enough, and there are parallels not just with the conditions of the 1830s but also with a time a 100,000 years or more ago, when generation upon generation of hominins could exist without ever feeling the direct influence of other groups.

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Of course, it can’t be quite the same, not least because of the webs of communications and transport that have to exist to keep interplanetary existence running. But this very same technological connectivity also creates an opportunity—if taken—to break away from the cycles of economics and inequalities that are so entrenched on the Earth. Further down this timeline there could be new forms of independence for humans and eventually new openings for biological evolution to take our species on thousands of new paths, especially if we tinker with biology directly, through gene editing to tweak our physiological baselines, driven by a desire to be more resilient to alien environments. All of this could make our descendants’ future and the future of all life in the solar system far more robust against any kind of existential crisis. Dilution and diversity may be the ultimate strengths in a Darwinian universe.

If this all sounds too good to be true, well, of course, it might be. The path to all futures will inevitably have glitches and terrible traps. But Dispersal is a possibility, another kind of boundary condition in a complicated landscape of decisions and turning points. As with space exploration today, those possibilities will depend on ideas and on how science and technology evolve alongside us, and evolve they will.

Read Caleb Sharf’s “3 Greatest Revelations” while writing The Giant Leap here.

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Excerpted from The Giant Leap: Why Space is the Next Frontier in the Evolution of Life by Caleb Scharf, copyright ©2025 by Caleb Scharf. Used with permission of Basic Books, a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.

Lead image: Teo Tarras / Shutterstock

Caleb Scharf

Posted on January 12, 2026

Caleb Scharf is an astrobiologist, author, and recipient of the 2022 Carl Sagan Medal. His latest book is The Giant Leap: Why Space is the Next Frontier in the Evolution of Life.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Rogue Planet Weighed for the First Time

“The galaxy may be teeming with rogue planets”

By Jake Currie    January 9, 2026

There are planets out there wandering through space, ejected from their solar systems with no orbit to call home. Known as “rogue planets,” these cosmic nomads are thought to be fairly common, but without an accurate measure of their mass, there’s no way to know if they’re actually planets or something else. Now, according to new research published in Science, astronomers have managed to weigh a rogue planet for the first time.

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The only way to detect planets is when they transit in front of a star, bending its light with their gravity in a microlens effect that produces a flicker to those observing it through a telescope. Unfortunately, a transit by itself doesn’t provide enough information to determine the mass of the flicker-causing culprit.

The solution? Adding another telescope stationed far, far away from the first.

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An international team of astronomers led by Dong Subo of Peking University in Beijing witnessed a microlensing event from a series of ground-based telescopes that just happened to be captured by the Gaia spacecraft, located more than 930,000 miles from Earth. Comparing data from ground- and space-based telescopes allowed the team to determine the mass of the transiting object, similar to how human depth perception functions using two eyes.

Read more: “We Discovered a Rogues’ Gallery of Monster-Sized Gas Giants”

“We are able to use the same principle to extract the distance information of this rogue planet candidate, finding the mass and distance separately,” Dong explained in a statement. “The difference is that the spacing between the eyes of we humans is a few centimeters, whereas Gaia is about 1.5 million kilometers away from Earth.”

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The team determined the rogue planet’s mass clocked in at roughly the same as Saturn’s, placing it firmly in the “planet” category. “We know for sure it’s a planet,” Dong said.

Now that this novel method of detecting bona fide rogue planets has borne cosmic fruit, the next step is to use it to find more—and there could be plenty out there. Or as Dong put it, “Our discovery offers further evidence that the galaxy may be teeming with rogue planets that were likely ejected from their original homes.”

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Lead image: Spacecraft: ESA/ATG medialab; Milky Way: ESA/Gaia/DPAC; CC BY-SA 3.0 IGO.

Jake Currie

Posted on January 9, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

When We Learned Our Universe Is Speeding Up

Violent star blasts pointed to a huge cosmological surprise

By Molly Glick    January 9, 2026

On this day nearly three decades ago, our view of our cosmic neighborhood changed forever. Our universe seems to be swelling over time at an increasing pace, two groups of scientists announced at a 1998 American Astronomical Society meeting.

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These teams were studying distant supernovae, or massive explosions of dying stars, hoping to learn the speed at which the universe’s expansion was winding down. By comparing the supernovae’s intrinsic brightness with the observed brightness, scientists can estimate their distance from Earth and learn about the universe’s growth. That’s how they noticed something odd: These blasts, known as Type 1a supernovae, were fainter than they expected. Such supernovae are usually quite bright, so something was contributing to their surprisingly dim appearance.

The scientists realized that these supernovae weren’t as nearby as they had thought, so they had zipped away from Earth quicker than expected. “These observations led scientists to ultimately conclude that the universe itself must be expanding faster over time,” according to NASA.

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Since then, a growing pile of evidence from far-off supernovae and other space spectacles has supported this theory. But what mysterious force is behind our universe’s accelerated expansion?

Read more: “These Physicists Want to Ditch Dark Energy”

Researchers use the term dark energy to describe whatever’s responsible for this phenomenon, and they don’t have a solid grasp as to what it actually is. There are, however, plenty of guesses so far. For instance, seemingly empty parts of space might generate something called vacuum energy, which is thought to nudge the universe outward.

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Vacuum energy, also known as the cosmological constant, comes from Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity. He put this arbitrary component in his equations to ensure that the universe remained static—this was the prevailing understanding of our cosmic realm at the time. He later scrapped the cosmological constant when astronomer Edwin Hubble demonstrated that the universe is, in fact, expanding. Einstein called this his “biggest blunder.”

But his work wasn’t for nothing. Today, scientists studying the bizarre realm of quantum mechanics think that vacuum energy can be explained by pairs of particles and antiparticles that rapidly pop up and vanish after duking it out. “The effect of all these particles wiggling into and out of being is a thrumming ‘vacuum energy’ that fills the cosmos and pushes outward on space itself,” wrote Clara Moskowitz for Scientific American.

That’s just one potential explanation for dark energy, which scientists can’t even directly glimpse and makes up roughly 70 percent of the universe. To make things even more complicated, recent findings suggest that the universe’s expansion may actually be slowing down.

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Thankfully, high-tech tools like the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, which is currently inspecting tens of millions of galaxies to learn about the effects of dark energy on the growth of our universe, could help assemble the pieces of this cosmic puzzle.

Until then, we’ll continue as tiny specks within a massive realm transforming at a rate unknown to us.

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Lead image: NASA/CXC/U.Texas

Molly Glick

Posted on January 9, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Environment

- As Biodiversity Dwindles, Mosquitos Turn to Human Blood

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

As Biodiversity Dwindles, Mosquitos Turn to Human Blood

We may not be tastier, but just more abundant these days

By Devin Reese    January 15, 2026

What female mosquitoes choose to feed on has a bearing on human health, since they transmit pathogens from one host to another. In theory, mosquitoes can take their blood meals from any vertebrate, but in practice, they may favor certain hosts based on smell, body heat, or simply availability.

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A new study published in Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution shows that mosquitoes along the east coast of Brazil are taking blood from humans more often than from any other animal.

Researchers from Brazil’s Universidade Federal Rural do Rio de Janeiro and Instituto Oswaldo Cruz examined the diets of mosquitoes inhabiting the humid Atlantic Forest. What used to be an intact forest has been increasingly colonized for human activities, such that only about a third remains wild. As humans edge other vertebrate animals out of their habitats, mosquitoes may have to retool their diets.

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Using light traps over two consecutive days, the researchers captured nine species of female mosquitoes. Of the 1,714 individuals captured, 145 were engorged with blood from recent feedings. The researchers sequenced DNA from blood in their stomachs, and, using a reference database of vertebrate DNA barcodes, were able to identify the sources of the blood meals from 24 mosquitoes. These sources included 18 humans, one amphibian, six birds, one dog, and one mouse. Some mosquitoes had blood from more than one feeding event in their guts.

Read more: “When Disease Comes for the Scientist”

By numbers, humans were the favored meal source. “With fewer natural options available, mosquitoes are forced to seek new, alternative blood sources. They end up feeding more on humans out of convenience, as we are the most prevalent host in these areas,” hypothesized study author and microbiologist Sergio Machado in a statement.

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Unfortunately for us, mosquitoes are known to readily adapt to different food sources in their environments.

With more than 700,000 people dying annually from diseases caused by mosquito-borne pathogens, mosquito diets are a serious concern, according to the study authors. They recommend that mosquito-control strategies consider their demonstrated feeding preferences as part of the risk equation. The continued deforestation of the Atlantic Forest is likely to continue to shape the feeding behavior of mosquitoes, as “the loss of native vegetation is associated with an increase in the transmission of etiological agents of arboviruses (dengue, Zika, Chikungunya, and yellow fever),” wrote the researchers.

In other words, more people, relative to other animals, shift the mosquito cafeteria toward humans.

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Lead image: Loomo Digital / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on January 15, 2026

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

Evolution

- The Deep Evolutionary Roots of Sleep

EVOLUTION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Deep Evolutionary Roots of Sleep

Protective slumber emerged even before brains did in the ocean shallows

By Kristen French    January 7, 2026

Sleep is risky. When you doze off, your defenses are down, making you an easy mark for predators and other threats. And yet, the majority of living things do it, including most animals, insects and even many plants.

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Sleep has many documented benefits, of course: saving energy, repairing the brain, laying down the tracks of memory. But its original function has been harder to pinpoint. Why did it first evolve? It’s a mystery scientists have been trying to solve for decades.

Recently, a team of Israeli scientists decided to plumb the ocean in search of an answer, placing two ancient sea creatures in their sights: the lyrically named upside-down jellyfish (Cassiopea andromeda) and the starlet sea anemone (Nematostella vectensis). Jellyfish and sea anemone are among the oldest animals to have evolved on Earth, belonging to the phylum Cnidaria, whose fossil record dates back to the Precambrian period, some 580 million years ago.

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Publishing their findings in the journal Nature Communications, the scientists report that these early creatures need about as much shut-eye as humans do and that sleep may have first emerged as a means of protecting vulnerable neural tissue from the havoc wreaked by the daily grind.

Read more: “Dreaming Is Like Taking LSD”

Scientists already knew that the pair of shallow coastal ocean dwellers keep very different schedules of downtime: The jellyfish sleeps at night, with occasional naps during the day, while the latter is most active in the crepuscular hours, around dusk and dawn. But little was known about their specific sleep habits.

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The starlet sea anemone is a tiny burrowing creature that’s mostly translucent, with frilly, colorful tentacles, while the upside-down jellyfish rests belly down on the seafloor, its arms branching overhead like an underwater flower. These animals are so simple that they lack a brain, instead relying on networks of neurons known as neural nets to help coordinate their activities.

First, the Israeli scientists had to establish what counts as sleep for each creature. A jellyfish’s tentacles never stop pulsing, so how do you know when it’s dozing? Looking for quieted pulsing over a sustained period and slowed reaction times to light, they noted that sleep in the jellyfish could be described as under 37 pulses per minute for a period of 3 minutes. For the starlet sea anemone, they used an infrared camera and a light stimulus to identify the dividing line between snoozing and arousal, determining that these animals are sleeping when they’ve been sluggish for 8 minutes and show relative indifference to both light and food.

Using these definitions, the scientists reported that both creatures slept about a third of the day—roughly 8 hours in human terms—in their natural habitats, and that the sleep schedules they kept responded heavily to sleep deprivation, environmental light, and circadian rhythms. Feeding the creatures melatonin—a natural hormone involved in sleep regulation, whose production is influenced by light—led to increased sleep during times when each would normally have been more active, but had little impact on their activity during normal rest phases. It also reduced DNA damage in both species during times of the day when they were normally alert.

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The scientists measured DNA damage in the two creatures under different conditions as well and found that it climbed when they were awake and was amplified when they were sleep deprived, but declined when they were asleep and following “recovery” sleep.

Most surprising, they found that DNA damage pushed the creatures to sleep more. In both the jellyfish and the sea anemone, the scientists induced damage by exposing them to certain chemicals and frequencies of light. Then, they recorded the sequences of events that followed: First, additional DNA damage accumulated, then the creatures slept for longer, after which the DNA damage decreased. The relationship appeared to work both ways: More DNA damage led to more sleep, and more sleep reduced DNA damage.

The findings suggest that sleep may have arrived on the scene to allow living things to survive the ravages of time.

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Lead image: Minakryn Ruslan / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on January 7, 2026

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.

General

- Print Edition 65: The Food Issue

GENERAL | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Print Edition 65: The Food Issue

By Liz Greene    January 20, 2026

Issue 65 of the Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our November and December 2025 online issues, and a special Food section. It includes contributions from animal rights activist Peter Singer, science writer Amanda Gefter, evolutionary biologist David P. Barash, and more.  This issue also features new illustrations by Ellen Weinstein.

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Genetics

- Did This Drawing Preserve Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA?

GENETICS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Did This Drawing Preserve Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA?

Cracking the code on the origins of a Renaissance work of art

By Kristen French    January 7, 2026

If The Holy Child, a famed Renaissance-era sketch of Baby Jesus, could speak, what would it tell us?

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Scientists recently gathered some tantalizing clues. Many attribute the red-chalk drawing—which features an angelic infant with eyes cast downward, plump cheeks, and lips drawn into a pout—to the great Renaissance master and Italian polymath Leonardo da Vinci, potentially as practice for later works depicting the Baby Jesus. Features such as left-handed hatching, a Da Vinci trademark, were thought to give away his authorship. But the drawing’s true creator is still in doubt: Some claim a student of da Vinci’s could have sketched it.

Now scientists from the field of so-called arteomics, or the study of biological traces on artworks and other cultural artifacts, are eyeing tiny bits of DNA swabbed from the work and testing them in a lab to try to solve the mystery. They recently published their findings in a bioRxiv preprint that hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet.

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What emerged from the DNA analysis: faint Y-chromosome markers that fall within a lineage common in parts of the Mediterranean where da Vinci was from, a subtle hint that Leonardo may be the true author, after all. But the scientists point out that the signal is weak. They also found DNA that seemed to come from a wide variety of people who may have touched the object over the centuries, even modern handlers of the artwork.

Read more: “Bring Us Your Genes”

“Establishing unequivocal identity … is extremely complex,” David Caramelli, an anthropologist and ancient DNA specialist at the University of Florence, who works with the Leonardo da Vinci DNA Project, told Science. Because the team was explicitly looking for da Vinci’s DNA, and focused at least in part on Y-chromosomes found only in male lineages, the DNA collection was performed exclusively by female scientists. This way, they reasoned, there would be less risk of contamination.

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DNA samples from da Vinci himself have been hard to come by because his remains were reportedly scattered during the French Revolution and he had no known direct descendants. But scientists from the Leonardo da Vinci project might eventually be able to compare the samples extracted from the Holy Child drawing against Y chromosome DNA from living descendants of Leonardo’s father, who were recently identified, or from the tombs of relatives of the artist.

The Holy Child drawing was just one of many works and objects that the team analyzed. They also examined archival letters written by a cousin of Leonardo’s who shares a common ancestor in Tuscany, drawings on paper by other artists—Filippino Lippi, Andrea Sacchi, and Charles Flipart, to use as non-Leonardo comparisons—as well as a series of more functional controls: the frame that stored the drawing, environmental surfaces from the sample collection rooms in the United States and Italy, commercially acquired art from the same time period, and cheek swabs of other humans. The Y-chromosome markers they found in the drawing were compatible with paternal-line patterns found in the other Leonardo-associated objects.

Human DNA wasn’t the only sign of life to emerge either. Each object contained a whole world of genetic material from fungi, viruses, plants, and bacteria that seemed to spin a kind of life story. The mixes of DNA varied from piece to piece and seemed to relate to what the object was made of, how it had been stored and conserved, how often it had been handled and by whom.

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Some suggestive details that emerged from this biological cacophony: The scientists identified citrus DNA on the Holy Child drawing, historically plausible because it was culturally important in the gardens of the Medici family, who were key patrons for da Vinci. But they emphasized that plant DNA can come from many sources, including dust, conservation, and handling.

The team also reported DNA of Leptospira, which causes a zoonotic bacterial disease and is consistent with rodent-rich environments that might have existed in Tuscany during da Vinci’s time. Another provocative find: the DNA of plasmodium, a genus of a single celled parasite that causes malaria, in swabs of the letter. This was a significant, but preliminary, observation given that malaria was historically endemic to parts of Italy and had been found in Medici remains.

The da Vinci effort “opens a whole new world” for the study of art provenance, chemist Stefan Simon, director of the Rathgen Research Laboratory at the National Museums in Berlin, who is not affiliated with the project, told Science.

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If the scientists can identify da Vinci’s DNA, it might even help us understand what made him such a keen observer of nature. In fact, some scientists believe he had special powers of perception that were rooted in biology.

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Lead image: Wikimedia Commons

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Kristen French

Posted on January 7, 2026

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.

Geoscience

- Watch This Glacier Race into the Sea

- A Billion-Year-Old Piece of Sky Locked Within Ancient Salt Crystals

GEOSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Watch This Glacier Race into the Sea

High-tech radar technology offers an unprecedented look at escaping ice speeds on Greenland and Antarctica

By Molly Glick    January 15, 2026

You’re looking at one of the quickest moving glaciers in the world—the bright hues added to this satellite image of Jakobshavn Glacier in Greenland represent the average speed of ice movement between 2014 and 2024. Ice was observed to travel up to about 160 feet per day, or around the width of a football field, according to the European Space Agency (ESA), whose Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites recorded these trends. There could be a few reasons why: For one, the floating edge that once met the seafloor may have melted enough to no longer serve as a “doorstop” to slow down the glacier’s movement.

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These findings came from the first continuous, high-resolution survey of ice-flow speeds across the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets. This information is vital in keeping tabs on the break-up of ice sheets and gauging how the world’s seas will rise in the coming decades. We already know that the Arctic is heating up quicker than the rest of the globe, and that Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets are melting six times faster than in the 1990s.

NOT-SO GLACIAL SPEED: This map tracks the average velocity of ice traveling across the Antarctic ice sheet between 2014 and 2024. Image by ESA (Data source: Wuite, J. et al. 2025).

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Before this recent ESA mission, satellites had only taken snapshots of a few glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland or collected infrequent data. Some teams have examined glaciers over time with optical imagery from satellites, which captures what’s visible to the naked eye. But this limits monitoring to the daytime, and clouds or smoke can block the satellite’s view.

A technology called synthetic aperture radar (SAR) clears these hurdles by beaming out energy pulses and measuring the amount of energy reflected back from these glaciers. Between 2014 and 2024, an instrument on Copernicus Sentinel-1 satellites collected SAR data to trace the ice’s travels.

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

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The vibrant visualizations of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica were created by a team from ENVEO IT, an engineering company based in Austria. They applied specialized algorithms to the SAR measurements, according to a Remote Sensing of Environment paper, generating maps that display average ice speeds over the decade-long satellite survey period.

“Before the launch of Sentinel-1, the absence of consistent SAR observations over polar glaciers and ice sheets posed a major barrier to long-term climate records,” explained study co-author Jan Wuite of ENVEO IT in a statement. “Today, the resulting velocity maps offer an extraordinary view of ice-sheet dynamics, providing a reliable and essential data record for understanding polar regions in a rapidly changing global climate.”

In the future, ESA will continue to keep an eye on the speed of these ice sheets from space thanks to the ROSE-L satellite mission that’s slated to launch in 2028. ROSE-L will harness a similar SAR instrument to track the flow of ice, offering a detailed look into what the warming future holds.

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Lead image: ESA (Data source: Wuite, J. et al. 2025)

Molly Glick

Posted on January 15, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

GEOSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Billion-Year-Old Piece of Sky Locked Within Ancient Salt Crystals

Here’s what was in the air during the so-called “Boring Billion”

By Devin Reese    January 12, 2026

Based on the fossil record, animals exploded onto the scene nearly 600 million years ago. While that may seem like a long time, Earth had already been around for almost 4 billion years. By looking back at the conditions leading up to animal evolution, scientists better understand how complex life came about. In a recent study published in PNAS, earth scientists obtained the most precise snapshots ever of Earth’s early atmosphere during the Mesoproterozoic, and it opened more questions than it answered.

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Dubbed the “Boring Billion,” the Mesoproterozoic spans the period from about 1.8 to 0.8 million years ago, when things appear to have been relatively static with no huge physical or biological changes. Researchers from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Lakehead University, Ontario, obtained samples of rock salt crystals dated to 1.4 billion years old. They analyzed pockets of fluids and gases trapped in the halite rocks to determine the chemical composition of the atmosphere at the time.

“It’s an incredible feeling, to crack open a sample of air that’s a billion years older than the dinosaurs,” said lead study author and RPI graduate student Justin Park in a statement.

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Read more: “The Bacteria That Revolutionized the World”

The data showed that the Mesoproterozoic atmosphere was oxygen-rich, containing several times (3.7 percent) the oxygen level today. Carbon dioxide was about 10 times as abundant as it is now, which would make for a warm climate, despite the sun being young and not yet as hot. The study authors estimate that, with the sun being at about 70 percent of its current output, temperatures would have been around 88 degrees Fahrenheit.

So, if oxygen levels and climate were suitable for animal life, it begs the question of why animals didn’t show up on Earth until hundreds of millions of years later. “[This data] may reflect a brief, transient oxygenation event in this long era that geologists jokingly call the ‘boring billion,’” explained Park.

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On the other hand, noted the study authors, red algae showed up during this period, adding oxygen to the atmosphere via photosynthesis. The high oxygen levels might reflect that photosynthetic algae were diversifying and becoming more abundant, a preview of the role they still play today in today’s global oxygen cycle.

So, the tiny time capsules that preserved ancient conditions in halite rocks provided evidence about how Earth’s atmosphere and life evolved. Knowing what the Earth looked like 1.4 billion years ago could also give us a better understanding of what to look for when we search for life on other planets.

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Lead image: Kuttelvaserova Stuchelova / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on January 12, 2026

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

Health

- Some Doctors Are Using Emojis With Patients More Often

- How Childbearing Leaves Its Imprint on Mothers’ Biological Age

- How Financial Hardship Shows Up in Baby Brains

- These Pills Talk to Your Doctor

- How Some People Get Drunk Without Drinking

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Some Doctors Are Using Emojis With Patients More Often

Smileys are especially popular

By Molly Glick    January 16, 2026

Emojis have long infiltrated all sorts of communications, including text messages and even work emails. Now, doctors are dropping these expressive icons into medical records.

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Healthcare providers have already been found to incorporate emojis and emoticons—their vintage counterparts—into texts with colleagues on a clinical messaging platform, according to a 2023 JAMA Network Open study. Now, researchers say they’ve conducted the first study examining emoji use in electronic health record clinical notes, which includes portal messages sent to patients. Compared with the 2023 paper, doctors seem to use them a lot more when chatting with patients than with their coworkers.

A team from the University of Michigan and Cornell University sifted through more than 200 million notes sourced from 1.6 million patients created between 2020 and 2025 at the University of Michigan’s academic medical center. They identified 372 unique emojis used in 4,162 notes, findings recently published in JAMA Network Open.

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WINKY FACE: The 50 most common emojis found by the research team in electronic health records. Image from Hanauer, D., et al. JAMA Network Open (2025).

While the rate of emoji inclusion stayed relatively stable at 1.4 notes with emojis per 100,000 notes between 2020 to 2024, it suddenly jumped to 10.7 by late 2025.

“These were scattered throughout clinical notes but were mostly found in brief messages sent to patients via the portal,” said study co-author David Hanauer, a clinical informaticist at the University of Michigan, in a statement. “While emoji use in medical records is still rare, their use seems to be on the rise, raising important questions about age-related differences in use and interpretation, as well as best practices for digital clinician-patient communication.”

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They noticed that smileys (😀) or emoticons such as the classic : ) were the most commonly used type of emoji, appearing in 58.5 percent of notes, along with objects, like a pill (💊) and maple leaf (🍁), in 21.2 percent, and emojis related to people and the body in 17.6 percent. As for the most popular specific emoji, the smiley came out on top, with far more appearances (1,772) than the second most popular, the telephone receiver (📞, 544).

Read more: “Your 🧠 On Emoji”

Emojis were very rarely incorporated in messages to replace a word, such as a pill bottle for the word medicine—this only occurred among 1 percent of all emojis that the researchers analyzed. Most served to highlight a point, or were included “for their own sake,” the statement explained. This aligns with past findings that emojis tend to be employed to reduce ambiguity and shape a message’s tone.

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But these symbols may not always clear things up—they could create confusion, especially for older patients, the authors noted. Patients between 10 and 19 years old received the most emojis per 100,000 portal messages from providers, followed by patients between 70 and 79 years old. Some studies have suggested that older adults are less likely to accurately interpret emojis than younger people, but researchers haven’t reached any clear conclusions. Other factors, like gender and culture, may also affect one’s understanding.

“Given the small but growing presence of emojis in clinical documentation, we recommend that healthcare institutions proactively develop guidelines for their use to maintain clarity and professionalism in clinical communications,” Hanauer said in the statement.

Further research should probe how emojis seem to influence “patient understanding, trust, and outcomes and explore whether these playful digital symbols offer new opportunities or pose unintended challenges in electronic health record communication,” he added.

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Lead image: Roman Samborskyi / Shutterstock

Molly Glick

Posted on January 16, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Childbearing Leaves Its Imprint on Mothers’ Biological Age

The number of kids a woman has and when she has them may shape her later years

By Kristen French    January 12, 2026

Having kids is costly. Not just financially, but biologically, too. At least in theory. Evolutionary biologists propose that bodies may have limited energy to split between reproduction and long-term maintenance.

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Now a team of Finnish scientists has used decades of data from a massive twin study spanning 15,000 women to ask whether the arc of childbearing—how many children a woman has, and when she has them—could influence the rate at which she ages. Participants in the study were invited to complete a survey in 1975 and their lives were followed through 2020.

The researchers, from the University of Helsinki and the Minerva Foundation Institute for Medical Research, found a U-shaped pattern. Women who had two to three children and gave birth between the ages of 24 and 38 fared best. Women who had too few or too many fared the worst. The scientists controlled for smoking, alcohol use, weight, and education and published their results in Nature Communications.

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“From an evolutionary biology perspective, organisms have limited resources such as time and energy,” explained doctoral researcher and co-author Mikaela Hukkanen, in a statement. “When a large amount of energy is invested in reproduction, it is taken away from bodily maintenance and repair mechanisms, which could reduce lifespan.”

Read more: “Mobile Genes From the Mother Shape the Baby’s Microbiome”

Having more than four kids, in particular, was associated with shorter lifespans than average, and more accelerated biological aging. Childless women also aged more rapidly than women with a few children, though the researchers suggested that this unexpected result might be explained by other lifestyle- or health-related factors that weren’t accounted for by the study: any underlying health issues that could have reduced fertility, different social support systems later in life, or different disease risks. For instance, certain kinds of pregnancies or lactation patterns can affect one’s cancer risk.

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The researchers were quick to point out that the results don’t suggest certain childbirth age or childbearing numbers actually cause healthier aging, nor that women should shape their reproductive choices around the findings, particularly since the number of children women have today has fallen, and age of first birth has increased. (The twins in the study were born between 1880 and 1957.)

“An individual woman should therefore not consider changing her own plans or wishes regarding children based on these findings,” said study author Miina Ollikainen.

The results, which took biological aging markers from blood samples into account, support earlier findings based on mortality data. According to these epigenetic blood markers, women who had many children or no children were biologically slightly older than their chronological age. Women who had children at a very young age were also more likely to have an accelerated biological age.

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“Our results show that life history choices leave a lasting biological imprint that can be measured long before old age,” added Miina Ollikainen.

In this twin cohort at least, the price tag of motherhood showed up in the extremes. The child-rearing middle ground seemed to be the safest bargain for the long game.

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Lead image: DOERS / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on January 12, 2026

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

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Financial Hardship Shows Up in Baby Brains

Early financial strain can have a measurable impact on how infant brains develop

By Kristen French    January 8, 2026

In the first year of life, human babies are wrinkled, fragile, and vulnerable to all kinds of stressors at home and in the world: chaotic sleep schedules, over-stimulation, parental stress. When the adversity is chronic, it can have a lasting impact on how their brains develop.

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But adversity is a complicated web, with many intersecting threads: Parental stress often overlaps with other stressors, such as financial shortfalls, big life disruptions, as well as disadvantages in neighborhood, housing, and education. Scientists have wanted to understand whether the impacts of some of these factors can be isolated, and which ones matter most to the babies’ long-term brain health.

Recently, a team of Boston Children’s Hospital researchers decided to sort through data from an ongoing project called Baby Steps, which is part of a program serving mostly low-income families at Boston Children’s Hospital. They studied nearly 300 babies who came to the hospital for regular visits at 4, 9, and 12 months. During the visits, the researchers recorded resting-state EEGs in the babies and surveyed the parents (typically moms) about their income levels, their perceptions about whether their incomes met their needs, caregiver stress, challenging life experiences, and the kinds of opportunities available in their neighborhoods.

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Rather than try to isolate individual variables, the scientists used a network approach to map connections between them. Next, they looked for clusters, to identify which factors were most central in the network. They found that a single variable acted as the primary bridge between family stress and infant brain development. The culprit was income sufficiency—not the actual dollar value of family income but whether the caregiver felt that income was enough to cover family and household costs. They published their results in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Read more: “When Stress Comes with Your Mother’s Milk”

“Children grow up in complex, dynamic environments where stressors are interconnected,” said Haerin Chung, co-author of the study, in a statement. “By using a network approach, we can identify which factors are most central—much like identifying influential nodes in a social network. Changing those central factors may have ripple effects across a child’s developmental environment.”

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Moms who said their incomes were never enough also tended to have lower levels of income and education, more stressful life events, and higher overall stress. But even after the scientists accounted for these other factors, income insufficiency still showed a unique association to how well babies’ brains developed.

The scientists focused most closely on brain features that typically develop quickly in the first year of life, and show up on EEGs in alpha and beta ranges, linked in other research to later cognitive development in areas such as executive function, language, and attention. Babies whose moms said their incomes were rarely or never sufficient generally showed slower increases in alpha power, slower increases in alpha peak frequency—a classic marker of maturation in infancy—and consistently lower beta power. These differences were noticeable when the babies reached around 9 months of age.

Some previous studies have shown that adversity can accelerate certain aspects of brain development in babies. But the scientists point out that different populations may show different responses. The population sample examined in the clinic had more severe and concentrated adversity than most general population studies, they note. Also, it’s possible that brain development could catch up later in life. The scientists plan to re-check EEG patterns after 24 months to see how the existing patterns shape up.

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The scientists say their findings could be useful in the clinic. Asking new parents whether their incomes are sufficient to cover their needs could work as a quick screen for developmental vulnerability in their babies—not as a replacement for full assessment, but just as an early warning light.

Lead image: Jump.Studio / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on January 8, 2026

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

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

These Pills Talk to Your Doctor

It’s tough to keep people on track with their medications, but a tiny radio antenna could help

By Molly Glick    January 8, 2026

It’s easy enough to forget to take a daily pill—but what if your medication could report back to your doctor within minutes of you swallowing it?

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Non-adherence to medication contributes to around 125,000 preventable deaths annually in the United States, and nearly half of all people with chronic conditions don’t take medications as they’re prescribed.

Now, a new biodegradable system with a radio frequency antenna could help tackle this problem. The tiny gizmo could, for instance, help ensure that transplant patients regularly take their immunosuppressive drugs, which are critical to the long-term success of these procedures. It could also be used with people with infections including tuberculosis or HIV, who require treatment for extended periods, according to a new paper in Nature Communications.

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This new system is designed to be eco-friendly and convenient while effectively communicating with doctors. Image from Say, M.G., et al. Nature Communications (2025).

Again, sticking to a drug schedule matters: HIV can progress more quickly into AIDS if people don’t take their medications as directed, for example.

“The goal is to make sure that this helps people receive the therapy they need to help maximize their health,” said study co-author Giovanni Traverso, a physician and engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in a statement.

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Researchers have looked into several high-tech methods to ensure that people stay on track with their medications, like smart pill bottles that send reminders to patients and ping physicians and caregivers when they’re opened.

Labs have also looked into pill capsules with sensors that can communicate with doctors when swallowed. But most designs for these ingestible sensors rely on polymers that don’t dissolve in the body and stiff bits of electronics, which people excrete intact. This could risk gastrointestinal injuries, not to mention add to the growing piles of electronic waste accumulating around the world.

Read more: “Getting Googled by Your Doctor Is the New Normal”

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But with the new system from Traverso and his colleagues, most of the components break down in the stomach within a week, and a micrometer-sized radio frequency chip leaves the body through the digestive tract. The antenna is made of zinc and enclosed in a cellulose particle, and the surrounding capsule is made from gelatin coated with cellulose. These materials are known to be safe and commonly used in medicine. The capsule is also covered in safe levels of molybdenum or tungsten, materials that block radio frequency signals until the pill starts to break down in the body.

During experiments in pigs, which have similar-sized gastrointestinal tracts to humans, the radio frequency signal was successfully transmitted from within the stomach and was read by a receiver up to 2 feet away. The devices dissolved as intended in the pigs’ stomachs as well.

“These findings highlight the system’s potential to improve patient adherence tracking without introducing significant logistical burdens or ecological impact,” the authors wrote in the paper.

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In a potential design for humans, the team would create a wearable device with a receiver that can send the information to a patient’s healthcare providers. They aim to conduct more research before testing the concept in people. The system isn’t meant for the mass market, they noted, but for situations where people’s lives—and public health more broadly—depend on steady drug regimens.

“We want to prioritize medications that, when non-adherence is present, could have a really detrimental effect for the individual,” Traverso said.

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Lead image: Courtesy of the researchers

Molly Glick

Posted on January 8, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Some People Get Drunk Without Drinking

Auto-brewery syndrome is a devastating and poorly understood condition, but effective treatments could be on the way

By Molly Glick    January 8, 2026

It’s possible to become intoxicated without taking a single sip of alcohol—and scientists think they’re closer to fully understanding why.

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Due to a rare condition called auto-brewery syndrome, or ABS, some people’s bodies produce enough ethanol to cause intoxication. That’s the same substance found in wine, beer, and other types of alcoholic drinks.

In individuals with ABS, microbes in the gut break down carbohydrates and turn them into high amounts of ethanol that make their way into the bloodstream. In most people, this process produces tiny concentrations of alcohol that don’t have any effect. Scientists aren’t sure how exactly this phenomenon occurs, and the limited research so far includes case reports on individual patients and a small study with five patients published in 2023.

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Fewer than 100 cases of ABS have been recorded around the globe, but researchers suspect the condition is underdiagnosed. It comes with stigma, for one, as patients may be mislabeled as drinkers who hide their habits. And diagnosis requires close supervision to rule out drinking and detailed monitoring of one’s blood-alcohol concentration. Such testing can be hard to access and may not be covered by insurance.

“Auto-brewery syndrome is a misunderstood condition with few tests and treatments,” explained Elizabeth Hohmann, a physician at the Mass General Brigham Department of Medicine, in a statement.

People with ABS can face arrest, family conflict, and other serious consequences, case studies have found. The condition can also lead to medical issues such as cognitive impairment, liver damage, and withdrawal symptoms.

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Read more: “How the Western Diet Had Derailed Our Evolution”

Researchers suspect that imbalanced gut microbes are to blame, and the condition might be linked to gastrointestinal illnesses like Crohn’s disease and short-gut syndrome. Some case reports have identified types of ethanol-producing bacteria called Klebsiella in samples from ABS patients, who recovered with antibiotics. But the precise causes behind this mysterious condition remain elusive.

To learn more about ABS triggers and treatments, Hohmann and her colleagues examined the makeup of gut microbes from 22 people diagnosed with the condition, along with 21 unaffected people from their households to see whether their environments and diets play a role. The study, which was published today in Nature Microbiology, also included 22 healthy control participants.

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Stool samples and blood tests revealed that, during a flare, median ethanol concentrations in ABS patients were significantly higher—nearly three times more—than those seen in the household partners. This hints that ABS could be diagnosed with a stool test, which may prove a far more convenient and accessible option than the other testing methods outlined above.

Those with ABS also had higher amounts of bacteria such as Escherichia coli and Klebsiella pneumoniae in their stool. These microbes are known to turn sugars into alcohol. Previously, research had suggested that certain fungi were to blame. But overall, the precise types of tiny perps behind ABS are still unclear, and it’s tough to tease out all the species involved.

The scientists also noticed that, during flare-ups, some ABS patients had elevated levels of certain enzymes that are known to be involved in fermentation. “The authors note that rather than focusing on specific bacteria species, treatments that target microbial enzymes involved in ethanol production may be a more effective strategy,” according to the statement.

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The study examined the outcome of an individual with ABS who received a fecal transplant with healthy bacteria as well. During remission, the composition of microbes in his gut had transformed to mirror those of the donor’s. And after a second transplant, the patient didn’t experience any symptoms for more than 16 months. Hohmann’s team is now working on a phase 1 clinical trial testing this type of transplant in eight patients with ABS.

“Our findings may lead the way toward easier diagnosis, better treatments, and an improved quality of life for individuals living with this rare condition,” Hohmann said.

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Lead image: Dirk Wohlrabe / Pixabay

Molly Glick

Posted on January 8, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

History

- The Accidental Discovery of Aristotle’s Paradigm-Shifting School

- C-Sections Have a Surprisingly Ancient History

- Pompeii’s Early Baths Were Petri Dishes

- When Fake Nuclear Disaster Fallout Reached Los Angeles

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Accidental Discovery of Aristotle’s Paradigm-Shifting School

The ancient institution shaped education as we know it today

By Molly Glick    January 14, 2026

As archaeologists dug at a spot in Athens, Greece slated for a new modern art museum in 1996, they looked for signs of ancient remnants to ensure any ruins wouldn’t be damaged by future construction. What they found at the site, which at the time included an unpaved parking lot, was quite intriguing: the traces of a large building that once spanned more than 30,000 square feet and had been significantly damaged by military installations between the 19th century and 1966.

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Archaeologist Eutychia Lygouri-Tolia, who worked on the excavation, said the structure was once an athletic training center at the Lyceum, a sanctuary dedicated to Apollo that hosted a school established by the Greek philosopher Aristotle in 335 B.C. This physical evidence aligned with literary sources from the time, which claimed the Lyceum sat southeast of the ancient city. This week in 1997, Greek Minister of Culture Evangelos Venizelos announced the first physical evidence of the Lyceum’s location—some researchers had their doubts, but it’s generally considered to be accurate.

EDUCATIONAL ECHOES: The lingering evidence of the Lyceum at an archaeological site in Athens. Photo by Carole Raddato / Wikimedia Commons.

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The Lyceum brought in scholars from throughout the Mediterranean and laid the foundation for higher education. It was the first known institution to “combine systematic research activity into every branch of knowledge with a huge library,” according to Classics scholar Edith Hall, along with public lectures and courses taught at what we now consider undergraduate and postgraduate levels. Aristotle’s school was known as the Peripatetic school, a term that may refer to ancient pathways at the Lyceum or Aristotle’s tendency to lecture as he strolled about.

Read more: “The Bridge From Nowhere”

Before Aristotle set up the Peripatetic school, plenty of intellectual icons spent time at the Lyceum. Socrates and Protagoras, for instance, often came by to debate and lecture during the late fifth century B.C. During Aristotle’s time there, he taught, penned the majority of his dialogues and philosophical treatises, and gathered literature for Europe’s first-ever library. The Peripatetic school was part of the ephebeia, a military and educational program that sought to churn out “well-conditioned young citizen warriors to defend the city.”

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The school continued to thrive after Aristotle’s death in 322 B.C., but it experienced multiple violent attacks in succeeding centuries. In 86 B.C., the Roman general Sulla led an attack on Athens, which included significant damage to the Lyceum, and another brutal blow arrived with the sack of Athens by the enemy Heruli people in 267 A.D. Finally, in 529 A.D., Roman Emperor Justinian shuttered all of the city’s philosophical schools.

Today, you can visit the ruins of the Lyceum—but only small hints of the once-grand institution remain.

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Lead image: Gustav Spangenberg

Molly Glick

Posted on January 14, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

C-Sections Have a Surprisingly Ancient History

And their meaning has shifted over millennia

By Molly Glick    January 14, 2026

Each year in the United States, nearly 1.2 million women have their children by cesarean section, or around a third of all deliveries—an increasing trend throughout the country over the past few decades.

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This practice has surprisingly old origins—the term “cesarean” may come from the surgical birth of Roman general Julius Caesar, though it’s unlikely he was actually delivered through his procedure. Still, C-sections seem to have been used in the Roman Empire to save children when women in labor were dead or dying in order to expand the state’s population. And in some older contexts, the surgery served the religious purpose of burying the mother and infant separately.

Written records of C-sections didn’t emerge until the 16th century. Around the year 1500, Jacob Nufer, who herded swine in Switzerland, is reported to have surgically removed his wife’s baby during her labor that had spanned several days—he seems to have acquired some know-how from performing surgeries on livestock. But it’s unclear how well the story’s details match reality, as it wasn’t written down until 82 years later.

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And on this day in 1794, physician Jesse Bennett carried out the first successful C-section in the U.S. As news of this procedure traveled, it “increased awareness and understanding about successful techniques for cesarean delivery to save the life of both mother and child,” according to a review article published in Academic Medicine & Surgery.

Read more: “Why Egg Freezing Is an Impossible Choice”

For centuries, C-sections were mostly done out of necessity. They were more common in rural communities that lacked access to medical professionals and hospitals. People didn’t need to consult with a doctor, and they could be performed in the early stages of challenging labor to help both the mother and child survive. Such surgeries took place on beds and kitchen tables. This was probably a good thing, too: Up until the mid 19th century, infections ran rampant in hospitals, where medical attendants typically operated with unclean hands.

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Medical education didn’t often involve hands-on dissection of human cadavers until around this time, a shift that allowed students—mostly men—to improve their surgical skills. (This trend, of course, sidelined the women who had previously worked as attendants in delivery.) Meanwhile, the use of obstetrical forceps became increasingly common: “Men’s claims to authority over such instruments assisted them in establishing professional control over childbirth,” according to the National Library of Medicine.

Today, more recent advances have made C-sections far safer, including ultrasounds to determine the positioning of a fetus, more precise surgical tools, and more effective forms of anesthesia. But some researchers have pointed out that C-sections aren’t always performed when medically necessary, and may be carried out due to “time constraints and perceived convenience,” among other factors not directly tied to medical care—a striking contrast to the procedure’s once-vital role.

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Lead image: maxim ibragimov / Shutterstock

Molly Glick

Posted on January 14, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Pompeii’s Early Baths Were Petri Dishes

Things improved with an impressive aqueduct system—if you don’t count lead contamination

By Molly Glick    January 13, 2026

The ancient Romans took bathing seriously—it was a crucial facet of their daily lives, and people from a range of social rungs enjoyed dips in public baths. Romans seem to have taken sanitation inspiration from the Greeks, who washed up in athletic facilities and public baths.

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To learn about the transition from Greek to Roman bathing practices, researchers looked to the remains of the ancient city of Pompeii in what’s now Italy. The Greeks called Pompeii home for centuries until the second century B.C., when the rival Samnite people took over—they were familiar with Greek culture. Then, around 80 B.C., Pompeii became a Roman colony.

This rule came to an abrupt end in 79 A.D., when the eruption of Mount Vesuvius covered Pompeii and many of its thousands of residents in ash. The tragedy has preserved remnants of the city for millennia, providing researchers a uniquely detailed  look at its long history, which includes an intricate record of Roman Pompeii’s water system, along with fragments of earlier systems.

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CARBONATE CLUES: Researchers used carbonate samples, pictured here, to learn what Pompeii’s ancient baths were like. Photo by Cees Passchier.

Researchers from throughout Europe pieced together this aquatic history based on deposits of calcium carbonate in ancient baths, wells, and an aqueduct. The deposits have alternating layers that vary in chemical composition, hinting at changes in water quality and quantity over centuries, along with where it was sourced from.

Analysis of these deposits revealed that the Romans revamped the water supply system, according to a recent PNAS paper. The scientists found that pre-Roman wells supplying the baths were connected to groundwater chock-full of minerals. This “was not ideal for drinking purposes,” explained a statement. But an aqueduct added by the Romans seemed to be fed by springs around 22 miles northeast of the city, a much more suitable source.

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Read more: “What Volcanoes Tell Us”

The team also noticed significant shifts in cleanliness over time. The city’s oldest public bathing facilities, known as the Republican Baths, were built around 130 B.C., predating the Romans. They seem to have been pretty nasty: Carbon isotopes in sediment from drainage water pointed to bathwater contaminated with human waste, including sweat and urine.

This indicates the water wasn’t replenished very often—around once a day. But  previous archaeological evidence has suggested it was a slow, arduous process involving a wheel and chains of buckets. Later, with the aqueduct in place, the Romans could refresh the water much more often.

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The carbonate deposits also revealed elevated levels of lead in the Republican Baths, which may have come from the piping system. And in the later Roman infrastructure, they found evidence of lead contamination from the city’s pipes. But lead pollution in both contexts seem to have waned over time thanks to mineral deposits that built up inside the pipes. This issue may have cropped up whenever pipes were replaced.

The wealthy residents of Pompeii likely had lower lead levels in their drinking water, New Scientist reported, because their homes had roofs that sent rainwater directly into a cistern, while poor people may have been more dependent on lead-contaminated water from street fountains—class disparities in water access echoing those found around the world today.

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Lead image: MentNFG / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on January 13, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

When Fake Nuclear Disaster Fallout Reached Los Angeles

A 1965 test revealed how people would fare if a nuclear rocket launch went wrong

By Molly Glick    January 12, 2026

Today in 1965, a nuclear rocket engine exploded in the Nevada desert—scientists purposefully set off the blast, sparking political controversy that lingered for decades.

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The experiment coincided with the rise of the atomic bomb and the surging space age, as the United States and the Soviet Union duked it out to achieve cosmic supremacy. Four years earlier, the U.S. had launched its first spacecraft powered by nuclear energy—the heat from a nuclear reaction sending a rocket whizzing spaceward. But the precise risks of a launch gone sideways remained unclear.

“One continuing nightmare of the atomic age is the possibility that somewhere, some time, a nuclear reactor may go out of control and blow itself to bits like an overheated steam-age boiler with its safety valve tied down,” according to a Time article published on Jan. 22, 1965. “Builders and promoters of reactors insist that this is highly improbable, but the Atomic Energy Commission wants more facts—just in case.”

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ROCKET RISKS: The moment the Kiwi reactor blew to bits in Jackass Flats, Nevada. Photo by NASA / Wikimedia Commons.

The U.S. Atomic Energy Commission oversaw the development of peacetime nuclear science and technology from 1946 to 1975. For more clarity on potential rocket accidents, the commission vaporized part of a prototype Kiwi nuclear reactor core on Jan. 12, 1965, in Jackass Flats, Nevada by abruptly boosting power on the generator. They aimed to observe the impacts on the reactor and surrounding environment. Scientists set the Kiwi on a railroad car and placed test objects around it, including nuclear fuels and explosives.

The reactor reached temperatures above 8,000 degrees Fahrenheit—nearly as hot as the sun’s surface—and hundreds of pounds of uranium fuel transformed into vapor.

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Then, “a cloud of grey smoke rose up with a ball of fire at its heart; out of it spouted flashes of light like giant Fourth of July sparklers,” Time reported. “Observers heard a loud bang and felt a modest shock wave.”

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

As the cloud cleared, Air Force bombers dropped in to gather air samples. Researchers hoped that the radioactive fallout would travel away from inhabited parts of Nevada. But the explosion instead whisked a radioactive cloud more than 200 miles southwest to Los Angeles.

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Technically, the test went off without a hitch—it matched predictions from researchers at Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, and the results suggested that nuclear-powered rockets could be vaporized into wee bits in space at the end of their missions.

To gauge the impacts on surrounding populations, the U.S. Public Health Service monitored the nearby neighborhood and gathered milk samples in parts of southern Nevada and California covering more than 200 miles downwind of the test site. The government also tracked the fallout cloud as it traveled the skies. Ultimately, testing revealed that “estimated radiation doses to humans beyond the test site were well below current limits set by the Environmental Protection Agency,” The Associated Press reported.

There was, however, some political fallout. An Associated Press article publicizing the test prompted the Soviet Union’s government to question whether the U.S. was violating a treaty that banned nuclear weapons testing, but the Department of State informed the USSR that “reactors are designed as stable power sources and are intrinsically unsuitable for use as weapons.”

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In 1994, Massachusetts Representative Edward J. Markey released documents on the test, as part of a broader inquiry into covert radiation experiments during the Cold War. “Elements of the nuclear-powered rocket program should qualify as human experiments,” Markey wrote. He also urged that such tests should include “a public discussion of radiation protection measures and anticipated doses to workers and the public,” according to The Associated Press.

In a 1986 report, Markey shared details on 31 nuclear experiments spanning the 1940s through the 1970s, in which “about 695 persons were exposed to radiation which provided little or no medical benefit to the subjects.” He referred to these participants as “American nuclear guinea pigs” and requested that those involved be compensated for damages—they later received a total of nearly $5 million from the government.

While the world avoided mass destruction during the Cold War, the Kiwi blast and other tests investigated by Markey illuminate how this standoff still hit close to home.

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Lead image: AEC-NASA / Wikimedia Commons.

Molly Glick

Posted on January 12, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Microbiology

- Beer Could Be the Next Frontier in Lab-Grown Meat

MICROBIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Beer Could Be the Next Frontier in Lab-Grown Meat

Spent brewing yeast offers a meat-textured scaffold for your next burger

By Devin Reese    January 9, 2026

Sustainability concerns in conventional meat production have motivated a search for ways to cultivate lab-grown meat. Livestock ranching is environmentally destructive, and also deals in whole animals, of which only parts are consumed, not to mention the deplorable conditions animals may face on factory farms. Cultivated meat, where animal flesh is grown free of a living animal, promises meat-lovers a good burger or chicken patty with a lower environmental footprint and reduced risk of zoonotic diseases.

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One of the main challenges in producing cultivated meat has been containing costs while creating something biodegradable with a meat-like texture. Lab-made meat is basically animal cells grown on a supportive scaffold to mimic the connective tissues in traditional meat. A new paper describes a pioneering method for making natural cellular scaffolds for cultivated meat.

“While it’s relatively easy to grow animal cells for mass food production, you need to be able to grow them on something cheap, edible, and that preferably provides a structure that resembles real meat,” explained senior author and regenerative medicine professor Richard Day in a statement.

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Read more: “The Unnatural History of Bird Flu”

Day and his graduate students at the University College London grew a cellulose structure from repurposed brewer’s spent yeast retrieved from the United Kingdom’s Big Smoke Brewing Company. The yeast was used to culture a bacterium—Komagataeibacter xylinus—that’s known for its cellulose production (cellulose is made by plants, but also certain genera of bacteria). The researchers tested the properties of the bacterial cellulose vis-à-vis their similarity to meat.

The scaffold proved worthy for your next lab-cultured burger. The cellulose grown on brewing waste was similar in its texture, structure, and thermal properties to meat products. Furthermore, when animal fibroblasts (meat cells) were introduced to the scaffold, they attached well and started to proliferate.

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“In this study we collected a relatively small amount of raw material from one craft brewery that would otherwise have gone to waste. But huge volumes of brewing waste are generated each year that could have a valuable use,” said first author and Ph.D. student Christian Harrison.

Still, the study authors contend that there is more research to do before the bacterial cellulose becomes the medium of choice for cultivated meat. For example, they plan to explore how different meat cell types, different bacterial yeast cultures, and variance between brewers’ yeast batches will affect the final product.

Hey, we’ll drink to that.

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Lead image: Anna Aybetova / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on January 9, 2026

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

Neuroscience

- The Confabulations of Oliver Sacks

- The Search for Where Consciousness Lives in the Brain

- This Hidden Brain Region Could Help You Stay Resilient in Old Age

- Astronaut Brains Change Shape in Space

- How Brain Waves Shape Your Sense of Self

- Why Finding Motivation Is Often Such a Struggle

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Confabulations of Oliver Sacks

A neurologist reckons with recent revelations about the celebrated doctor and author

By Pria Anand    January 20, 2026

I loved literature before I loved medicine, and as a medical student, I often found that my textbooks left me cold, their medical jargon somehow missing the point of profound diseases able to rewrite a person’s life and identity. I was born, I decided, a century too late: I found the stories I craved, not in contemporary textbooks, but in outdated case reports, 18th- and 19-century descriptions of how the diseases I was studying might shape the life of a single patient.

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These reports were alive with vivid details: how someone’s vision loss affected their golf game or their smoking habit, their work or their love life. They were all tragedies: Each ended with an autopsy, a patient’s brain dissected to discover where, exactly, the problem lay, to inch closer to an understanding of the geography of the soul. To write these case studies, neurologists awaited the deaths and brains of living patients, robbing their subjects of the ability to choose what would become of their own bodies—the ability to write the endings of their own stories—after they had already been sapped of agency by their illnesses.

Among these case reports was one from a forbidding state hospital in the north of Moscow: the story of a 19th-century Russian journalist referred to simply as “a learned man.” The journalist suffered a type of alcoholic dementia because of the brandy he often drank to cure his writer’s block and he developed a profound amnesia. He could not remember where he was or why. He could win a game of checkers but would forget that he had even played the minute the game ended. In the place of these lost memories, the journalist’s imagination spun elaborate narratives; he believed he had written an article when in fact he had barely begun to conceive it before he became sick, would describe the prior day’s visit to a far-off place when in actuality he had been too weak to get out of bed, and maintained that some of his possessions—kept in a hospital safe—had been taken from him as part of an elaborate heist.

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Sacks’ journals suggest he injected his own experiences into the stories of his patients.

In the years since I first read about the journalist, I have become a neurologist, well versed in the medical jargon that describes symptoms like his: confabulation, a gap in memory filled with a story that feels entirely true to the person telling it. Confabulations can be fantastical or banal, grounded in memory or imagination, but confabulations share one essential feature: Confabulators experience their own stories as the truth. A confabulation is not a conscious lie, but rather an unconscious repair.

Neurologist Oliver Sacks, who died in 2015, was perhaps the most prolific chronicler of symptoms like confabulation, filling the pages of his books with detailed descriptions of his own patients’ wounds and blindnesses. I first read Sacks as a college student studying cognitive science and again as a neurology resident steeped in the strangeness and wonder of wounded brains. In his foreword to Awakenings, the stories of patients who had survived the “sleeping sickness” epidemic of the 1920s, alive but lethargic and permanently immobilized, Sacks wrote that the book was possible in large part because of the Bronx hospital where he practiced, which he called “a chronic hospital, an asylum,” where his patients resided for decades.

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Sacks bore witness to “situations virtually unknown, almost unimaginable, to the general public and, indeed, to many of my colleagues.” Years after I first read Awakenings, I wrote my own book, The Mind Electric, informed in part by my own experiences at a city safety-net hospital in Boston, where I now practice neurology. I admired Sacks because he found inspiration in places others had not thought to look, because he centered stories from the margins that had previously gone untold. I wanted to do the same.

STORIES KEEP US ALIVE: “I loved The Arabian Nights as a child because it felt fantastical,” writes author and neurologist Pria Anand. “From Scheherazade, I learned that stories keep us alive.” Credit: Mutualart / Wikimedia Commons.

Among the chapters of Sacks’ 1985 The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, a collection of medical tales, is a case study titled “A Matter of Identity.” It’s the story of William Thompson, an ex-grocer struggling with a form of dementia born of longstanding alcoholism. Thompson, Sacks wrote, could not remember that he lived in a hospital. When Sacks visited him in a white doctor’s coat, Thompson imagined that he was a customer at his deli, then a kosher butcher, then an old gambling buddy, and then a Mobil station mechanic. Thompson, Sacks wrote, suffered a sort of “narrative frenzy … He must seek meaning, make meaning, in a desperate way, continually inventing, throwing bridges of meaning over abysses of meaninglessness, the chaos that yawns continually beneath him.”

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In a New Yorker article published last month, journalist Rachel Aviv dissects Sacks’ own desperate quest for meaning, reporting on unpublished journals suggesting that Sacks invented patient narratives, sometimes injecting parts of his own experiences into the stories of his patients. In Awakenings, Sacks wrote that his patient, Leonard, likened his frozen body to a caged panther in a Rainer Maria Rilke poem. In fact, Sacks’ letters and notes suggest, it was Sacks, not Leonard, who identified with the poem, writing to a friend that the experience of writing his first book, Migraine, made him feel like “Rilke’s image of the caged panther, stupefied, dying, behind bars.” In a chapter of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks wrote about a woman he called Rebecca, who blossomed despite her cognitive limitations after the death of her grandmother. In the book, Sacks reported that she joined a theater group and emerged from her grief as “a complete person.” Sacks’ journals, filled with transcriptions of his conversations with Rebecca, suggest that the reality was messier: Rebecca never joined a theater group but rather succumbed to her grief, telling Sacks that she wished she’d never been born.

What emerges from Aviv’s deeply reported work is not conscious deception, but the gravitational pull of confabulation, a tidy narrative mistaken for truth. Aviv quotes a letter Sacks wrote to his brother, Marcus, enclosed with a copy of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. In the letter, Sacks calls the book a collection of “fairy tales,” explaining “these odd Narratives—half-report, half-imagined, half-science, half-fable, but with a fidelity of their own—are what I do, basically, to keep MY demons of boredom and loneliness and despair away.” In fact, Sacks writes, Marcus would likely call them “confabulations.”

Science has a long tradition of using neurological wounds like confabulation as windows, opportunities to catch a glimpse of the complex ways our brains work when they are whole. We understand something about the biological basis of communication from studying people bereft of language, about the underpinnings of human perception from studying people who have experienced blindness, and about the neural pathways that generate movement from studying people suffering paralysis. Even the most esoteric-seeming neurological injuries speak to universal features of our brains.

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For patients like Thompson and the 19th-century Russian journalist with amnesia, confabulation bridges a discontinuity, stepping in when memory fails. For Sacks, deeply closeted until his 80s, Aviv suggests confabulation served a different, more poignant purpose: His stories offered a place to put those parts of his own identity that he had been forced to sublimate. In his journals, Sacks wrote that he gave the patients in his books “some of my own powers, and some of my phantasies too.” He gave his patients his own inner monologues, his own desires, projections of his own insecurities. “I write out symbolic versions of myself,” he wrote.

As a doctor, I, too, traffic in stories, hunger for coherence rather than chaos.

I have always loved Sacks best when he wrote, not about his patients’ symptoms, but his own. His early experiments with psychotropics are catalogued in Hallucinations, the symptoms of his own visual auras in Migraine, and his alienation from his own body in A Leg to Stand On, the story of how he tore his quadriceps while mountain-climbing in Norway and found himself unable to move the leg, even after a surgery to repair muscle. Sacks describes the leg as “foreign,” a part of himself that he cannot relate to.

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Four years before Sacks died, he wrote about his own body in The Mind’s Eye, meditating on the childhood eye cancer that would eventually kill him alongside the stories of other artists and scientists who found themselves unable, in some essential way, to see. In a deeply personal chapter titled “Face-Blind,” Sacks revealed his own blindness: prosopagnosia, the inability to recognize even the most intimately familiar faces. Sacks remembered failing to recognize his own therapist five minutes after leaving an appointment and birthday parties at which he asked friends to wear name tags. Sometimes, he wrote, he apologized to his own reflection in the mirror, unable to recognize even himself. Still, he was oblivious to his prosopagnosia until late in his life, when he visited his brother in Australia for the first time in decades and recognized his own deficiency in his brother’s face-blindness.

For all Sacks knew about the ways that brains are able to hide their wounds, he had failed to acknowledge his own.

The genius of Sacks was that he insisted on centering people rather than illnesses, stories rather than jargon. His patients find ways to repair their reality rather than succumbing to their illnesses. As an epigraph to The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat, Sacks chose to focus not on science, but rather fables: “To talk of diseases is a sort of Arabian Nights entertainment.” The quote is attributed to William Osler, the 19th-century internist who founded the hospital where I would train a century later.

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I loved The Arabian Nights as a child because it felt fantastical. I read of caliphs and sorcerers, of jinn born of fire and of seas peopled with merfolk. The Arabian Nights is a strange, protean text, a shapeshifting, Russian-doll narrative of stories nested within stories to which tales have been added, subtracted, mutated over centuries and continents. The fables themselves are framed by the story of Scheherazade, the latest bride of a monstrous king who weds a new woman each night only to have her beheaded the following dawn. The night of their wedding, the resourceful and brilliant Scheherazade begs to be allowed to say goodbye to her beloved younger sister, Dunyazad, for whom she begins to weave a marvelous bedtime story while the king lies awake and listens. When dawn breaks, the tale remains unfinished, and the king, anxious for a resolution, spares Scheherazade’s life for one more night. The next night, and the next night, and the next, Scheherazade spins a web of endless stories that enthrall the king, always ending on a cliff-hanger so that he will keep her alive. From Scheherazade, I learned that stories keep us alive. But stories can also mislead.

When I was a medical student, reading the old case reports, I wondered whether writers were particularly prone to confabulation, primed to search for a coherent plot. Since becoming a physician, I have wondered even more whether doctors are particularly prone to confabulation. Medical students are taught to imagine a binary: doctor and patient, science and faith, objective truth and subjective report, us and them. Our morning rounds are an exercise in telling and retelling patients’ stories in a way that explains their illnesses, cloaked in the sense of objectivity offered by a white coat. But the stories told on these rounds are just as prone to false truths as the reports of an amnesia patient, subconsciously shaped by our priors, our communities, our own narratives. On rounds, a woman’s pain might be recast as anxiety, for instance, while a vitamin deficiency born of alcohol use might be regarded as a deserved punishment.

As a doctor, I, too, traffic in stories, hunger for coherence rather than the chaos and uncertainty that medicine and bodies often offer. In medicine, we arbitrate which stories are important and which don’t matter, which are true and which are false, as if we were omniscient rather than subjective beings, as if our training somehow excises the humanity, the personal, from our practice. In my own writing as in my medical practice, I remind myself to always leave room for uncertainty, for that which I cannot possibly know about someone else’s body, about their story.

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I loved Sacks for his unflinching desire to bear witness to the complexity of illness, and it pained me to read that he sometimes put his own story ahead of his patients’ realities. Hospitals are places of both ruin and miracles, heartache and wonder, the narratives they contain as spellbinding as they are messy. Sacks knew this better than any writer. And so, for all that feels profoundly, universally human about his vulnerabilities, I struggle to understand his impulse to confabulate on the page when the unvarnished truth would have been more compelling.

But Aviv’s article also left me with an unsettling revelation that transcends Sacks’ writing: not simply that Sacks revised reality, but that we all do. Confabulation is powerful precisely because it slips beneath consciousness, beneath the attention of even the keenest observers. Surrounded by a chaotic world, deluged with sights, sounds, and sensations, our brains instinctively search for narrative order, telling stories to explain away that which we cannot understand and that which we fear. All of us narrate our way through gaps, often mistaking the satisfaction of a tidy story for the truth. For all his flaws, perhaps despite himself, Sacks continues to illuminate the frailties of the human condition.

Lead image: Torley / Flickr

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Pria Anand

Posted on January 20, 2026

Pria Anand is a neurologist and the author of The Mind Electric: A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains. She is an assistant professor at the Boston University School of Medicine, and she cares for patients at the Boston Medical Center.

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Search for Where Consciousness Lives in the Brain

A new technology could help scientists answer an old question

By Kristen French    January 14, 2026

In 1998, neuroscientist Christof Koch bet philosopher David Chalmers that within 25 years, scientists would discover the neural correlates of consciousness. He was certain that we were on the cusp of solving the so-called hard problem: how the physical flesh of the brain gives way to the everyday streams of feelings, sensations, and thoughts that make up our waking experience.

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That bet didn’t go well for Koch: A couple of years ago, he paid up, delivering a case of fine wine to his opponent on a conference stage in New York City.

But many scientists still believe that the scientific keys to the kingdom of consciousness are within reach. Lately, some are focusing their attention on a new technology called transcranial focused ultrasound, in which acoustic waves are transmitted through the skull deep into the interior tissues. These waves can be used to stimulate specific target areas as small as a few millimeters in size and to monitor the changes that result.

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Now, two researchers from MIT have mapped out specific ways to use the technology to chip away at the hard problem. Because transcranial focused ultrasound offers a powerful and noninvasive way to alter brain activity, it will allow scientists to track cause-and-effect for the first time, they argue. In a new paper, published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, they plot out a series of experiments that will aim to answer how consciousness arises in the brain—and where.

“Transcranial focused ultrasound will let you stimulate different parts of the brain in healthy subjects, in ways you just couldn’t before,” Daniel Freeman, an MIT researcher and co-author of the paper, explained in a statement. “This is a tool that’s not just useful for medicine or even basic science, but could also help address the hard problem of consciousness. It can probe where in the brain are the neural circuits that generate a sense of pain, a sense of vision, or even something as complex as human thought.”

Read more: “What’s So Hard About Understanding Consciousness?”

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Most existing brain-monitoring technologies, such as MRI, EEG, or other forms of ultrasound, provide imaging of existing activity in the neural tissue but cannot alter it, so they can’t measure cause and effect. Meanwhile, other forms of brain stimulation, such as transcranial magnetic or electrical stimulation, have been around for a long time, but they’re blunt instruments. They can only affect large swaths of cortex. Transcranial focused ultrasound can target specific areas deep in the brain that many theories of consciousness propose are crucial—and produce imaging with much higher resolution.

Outside of brain stimulation, the only way for scientists to alter and monitor activity in specific tissues of the brain is through surgical interventions, which are both risky and invasive, presenting ethical challenges for studying healthy brains. “There are very few reliable ways of manipulating brain activity that are safe but also work,” said Matthias Michel, an MIT philosopher who studies consciousness and a co-author of the new paper.

“It truly is the first time in history that one can modulate activity deep in the brain, centimeters from the scalp, examining subcortical structures with high spatial resolution,” Freeman added. “There’s a lot of interesting emotional circuits that are deep in the brain, but until now you couldn’t manipulate them outside of the operating room.”

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Freeman and his colleagues are especially interested in solving a fundamental disagreement about the origins of conscious experience: Does it require higher-order mental processes, such as reasoning or self-reflection, linking activity from different areas of the brain into a coherent whole? Or do specific patterns of localized activity—especially in subcortical structures at the back of the brain or in the back of the cortex—give rise to particular subjective experiences without a need for such interpretive overlays?

The new technology could answer a series of smaller questions that would help solve that bigger picture conundrum. For example: What roles do the prefrontal cortex and subcortical structures play in conscious perception? Is consciousness local or spread across networks? If it’s spread across distant brain regions, how are different perceptions linked to produce unified experience?

Some of the MIT researchers’ upcoming experiments will focus specifically on stimulating the visual cortex and higher-level areas in the frontal cortex. “It’s one thing to say if these neurons responded electrically,” argued Freeman. “It’s another thing to say if a person saw light.”

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Focused ultrasound won’t solve the hard problem overnight, but it may help us begin to see the light.

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Lead image: Mahesh Patil / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on January 14, 2026

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

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

This Hidden Brain Region Could Help You Stay Resilient in Old Age

A surprising measure of frailty and grip strength

By Kristen French    January 13, 2026

Old age can land a hard blow. But physical strength and resilience can help you punch back. Without it, older adults become increasingly vulnerable to all kinds of calamities: illness and injury, hospitalization, heart disease, cancer. The more criteria for frailty a person meets, the higher the risk of death.

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Now scientists have identified a little-known region of the brain that may be tied to how well we preserve physical and cognitive resilience as we age. The findings could help clinicians uncover risk of frailty before it creeps in—and even protect against it.

Frailty involves not just muscle loss, but loss of coordination and cognitive and emotional decline. A simple test known as the grip test is increasingly considered the most promising way to measure it. The grip test is exactly what it sounds like: Squeezing your hand into a grip around an object with as much strength as you can muster. And so researchers at the University of California, Riverside, decided to use functional MRI to track activity in the brains of 60 older adults while they performed the grip task.

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Read more: “Raising the American Weakling”

“Grip strength is more than just muscle,” explained Xiaoping Hu, a professor of bioengineering at University of California, Riverside and senior study author, in a statement. “It’s a marker of how well your body and your brain are functioning as you get older.”

Hu and his colleagues monitored many parts of the brains of their participants while they clenched their hands into a tight grip, but one structure materialized as the hero in these tests. Activity in the caudate nucleus, known for helping to manage movement and decision-making, was correlated with grip strength.

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The caudate nucleus is a c-shaped structure deep in the basal ganglia known to play a key role in learning, memory, movement control, and executive functions, such as focus. But until now it hadn’t been considered a potential early beacon of frailty and resilience. “This could eventually help clinicians spot frailty earlier, by identifying patterns in brain activity before people begin to lose strength,” Hu said via statement. The researchers published their findings in Frontiers in Neuroscience.

Hu and his colleagues used advanced modeling to map the internal communication systems in the brains of their participants, also known as the “functional connectome.” To make sure that they were, in fact, measuring frailty and not other variables, they adjusted their findings for differences in sex, age, and muscle mass. The participants were all 65 to 87 years of age and had no significant health problems.

If the findings hold up in more diverse populations—the participants in the study were all from Riverside, California—the team is hoping to use them to design a new diagnostic tool and even therapies or training programs that can target the caudate nucleus.

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“We’re trying to understand aging not as a single event, but as a process,” Hu said. “And of course we hope, long term, that more specific and accurate predictions about how people will age can reduce the worst effects of aging.”

Lead image: oneinchpunch / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on January 13, 2026

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

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Astronaut Brains Change Shape in Space

New research reveals spaceflight is literally mind-bending

By Jake Currie    January 12, 2026

Over the past half-century of manned spaceflight, scientists have learned a lot about how the human body responds once freed from the confines of Earth’s gravity. Vertebrae drift farther apart, bones lose density, muscles atrophy, and fluids tend to migrate toward the head. But what about the brain?

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According to new research published today in PNAS, human brains actually move and change shape in space. Scientists came to that conclusion after studying MRIs conducted on 26 astronauts before and after spending time in microgravity. Overall, they found that astronaut brains shifted backward, upward, and rotated toward the back following spaceflight.

Read more: “The Martians Are Coming—and They’re Human”

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Of course, detecting displacement of a gelatinous organ surrounded by fluid in microgravity might not seem like brain surgery (or rocket science). So, the scientists decided to go further, looking at changes in specific regions of the brain as well. In fact, that’s where things got interesting. They found that different areas of astronauts’ brains were displaced more than others, and sometimes in a different direction than the brain overall.

Interestingly, the specific regions with the largest displacements were those responsible for sensorimotor functions. In astronauts who spent more than a year in space, the supplementary motor cortex—that is, the part of the brain responsible for planning and coordinating movements—moved upward more than other brain regions.

Some of these changes affected astronauts’ abilities on Earth as well. Bigger movements in the posterior insula, which processes bodily sensations, were associated with greater declines in balance, post-flight. Thankfully, these changes weren’t permanent—astronauts’ brains recovered around six months after their feet were back on terra firma.

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Lead image: Yta23 / Shutterstock

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Jake Currie

Posted on January 12, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Brain Waves Shape Your Sense of Self

It’s all a matter of timing

By Kristen French    January 12, 2026

How do humans know where the self ends and the world begins?

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It’s a feeling that’s central to everyday experience and vital for survival, but it can easily be disturbed. Take the classic rubber-hand illusion. A person’s real hand is hidden from view while a rubber hand is placed in full view. When both hands get tapped at the same time, the person may begin to feel that the rubber hand is their own. But even slight variations in timing can make this uncanny feeling fade.

So how does the brain keep track of when different sensory signals come in from the body? It relies on certain rhythmic waves known as alpha waves, as they flow through the parietal cortex, which is responsible for processing touch, body position, and other bodily sensations.

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Now a team of scientists from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden has found that individual differences in the frequencies of these alpha waves can determine how well a person senses their body as distinct from the outside world. If the alpha waves run faster, your brain is better at deciding what’s really part of you. If they run slower, it leaves the distinction between self and other a bit blurrier. The scientists recorded EEG signals on 106 participants while testing them on the rubber-hand illusion, reporting their findings in Nature Communications.

Read more: “Does Anybody Really Know What Time Is?”

“We have identified a fundamental brain process that shapes our continuous experience of being embodied,” explained lead author Mariano D’Angelo, a researcher in the department of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institutet, in a statement. “The findings may provide new insights into psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, where the sense of self is disturbed.”

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People with schizophrenia tend to have slower alpha waves. The findings could also help scientists create better prosthetics and virtual reality experiences: The more precise the timing of sensory feedback, the more these augmentations will feel real.

To do their experiment, the scientists manipulated the frequencies of taps delivered to the rubber hand and the participant’s real hand, with delays or accelerations of up to 500 milliseconds. Next, they asked the participants to judge whether the fake hand felt like their own. They also tested participants on their ability to judge differences in timing between brief tactile and visual prompts, which had previously been linked to differences in the frequencies of their alpha waves.

What they found is that there was a strong overlap between the two: how well people could discern differences in timing of external cues, and how tolerant they were of timing mismatches when deciding whether the rubber hand felt like their own.

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In a second part of the experiment, the scientists were able to show that this wasn’t just a matter of correlation, but that there is a causal link. Using gentle brain stimulation, they temporarily sped up and slowed down the alpha waves in the parietal cortexes of 30 participants. They found that these manipulations influenced how likely they were to feel the rubber hand was their own, as well as how well they were able to judge differences in timing of external light and touch signals.

Finally, they used mathematical modeling based on Bayesian reasoning to show that the changes in alpha frequency didn’t change participants’ beliefs so much as their uncertainty about the source of sensory signals. Faster alpha waves appeared to lead to cleaner, more reliable timing signals, while slower waves led to noisier, fuzzier timing signals.

“Our findings help explain how the brain solves the challenge of integrating signals from the body to create a coherent sense of self,” said Henrik Ehrsson, a neuroscientist with the Karolinska Institutet and co-author of the study.

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They say timing is everything. Apparently, that truism may extend to our sense of self. We are, at least in part, the rhythm we keep.

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Lead image: Stranger Man / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on January 12, 2026

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

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Why Finding Motivation Is Often Such a Struggle

The brains of macaques offer some clues

By Kristen French    January 9, 2026

Getting started is the hardest part, as the old chestnut goes. Even when we really want to do something, we may delay taking that first step, especially if some part of it seems like drudgery. We may circle the task instead, doing everything but it: tidying our sock drawer, gazing out the window, baking a cake. Mustering motivation can feel like a herculean effort.

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But why does this happen when we ultimately anticipate pleasure and reward?

To better understand how the impetus to get going on something new works in the brain, a team of scientists from Kyoto University recently turned to macaques, a genus of gregarious monkeys widespread across Asia. Macaques aren’t humans, of course, but they’re genetically close relatives with whom we shared a common ancestor tens of millions of years ago. The team of scientists published their results in the journal Current Biology.

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The scientists placed two male macaques in dark soundproof booths facing a screen, where a little dot would appear. If the monkey focused on the dot long enough, he was given the option to choose between a large sip of water and an unpleasant puff of air to the face, or a tiny sip of water, no puff. In the second round, both choices gave the monkey a drink, just of different amounts. Splitting the tasks in this way allowed the researchers to separate the motivation to start from the appeal of the reward.

Read more: “What Birdsong Says About Motivation”

While the monkeys were completing their tasks, the scientists tracked their eye movements and pupils with an infrared tracker and monitored their brain activity with small electrodes implanted directly in the brain tissue. They zoomed in on a specific circuit involved in motivation in the basal ganglia, which helps to control muscle movement—the pathway from the ventral striatum, which is crucial for reward, decision making, and goal-directed behavior, to the ventral palladium, often involved in addiction and natural drives such as hunger and sex. Then the scientists selectively muffled this circuit using a designer drug, and repeated the experiment.

In the first part of the experiment, when the task included the possibility that the monkeys would get an annoying puff of air in the face, they were much more likely to bail out early. But when they didn’t bail, they chose bigger rewards and avoided the annoying puffs of air. After the circuit was muffled, motivation to start returned. Their reaction times were also faster, even when they got the punishing blast of air to the face.

The scientists recorded single neurons in separate sessions and found a pattern of push-pull as well. The ventral striatum neurons were more active during the task that included the puff of punishing air, and reacted quickly to that punishment, while the ventral palladium neurons were less responsive when the punishment was included and change was more sluggish.

The scientists propose that unpleasant conditions ramp up activity in the ventral striatum, which inhibits activity in the ventral palladium, making it more difficult to initiate the next attempt. If you suppress this circuit, however, the ventral palladium is less inhibited, so the motivation to get started improves. In other words, the ventral striatum acts as a kind of warning signal that can clamp down the go prompt coming from the ventral palladium.

The reason this check to initiation is in place, they suggest, is that it prevents us from engaging in excessively risky behavior. The study had a few limitations: the sample, for instance, included just two macaques. Also, the designer drug manipulations and the neuron recordings didn’t happen at the same time, so while the mechanism they propose is suggested, it’s not proven.

The authors say the findings could inform our understanding of clinical psychiatric conditions such as depression and schizophrenia, which often come with flattened motivation. People with such conditions may still recognize rewards and value them but have trouble getting started on tasks, especially if these tasks come with stress, discomfort, or other perceived costs. The circuit the scientists identified could become a target for interventions aimed at getting these patients out of a rut and into action.

Motivation, the findings suggest, isn’t always about wanting something badly enough. Wanting and doing aren’t the same thing when significant stress is part of the equation. When the calculation goes awry, even pleasure can fail to move us.

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Lead image: CandyRetriever / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on January 9, 2026

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

- How Coastlines Shape the Extinction Risk for Marine Invertebrates

- Tyrannosaurids Took Their Time Growing to 17,000 Pounds

- The Secrets of an Ancient Hunk of Woolly Rhinoceros Meat

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Coastlines Shape the Extinction Risk for Marine Invertebrates

Invertebrates that lived on north-south coastlines had better chances of survival

By Devin Reese    January 16, 2026

To predict how communities of organisms will respond to environmental changes, scientists look to the deep past. Tracking the relationship between biodiversity change and change over millions of years provides a window into factors that allow (or disallow) organisms to handle change. In a paper published yesterday in Science led by University of Oxford researchers, the extinction risk of marine invertebrates was tied to the configuration of coastlines.

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The researchers looked at about 300,000 fossils representing more than 12,000 genera of ocean invertebrates that lived over the past 540 million years on shallow, continental shelves. By reconstructing the arrangements of the continents during the organisms’ lifetimes, they estimated the geometry (both shape and orientation) of the coastlines they inhabited. Then, by statistically modeling the relationship, they tested the hypothesis that coastline geometry influenced extinction risk.

The data showed that organisms inhabiting north-south-oriented coastlines, like today’s North American coasts, had a better chance of long-term survival when conditions changed. The study authors hypothesized that the north-south coastlines offered a corridor for organisms that rely on shallow waters to migrate and stay within their tolerance ranges when climate or other conditions changed.

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Read more: “Our Boiling Seas”

Organisms that lived alongside islands, inland seaways, or east-west-oriented coastlines like today’s Mediterranean Sea coasts were disadvantaged when conditions changed. Migration to newly suitable habitats was likely impossible, short of crossing the open ocean. As such, these coastal invertebrates, which have limited abilities to traverse long distances, faced what the researchers dubbed “latitudinal traps.”

“Groups that are trapped at one latitude, because they live on an island or an east-west coastline, for example, are unable to escape unsuitable temperatures and are more likely to become extinct as a result,” explained study author and earth scientist Erin Saupe in a statement.

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During mass extinction events or periods that were particularly warm, the role of coastline geometry in extinction risk was more pronounced. The geographic constraints imposed by the shape and orientation of coastlines appeared to have amplified importance in driving extinction during periods of elevated environmental stress.

“This work confirms what many paleontologists and biologists have suspected for years—that a species’ ability to migrate to different latitudes is vital for survival,” concluded lead author and earth scientist Cooper Malanoski in a statement.

These patterns detected over millions of years might apply to modern species. Organisms living in “latitudinal traps” of east-west coastlines or islands may be especially vulnerable to dramatic changes in conditions.

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The study calls for paying attention to coastline geometry in predicting and mitigating how species will endure continuing climate changes.

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Lead image: Erik Lukas / Ocean Image Bank

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Devin Reese

Posted on January 16, 2026

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

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Tyrannosaurids Took Their Time Growing to 17,000 Pounds

Forty-year growth periods may have given them a leg up in dominating their ecosystems

By Devin Reese    January 15, 2026

How long did it take for a Tyrannosaurus rex to grow to its maximum size of more than 17,000 pounds?

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Growth often levels off at adulthood, so assessing annual growth rates of an animal can give you an idea not only of how fast it grew, but when it reached maturity. Like you’d do for a tree, you count and measure growth rings in slices of T. rex leg bones, with wider rings indicating faster growth.

In a study published yesterday in Peer J, researchers examined growth rings in 17 Tyrannosaurus fossils to plot their pattern of growth.

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“Examining the growth rings preserved in the fossilized bones allowed us to reconstruct the animals’ year-by-year growth histories,” explained lead study author and Oklahoma State paleontologist Holly Woodward Ballard in a statement.

Read more: “T. Rex Was a Slacker”

In the most complete analysis of Tyrannosaurus internal bone structure to date, the researchers examined femurs and tibias from young juvenile specimens to older adults. The use of polarized light facilitated analysis of growth rings that would otherwise be missed. A statistical algorithm led by mathematician Nathan Myhrvold combined data across specimens to come up with a growth trajectory for the species.

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Previous studies had estimated time to max size for T. rex at about 25 years, but the new data indicates that it grew more slowly, reaching its maximum size at 35 to 40 years of age. That’s a really long sub-adulthood.

“A four-decade growth phase may have allowed younger tyrannosaurs to fill a variety of ecological roles within their environments,” hypothesizes co-author and Chapman University paleontologist Jack Horner. “That could be one factor that allowed them to dominate the end of the Cretaceous Period as apex carnivores.”

The new data also adds fuel to an ongoing debate about whether smaller specimens of T. rex are unique species—members of a hypothetical genus dubbed Nanotyrannus. Two of the 17 specimens, colloquially called “Jane” and “Petey,” proved to be outliers on these new growth curves. Thus, they may be species other than T. rex, as proposed in a recent related study published in Nature.

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The inclusion of additional tyrannosaurid specimens into the statistical models would continue to beef up our understanding of how these animals became the giants of the Cretaceous.

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Lead image: Photo Spirit / Shutterstock

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Devin Reese

Posted on January 15, 2026

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

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Secrets of an Ancient Hunk of Woolly Rhinoceros Meat

It helps decipher what exactly happened to its species about 14,000 years ago

By Devin Reese    January 14, 2026

The stomach of a preserved wolf puppy from the Siberian permafrost concealed a surprise. Inside its stomach was a chunk of frozen meat. Because the wolf (Canis lupus) had been radiocarbon dated to 14,400 years ago, its last meal was also deemed 14,400 years old. And, based on its DNA, the meat was the flesh of an animal you might not expect to find in a wolf’s belly: a woolly rhinoceros.

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In a study published today in Genome Biology and Evolution, a team of biologists from Sweden, Wales, Denmark, and Russia reports on one of the most recent woolly rhinoceroses known. The species (Coelodonta antiquitatis) went extinct about 14,000 years ago, but the causes of its decline have been unclear. By extracting a high-coverage genome from the muscle tissue (i.e., meat), the researchers got a read on woolly rhinoceros’ genomic diversity on the eve of their extinction.

“Sequencing the entire genome of an Ice Age animal found in the stomach of another animal has never been done before,” explained study author and Stockholm University paleo-geneticist Camilo Chacón-Duque in a statement.

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Read more: “The Last of Their Kind”

You’d expect to find evidence of the species’ decline in its genome in the form of more harmful mutations from inbreeding, smaller population size, and genetic deterioration. But the sequencing revealed no such effects, suggesting that the woolly rhino populations, even as they closed in on extinction, weren’t suffering a rapid population decline.

In comparing the genome of the wolf-eaten rhinoceros to other woolly rhino genomes from earlier Pleistocene specimens—18,000 and 49,000 years ago, respectively—the data showed little change in genome diversity.

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“Our analyses showed a surprisingly stable genetic pattern with no change in inbreeding levels through tens of thousands of years prior to the extinction of woolly rhinos,” said study author and Stockholm University paleo-geneticist Edana Lord.

The absence of a lead-up to its extinction suggests that the woolly rhinoceroses flamed out rapidly. Their populations remained genetically healthy until the end of the last Ice Age, and then collapsed suddenly, perhaps leaving a record at the genomic level during their last few hundred years. The study authors hypothesize that their collapse was caused by the global warming that capped the Ice Age during its final stages.

Let that be a lesson to us.

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Lead image: Daniel Eskridge / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on January 14, 2026

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

Psychology

- How Having Kids Makes Parents Disgust-Proof

- Your Infant Knows Exactly What Your Baby Talk Means

- Why the Do Nothing Challenge Doesn’t Do Much for You

- In Pursuit of a Psychedelic Without the Hallucination

- Delusions Are Often Not-So-Delusional After All

- Your Face May Decide What You Like Before You Do

- Genius Dogs Can Learn Words Like Toddlers

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Having Kids Makes Parents Disgust-Proof

All those dirty diapers make it pretty hard to get grossed out about anything else

By Kristen French    January 18, 2026

It’s hard to imagine that soiled diapers could have any side benefits for parents. But recent research suggests that exposure to all that poop trains parents to tune out disgust so they can soldier on.

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Neuroscientists from the University of Bristol recently reported that repeated long-term exposure to their babies’ bodily waste actually reshapes parents’ brains: It suppresses their disgust responses not just in the moment, but over the longer term as well. They published their results in the Scandinavian Journal of Psychology.

The researchers say the findings could help design strategies to support workers in jobs where disgust is a daily part of the routine, such as working with human cadavers or raw meat. Not surprisingly, professions that require regular contact with body waste often have a hard time recruiting staff. The scientists chose to study how parents handle baby poop because people who become morticians or surgeons might have naturally low disgust thresholds before they join, which could skew the results of any experiments. Most parents don’t choose to parent based on how easily or not they feel the ick, the team reasoned.

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Read more: “Why We Love to Be Grossed Out”

“Disgust is a basic human emotion that helps protect us from harm,” explained Edwin Dalmaijer, a cognitive neuroscientist in Bristol’s School of Psychological Science and one of the study’s lead authors, in a statement. “Most people recognize it as the strong ‘yuck’ feeling we get when we smell gone-off food, see something dirty, or think about bodily fluids. This reaction is not just about being picky, it evolved to keep us away from things that might make us sick.”

That feeling of disgust is often visceral and immediate, he pointed out. “When we feel disgust, our bodies often respond automatically, for example by feeling nauseous, or wanting to move away quickly. While this reaction is powerful in the short term, it has long been debated whether repeated exposure over months or years can truly reduce disgust,” said Dalmaijer. “Parenthood dramatically increases exposure to these substances, and people do not choose to become, or stop being, parents based on disgust. This makes it an ideal ‘natural experiment’ for studying how disgust changes over time.”

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To track these changes in disgust in parents, the scientists analyzed both physical reactions and survey responses from 99 parents and 50 parents respectively, recording how much they looked away from images of soiled diapers—including the soiled diapers of newborns, breastfeeding babies, and weaned babies, whose poops look more adult-like—as well as how they replied to questions about parenting and diaper handling.

The findings were surprising: Parents of children who were being weaned off their mother’s milk or were already eating exclusively whole foods at the time of the experiment showed little avoidance of soiled diapers or bodily fluids and waste in general, such as vomit. Their disgust responses were also noticeably lower compared to adults without children. But parents whose youngest children were still exclusively breast feeding responded to bodily waste with levels of disgust that were similar to those of non-parents.

The researchers say the finding may be an adaptive response to help protect against disease in young infants. The feces of infants who are still exclusively milk-fed tend to have a more tolerable scent than those of kids who have started eating solid food. But when they’re still dependent on breast milk, babies are more vulnerable to infection and illness. Meanwhile, the later desensitization could help parents care for their young when they fall ill.

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“Parenthood doesn’t just change daily routines,” said Dalmaijer, “it can fundamentally alter how humans experience disgust, with lasting effects that extend beyond childcare itself.”

The dirty diapers eventually disappear. But the softened gag reflex may not.

Lead image: Noman Ahmed jia / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on January 18, 2026

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

Your Infant Knows Exactly What Your Baby Talk Means

It may help infants learn vowel sounds

By Kristen French    January 17, 2026

Some people refuse to use baby talk with babies. The sing-song repetition of cute nonsense words commonly spoken by adults to infants—and pets—can have a grating quality that makes some people cringe, like nails on a chalkboard. It can seem like the adults are regressing to a more primordial, infantile version of themselves.

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But baby talk may actually help babies learn to talk.

These are the findings of a study recently published in the journal Developmental Science. Researchers from the University of the Sunshine Coast in Queensland, Australia, wanted to know if the exaggerated pitches and other sounds typical of what’s technically termed “infant-directed speech,” or IDS, could help babies learn to tell the difference between one vowel sound and another. Vowel sounds are the ones most commonly exaggerated by adults in baby talk, research has shown, but this practice isn’t unique to infant-directed speech. Humans also tend to draw out vowel sounds when articulating in noisy environments and talking with non-native speakers.

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Whether baby talk helps babies learn language has been a somewhat controversial subject. “Previous research has consistently shown that infants prefer to listen to IDS,” said researcher Varghese Peter in a statement. “But whether it has any significance beyond this is under debate.”

Read more: “When Kids Talk to Machines”

Some studies have already shown correlation: That infants whose parents use exaggerated vowel sounds appear to have better language perception abilities and larger vocabularies later. But not all baby talk features long sing-songy vowels. For example, parents who speak Dutch, Norwegian, and Danish are less likely to use them when talking to infants. Exaggerated vowels can also blur the distinctions between one vowel and the next, which could, in theory, make it harder for babies to learn how to understand and use them.

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To investigate, Peter and his colleagues recruited 22 Australian adults, 24 4-month-old infants and 21 9-month-old infants and brought them into the lab. Then they played recordings of a single Australian-English mother talking in baby talk with her 9-month-old infant and in regular adult speech with someone else and recorded what was happening in the study participants’ brains using EEG recordings when they were listening to specific vowel sounds spoken in the language of baby talk. They chose these particular ages because the first year of life is critical for language development— a time when babies become more attuned to native language sounds and less sensitive to non-native ones. In the first four months, babies are mostly learning acoustic pattern matching, while the perception of different vowel categories is thought to advance in a major way between six and nine months of age.

What the team found is that 4-month-old babies had stronger, more “mature” responses to vowels spoken in baby-talk-ese—what they called a “mature” response—whereas the brains of adults and 9-month-old babies responded similarly to both baby talk and regular speech. “When they heard vowels spoken in adult speech, their brains showed a less advanced response. However, when they heard the same vowels spoken in infant-directed speech, their brains produced a more advanced response, similar to that seen in older infants and adults,” explained Peter, referring to the 4-month-olds.

“In other words,” he continued, “‘baby talk’ isn’t silly at all; it may support early language learning from as young as four months of age.”The scientists note that it’s possible vowel exaggeration isn’t the only part of baby speech that could be responsible for the ways the youngest babies responded to baby talk. Typically, exaggerated vowels coincide with higher pitches and greater pitch ranges, which could have also contributed. Another caveat: The authors focused on a specific contrast between “a” sounds and “i” sounds. For more difficult vowel contrasts, the benefits of using baby talk could extend beyond nine months, they point out.

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What they found may not prove that every goo goo gaga creates a genius, but it does suggest that this linguistic nonsense has real meaning to those who actually need to hear it.

Lead art: Design_Stock7 / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on January 17, 2026

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

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Why the Do Nothing Challenge Doesn’t Do Much for You

Boredom lab researcher James Danckert says our collective obsession is misplaced

By Kristen French    January 17, 2026

They sit alone in a room, expressionless, doing absolutely nothing, giant timers clocking down the hours and minutes. No books, no devices, no food, no distractions, no sleep. It’s a challenge some Gen-Zers are setting for themselves on TikTok—the “Do Nothing” challenge. The idea is to deliberately court boredom to restore depleted attention spans, a salve for the frantic overstimulation of our distracted age. Some of these videos accumulate millions of views.

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It’s a new twist on an old idea. Over a decade ago, South Korean artist Woopsyang started the “Space-Out Competition” to combat burnout. Since then, the urge for stillness has evolved in many forms, including the recent mania for rawdogging, a term that’s come to mean enduring any mundane activity without aids, particularly long flights. That trend became such a sensation that the American Dialect Society chose rawdog as its Word of the Year in 2024.

@sspencerevans

What a productive day! #fypシ #challenge #worldrecord #meme #brainrot #sigmagrindset #sigma #antipiracy #vexbolts #unemployment #unemployed #challenges

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But the Do Nothing challenge and the rawdogging trend suggest a fundamental misunderstanding of how boredom and disconnection work, says James Danckert, a researcher in the Boredom Lab at the University of Waterloo. Boredom is closer to hunger than to holiness, he argues, and forcing it on yourself for hours on end doesn’t by itself have restorative power. Instead, the feeling suggests something about your attention, agency, or meaning is out of alignment.

I spoke with Danckert about why we’re so fascinated with boredom in this cultural moment, why some people have more trouble with boredom than others, and his frustration with the stubborn idea that boredom is fertile territory for creativity.

Why do you think we’re so fascinated by boredom of late?

In the early 2000s, we’d start all of our scientific papers with “boredom is an understudied phenomena,” but we can’t do that anymore because in the last 20 years, a lot more people have begun researching it. Some of the recent work aims to understand the relationship between social media and boredom. You might think that there’s so much at our fingertips now, surely boredom is gonna go away. But what we’re finding is that it’s actually increasing. So one speculation is that our capacity to connect well is diminishing, and as that’s happening, we’re getting more bored.

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Read more: “What Boredom Does to You”

It seems like boredom means a lot of different things to different people. Is there a good standard scientific definition of boredom?

There’s a distinction to be made here that’s important. State boredom is the in-the-moment feeling of “I am bored right now.” Functionally what is it doing? It is meant to signal to you that what you’re doing right now isn’t working. You need to do something else. And then there’s trait boredom, or boredom proneness. These are individuals who experience boredom frequently and intensely, and it makes them feel like their lives are just lacking in meaning.

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Are there any real downsides to forced boredom? These TikTokers who are filming themselves doing nothing for hours and hours and hours. Is that actually restorative?

The ultimate goal of in-the-moment feelings of boredom is to eliminate itself. Boredom wants to not exist, right? And so, to embrace boredom and say, “Oh, I’m gonna try and rawdog it on this flight for 12 hours.” It’s just a stunt. And it’s not listening well to what boredom is actually telling you, which is to find something meaningful to do.

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Just rawdogged my longest flight yet. #bareback #rawdog #airplanes #flights #travel

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But the other thing is that they’re misconceiving their own needs. They don’t want boredom. They want disconnection. And that’s perfectly fine. We used to talk about this in other ways: vegging out, or just relaxation for Christ’s sake. So anything that takes you out of the normal everyday stresses that we all experience. But I think we ought to intentionally choose those times and activities that are our disconnection times—and rawdogging boredom ain’t it. That’s just a fundamentally dumb idea. In the one or two examples that I’ve looked at, what I saw is that they’re uncomfortable, right? So they’re at least experiencing one of the key features of boredom. But when you want to disconnect from the hustle and bustle of your life, why would you intentionally engage in a thing that feels bad? It doesn’t make sense to me.

People claim that boredom is like a form of mindfulness, or it helps them address feelings and thoughts that maybe they were too afraid to confront. And both of these things can certainly be uncomfortable. How do you know the difference between the discomfort of boredom and say the discomfort of mindfulness or meditation?

Mindfulness practice, as I understand it, isn’t typically described as uncomfortable. It might allow you to deal with thoughts and experiences in your life that themselves are uncomfortable. But the practice of being mindful is generally considered to be quite positive, I would think. Mindfulness is also a practice. It’s a thing that takes time to get good at. So you can’t hope to just do a one-hour session of mindfulness and solve all of your problems. You need to practice this over a number of months and years.

In 2014, Timothy Wilson and his group published a research paper titled “Just Think.” They put people in a room for 15 minutes with nothing but their thoughts. They took away their cell phones. There was nothing to look at in the room. You couldn’t do anything. You just had to sit in a chair, you and your thoughts. Then they asked you how it felt. And one thing that got lost in the media frenzy around this particular paper was that actually one-third of the participants rated the experience to be quite pleasant. One-third were ambivalent, and one-third hated it. They just thought it was boring and terrible. Again, the paper included nine experiments, but the one that got the media attention was this one that involved either sitting in a room for 15 minutes with nothing but your thoughts—or you could self-administer an electric shock.

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yes

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And people had experienced these electric shocks before the 15 minutes began. They’d rated them to feel negative and bad. They’d said that they would pay certain amounts of money to not experience them again. And then when you put them in there for the 15 minutes, still some significant percentage—more men than women—administered these electric shocks, rather than sit there and do nothing. One guy administered 196 electric shocks in 15 minutes to himself. To me, what that says is that we evolved for action, not for thought. Thought is a great and wonderful thing. Language is a great and wonderful thing. But we evolved to control our bodies and interact with the environment around us.

Boredom is also common where we feel constrained—when we have no autonomy and no agency. So we don’t feel like we can act in ways that we want to act. So these are examples and data that suggest that rawdogging boredom on a flight is just a silly idea. It’s going against what we’re actually evolved to do. Instead, what you might want to do is to say, “Okay, I’ve got a boring flight ahead of me. What would be a meaningful thing that I can do?” It could be something as simple as trying to complete the hardest Sudoku you’ve ever done. It doesn’t have to be meaningful in the sense of curing cancer, but something that matters to you is a better thing to attempt on a long flight than just trying to sit with it and do nothing.

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You mentioned earlier that some people are more prone to boredom, and in other talks I’ve heard you say that this is connected to problems with self-control and self-esteem. Why?

We’re actually still working on that. But self-control seems to be a cluster of processes that allows you to effectively pursue your goals. It allows you to marshal your thoughts, actions, and emotions in the pursuit of what matters to you. Often what you see in the literature is that people talk about self-control primarily as a challenge of inhibition. But for boredom proneness, I actually think that it’s a different kind of self-control that they struggle with—what we call a struggle to launch into action. When a young 5-year-old child comes to you and says, “I’m bored,” you, as a parent, tend to have this sort of knee-jerk reaction to say, “Why don’t you do this? Why don’t you go play with your Legos? Why don’t you go play outside? Why don’t you go and do a drawing? Why don’t you read a book?” The child knows all of those options are available. They just don’t want those things at this time. That’s the problem of boredom proneness. You don’t want what’s available right now, and you don’t know what you do want.

That’s so interesting because a study just came out about motivation in macaques, specifically related to getting started on a task, even one that’s expected to be rewarding. They found basically that there’s this one circuit in the basal ganglia of the brain that when it’s inhibited, the monkeys could get started, even if the reward came with an unpleasant punishment. Whereas if the circuit was active, they couldn’t. As far as you know, is there a signature of boredom in the brain?

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So the answer to that would be no. There’s really great work from Lisa Feldman Barrett talking about this notion of signatures of any kinds of affective experiences. And I think we’ve been hunting for that for decades. You know, what’s the signature of happiness? What’s the signature of anger? The answer is, there just really isn’t one physiological or neurological signature. We have these large-scale networks that are important for interacting with the world. And there’s just a ton of overlap.

But one part of the brain that seems to be very interesting for boredom is the insular cortex, which is very important for representing what we call interoceptive sensations, or internal body sensations. So feelings of hunger and thirst, butterflies in the stomach, a racing heart. And what Feldman Barrett suggests—she focuses a lot on depression and a little bit on anxiety—is that we use these internal body states to predict how we’re going to feel later on. So the boredom-prone person might just have faulty anticipation of reward. They might not know what’s going to feel good. They might not know what’s going to be engaging or might not be using these internal signals accurately. We’ve published some work on that that shows that people who are boredom-prone pay a lot more attention to their internal body states, but they’re kind of confused by them. They don’t make sense of them as well. There’s a concept known as alexithymia, which is the difficulty of labeling and discriminating your affective states, and people who are boredom-prone tend to have higher levels of alexithymia, as well.

Some researchers suggest there’s a relationship between boredom and creativity. Do you think there is any merit there?

The creativity idea has been a bit of a bugbear of mine, and a number of my colleagues who do boredom research feel this way, too. I think there’s this great desire in people to want to believe that boredom will somehow make you creative. But if you think about it, the logic just doesn’t work. So I start thinking about, “Where does the desire come from?” Famous people will often say, “I was bored, so I did X.” And because we look up to famous artists, we think, “Oh wow, boredom must be a really helpful tool in making you creative.”

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The story I’ve used in the past a lot is from Jimi Hendrix. Somebody sees Jimi Hendrix play for the first time, and is just blown away and corners him backstage and says, “Man, where have you been hiding?” And Hendrix replies, “I’ve been playing the Chitlin’ Circuit, and I was bored shitless.” A Chitlin’ Circuit was something in the ’50s and ’60s in America that was a sort of safe circuit of venues for Black Americans to perform anything from stand-up comedy to music to whatever. But the kind of music that was expected in the Chitlin’ Circuit was old and not to Hendrix’s liking. So he did something else and became the guitar virtuoso that we know. But the logic there is all wrong. Boredom didn’t make Hendrix a genius. Practice made Hendrix a genius. Trying to do different things made Hendrix a genius.

Creativity is a wonderful solution to boredom, but you can’t hope that it works the other way around. So the paper from 2014 that everybody cites that says boredom makes you creative: There’s loads and loads of problems with that paper. We tried to replicate it and found the opposite: The more bored we made people, the less creative they were.

@themichaelbarrymore

Not even any music on, did this in silence 😶‍🌫️ #timepass

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I would think that people who get bored easily tend to seek out novelty more.

That’s a reasonable conclusion to come to, but we have actually struggled to find that. People who are prone to boredom want novelty, but they fail to launch into action. Now, the temporary state itself might work exactly in the way that you suggested—that it pushes you toward novelty seeking. But novelty seeking alone isn’t gonna make you creative either. It’s what you do with that novelty, what you do with the new thing that you find and come back to practice.

You have mentioned elsewhere that animals feel boredom. How do we know?

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I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a mink in the wild. They scamper around. They look like they’re mischievous little creatures. And we still farm them for their fur, which is disgusting. But what Georgia Mason and Rebecca Meagher did is they had two groups of mink housed in different types of cages. One group is in cages that we normally keep them in on our fur farms, where there’s just nothing for them to do. Very boring. The other one was a cage that had lots of little things for the mink to play with.

They housed these two groups for two weeks in the different types of cages. At the end of the two weeks, they exposed the animals to different kinds of items. They exposed them first to items that the animal would normally approach—apparently for mink, a toothbrush is like a laser pointer for a cat. They just go crazy for it. They love toothbrushes. So they expose ‘em to something like that, that they would normally approach. Then they’d expose them to things that they’d normally avoid—the silhouette of a predator or the smell of urine of a predator. Things that they would shy away from. And then the third group of things was neutral stuff. Stuff the animals had seen before—just a bottle of water or something like that.

The logic was this: If the animals in the cage with nothing to do were depressed, they’d show less interest in the toothbrush stuff they normally liked ‘cause they were depressed. If they were apathetic after the two weeks in the cages, they’d show no interest in anything. They wouldn’t show approach or avoidance behavior. They wouldn’t care about any of the items. If they were bored, they’d approach everything—and they’d approach even things that they’d normally avoid, like the silhouette of the predator. And that’s exactly what they found. The minks in the cage with nothing to do for two weeks rapidly—more rapidly than the other group—and indiscriminately approached all kinds of items as if they were desperate for stimulation and just wanted something to do.

What made you want to study boredom?

Two things motivated me to get into boredom research. One was that, as a late teen, early 20-something young person, I started to experience boredom a lot and hated it. I wanted to find ways to eliminate it from my life. I no longer think that that’s either possible or desirable. But around about the same time, my brother had a motor vehicle crash where he suffered a fairly serious brain injury. Months later, after serious rehabilitation, he’d report that he was bored a lot. And to me, that suggested that something organic had changed in his brain. Some consequence of that brain injury made things that were once pleasurable seem boring. And so, I wanted to understand what had happened in the brain to make that the case for him.

Has studying boredom helped you feel less bored?

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I don’t think studying it has made me feel less bored. I think time has made me feel less bored. That’s one of the things that the data shows: Boredom rises in our teenage years and then starts to drop off in the late teens and early 20s. There’s a great study from Alycia Chin and colleagues called “Bored in the USA.” In our middle decades, when we’re busy with our careers, our children and all that kinda stuff, boredom drops off, because you don’t have time for it. Then it starts to rise again in the 60s and 70s. And what we’re starting to pursue a little bit more is that that’s probably about loneliness as much as anything. And so, in those later decades, people who are more socially connected experience boredom less. There’s some great work from my colleague Mark Fenske, who’s shown recently that hearing loss in the elderly is predictive of boredom.

So studying boredom hasn’t made me less bored, but over time and with all of the pressures of life, I don’t feel bored nearly as much as I used to. I’m hopeful that in my later decades I’ll pay attention to social connection—and avoid boredom.

Lead image: Master1305 / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on January 17, 2026

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

In Pursuit of a Psychedelic Without the Hallucination

Making magic mushrooms not quite so magic

By Kristen French    January 16, 2026

Psilocybin—the psychedelic ingredient found in some “magic” mushrooms—has shown a lot of promise for treating depression and anxiety in clinical trials. That’s particularly true over the longer-term. Even one to two doses has been reported to relieve symptoms in some people for several weeks up to as long as six to 12 months.

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But the hallucinations that come along for the ride can sometimes spell trouble for people with other psychiatric illnesses—triggering psychosis in those who have schizophrenia, or in those with a family history of psychosis. The costs of providing caretakers to help safely guide people through these mind-bending trips can also make the drug too expensive for many.

Now, some researchers are asking whether they can create a drug with similar benefits but with a little bit less magic: providing the mood-boosting effects but doing away with the hallucinations. The researchers, from Dartmouth, recently identified a neural receptor that could be a potential target for such a drug, reporting their findings in Molecular Psychiatry.

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“When people think about psilocybin, they think about acute effects like hallucinations, which are attributed to the activation of a specific neuroreceptor,” explained Sixtine Fleury, the study’s first author and a psychology and brain sciences researcher at Dartmouth, in a statement. “We thought that the beneficial effects reported for treating depression and anxiety may be found in other receptors.”

Read more: “The Psychedelic Scientist”

The long-lasting antidepressant effects of psilocybin are often credited to a single receptor in the brain: 5-HT2A, which also happens to be the one most closely tied to hallucination. But psilocybin’s “active” form psilocin—the part of the compound that actually binds to receptors in the brain after it’s ingested—attaches to many binding sites in the brain’s serotonin system, a neurotransmitter pathway that helps to regulate mood, sleep, appetite, and social behavior, among other things.

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“Our study shows that there likely is another target,” explained study author Katherine Nautiyal, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth. “Researchers have narrowly focused on the 2A receptor because we know it causes hallucinations, but the screening profiles of psilocybin show that these drugs bind to nearly all of the serotonin receptors.”

The scientists wondered if a receptor known as 5-HT1B, which has already been implicated in reward processing, anxiety, and plasticity, all relevant to depression, might play a role in generating the positive and long-lasting mood effects of psilocybin. To check out this hypothesis, they ran a set of experiments in mice, which have a serotonin system similar to that of humans. They wanted to see if psilocybin worked differently when the 5-HT1B receptor was blocked so they tested it in three different ways before administering the drug.

First, they removed or blocked the 5HT1B receptor, using genetic engineering to create mice that lacked it. Next, they allowed mice to develop with normal 5HT1B receptors, but blocked these receptors when the mice were adults. Finally, they gave the mice drug blockers that muted the receptor right before they gave them the psilocybin. Then they injected psilocybin into the three different sets of mice and watched what happened in their brains using imaging and network analysis. They also measured behavior in the mice, both immediately after the injection and days later, such as how they navigated a maze or an open area, or how long it took them to start eating in a bright, stressful area.

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What they found is that the 5-HT1B receptor really mattered for the longer-lasting, mood-relevant effects of psilocybin in mice. But activating 5HT1B alone didn’t recreate psilocybin’s full effects. In one of the stress tests, the benefits were mostly found in females, but another showed effects in both sexes—a reminder that there’s no one-size fits all response for psilocybin effects, even in mice. Still, the findings are a promising starting point.

“These substances have the potential to open new avenues for clinical therapy and therapeutic drugs,” Fleury said. “It’s important to find better treatments that are more efficient and more effective for people, but it’s also important that we have a safe way to do that.”

Their hope is that taking a psychedelic trip can heal the brain without the psyche leaving the comfortable grounding of Earth.

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Lead image: Fotema / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on January 16, 2026

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

Delusions Are Often Not-So-Delusional After All

A radical shift in understanding psychosis

By Kristen French    January 13, 2026

I feel like I’m sort of being sent a mission,” says Adam, “… like I’m getting messages through the TV.” Adam doesn’t know what his mission is, he clarifies, but it doesn’t feel like a good mission. He gets the sense that the TV wants him to do something bad. His mission seems to connect to homicidal thoughts, he explains, and has a “commanding atmosphere.”

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Adam was a participant in a recent study about clinical psychosis and delusions published in The Lancet Psychiatry, where his account was recorded. Psychotic delusions only affect a small percentage of the global population, about 1 percent. But they’re very troubling for those who have them, and very difficult to dislodge. How do these strange beliefs arise, particularly during a person’s first episode of psychosis, and how can clinicians help those who are having them return to a more grounded reality?

One team of psychologists from the United Kingdom and Australia proposed that these psychotic episodes are more than just problems of thought: They represent a bigger shift in how a person experiences the lived and embodied world, shaped in part by life events, personal history, and emotions. To test this hypothesis, they led a qualitative study of a small group of 10 young adults in the U.K. who were getting early intervention for psychosis care. The participants had a median age of around 25. All had suffered through a first episode of psychosis and were either experiencing or had experienced clinically significant delusions in the past. People whose delusions were related to substance use were excluded.

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“Our research provides a radically different perspective on psychotic delusions, demonstrating how they emerge from the emotional, bodily, and linguistic fabric of people’s lives,” explained Rosa Ritunnano, from the Institute for Mental Health at the University of Birmingham, a consultant psychiatrist and author of the study, in a statement. “For a long time, clinicians have struggled to understand where delusions come from and how they take shape. Our research offers new insight by showing how delusions are grounded in emotional experiences that involve great bodily turmoil.”

Read more: “The Faulty Weathermen of the Mind”

Over a period of six months in 2023, the researchers completed 33 interview sessions total across all 10 participants. Participants also completed a number of standardized psychological questionnaires about anxiety, insight, purpose, and anomalous experiences. Then the team analyzed the material they collected from three perspectives. First, they examined clinical records, to classify delusion themes using a standardized clinical framework. Next, they carried out a phenomenological analysis to capture the first-person lived texture of the experience, mapping changes in space, time, language, mood, and existential orientation, among other things. In the final narrative analysis, they collected each individual’s life story, aiming to understand the delusions in the context of childhood experiences, relationship turning points, and coping strategies. They paid special attention to figurative language.

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What the researchers found was that each participants’ delusions were driven by overlapping themes. Three major themes were most common across the delusions they examined: All of the delusions were persecutory, while 9 out of the 10 had delusions with so-called “reference” themes—feeling that everything carries special messages for you—and grandiose or religious themes. These delusions also coincided with a larger shift in how the participants understood reality: Their experiences of time, of other people, the atmosphere, and their place in the world all shifted significantly.

The most common distortions included unusually intense or sticky perception, distortion of time, boundaries between self and other becoming blurred, a pervasive revelatory mood, and existential shifts, such as feeling uniquely special or cosmologically different. Taken together, these findings suggest that delusions aren’t just random beliefs, but rather a story the mind begins to tell itself to make sense of a whole-system-change in their lived and embodied experience.

The researchers also found some patterns in the participants’ life stories: early and repeated painful interpersonal experiences that featured powerful emotions, particularly shame but also fear, anger, and feeling controlled. Later, during major life upheavals, such as breakups, abusive relationships, rejection, loneliness, or major stress, that template was reactivated and the participants coped through a series of strategies that included obsessive searching for meaning, immersion in spiritual or fictional narratives, and spirals of absorption. In other words, the delusions often arrived at the end of a long emotional runway, not out of thin air.

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Three common upheavals often preceded the emergence of delusions. The first was feeling under the spotlight, exposed, or judged, a feeling often rooted in shame. This heightened self-consciousness could later shift into feelings of persecution or transform into feelings of grandiosity (for example: that one is a god). The second involved a shift from emotional emptiness to a sense of meaning or connection, which could be experienced as awe, hope, feeling protected, and feeling chosen or connected to a cosmic mission. The third was that the individuals were living in a simulation, marked by disembodiment, detachment, and numbness, which could coincide with feelings of being watched, everything seeming fake, and emotions feeling performative.

The authors argue their findings suggest that delusions can be hard to correct not because of bad reasoning but because they’re so powerfully anchored in bodily feelings, in deep instinctual urges to hide, fight, connect, or obey, in transformations of their understanding of the social world and in identity-level meaning. As such, they believe that treating the delusion will require engaging not just with the false belief itself, but with a person’s embodied emotional states, history, and coping styles and providing emotionally soothing environments. They also suggest clinicians pay special attention to figurative language.

Jeannette Littlemore, a professor of linguistics and communication at the University of Birmingham and co-author of the paper, said, “We all use metaphors and narratives to understand our experiences and make sense of our lives. But psychosis patients do so more intensely. As a result of having endured strong (often negative) emotional experiences, which are then responded to by the body, and shaped by everyday language use, people experiencing psychotic delusions really are living in metaphor. People may feel delighted and say they are so happy they can ‘touch the sky’; this could lead them to experience the delusion of thinking they can fly.”

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If the findings hold up in larger scale studies, they suggest that delusions aren’t just odd beliefs. They’re the visible signs of a deeper whole-world emotional shift, grounded in the lived body, shaped by personal history and expressed through stories.

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Lead image: missSIRI / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on January 13, 2026

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

Your Face May Decide What You Like Before You Do

But it might depend on social cues

By Kristen French    January 8, 2026

We all subtly mirror the facial expressions of the people around us, smiling when they smile, furrowing our brows in concert, usually without even noticing it. This is known as facial mimicry, and it’s thought to play a role in empathy and social connection. But what can this form of mimicry actually say about a person’s preferences?

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More than you might think, according to new research.

To investigate this question, a team of scientists from Tel Aviv University paired dozens of strangers up in a lab and ran two experiments. In the first, one of the partners described two different films in short summaries. The other partner listened, watched the first person’s face, and then decided which movie they most wanted to watch. Next, they switched roles. In the second experiment, both partners listened to recordings of an actress reading similar summaries of movies, without any visuals to refer to. Afterward they chose which movie they preferred. The movie summaries in each case were similar, with no obvious winner.

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While these experiments were underway, the scientists used sensitive sensors to track tiny muscles in the faces of the listeners—muscles that can’t be seen in a mirror and that move without our knowing or even feeling it. After that, they analyzed both how much each person’s face changed overall, how broadly they arched their eyebrows, for instance, as well as how much they mimicked the speaker’s facial expression.

What they found is that peoples’ stated preferences tracked the degree to which they mimicked the speaker’s positive facial expressions, such as cheek-raising, more than it matched their own facial expressions. That finding, published in Communications Psychology, held up across multiple forms of analysis and ways of crunching the data. Mimicry of negative expressions sometimes trended toward weaker preference, but those effects were less consistent. By contrast, the listener’s own facial expression alone didn’t predict preferences as reliably.

Read more: “Time Is Contagious”

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“The study showed that we are not just listening to a story—we are actually being ‘swept’ toward the speaker,” explained co-author Liron Amihai, a doctoral student, in a statement. “This mimicry often happens automatically, and it can predict which option we will prefer long before we think about it in words. Facial mimicry, therefore, is not merely a polite gesture, but also a part of the decision-making system.”

What was most surprising is that this outcome held up even in the second experiment, where the listeners were unable to see the speakers’ faces. It turns out that humans can hear a smile in someone’s voice, and can mimic it. So even when there was minimal social interaction with the person reading the movie summary—and little expectation of polite behavior—the listeners’ mimicry of the speaker’s facial expression still revealed their preference.

The researchers hypothesize that when you mirror someone else’s facial expressions, your brain may use that as a signal to influence your decisions, even before you consciously evaluate them. Of course, the scientists point out, the findings are correlational and so don’t show that mimicry causes preference, nor that listeners are being manipulated by the speakers.

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But it would be wise to interpret the results with caution. The study had some important limitations: The participants were all women, and the effects were modest. Also, past efforts to show that body postures and facial expressions influence our minds and emotions have been at least partially debunked.

For example, one widely circulated 1988 study showed that if your mouth is arranged into a smile by holding a pen in your mouth, you will rate things as funnier than if your mouth is prevented from smiling. But a large multi-lab replication effort failed to yield the original effect, and a later meta-analysis found these effects to be small and variable. Another popular 2010 study suggested that “power poses” could change hormone levels and risk tolerance among women, but later work found that these gestures didn’t have the effects the researchers initially claimed, instead only nudging self-reported feelings of self-confidence.

But if the findings hold up, they suggest our faces may know what we like before our brains do.

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Lead image: Prostock-studio / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on January 8, 2026

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

Genius Dogs Can Learn Words Like Toddlers

New research shows “gifted word learning” pups have surprising verbal aptitude

By Jake Currie    January 8, 2026

You’ve probably seen videos on social media of dogs enthusiastically plucking a toy their owner requested by name from an impossibly large pile of similar toys. Called “gifted word learning” (GWL) dogs, these impressive pups have vocabularies comprising hundreds of words. Now, new research published in Science suggests some of these genius dogs can learn words as well as an 18- to 23-month-old human can.

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To test the upper limits of word learning in this select canine group, scientists devised a series of experiments to determine if GWL dogs could learn a new word for a toy based solely on overhearing third parties talk about it. The most appropriate third parties for the task, of course, were the dogs’ owners. Scientists sent detailed instructions, asking them to call a new toy by name to one another in the presence of the dog (without addressing them directly), verifying compliance with video of the sessions.

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After periods of rest, the dogs were then asked to retrieve the new toy from a group of toys in a separate room, and scientists recorded whether they were successful or not. Incredibly, the GWL dogs were able to pick up on the name of the toy just by overhearing their owners talk about it, showing verbal aptitude similar to a human toddler.

Something to keep in mind the next time you’re discussing getting rid of that favorite toy that’s become a little too worse for wear.

Read more: “Why Do Some People Look Like Their Dogs?”

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Lead photo: Miso, a 6-year-old male border collie from Canada, knows the names of about 200 toys. Credit: Veronica Suen.

Jake Currie

Posted on January 8, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Technology

- Your Voice Gives Away Valuable Personal Information

- The Quest for the Perfect Lip-Synching Robot

TECHNOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Your Voice Gives Away Valuable Personal Information

The privacy risks of always-listening voice control systems—and how to protect against them

By Kristen French    January 20, 2026

The voice is the music of the soul. Since the time of Plato and Aristotle, it’s been linked to a person’s character and inner life. And it often betrays things we try to hide: fatigue, fear, attraction, scorn.

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But the sound of your voice may reveal even more than you realize—for instance, details of your physical and mental health, your cultural and education backgrounds, even your political preferences.

Scientists are increasingly learning how to use computers to track these vocal inflections and fingerprints, but some scholars are sounding the alarm. Today, speech-recording devices are everywhere, in smart speakers and phones like Siri and Alexa and in the voice control systems in TVs, cars, and appliances. Some of these systems have “always listening” protocols that monitor audio continuously in the environment for trigger phases to activate.

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Given the intimate personal information contained in your voice, these technologies present major privacy risks. The recordings of your voice that they collect could one day be used against you, warns Tom Bäckström, professor of speech and language technology at Aalto University in Finland: to increase your insurance premiums; tailor ads to your interests, needs, or emotional states; screen you for certain jobs; and worst of all, harass, stalk, or extort you.

“When someone talks, a lot of information about their health, cultural background, education level, and so on is embedded in the speech signal. That information gets transmitted with the speech, even though people don’t realize it,” Bäckström explained in a statement.

Read more: “What Makes an Opera Star Stand Out?”

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To deter abuse before it happens, Bäckström and his colleagues are working to develop protective measures and technologies. They recently published a paper in the Proceedings of IEEE that reviews the potential risks posed by speech-recording technologies, and the measures that could be taken to protect against those risks.

Some of the risks include voice assistants accidentally recording private conversations, companies using voice data for profiling or surveillance, stalkers or abusers using voice data to track people, and shared devices leaking one person’s private information later on.

The scientists built a metric that they say can be used to tell how much information about a person a particular voice clip reveals, based on the pitch of the voice or other features, such as the actual words it contains. The new metric is the first, they claim, that can capture how much is revealed in any one audio recording of a voice. Bäckström says the technology could be used specifically to help people understand how much of their privacy is at risk when they use certain speech-recording technologies.

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The team of scientists is also working to build technologies that can compress, distort, anonymize, or re-synthesize speech, so that only the essential information gets transmitted when a person uses a speech-recording technology. And they’re developing “adversarial training” protocols that would train systems to complete an intended task without tracking private personal information contained in a voice.

“To ensure privacy, you decide that only a certain amount of information is allowed to leak, and then you build a tool which guarantees that,” he explained. “But with speech, we don’t really know how much information there is. It’s really hard to build tools when you don’t know what you’re protecting, so the first thing is to measure that information.”

Another privacy-saving approach would be to disentangle the components of speech when companies record it, the authors write—separating words from tone, identity, and emotional content, though this is one of the more challenging projects. Encryption is yet another tool that might help protect voice privacy, though it’s slow and expensive. Then there’s sound engineering, which could be used to alter a vocal recording in such a way that only the intended listener could hear it clearly. One thing individuals can do to protect their privacy in advance is to avoid sending any voice data to the cloud, the scientists suggest, though this can be tricky with shared services.

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The speech technology privacy field is in its infancy, and many open questions for study remain: how to handle consent in real-time voice interactions, how privacy degrades over longer recordings, how to protect against future attacks, how to deal with multi-person conversations, how to design systems that people trust. Perceived privacy is in some ways as important as actual privacy, the study authors argue, given the strong psychological ownership people tend to feel about their voices. People will abandon systems they don’t feel they can trust, they point out.

Ultimately, much of the burden will lie with the companies that make speech-activated technologies. The ethical thing to do is to build systems that minimize what they hear, record, remember, and infer.

Because the machines are learning to listen—in ways that a human never could.

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Lead image: Anton Vierietin / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on January 20, 2026

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

TECHNOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Quest for the Perfect Lip-Synching Robot

Their mouths may move convincingly, but they’re far from lifelike—for now

By Molly Glick    January 14, 2026

If we’re ever going to effectively communicate with robots, they’ve got to get better at lip-syncing.

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Intricate mouth movements are vital for human connection, especially in loud environments—in such settings, we gaze at a speaker’s mouth up to half the time.

This means that they’re a key feature for robots we can comfortably chat with, but researchers have long struggled to create robots with lips that can skillfully synchronize with audio. Bots have mechanical constraints that limit the range of motion and speed of lip movements, for example, and they tend to lag after commands.

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To overcome this hurdle, researchers from Columbia University in New York harnessed artificial intelligence models inspired by the human brain, known as neural networks, enabling the humanoid bot to make smooth mouth motions that sync up with a mix of words.

KARAOKE ROBOT: The lip-syncing tool outperformed other systems designed for similar uses, and even allowed for realistic chats in multiple languages. Video by Yuhang Hu.

“The capability to form complex lip shapes … enhances overall more detailed speech synchronization, providing more lifelike interactions that mitigate some of the risks of the uncanny valley effect,” according to a new Science Robotics paper.

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The team designed a human-like robot face with “skin” made of soft silicone. It has magnetic connectors that allow for 10 degrees of freedom, making all sorts of lip movements possible.

To train the models powering this bot, the team fed them recordings of their robot making various lip movements, like those associated with rounded vowels. Then, they incorporated AI-generated videos of “ideal” lip movements for certain sentences into their models.

The system allows a robot’s lips to form the shapes associated with 24 consonants and 16 vowels, the researchers reported in the paper.

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Read more: “Deepfake Luke Skywalker Should Scare Us”

Using these “ideal” AI videos as a baseline, they compared their new system with existing techniques used to shape robot lip movements. Among all the methods, theirs had the least mismatch compared with mouth movements from the AI videos. The bot was also able to convincingly utter 10 different languages, including Korean, French, and Arabic, with varying phonetic structures, and it even did a bit of karaoke.

There’s still plenty of room for improvement, the researchers acknowledged, including incorporating more training data and adding more physical degrees of freedom. In the future, they think that their tool could be used in education and in caring for older adults experiencing cognitive decline, as it could help us connect with robots “on a human level.”

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But they also caution that heightened emotional connection with robots could “be exploited to gain trust from unsuspecting users, especially children and the elderly,” and that designers should implement safeguards against these risks.

“The ability to create physical machines that are capable of connecting with humans at an emotional level is maturing rapidly,” the authors wrote. “The robots presented here are still far from natural, yet one step closer to crossing the uncanny valley.”

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Lead image: Yuhang Hu

Molly Glick

Posted on January 14, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Zoology

- This Fish Really Does Need a Hole in Its Head

- Your Favorite Zoo Animals Are Getting Old

- The “Far Side” Had It All Wrong—Cows Really Can Use Sophisticated Tools

- Horses Can Smell How You’re Feeling

- What “Primate” and Other Slasher Monkey Movies Get Wrong

- Take a Look at the Hairy Mouthparts of a Queen Bee

- The Trick to Studying Dolphins Without Stressing Them Out

- Why Is That Monkey Giving Me a Dirty Look?

- Did This Spiral Sea Creature Outlive the Dinosaurs?

- What Chimps Reveal About Human Parenting

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

This Fish Really Does Need a Hole in Its Head

It’s a resonating chamber for drumming with its ribs

By Devin Reese    January 20, 2026

In their watery ocean worlds, fish have some weird features that are used to do some odd things, which we rarely witness. In “studying how strange fish do strange fish things,” biologist Daniel Geldof, while a master’s student at Louisiana State University, decided to investigate the rockhead poacher (Bothragonus swanii), known for the big cavity in its skull. In his master’s thesis, Geldof described the unique anatomy of this cranial pit that might explain its function.

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Rockhead poachers are found along the Pacific coast from Alaska to Central California, often seen in pools in the intertidal zone when tides are out. Early naturalists thought that the head pit might enhance camouflage in rocky pools, where their gray, bony armor blends in well. Or the head cavities might serve as part of a system to produce their characteristic buzzing sounds. Geldof explained in a statement that “the goal of my entire thesis project was to figure out why” rockhead poachers have the unusual head anatomy.

Read more: “The Unexpected Music of a Coral Reef”

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Using a 5,000-pound Heliscan MKII X-ray microscope at LSU, Geldof created 3-D models of rockhead poacher heads from fish specimens already collected. In the incredibly detailed models, he traced nerves traveling from the fish’s brain and found that a branch of the lateral line nerve—implicated in motion sensing—enters the cranial pit. And so, it likely plays a role in sensing the movement of water relative to the fish.

But Geldof also noticed that the fish’s first set of ribs waswere larger and flatter than normal, positioned close to the pit, and moored in muscles and tendons. He hypothesizes that the rockhead poachers use their modified ribs as drumsticks to strike the base of the cranial pit in rapid succession to create the buzzing sounds. The drumming likely propagates signals through the ground, where the fish typically rest, to communicate with other rockhead poachers in the area.

“The ocean, especially in shallow and rocky areas where the rockhead poacher lives, is unbelievably loud and acoustically complex,” said Geldof. “This fish is efficiently using its tiny body so it can still be heard under a unique set of conditions.”

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Essentially, then, the “hole truth” is that the mysterious pit appears to be multifunctional, serving in both sensory reception and substrate-based communication.

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Lead image: Rhinopias / Wikimedia Commons

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Devin Reese

Posted on January 20, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Your Favorite Zoo Animals Are Getting Old

Humans aren’t the only mammal species with aging populations

By Devin Reese    January 20, 2026

We hear a lot these days about aging human populations. Projections show the number of Americans 65 years old or older increasing by a whopping 42 percent from 2022 to 2050, according to United States Census Bureau stats. And, based on this graphic, many other countries rank even more top-heavy in elderly people, thanks to healthcare advances that promote longevity, coupled with declining reproduction rates.

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But it’s not just humans that face a demographic crisis. A study published yesterday in PNAS demonstrates that captive mammals in zoos—thanks to advances in animal husbandry—are also living longer. As zoos get too crowded as a result, they’re curtailing reproduction, simply because they don’t have the space to offer. With captive breeding playing an increasingly important role in keeping endangered animal species on the planet, they’ve been characterized as collectively comprising the “Millennium Ark.”

Led by zoo population biologist João Pedro Meireles, researchers from the University of Zurich Clinic for Zoo Animals explored the demographic trends of 774 mammal populations in European and American zoos from 1970 to 2023. Zoo animals, such as this chimp, are now typically outliving their wild counterparts, which showed up in the data as increases in the average proportion of senior animals. The trend held regardless of geographic region, taxonomy, conservation status, and management strategy of the particular zoo.

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Read more: “Why Elephants Rarely Get Cancer”

Along with the median age of animals increasing, captive reproduction is on the decline. “For the high-priority populations, 76 percent in North America and 79 percent in Europe had decreasing trends for the proportion of actively reproducing females,” wrote the study authors in the paper. Older mammals naturally have lower reproductive rates; even for species that don’t experience menopause, the chance of successful reproduction decreases with age. Also, as zoos get overcrowded, they resort to limiting reproduction via hormonal contraception, castration, or just by keeping males and females apart.

In graphing the demographics of the zoo populations, the paper’s researchers found that the pyramidal shapes typical of healthy, breeding populations have shifted toward diamond shapes, with a bump of aging individuals from limited reproduction.

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Citing long-standing warnings that “the Millennium Ark is sinking,” Meireles and his coauthors caution that the aging mammal population “fundamentally jeopardizes the long-term capacity of zoos to harbor insurance populations, facilitate reintroductions of threatened species, and simply maintain a variety of self-sustaining species programs.”

The improvements in animal care that have led to the aging population problem are laudable, but must now be accompanied by more zoos, more space in zoos, or a reallocation of existing space to favor endangered species, even if it means reducing how many species a zoo holds.

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Lead image: MJM Pictures / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on January 20, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The “Far Side” Had It All Wrong—Cows Really Can Use Sophisticated Tools

Upending Gary Larson’s premise that cows are too daft to use tools

By Devin Reese    January 19, 2026

If cows could use tools, imagine the scenes that might unfold: cutting wires to escape from their pastures; extracting themselves from milking machines; or removing the twine on hay bales. Cows haven’t been seen doing any of these things, of course. But a study published today in Current Biology demonstrates a cow named Veronika effectively using a deck broom as a scratching tool, satisfying the scientific definition of tool use as “the manipulation of an external object to achieve a goal via a mechanical interface.”

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Veronika is a pet Brown Swiss cow (Bos taurus) kept as a companion by a farmer. In a series of 10 trials, researchers from the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna presented her with a deck broom tossed on the ground in a random orientation. Each trial, they recorded which end of the brush she selected and how she used it. Veronika manipulated the broom with her mouth, positioning it under her tongue, then wedging it into the gaps between her incisors and molars for a stable grip.

Veronika adeptly used the deck brush to scratch her itches, manipulating it to target different areas. Across the randomized trials, she chose the bristled end to scratch her hindquarters but switched to the stick end for softer lower-body areas. Across repeat trials, she made consistent choices about how to wield the broom. “When I saw the footage, it was immediately clear that this was not accidental,” said study author and cognitive biologist Alice Auersperg in a statement.

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Read more: “Scratch My Back and I’ll Scratch Yours”

Veronika’s tool use is considered “egocentric” tooling because it’s directed at herself. Although it’s simpler than “allocentric” tool use, wherein the tool is directed at something outside of oneself, it’s nevertheless a cognitive feat. Other than in primates, such adaptive use of a tool by a mammal has never been reported before.

The findings suggest that the abilities of cows have been underrated, since tool use offers a “stringent test of cognitive flexibility,” wrote the study authors.

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Perhaps that shouldn’t surprise us, since cows have been associated with humans for more than 10,000 years as domesticated animals. The researchers point out that Veronika may have had ample time to experiment and learn this behavior during prolonged contact with a human-built environment. Her status as a companion animal to the farmer might also have provided more opportunities to observe a cow’s behavior.

“The findings highlight how assumptions about livestock intelligence may reflect gaps in observation rather than genuine cognitive limits,” said Auersperg.

What will cows, sheep, or goats be doing next?

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Lead image: Peter Hofstetter / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on January 19, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Horses Can Smell How You’re Feeling

If you lead with fear, they may respond with their own fearful behaviors

By Devin Reese    January 15, 2026

If you’ve been lucky enough to meet a friendly horse, then you know they lead with their noses—the first thing they want to do with a new acquaintance, human or otherwise, is to get a good snuffle in. A study just published in PLOS One by a team of animal behavior researchers in France demonstrates that it’s not just for fun-with-scents; horses are getting a read on your emotional state, which in turn affects their behavior toward you.

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In earlier research published in Nature, these researchers demonstrated that horses could discriminate between human emotions of fear versus joy. Horses were exposed to the odors of human sweat on cotton pads after study participants had either watched a horror movie or a comedy movie. After habituation to either “fear odor” or “joy odor,” horses spent more time sniffing the novel scent (see video here).

The new research built on those findings by evaluating the behavior and physiology of horses when exposed to human odors. Odor samples were collected from adult participants who had abstained from any scented body products during the lead-up to the study. Then, 43 Welsh mares were randomly assigned to the three experimental groups of fear odors, joy odors, or a control (in this case, a cotton pad with no human scent).

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Read more: “Can Science Breed the Next Secretariat?”

A naïve observer noted horse behavior during a range of interactions—grooming of the horse on its withers and neck; standing near the horse; startling the horse with the sudden opening of an umbrella; and presenting the horse with a colorful, novel object.

The results showed that, in smelling the fear odor, horses had heightened fear responses, which caused them to reduce interaction with humans. Fear responses manifested through startle reactions, raised heart rates, and more staring at the “intruding” person. For example, the maximum heart rate of horses in the fear group was significantly higher than that of horses in the joy or control group. Horses sniffing fear odors also touched the participants less, stared more at the novel objects, and were more easily startled by the umbrella.

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“These findings have practical implications regarding the significance of handlers’ emotional states and its transmission through odors during human-horse interactions,” wrote the study authors. They propose that further research on other domestic animals could help understand the extent of the role of olfaction in interactions between humans and other species.

Just know this for now: If you smell like fear when you approach an animal, it may respond in kind.

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Lead image: JW.photography31 / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on January 15, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What “Primate” and Other Slasher Monkey Movies Get Wrong

A primatologist explains why monkeys aren’t monsters

By Kristen French    January 13, 2026

Last Friday marked the major studio release of a graphic new horror movie Primate. In the film, a chimpanzee named Ben, who has been kept as a pet by a family in Hawaii, is bitten by a rabid mongoose, after which he suddenly transforms into a slasher-like villain. Ben stalks a group of teens in the family’s cliffside home, targeting their faces, and leaving a trail of blood and gore in his wake.

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It’s a new twist on an old trope: The ape as stalker has a long tradition in Hollywood going back to at least the 1980s. Films like Link, Shakma, and Congo, even the Planet of the Apes series, all frame primate violence in similar ways: relentless, personal, and on purpose.

But what do these films get wrong about apes who go ape—and what, if anything, do they get right?

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For answers, I sought out Michael Wilson, a primatologist at the University of Minnesota, who has studied violence and aggression in chimps and other primates for the past 25 years. Watching films like Planet of the Apes and King Kong as a child inspired Wilson to want to study apes in the first place. But what he loved about these films was that they made the apes sympathetic characters. They were moral animals rather than rabid beasts. In fact, Wilson advised on the making of some of the more recent Planet of the Apes movies*: He provided vocalizations—and recommended they be used sparingly. “Movies always show wild animals being much noisier than they are in life,” he says.

I spoke with Wilson about how portrayals of chimps and gorillas have flip-flopped over the years, why we’re so obsessed with chimpanzee violence, and what that violence looks like in the wild versus in captivity. We also talked about the dangers of turning monkeys into monsters on film.

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From your perspective, what do films get wrong when they turn chimp aggression into relentless human-style predation?

There are things that movies do with monsters, whether the monster is a chimp or a giant gorilla or something else. The monsters behave in ways that animals just don’t. You mention the relentlessness that the monster brings to it in Primate, right? I think that’s a little tedious. Real animals can be really scary, you know? Chimps have hurt and killed people in real life. They’re strong. They’re powerful. They have sharp teeth. They can do a lot of damage. But it’s not the demon-level, monster strength that gets portrayed in movies nowadays.

What does your work with chimpanzees in the wild tell us about how closely chimp violence actually mirrors human violence and aggression?

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There’s a long tradition of seeing chimpanzees as the origin of war. Because chimps are unusual compared to other primates, in that they team up to defend a joint territory and will carry out these gang attacks against members of other communities. So when that was first observed in the 1970s, people immediately made the connection to human warfare and suggested that human warfare has shared roots—that we inherited this from a common ancestor. There’s been really vigorous debate about that. There are some people who just object to the idea that violence has anything to do with biology because they feel that’s a pessimistic argument that makes violence inevitable.

But it’s not just chimps that act violently. It’s pretty widespread across animal behavior. And evolutionary biology provides some explanations that make sense. Among the chimpanzees, males defend a territory that has food for themselves and their mates and their offspring. There’s lots of evidence now that the bigger the territory and the more food available, the more quickly the females reproduce and the more likely offspring will survive. So it pays in these kinds of reproductive terms for chimps to be violent.

Read more: “The Cosmopolitan Ape”

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When there are more resources, does violence decline?

People have an intuition that violence is about resource scarcity and that when times get tough, you get more fighting because resources are scarce. But the chimp community with the highest rate of intergroup killing is the Ngogo community that’s in the center of this big beautiful park in Uganda: Kibale National Park. Chimps have a lot of food resources there. Instead, what seems to be happening is that when you have abundant food for everyone, you have spare energy to do other things like hunt monkeys and defend the boundary of your territory and kill the neighbors. And also, there’s something to fight over, resources worth defending.

So there’s between-community fighting, but then there’s also violence within communities that has gotten less attention because it doesn’t link up so obviously to warfare. Those instances of violence include infanticidal attacks by both males and females against baby chimpanzees and within-group killings of older males by other males.

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Are the within-group killings of babies and older males carried out by lone killer chimps, or is that idea just complete make-believe?

Well, it’s not completely a fantasy. I guess the movie Primate starts with a lone rabid chimp ripping the face off of somebody. And you know, that comes from these real-life cases. There was a woman in Connecticut who kept a chimp named Travis, and one of her friends came over and Travis attacked her friend and destroyed her face. So you don’t need a rabid mongoose to bite a chimp to make them do that. They’re powerful animals, and when they get provoked or feel threatened for whatever reason, they’re capable of doing that. And that’s not the only case. There have been a number of other cases of people attacked by captive chimps, and also wild chimps.

Are certain chimps repeat offenders?

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When I was doing my dissertation research in Uganda, there was a series of cases of children who were attacked and maimed and sometimes killed. One of our field assistants worked in the villages to try to find out what was going on. These killings seemed to be connected to the movements of a particular male chimpanzee who my thesis advisor, Richard Wrangham, named after Saddam Hussein. So they called the chimp Saddam. The Uganda Wildlife Authority eventually provided a rifle to one of our employees who had been a game guard in the past. And after another killing of an infant, the villagers cornered the chimp and the former game guard shot the chimp and killed him. After that, a number of years passed without any predatory attacks on children, though these attacks did resume again eventually. So it’s not just this one extraordinary individual. It’s something that chimps do. It’s kind of a consistent problem in human-animal conflict.

So whether certain chimps can have especially aggressive tendencies isn’t a settled question?

We don’t have really definitive answers about these things. In general, chimpanzees, especially males, are aggressive and they’re also predators and they’re opportunistic. But it also seems to be the case that particular individuals are more interested in pursuing those opportunities than others. So there is that variation among individuals.

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What do recent movies about apes get right?

One thing you see with the new Planet of the Apes movies is that they got the message that chimps can be incredibly acrobatic when they’re hunting monkeys. And so, the newer Planet of the Apes movies have tried to show a kind of athleticism and acrobatic skill. That’s a correction from the very first Planet of the Apes movies, where they were just using people in ape suits, right?

Those early movies were made when they still thought of chimps as being basically just peaceful and intelligent. They made gorillas the bad guys. They were the military thugs, and the chimps were intelligent and clever, acting as protesters against the war. They were considered the hippies of the apes. But the [new] filmmakers got the message that chimps are powerful and can be fast and acrobatic and athletic and dangerous and scary.

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But they don’t really get the fact that animals in the wild spend a lot of time doing really boring things: looking for food and eating food. Killing each other and beating each other up doesn’t happen very often.

When did the narrative flip-flop about gorillas versus chimps being the good guys?

Gorillas are big, powerful animals, and they look really impressive. They do these charge displays and beat their chests and all of that. They can hurt people, and they can hurt each other. But when people like George Schaller and Dian Fossey started studying gorillas, in the late ’50s and ’60s, they really emphasized that gorillas were gentle giants. They spend most of their time stuffing their faces, eating and digesting. And they don’t move very fast. And they don’t hunt people.

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Why do you think we have this urge to turn primates into either heroes or villains, gods or monsters?

There’s this recognition that people can be monstrous and violent. People can be predators. So we’re interested in conflict. And when you look at apes, one of the really striking things about them is that they look so much like us, but they also are clearly animals. They’re covered in hair. They don’t have language. They’re brutes. So they vividly represent the wild monster within. As you know, the scientific name of chimpanzees is Pan troglodytes, and Pan is, of course, the Greek God of the wild, the untamed spirit of nature. And they embody that: They’re lusty, uncontrolled. They’re animals, and yet, they look like people and they do all these clever things.

There are a few films now in which apes raised by humans end up being extra dangerous: Link and Congo, Jordan Peele’s Nope from 2022, and now Primate. Do we know how human upbringing affects chimp behavior over the long term?

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It’s kind of amazing to me, when you think about it, that in all the years that we’ve spent as researchers in the wild with chimps, I don’t know of any cases of a researcher really being seriously injured by a chimp. It’s mainly the captive chimps—who have been reared by people, sanctuary chimps—that have mauled and injured and killed people.

The sample sizes are so small. No one’s really systematically studied this. So it’s really just speculation. But one speculation that I have is that in captivity, they know more about how weak we are compared to them. Because they’ve interacted directly with us. Also, when chimps grow up in captivity, they get quite a bit bigger because they have access to so much food. Travis was maybe over 200 pounds. Very little of that was body fat, because they don’t store fat nearly as efficiently as we do. So it’s a lot of muscle.

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What is the danger in films that turn chimps into monsters—either for the chimps or for humans?

This was something that Jane Goodall was concerned about: If chimpanzees are depicted as monsters all the time, who’s going to try to save them. And they’re endangered. People pose much greater danger to chimpanzees than chimpanzees do to people. People hunt them for food in much of Africa. And we destroy their habitats. We harm chimps in many, many ways. Like many animals, they’re at risk of becoming extinct. If people think of wild animals as threatening monsters, then the response is, “Well, we need to kill them to save ourselves.” Whereas the facts are that most wild animals leave us alone unless we bother them.

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Lead image: Edwin Butter / Shutterstock

*An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Michael Wilson advised on the making of the most recent Planet of the Apes movie. In fact, he advised on War for the Planet of the Apes (2017) and Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (2014). This has been corrected in the article above.

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Kristen French

Posted on January 13, 2026

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

Take a Look at the Hairy Mouthparts of a Queen Bee

They’re actually what sets her apart from her worker bees

By Devin Reese    January 12, 2026

In social insects, queens, after their nuptial mating flight, get to lie around and be tended to by their caste of workers. Because the queen’s only job is to make babies and order her workers around, she tends to be much bigger and fatter, and less mobile. But, not so for bumblebees, where the queen is larger but otherwise physically indistinguishable from her workers. In a study published today in PNAS, researchers describe a key difference that sets bumblebee queens apart—their tongues.

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QUEEN BEE: This close-up is a SEM image of a queen bumblebee’s tongue. While it looks impressive here, the queen’s tongues have more widely spaced hairs than workers, making them less efficient for gathering nectar. Image from Huang, Z., et al. PNAS (2026).

In bumblebees (Bombus terrestris), the queens forage intensively as they’re getting their nests set up, but as soon as their workers take over the nectar-gathering job, the queens stop. Wondering what was keeping them from gathering more nectar, engineers from San Yat-Sen University, Georgia Tech, and Beijing Institute of Technology combined forces with a paleobiologist from the Chinese Academy of Sciences to examine bumblebee mouthparts. Prior studies had assumed that the queen’s behavior stemmed from hormonal and energy metabolism changes that kicked in once she started reproducing.

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Read more: “Loyalty Nearly Killed My Beehive”

But when they compared bumblebee queens to workers at a micro level, using scanning electron microscopy (SEM), the researchers found a difference in their tongues. Bees lap flower nectar using a long proboscis that’s basically a tube wrapped in a hairy tongue. Each segment of the tongue has a ring of slender hairs separated by curved areas (menisci) that trap the liquid nectar. The SEM images revealed that queen bumblebees have more widely spaced hairs than workers, resulting in limited nectar retention in the curved menisci. The queen’s tongue is effectively more porous, which means that queens can lap nectar, but much of it doesn’t stay on their tongues, making them less efficient foragers compared to workers. The study authors postulate that “this physical constraint offers a mechanistic explanation for why queens relinquish foraging once workers emerge, underscoring how subtle deviations in microstructure can influence the division of labor in social insects.”

The microscopic variations in tongue structure may also be relevant in understanding the matching between bee species and flower types. Classically, bee tongue length is interpreted relative to the depth of flower nectaries as an example of coevolution. But porosity of the tongue relative to the viscosity of the nectar may also play a role in bee-flower matchmaking.

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So, next time you see a bumblebee buzzing around, be sure to check out its mouthparts.

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Lead image: Linas T / Shutterstock

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Devin Reese

Posted on January 12, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Trick to Studying Dolphins Without Stressing Them Out

Cameras attached to drones appear to be as reliable as hands-on monitoring methods

By Molly Glick    January 9, 2026

Dolphins, whales, and other beloved marine mammals face myriad harms from human activities. Strains from climate change, pollution, and commercial fishing can prompt health issues, including injuries and disturbed endocrine systems, which can risk a broader population’s survival. Due in large part to people, marine mammal communities are at high risk in nearly half of coastal waters around the globe.

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Typically, researchers only notice these issues when significant numbers of animals die at once or when a population has shrunk to such a level that conservation measures can’t meaningfully help. But it’s tricky to monitor marine mammals because they’re usually submerged and on the move. Checking their vital signs like body temperature and breathing rates in the wild often involves hands-on techniques, such as rectal probes and heart tests called electrocardiograms, which can stress animals out, deliver unreliable measurements, and tend to be expensive.

The good news: Drones can offer a non-invasive alternative. By attaching thermal cameras to drones, researchers can check an animal’s temperature and breathing rates, which can both point to illness or injury. Such cameras have previously been tested on both land– and sea-dwelling animals, but few studies have checked whether these measurements match up with ones taken directly.

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Seeking to beef up this field of research, a team of scientists based in Australia flew drones with thermal cameras at various heights and measured the temperatures of 14 adult bottlenose dolphins’ blowholes, bodies, and dorsal fins, along with breathing rates—these are tracked by observing changes in temperature as air moves in and out of the blowhole during each breath. To gauge this technique’s accuracy, they compared the camera data with measurements taken near the dolphins with handheld infrared thermometers and directly with a rectal probe.

Read more: “To Stop Illegal Fishing, Send a Seabird”

Over two seasons, the scientists captured more than 30,000 images of the dolphins with a variety of drone heights and angles, along with a mix of shots where the animals’ upper bodies were in and out of the water. They found that a drone height of around 32 feet worked best, for example, and that overall this monitoring method aligned with measurements taken in close range. They reported their results in the Journal of Thermal Biology.

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The dolphin discovery does come with some caveats: For instance, these dolphins were under human care at Sea World in Australia. It’s possible that dolphins in the wild will react negatively to drones buzzing above them, as has been found in past studies, but reactions seem to vary depending on the context. In future work, drone monitoring could be tailored to specific populations, the authors noted in the paper.

“As coastal ecosystems face growing pressure, tools such as thermal drones that allow researchers to monitor wildlife efficiently, repeatedly, and non-invasively will become increasingly important,” study authors Charlie White and Guido J. Parra of Flinders University wrote for The Conversation.

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Lead image: C White/CEBEL (Flinders University)

Molly Glick

Posted on January 9, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Why Is That Monkey Giving Me a Dirty Look?

It’s intentionally sending a signal that it’s pissed off, so beware

By Devin Reese    January 9, 2026

Sometimes you catch yourself in the mirror making a facial expression you don’t expect, whether it’s a giddy smile for your secret crush or a stink eye for the competition. We think of facial expressions as reflexive, as a manifestation of our internal thoughts showing themselves on the surface. But according to a study published yesterday in Science, primate facial expressions are under voluntary control, suggesting that we do intend to make that giddy smile.

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Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Jerusalem, and Nottingham Trent studied facial expressions in macaque monkeys, which have expressive faces comparable to those of humans. It was known that multiple regions of the cerebral cortex interfaced directly with the facial nerves, but not how the system was organized to generate facial expressions. The team used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and single-neuron recordings to detect system-wide patterns.

They found that control over the myriad small muscles that create facial expressions comes from neural circuits used to produce voluntary movements. The neural activation when macaques were making faces at each other looked like neural activation during voluntary movements, like chewing. In both cases, motor regions across the cerebral cortex controlled facial expressions. Every region had broadly tuned nerve cells that fired up as macaques made faces, as well as nerve cells that were specific to each facial expression. Furthermore, the signals rolled out in a sequence before the facial expression appeared, in a lead-up culminating in the actions of the facial muscles.

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Read more: “The Natural Harmony of Faces”

“Muscle kinematics are the end product of a larger sensory motor process wherein cognitive variables, such as visual information, internal states, and somatosensory feedback, each play a role,” wrote the study authors. The neural patterns unfolding prior to the facial expression itself suggest that “facial gestures are intentionally prepared to forecast upcoming social interactions,” they added.

So facial expressions are coordinated results of our brains integrating sensory information and context across a distributed network. When you catch your giddy smile or stink eye in the mirror, be assured that they’re the product of voluntary decisions about what social cues you chose to project at that moment.

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Lead image: Alexander Julius Jensen / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on January 9, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Did This Spiral Sea Creature Outlive the Dinosaurs?

An ancient marine murder mystery that remains unsolved

By Molly Glick    January 7, 2026

Around 66 million years ago, tragedy struck the dinosaurs when a massive space rock barrelled into what’s now the Yucatán Peninsula in southeast Mexico. This killed off around 75 percent of all the planet’s species, dinos among them.

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Scientists have long thought that ammonites—extinct, curly-shelled mollusks related to today’s squids and octopuses—perished in this disaster, known as the Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event. Some teams had previously proposed that certain ammonites survived, according to fossil finds, but this theory has proven controversial.

Now, evidence suggests that some of these spiral-shaped species did manage to persist after all. Recent analysis of ammonite fossils dug up around a coastal cliff in Denmark, a site known as Stevns Klint, hints that these cephalopods traversed the sea after the mass extinction event.

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SURVIVORS: These ammonite fossils excavated in Denmark suggest some of these cephalopods outlived the dinosaurs. Image from Machalski, M., et al. Scientific Reports (2025).

This site contains a well-defined rock layer chock-full of fossils that represents the boundary between the Cretaceous and Paleogene periods. A team of scientists from Europe and the United States inspected ammonite fossils from the earliest chunk of the Paleogene section at the site, which has previously been studied for insights on the creatures that recovered from the asteroid hit in shallow marine environments.

These ammonite remains were previously thought to date back before the extinction event, eroding and landing in a more recent rock layer. But according to microscope analysis of these contentious fossils, the mud within them included tiny spikes from sponges that are commonly found in remnants from the early Paleogene period. They also couldn’t find evidence of tiny moss animals or sea mats that are typically associated with the Cretaceous period, according to a paper recently published in Scientific Reports.

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

The microscopic evidence aligns with past estimates that ammonites stuck around for nearly 70,000 years after the asteroid impact. This means that the ammonite cold case still begs to be solved—future studies should aim to pin down “what actually killed the last ammonites that lived on Earth,” the authors wrote.

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Lead image: Stefano Puzzuoli / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on January 7, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Chimps Reveal About Human Parenting

Human caregiving seems to have shaped teens’ thrill-seeking tendencies

By Molly Glick    January 7, 2026

Young chimpanzees differ from human children in a key way—the hairier creatures seem to take physical risks earlier on.

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People tend to behave most recklessly during adolescence, according to data from around the world, and boys are more prone to risk-taking than girls are. To learn more about this phenomenon, scientists have set up experiments where they ask young people to take economic risks. But it’s unclear how exactly physical risk-taking, like during sports or active play, unfolds during childhood and adolescence. It’s obviously unethical to conduct experiments where people can get hurt, but watching one of our closest living relatives in the wild could offer helpful hints.

Compared with humans, chimp infants appear to act as daredevils earlier in life, according to a paper published today in iScience.

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Scientists gleaned this insight from recordings of 119 chimpanzees out in the wild at Kibale National Park in Uganda. They measured risky behavior through instances of “free flight”—for example, purposefully falling from a branch, or fully letting go while moving between branches. The team observed that chimp infants were three times more likely to live dangerously than chimp adults, while juveniles were 2.5 times more likely and adolescents 2.1 times more likely. Chimps are considered infants until they’re around 5 years old, juveniles between 5 and 10 years old, and adolescents from 10 to 15 years old.

Read more: “Dude, Where’s My Frontal Cortex?”

The careless abandon traced in these chimps seemed to gradually decrease with age, the researchers noticed, and it wasn’t linked to an individual’s sex or distance from the ground. Chimps spend most of their days traversing trees to find meals, and the type of play witnessed by the scientists might help them learn about the perils of falls while they’re less vulnerable to injury. It could also give them an opportunity to refine their locomotor skills.

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The researchers, from the University of Michigan and James Madison University in Virginia, suspect that varying parental supervision could help explain this difference between chimps and humans. After all, we’re the only surviving great ape species in which multiple members of the community, beyond the parents, offer plenty of care for our young. But among chimps, this responsibility is left to the mother. Infant chimps begin moving about independently relatively early on in their lives, compared with people, and their mothers can’t always chase them from tree to tree.

“Chimps just don’t have the capabilities that we do to restrict behavior,” explained study co-author Lauren Sarringhaus, a biologist at James Madison University, in a statement. “On the whole, it’s very different for humans.”

Across the globe and among a diversity of cultures, people tend to keep young children under close watch for most of the day, whether from older children, parents, or other adults nearby. Rather than an innate tendency in teens to seek out thrills, people may take more risks during adolescence because they’re finally free from nearly constant supervision.

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The contrasting ape evidence suggests that these caregiving practices have influenced patterns of physical risk-taking in people. “Considering the close evolutionary and developmental similarities between humans and chimpanzees, we hypothesize that if oversight were relaxed, physical risk-taking in humans would increase before adolescence,” the authors wrote.

Most likely, very few parents are willing to test that hypothesis.

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Lead image: Abeselom Zerit / Shutterstock

Molly Glick

Posted on January 7, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Table of Contents

Nautilus: 2026 Jan 20

Anthropology

The Poison-Arrow Technology of Our Hunter-Gatherer Ancestors

Arts

I Turn Scientific Renderings of Space into Art

Astronomy

Tiny Mars has a Big Impact on Our Climate

Spaceflight Prematurely Ages Astronauts

The First Observation of the Fiery Lifecycle of a Massive Solar Storm

Why Europa Might Not Have Life After All

How Jupiter and Saturn Dictate Earth’s Oil Deposits

An Asteroid Impact May Explain Our Lopsided Moon

Space Exploration Speaks to the Core of Who We Are

We’re Evolving Beyond This Rock Right Now

Rogue Planet Weighed for the First Time

When We Learned Our Universe Is Speeding Up

Environment

As Biodiversity Dwindles, Mosquitos Turn to Human Blood

Evolution

The Deep Evolutionary Roots of Sleep

General

Print Edition 65: The Food Issue

Genetics

Did This Drawing Preserve Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA?

Geoscience

Watch This Glacier Race into the Sea

A Billion-Year-Old Piece of Sky Locked Within Ancient Salt Crystals

Health

Some Doctors Are Using Emojis With Patients More Often

How Childbearing Leaves Its Imprint on Mothers’ Biological Age

How Financial Hardship Shows Up in Baby Brains

These Pills Talk to Your Doctor

How Some People Get Drunk Without Drinking

History

The Accidental Discovery of Aristotle’s Paradigm-Shifting School

C-Sections Have a Surprisingly Ancient History

Pompeii’s Early Baths Were Petri Dishes

When Fake Nuclear Disaster Fallout Reached Los Angeles

Microbiology

Beer Could Be the Next Frontier in Lab-Grown Meat

Neuroscience

The Confabulations of Oliver Sacks

The Search for Where Consciousness Lives in the Brain

This Hidden Brain Region Could Help You Stay Resilient in Old Age

Astronaut Brains Change Shape in Space

How Brain Waves Shape Your Sense of Self

Why Finding Motivation Is Often Such a Struggle

Paleontology

How Coastlines Shape the Extinction Risk for Marine Invertebrates

Tyrannosaurids Took Their Time Growing to 17,000 Pounds

The Secrets of an Ancient Hunk of Woolly Rhinoceros Meat

Psychology

How Having Kids Makes Parents Disgust-Proof

Your Infant Knows Exactly What Your Baby Talk Means

Why the Do Nothing Challenge Doesn’t Do Much for You

In Pursuit of a Psychedelic Without the Hallucination

Delusions Are Often Not-So-Delusional After All

Your Face May Decide What You Like Before You Do

Genius Dogs Can Learn Words Like Toddlers

Technology

Your Voice Gives Away Valuable Personal Information

The Quest for the Perfect Lip-Synching Robot

Zoology

This Fish Really Does Need a Hole in Its Head

Your Favorite Zoo Animals Are Getting Old

The “Far Side” Had It All Wrong—Cows Really Can Use Sophisticated Tools

Horses Can Smell How You’re Feeling

What “Primate” and Other Slasher Monkey Movies Get Wrong

Take a Look at the Hairy Mouthparts of a Queen Bee

The Trick to Studying Dolphins Without Stressing Them Out

Why Is That Monkey Giving Me a Dirty Look?

Did This Spiral Sea Creature Outlive the Dinosaurs?

What Chimps Reveal About Human Parenting