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Anthropology

- The First Person to Get Hit by Space Junk

ANTHROPOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The First Person to Get Hit by Space Junk

Decades later, extraterrestrial rubbish is quickly piling up

By Molly Glick    January 22, 2026

On this day in 1997, a woman named Lottie Williams was working out in a park near Tulsa, Oklahoma, when she glimpsed a “huge ball of fire” in the sky. A couple minutes later, something hit her on the shoulder and bounced onto the grass. The 5-inch-long object weighed around as much as an empty soda can.

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Williams wasn’t injured by this mysterious item, which she later learned came from a space rocket—making her the first person known to be hit by human-made space debris. The odds of such an incident are less than one in a trillion.

In 2001, the United States Air Force traced the piece of burnt fiberglass back to the second stage of a Delta II rocket. That’s a section of a rocket that contains the fuel and engines that blast spacecraft into the cosmos.

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This component helped launch an Air Force satellite from California in April 1996, as part of a mission demonstrating methods to monitor ballistic miles in flight. Eventually, atmospheric drag slowed down the decaying stage and sent it hurtling back to Earth.

Read more: “Are We Trashing Earth’s Loneliest Spot?”

On Jan. 22, 1997, the rocket stage whizzed back into Earth’s atmosphere some 42 nautical miles above Topeka, Kansas. It sprinkled debris throughout Texas and Oklahoma, including a 551-pound propellant tank that crashed near a farmhouse in Texas. Some 30 minutes after it pierced the atmosphere, a piece of the rocket tapped Williams’ shoulder.

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“I think I was blessed that it doesn’t weigh that much,” Williams told NPR in 2011. “I mean, that was one of the weirdest things that ever happened to me.”

As the rocket’s second stage barrelled back into Earth’s atmosphere, it seems to have heated up to more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit, the kind of sizzling temperature associated with uncontrolled re-entry. During this process, objects tend to travel over 20 times quicker than a bullet.

In coming years, space rubbish is expected to multiply as increasing numbers of commercial satellite constellations dance around the Earth: The amount of such debris may double in less than five decades, according to a 2025 report by the Inter-Agency Space Debris Coordination Committee, which includes more than 10 national space agencies. This growing cosmic dumpster pile could threaten future crewed missions and satellites—and therefore our chances of exploring new frontiers beyond our planet.

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Thankfully, it’s highly unlikely to endanger people on our planet’s surface, so stories like that of Lottie Williams will probably remain one in a trillion.

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Lead image: Dabarti CGI / Shutterstock

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Molly Glick

Posted on January 22, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

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

- Revisiting the Last Crewed Moon Mission on the Eve of the Next

- I Track Space Debris As It Crashes to Earth

- Space Dust Could Contain Building Blocks of Life

- Detailed View of Solar Flare Birth Caught for the First Time

- 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

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Revisiting the Last Crewed Moon Mission on the Eve of the Next

Soon, astronauts might fly farther from Earth than ever before

By Molly Glick    January 23, 2026

Next month, NASA is slated to launch the first crewed mission to the moon in more than half a century.

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During the 10-day Artemis II mission, scheduled for as early as February 6, four astronauts will circle the moon in the Orion spacecraft—the program isn’t sending people back onto the lunar surface quite yet. During the trip, Orion is set to whiz more than 4,000 miles beyond the far side of the moon. That would mark the longest distance people have ever traveled away from Earth. The crew will cross off plenty of other milestones, too: For one, pilot Victor Glover will become the first person of color to fly beyond low-Earth orbit, and mission specialist Christina Koch will become the first woman to do so.

While aboard, the Artemis II crew will work on various experiments. For example, they’ll explore the impacts of spaceflight on multiple aspects of human health and make new observations of the moon’s surface. They might even become the first to ever glimpse certain stretches of the far side of the moon.

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A GEOLOGIST GOES TO SPACE: Harrison Schmitt studying a boulder on the moon during the Apollo 17 mission. Image by NASA.

This is all in preparation for future Artemis missions, during which astronauts hope to learn about regions of the moon that remain elusive. For example, the Artemis III mission planned for 2027 aims to send astronauts to the South Pole for the first time. It’s super chilly there, upping the odds that the crew might encounter frozen water—a critical resource for future space trips.

The Artemis program’s eventual goal is to set up the first ever lunar space station, which will orbit the moon. It would host cutting-edge research and might later serve as a pit stop for humans headed to Mars. For now, these feats remain purely hypothetical.

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Read more: “The Woman the Mercury Astronauts Couldn’t Do Without”

Next month’s journey wouldn’t be possible without the lessons taken from the Apollo missions, which enabled the first human footsteps on the moon and the discovery that the moon is a rocky body with a similar interior and ingredients to Earth.

Humans last walked on the moon during the Apollo 17 mission in 1972. The crew conducted geological surveys and collected surface samples, among other cosmic experiments. The astronaut team included geologist Harrison Schmitt, the most recent living person to have stepped foot on the moon. Schmitt is also the only geologist to ever tread the lunar surface.

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Unlike previous astronauts, he wasn’t a pilot beforehand. In preparation for the mission, he attended a 53-week flight training course at Williams Air Force Base in Arizona. When he finally arrived on the moon, he explored the Taurus-Littrow Valley and gathered more than 240 pounds of rock samples to return to Earth for further study.

As Schmitt embarked on his first rover excursion at the valley, he exclaimed: “It’s a good geologist’s paradise if I’ve ever seen one!”

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Lead image: NASA

Molly Glick

Posted on January 23, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

I Track Space Debris As It Crashes to Earth

A planetary scientist explains how we can stalk this smoking wreckage

By Kristen French    January 23, 2026

Last February, debris from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket set the skies of Europe ablaze before crashing down to Earth in Poland, hitting a warehouse in a small village. The next month, the uncrewed trunk of another SpaceX spacecraft crash-landed in the Sahara Desert. And in May, the Soviet Kosmos 482, a Venus probe launched in 1972, disintegrated as it hurtled back to Earth, most likely over the Indian Ocean west of Jakarta, Indonesia.

Such incidents are rare, but are becoming more frequent as we crowd the skies with spacecraft and satellite constellations like Starlink. Most debris burns up before it makes contact, and when it doesn’t, it tends to rain down over oceans, deserts, or unpopulated areas. But the risk is growing of larger fragments colliding with humans, buildings, and infrastructure, smashing into airplanes, and polluting the atmosphere and water when they land.

Predicting where these giant rocket fragments will make contact—and recovering the toxic debris they leave behind—is tough because when they come screaming back to Earth, they’re moving faster than the speed of sound, and their trajectories are unpredictable. Recently, a pair of scientists hit upon a novel way of tracking the fragments in real time as they enter the atmosphere: existing networks of earthquake sensors known as seismometers.

Researchers Benjamin Fernando of Johns Hopkins University and Constantinos Charalambous from the Imperial College London were able to show that the shock waves created by some fragments as they travel through the atmosphere generate sonic booms that show up in seismic data. They tested their method on a specific piece of space junk from the Shenzhou-15 that fell to Earth in April 2024, and published their results in Science.

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I spoke with Fernando, a seismologist and planetary scientist in the Department of Earth & Planetary Sciences who has studied earthquakes on other planets, about the problem of space junk, why it’s getting worse, and what we can do about it. He says interceding would be like trying to outrun a ballistic missile.

How pressing a problem is space junk?

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We’re now at a point where we have multiple satellites reentering the atmosphere per day. And each of those poses some risk to planes, to people, and to infrastructure on the ground. And they’re all also beginning to change the composition of our atmosphere. This is a problem that’s new. There were tens of thousands fewer satellites 10 years ago than there are in orbit today—a  problem that’s only going to get worse.

Why is it going to get worse?

It’s mostly due to satellite mega constellations. The likes of SpaceX’s Starlink, though there are others. They’re basically working on a model of providing internet connectivity and other services through clusters of satellites, which operate in low Earth orbit. They have very low lifetimes. After a few years, they burn up, they come back to Earth, and then they’re replaced by new ones, which is quite different to how previous communications constellations have worked, where they tended to fly at much higher, more stable orbits.

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What are the risks to humans and property over the next decade?

A couple of reports have looked recently at the risk of space debris hitting an aircraft, and it looks like a pretty substantial risk. Then, of course, we have the actual risk of being hit by space debris on the ground, which keeps growing. But more widely, there’s the risk that fragments of space debris, which are flammable, toxic, and occasionally even radioactive, cause environmental contamination. This problem is also getting worse because we’re getting more satellites decaying more often, but we really don’t understand what the environmental implications of that are going to be either for the atmosphere or down on the ground.

What can scientists do to better understand it?

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Part of the problem is that, at the moment, we don’t really have any independent way of validating whether these objects entirely burn up and are destroyed on reentry, as these companies say they are. SpaceX, for example, says their satellites completely disintegrate in the atmosphere, but it’s difficult to validate that. And there’s some evidence of bits and pieces being found around the planet, which might be from Starlink satellites. So developing techniques that allow us to track and characterize debris during re-entry is particularly valuable because then we can actually start to independently evaluate, via open source data, what’s happening to these spacecraft as they hit the atmosphere.

Read more: “Space Exploration Speaks to the Core of Who We Are”

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What’s the most damaging space-junk incident in recent history?

The worst one ever was in 1978. That was the Kosmos 954 satellite. It was a Soviet reconnaissance satellite that had a nuclear reactor on board that reentered the atmosphere over Northern Canada and spread radioactive debris across a huge area of the Northwest territories. Part of the problem with the cleanup was it was difficult to tell exactly where which pieces had fallen.

That problem continues to exist today, largely because we don’t have good ways of tracking debris once it’s actually disintegrating within the atmosphere. A lot of the debris from Kosmos 954 was never recovered. It’s probably sitting at the bottom of lakes or rivers in northern Canada these days. And that’s just one example. We had a number of near misses in the Caribbean last spring from Starship explosions. We came pretty close to several aircraft being hit by pieces of debris. And then we also had widespread contamination across beaches in the Caribbean islands from debris fallout.

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How did you hit upon earthquake sensors as a good method to track space junk?

We’ve been using seismometers to track natural meteoroids entering the atmosphere for a while. We do that both on Earth, and I did a lot of work on NASA’s insight mission on Mars using meteoroids. So both the sonic booms and the ground impacts are sources for our seismometers. What we realized is that not only can we use these sensors to track natural meteoroids, we can also use them to track artificial meteoroids, pieces of space junk reentering the atmosphere. And we tested it on this example in California, which was a particularly good example because we have lots of seismometers in California. It opened our eyes to the fact that this technique could be far more widespread and enable characterization of debris reentries in close to real time.

Will it work in places that don’t have widespread earthquake sensors?

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Yeah, we’ve been looking at other reentries, not included in this paper, and we can still do stuff in regions that have far fewer sensors. So, for example, those Starship explosions over the Caribbean and subsequent reentries, we picked that up on single station seismometers in some cases, and we can still study the process. If we have an array, with 10 or more seismometers, it’s much easier to work out things like trajectory and speed. But that’s not always available. Across most of the contiguous United States and Canada, across Europe, bits of Asia, bits of Australasia it is, but elsewhere in the world we don’t always have that resource.

In those regions, we’re thinking about whether instead of earthquake sensors, we can use nuclear monitoring sensors—infrasound sensors that are directly measuring the shock waves in the atmosphere rather than measuring the shock waves once they’ve coupled into the ground, which is what the seismometers do.

Are there other kinds of accidental instruments that could be repurposed for space safety like weather stations or radio arrays?

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Weather radars will often pick up space-debris reentries. That’s one way of tracking them. But they’re not without challenges. They’re normally sensitive to the smallest fragments because those are the most numerous. And so, that gives you some information, which is very valuable, but it doesn’t necessarily give us all the information that we might want. The other thing to bear in mind is that many countries don’t have open-source radar or even any sort of radar systems that are shareable. And the best radar systems, normally military radar systems, can see over the horizon, which normal radar can’t. But those radar systems are normally classified.

The spacecraft that you studied for this paper, Shenzhou-15, was predicted to reenter over the Atlantic but actually appeared over California. How common are errors like that?

Very common. So part of the problem is that once you’re below about 200 kilometers in altitude in the atmosphere, the air resistance becomes very unpredictable and quite chaotic. Small changes lead to big differences in outcome. So you might remember that last year there was a reentry of a Soviet spacecraft. It was one of the Venus probes. No one knew where it was going to reenter. Even after the fact, no one knows whether it fell on land or out over the ocean, despite the fact that that spacecraft was designed to survive reentry. So pieces almost certainly impacted either the ocean surface or the land surface; it’s very common for these reentries even a few hours before they happen to have uncertainty of tens of thousands of miles.

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Shenzhou-15 also broke apart in stages before impact. Why was that significant?

If you’re interested in figuring out whether stuff reached the ground, and if so, what stuff reached the ground, you need to figure out how the spacecraft actually disintegrated. Things that are designed to survive reentry, like the space shuttle, obviously they ablate continuously. The surface layer is burning up, but the core stays intact. Other things like natural meteoroids, you’ll often see them explode in one single explosion. And those are, in some ways, the best cases for space debris. Either one piece hits the ground or the fragments are completely dispersed in a single explosion. We’re living in this unhappy middle place where we have things breaking off at different points in the trajectory. That gives you a big spread in both fragment size and fragment location. Also, we’re able to study how that spacecraft is interacting with the atmosphere, what’s happening when, because we don’t always know what these spacecraft are made out of. There’s no international reporting requirement to give exact compositions or measurements. They’re not like aircraft. So what we can do is make some inference about how the spacecraft actually broke up in the atmosphere, as well.

Is there anything about particular kinds of spacecraft or spacecraft components that makes them more likely to turn into these space-junk fragments?

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Some companies claim that they’re designing their spacecraft to actively burn up in the atmosphere. Whether that’s true or not, it’s very difficult to validate because we don’t have a good way of tracking them. In general, unfortunately, it seems like the things that are most likely to survive an explosion are also the things that are most dangerous on the ground—fuel tanks, battery packs, nuclear reactors. Because things that are small and dense don’t slow down very much in the atmosphere, and therefore, they don’t burn out very much either. They tend to be quite structurally strong as well.

Right now a lot of the tracking data is classified or proprietary. Is that sustainable as reentries increase?

I’m assuming that many national space agencies and militaries are monitoring this problem, but they’re obviously approaching it from slightly different perspectives than what we might be trying to do. One thing that we’re interested in is understanding the impacts that these reentries are having upon the chemistry and physics of the atmosphere. If we want to do that, I do think we will need more data. Whether that data comes from sources that are currently classified or whether we have to find new ways of studying these processes through, for example, seismology, is unclear.

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Do you have any hypotheses about what it might be doing to the atmosphere?

It looks like as it comes through the atmosphere, we get a lot of black carbon, which we suspect has a climate-warming potential. There are other components of the spacecraft, some of the glues, resins, and nitrogen species that are produced just by the intense heat of the atmosphere almost burning that appear to have an ozone-depleting potential. And then there’s all of the heavy metal ions and everything else that we’re adding to the atmosphere whose chemical and physical impacts are relatively understudied. So who knows really what that’s doing to the chemistry of the upper atmosphere.

Once you track this debris with the seismometers, is there anything that can be done to avoid impact or to intercede?

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Not really. So we’re focused on the near real-time response—once something has happened, cleaning it up, figuring out exactly where it ended up as quickly as we possibly can. Space debris will always outrun its own sonic boom. It’s traveling faster than the speed of sound. So it will hit the ground before you hear it. Frankly, it’s moving so fast, I’m not sure there’s a huge amount you could do about it anyway. It would be like trying to outrun a ballistic missile, which is impossible unless you know exactly where it’s going to hit. If you had a couple seconds warning you could get out of the way, but in practice there’s nothing you can do.

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Lead image: Christoph Burgstedt / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on January 23, 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 | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Space Dust Could Contain Building Blocks of Life

Protein precursors can form in cosmic dust clouds

By Jake Currie    January 22, 2026

The recipe for life seems simple at first blush: Combine organic compounds and liquid water, add an energy source, then simmer for eons. Unfortunately, finding the finished product somewhere that isn’t Earth has proven to be a frustrating endeavor. The ingredients themselves, however, might be more plentiful than previously thought, according to new research from Aarhus University published in Nature Astronomy.

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Astronomers Alfred Thomas Hopkinson and Sergio Ioppolo simulated the conditions found in cosmic dust clouds floating in the expanse between stars where new solar systems form. To recreate this extreme environment on Earth, they chilled a small chamber to roughly 430 degrees Fahrenheit below zero, created a near total vacuum, and subjected it to radiation. They introduced glycine—an amino acid already known to form in interstellar space—into the system.

Read more: “The Fly in the Primordial Soup”

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The researchers found that peptides, short chains of amino acids that can form more complex proteins, formed inside the chamber along with water—two potential ingredients for life. “We saw that the glycine molecules started reacting with each other to form peptides and water. This indicates that the same process occurs in interstellar space,” Hopkinson explained in a statement. “This is a step toward proteins being created on dust particles, the same materials that later form rocky planets.”

Their findings suggest complex organic molecules like proteins could be abundant in space, something that significantly increases the odds of life originating somewhere else in the universe.

“Bit by bit, these tiny building blocks land on rocky planets within a newly formed solar system. If those planets happen to be in the habitable zone, then there is a real probability that life might emerge,” study co-author Ioppolo explained.

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Even more exciting? This discovery could just be the first of many uncovering the nonliving processes that can produce the very building blocks of life.

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Lead image: sripfoto / Shutterstock

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Jake Currie

Posted on January 22, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Detailed View of Solar Flare Birth Caught for the First Time

They start small and end huge

By Jake Currie    January 21, 2026

For all of its life-sustaining energy, the sun is pretty chaotic. Roiling plasma covers its surface along with fluidic snarls of magnetic fields that birth solar flares. These fiery outbursts occur when opposing magnetic field lines pinch together, detach, and reconnect to form new lines that rapidly heat up, erupting into space.

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Even though scientists understand the broad, magnetic strokes of solar flare formation, they haven’t been able to study the birth of the phenomena in detail until now. Using a variety of imaging instruments onboard the European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter, solar researchers were able to capture a bounty of high-resolution data about how solar flares form. They published their findings today in Astronomy & Astrophysics.

INTO THE SUN: This video of a large solar flare highlights filaments, raining plasma blobs, magnetic reconnection events, and X-ray emission. Video by ESA & NASA / Solar Orbiter / EUI Team.

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“We were really very lucky to witness the precursor events of this large flare in such beautiful detail,” study author Pradeep Chitta of the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research said in a statement. “Such detailed high-cadence observations of a flare are not possible all the time because of the limited observational windows and because data like these take up so much memory space on the spacecraft’s onboard computer. We really were in the right place at the right time to catch the fine details of this flare.”

Read more: “Tiny Jets on the Sun Power the Colossal Solar Wind”

Solar flares, the scientists found, begin with small magnetic field reconnections, which rapidly destabilize other magnetic fields, snowballing into an avalanche of magnetic activity that crescendos into a dramatic eruption. “We were surprised by how the large flare is driven by a series of smaller reconnection events that spread rapidly in space and time,” Pradeep explained. In other words, a solar flare isn’t one single big event, but the culmination of a series of smaller events.

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As the quickly reconnecting magnetic fields deposited their energy into solar material, researchers also witnessed blobs of plasma raining down from the sun’s atmosphere. “These streams of ‘raining plasma blobs’ are signatures of energy deposition, which get stronger and stronger as the flare progresses,” Pradeep said. “Even after the flare subsides, the rain continues for some time. It’s the first time we see this at this level of spatial and temporal detail in the solar corona.”

Scientists hope these new findings will help them predict solar flares with more accuracy, an important endeavor considering the chaos they can cause in electrical systems on Earth.

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Lead image: ESA & NASA/Solar Orbiter/EUI Team

Jake Currie

Posted on January 21, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

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.

Communication

- What Would Richard Feynman Make of AI Today?

COMMUNICATION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Would Richard Feynman Make of AI Today?

The scientific sage was always suspicious of grand promises delivered before details were understood

By Robert Endres    January 22, 2026

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself—and you are the easiest person to fool,” Richard Feynman said in a 1974 commencement address at Caltech. He wasn’t speaking as a lofty philosopher but as a working physicist, offering a practical guide to daily work. He had little patience for prestige, authority, or explanations that couldn’t be tested. “It doesn’t matter how beautiful your theory is, how smart you are, or what your name is,” he liked to say. “If it doesn’t agree with experiment, it’s wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science.” Students often giggled at first, but then became silent as it sank in.

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Feynman was a man of contrasts—lively, irreverent, and deeply suspicious of explanations that sounded good but didn’t cash out in practice. Instead, he emphasized curiosity and intolerance for nonsense. And when things got too stuffy, he preferred playing the bongo drums. Feynman had a strong instinct to understand things by doing them, not by reading about them. Just as with physics, he didn’t want descriptions, he wanted participation. Curiosity didn’t need justification. And yes, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics. He invented a visual way to understand how light and matter interact—diagrams that let physicists see complex processes at a glance.

As a teenager, Feynman repaired radios without schematics. In his last act as a public figure, he exposed the cause of the 1986 Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Despite being ill with cancer, he cut through NASA’s flawed reasoning, insisted on speaking to engineers rather than administrators, and demonstrated O-ring failure with a simple glass of ice water on live television. In his mind, fixing radios and explaining the Challenger disaster were the same problem. In both cases, authority had obscured reality, and a simple experiment was enough to reveal it. That way of thinking—forged long before machine learning and neural networks—turns out to be uncomfortably relevant today.

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You can imagine Feynman being tempted to rise and ask a deceptively simple question: How do you know?

If Feynman were alive and wandering through our technological landscape, it’s hard to imagine him standing on a stage at an AI product launch. He disliked hype. He was suspicious of grand promises delivered before the details were understood—of applause standing in for questions. Instead of unveiling a finished product, he’d likely say something like, “I don’t really know what this thing does yet—that’s why I’m interested in it.” He might take the demo apart and break it, before fixing it and putting it back together. That alone would drain the room of hype and dampen the mood of anyone hoping for a smooth pitch, such as investors and stakeholders.

It is easier to imagine him sitting in the last row of a darkened auditorium, notebook in hand, watching carefully. On the screen, colorful animations glide past: neural networks glowing, data flowing, arrows pointing confidently upward, unencumbered by error bars, a demo that works beautifully, provided nothing unexpected happens. A speaker explains that the system “understands language,” “reasons about the world,” “discovers new knowledge.” Each claim is met with nods and polite applause. You can see Feynman being tempted to rise and ask a deceptively simple question: How do you know?

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But Feynman, new to this spectacle, would wait. He would listen for the moment when someone explained what the machine does when it fails, or how one might tell whether it truly understands anything at all. He would notice that the demo works flawlessly—once—and that no one asks what happens when the input is strange, incomplete, or wrong. He would hear words doing a great deal of work, and experiments doing very little.

UTTER HONESTY: In his 1974 commencement speech at Caltech, Richard Feynman told students scientific integrity depends on “utter honesty.” Experiments should “try to give all of the information to help others to judge the value of your contribution; not just the information that leads to judgment in one particular direction or another.” Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

Artificial intelligence is being presented to the public as a transformative force—one that promises to revolutionize science, medicine, education, and creativity itself. In many ways, these claims are justified. Machine learning systems can detect patterns at scales no human could manage: predicting the three-dimensional structures of proteins, screening images of tissue and cells for changes, identifying rare astronomical signals buried in noise, and generating fluent text or images on demand. These systems excel at sifting through oceans of data with remarkable speed and efficiency, revealing regularities that would otherwise remain hidden.

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Feynman would not have dismissed any of this. He was fascinated by computation and simulation. He helped pioneer Monte Carlo methods (simulating many possible outcomes at random and averaging the results) at Los Alamos National Laboratory, and computational approaches to quantum mechanics. Used well, AI can help scientists ask better questions, explore larger parameter spaces, and uncover patterns worth investigating. Used poorly, it can short-circuit that process—offering answers without insight, correlations without causes, and predictions without understanding. The danger is not automation itself, but the temptation to mistake impressive performance for understanding.

Much of today’s artificial intelligence operates as a black box. Models are trained on vast—often proprietary—datasets, and their internal workings remain opaque even to their creators. Modern neural networks can contain millions, sometimes billions, of adjustable parameters. One of Feynman’s contemporaries, John von Neumann, once wryly observed: “With four parameters I can fit an elephant, and with five I can make his tail wiggle.” The metaphor warns of mistaking noise for meaning. Neural networks produce outputs that look fluent, confident, sometimes uncannily insightful. What they rarely provide is an explanation of why a particular answer appears, or when the system is likely to fail.

This creates a subtle but powerful temptation. When a system performs impressively, it is easy to treat performance as understanding, and statistical success as explanation. Feynman would have been wary of that move. He once scribbled on his blackboard, near the end of his life, a simple rule of thumb: “What I cannot create, I do not understand.” For him, understanding meant being able to take something apart, to rebuild it, and to know where it would break. Black-box systems invert that instinct. They invite us to accept answers we cannot fully reconstruct, and to trust results whose limits we may not recognize until something goes wrong.

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Feynman had a name for this kind of confusion: “cargo cult science.” In fact, that was the title of his 1974 commencement address. He described cargo cult science as research that imitates the outward forms of scientific practice—experiments, graphs, statistics, jargon—-while missing its essential core.

The term came from South Pacific islanders who, after World War II, built wooden runways and bamboo control towers in the hope that cargo planes would return. They reproduced the rituals they had observed, down to carved headphones and signal fires. “They follow all the apparent precepts,” Feynman said, “but they’re missing something essential, because the planes don’t land.” The lesson was not about foolishness, but about misunderstanding. Without knowing why something works, copying its surface features is not enough.

Feynman’s message was not that science produces miracles but teaches a way of thinking that resists dogma.

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The risk with AI is not that it doesn’t work. The risk is that it works well enough to lull us into forgetting what science is for: not producing answers but exposing ideas to reality. For Feynman, science was about learning precisely where ideas fail. When performance becomes the goal, and success is measured only by outputs that look right, that discipline quietly erodes.

He loved technology and new tools, especially those that made it easier to test ideas against reality. He created visual tools, like his Nobel-Prize-winning diagrams, that simplified complex interactions without hiding their assumptions. But he was always careful to distinguish between instruments that help us probe nature and systems that merely produce convincing answers. Tools, for Feynman, were valuable not because they were powerful, but because they made it easier to see where an idea broke.

In Feynman’s view, science does not advance through confidence, but through doubt, by a willingness to remain unsure. Scientific knowledge, he argued, is a patchwork of statements with varying degrees of certainty—all provisional, all subject to revision. “I would rather have questions that can’t be answered,” Feynman said, “than answers that can’t be questioned.” This is in stark contrast to venture capital, which rewards bold claims. Corporate competition rewards speed. Media attention rewards spectacle. In such an environment, admitting uncertainty is costly.

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But for Feynman, uncertainty was not a weakness, it was the engine of progress. “I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing, than to have answers which might be wrong,” he said.

It’s tempting to think these concerns belong only to academics. But artificial intelligence is no longer confined to laboratories or universities. It shapes what people read and watch, how students are assessed, how medical risks are flagged, and how decisions are made about loans, jobs, or insurance.

In many of these settings, AI systems function less as tools than as institutional opacity—systems whose authority exceeds our ability to question them. Their outputs arrive with an air of objectivity, even when the reasoning behind them is clouded. When a recommendation is wrong, or a decision seems unfair, it is often difficult to know where the error lies—in the data, the model, or the assumptions embedded long before the system was deployed?

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In such contexts, the discipline of not fooling ourselves becomes more than an academic virtue. When opaque systems influence real lives, understanding their limits—knowing when they fail and why—becomes a civic necessity. Trust depends not only on performance, but on accountability, whether their limits are understood, questioned, and made visible when it matters.

Stepping back, the issue is not whether AI will transform science. It already has. The deeper question is whether we can preserve the values that make scientific knowledge trustworthy in the first place. Feynman’s answer, were he here, would likely be characteristically simple: slow down, ask what you know, admit what you don’t, and never confuse impressive results with understanding. History has shown more than once that scientific knowledge can race ahead of wisdom. Several physicists of Feynman’s generation would later reflect on having learned what could be done long before learning what should be done—a realization that arrived too late for comfort.

In 1955, Feynman gave a talk called “The Value of Science” at a National Academy of Sciences meeting at Caltech. He said that science is a discipline of doubt, remaining free to question what we think we know. His central message was not that science produces miracles but teaches a way of thinking that resists dogma, false certainty, and self-deception. He opened not with equations or authority, but with a Buddhist proverb: “To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven; the same key opens the gates of hell.” Science, Feynman said, is that key, a tool of immense power. It can open both gates. Which way it turns depends on you.

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More on Richard Feynman from Nautilus

“What Impossible Meant to Feynman”

“The Day Feynman Worked Out Black-Hole Radiation on My Blackboard”

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“Another Side of Feynman”

Lead image: Tamiko Thiel / Wikimedia Commons

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Robert Endres

Posted on January 22, 2026

Robert Endres is a professor of systems biology at Imperial College London, working at the interface of physics and biology to understand cellular sensing, migration, and pattern formation.

Environment

- What Makes This Weekend’s Blizzard So Brutal

- As Biodiversity Dwindles, Mosquitos Turn to Human Blood

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Makes This Weekend’s Blizzard So Brutal

Devastating winter storms like Fern are nothing new, but our warming world plays an increasing role in shaping these events

By Molly Glick    January 23, 2026

This weekend, more than half of the United States—at least 170 million people—is bracing for a winter storm set to span 2,000 miles. On the northern front of the system, from Oklahoma to Massachusetts, people could face up to a foot of snow, more than some places have experienced in years. And in the South, cities could encounter sheets of ice thicker than an inch. (You can learn more about your local impacts here.)

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The massive storm, referred to as Fern, may prove particularly risky due to a frigid front of Arctic air that will descend on most of the country over the next week, possibly resulting in subzero temperatures. That could enable the snow and ice to stick around—for those without power, this could quickly turn dangerous.

Climate change offers a key ingredient to the perfect storm arriving this weekend. Arctic air now tends to dip farther south due to the weakening of the polar jet stream, a quick-moving river of air located in the lower atmosphere at the spot where frosty polar air and warm mid-latitude air meet. This shift is thought to stem from the rapid warming of the Arctic: As the temperature difference between the Arctic and mid-latitudes shrinks, the jet stream moves becomes more sluggish and grows wonkier.

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Some scientists think this has made intense winter storms more likely in the mid-latitudes, including Europe, the U.S., and some areas of Asia—the southern fringes of the swirls of polar air.

Read more: “They Came for Climate Science. Then the Storms Came.”

But one team recently challenged this theory, noting that the polar jet stream has shown erratic patterns for over a century. In fact, it seems to have acted even more chaotic before climate change could have a significant impact.

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That said, other factors related to intensifying climate change are likely at play, too. For example, a warmer atmosphere holds on to more moisture, translating to more intense storms. “I’m not saying any one weather event is attributed to climate change,” Judah Cohen, a climatologist at MIT, told CNN. “But I do think it loaded the dice here.”

While this weekend’s storm is expected to be brutal, it probably won’t compare to the record-breaking wintry disaster known as the Great Blizzard of 1888, also referred to as the “Great White Hurricane.” On March 11, 1888, it hit the northeast U.S., where around a quarter of Americans lived at the time.

The storm dropped up to 55 inches of snow in some regions, and New York City experienced 85-mile-per-hour wind gusts. There, some 15,000 people got stranded on elevated trains, and many were stuck inside—including Mark Twain, who was holed up in a hotel at the time. And across the Atlantic coast, hundreds of boats sank amid fierce winds and waves. Ultimately, more than 400 people died in the blizzard, around half in New York City.

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The disaster forced cities to adjust their infrastructure, including aboveground water, telegraph, and gas lines. And Boston and New York City began working on the nation’s first belowground subway systems over the next decade.

Today, these cities will be among the hardest hit by the incoming storm, which will challenge the very infrastructure added over a century ago to keep residents moving amid white-out conditions.

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Lead image: iSweet / Shutterstock

Molly Glick

Posted on January 23, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

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.

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

- The Strawberry Is a Frankenfruit

GENETICS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Strawberry Is a Frankenfruit

New research reveals the genetic history of the cultivated strawberry

By Jake Currie    January 23, 2026

Just like humans, most organisms that reproduce via sex are diploid, meaning they have two copies of chromosomes (one from mom and one from dad). With plants, however, things can get a lot more complicated, and several species—including many agricultural crops—have multiple copies of chromosomes. For example, the cultivated strawberries you buy at the grocery store (Fragaria × ananassa) are octoploid, meaning they have eight copies of chromosomes.

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But how did they get such a complicated genome?

Polyploid plant species get their extra chromosomes through two different processes: autopolyploidy and allopolyploidy. Autopolyploid species just have multiple copies of their own chromosomes, whereas allopolyploid species originate from hybridization events in which two different sets of chromosomes are combined in one organism, which often becomes a new species. Though their genomes live on in modern allopolyploid plants, species that contributed their genetic material to these organisms may have since gone extinct. That makes unraveling allopolyploid genomes like the strawberry’s particularly tricky.

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Read more: “The Future of Food Looks Small, Dense, and Very Bushy”

To get a better handle on how the strawberry came by its eight copies of chromosomes, geneticists from Portland State University looked to the genome’s long terminal repeat retrotransposons. These little genetic elements are pieces of repeating DNA that can duplicate and insert themselves into other parts of the genome. By analyzing the patterns of their distribution, researchers can get a better picture of the plant’s evolutionary history. They published their findings in Horticulture Research.

By applying this novel method to strawberries, researchers were able to determine a couple of things. First, the strawberry’s genome comprises four distinct subgenomes (which makes sense given its octoploidy). Second, the modern cultivated strawberry experienced three distinct hybridization events that occurred around 3 to 4, 2 to 3, and 1 to 2 million years ago.

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“This work demonstrates how transposable elements can function as evolutionary time stamps embedded in plant genomes,” explained one of the study’s senior authors in a statement. “By focusing on when and where these elements expanded, we can reconstruct genome history even when direct ancestral references are missing.”

These new findings have important implications for agriculture and plant breeding and researchers hope to examine the long terminal repeat transposons of other polyploid crops—including wheat, sugarcane, and cotton.

And if you’re wondering how octoploid strawberries rank among polyploid plants, they’re far behind the current known record holder: The black mulberry has 44 copies of its seven chromosomes, making it a tetratetracontaploid plant.

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Lead image: pasja1000 / Pixabay

Jake Currie

Posted on January 23, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Geoscience

- Tiny Evidence Upends a Controversial Stonehenge Theory

- Watch This Glacier Race into the Sea

GEOSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Tiny Evidence Upends a Controversial Stonehenge Theory

Researchers curious about the monument’s origins stuck their heads in the sand—for good reason

By Molly Glick    January 22, 2026

For centuries, Stonehenge has attracted all sorts of theories—varying widely in credibility—as to how it cropped up some 5,000 years ago.

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Some explanations have leaned outlandish, pointing to aliens or Merlin the wizard, while  scientists have squabbled over the more probable stone origin stories. For example, some teams have proposed that glaciers pushed some of these stones to the oft-visited site at Salisbury Plain in southern England because their makeup reflects far-off locales. But most researchers think that people brought the stones over via sea or land.

The stones at this iconic monument fall into three groups: the hulking, nearly 28-ton sarsen stones, most of which seem to have come from around 15 miles away; bluestones that appear to originate more than 140 miles away in Wales; and the Altar Stone, a 6-ton slab that may have been brought from an area of northeast Scotland that’s more than 400 miles from the site.

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The bluestones and the Altar Stone in particular have sparked lively discussions on glacial versus human transport. Some claim that glaciers shepherded these foreign stones over hundreds of miles during the last Ice Age, which was more than 20,000 years ago. Until now, no studies have harnessed state-of-the-art geological techniques to test this glacial transport theory.

Read more: “How AI Is Helping Archaeologists Make Discoveries”

Along with these stones, ancient glaciers would have deposited millions of microscopic grains of minerals including apatite and zircon. When these two minerals form, they bottle up small concentrations of radioactive uranium that turns into lead at a specific rate. So studying the ratios of these elements enables the researchers to measure the age of each of these minerals bits. This is a crucial hint, as rocks throughout Britain vary widely in age.

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“If glaciers had carried rocks all the way from Scotland or Wales to Stonehenge, they would have left a clear mineral signature on the Salisbury Plain,” explained Anthony Clarke, a geologist at Curtin University in Australia, in a statement.

Clarke and his colleagues inspected sand at rivers near Stonehenge for these telltale mineral grains, and found no evidence that the bluestones came from Wales or that the Altar Stone hailed from Scotland. Most of the zircon gains they studied were 1.7 to 1.1 billion years old, suggesting they came from ancient sheets of sedimentary rocks once covering that area of England. And the apatite seems to have lingered at Salisbury Plain for tens of millions of years. The findings were recently reported in Communications Earth and Environment.

“That makes the alternative explanation—that humans moved the stones—far more plausible,” Clarke said.

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How exactly people schlepped these incredibly heavy stones, however, remains a mystery, much like the speculation over statues on Rapa Nui. The Stonehenge builders may have wielded rolling logs, “but really we might never know,” Clarke added.

It’s not even known precisely why people constructed Stonehenge, but researchers have some ideas: The site seems to have been used in a variety of ways, serving as an observatory, burial site, and even a party spot. With all this ancient intrigue, it’s no wonder that the monument continues to draw more than a million visitors each year.

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Lead image: Rachelle Haun / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on January 22, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

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.

Health

- The Strange Paradox in the RFK Jr. Diet Guidelines

- Do Non-Alcoholic Drinks Actually Help You Stay Sober?

- How Being a Good Dad Makes for Healthier Children

- Some Doctors Are Using Emojis With Patients More Often

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Strange Paradox in the RFK Jr. Diet Guidelines

The new food pyramid defies decades of nutrition research—but one recommendation may align with some newer findings

By Molly Glick    January 26, 2026

Federal food guidelines recently got a major makeover—and controversy ensued. The new recommendations announced by United States Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. prioritize foods including full-fat milk, steak, and butter, a major pivot from past recommendations. “We are ending the war on saturated fats,” Kennedy said at a press conference earlier this month.

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Confusingly, the recent guidelines also note that saturated fats shouldn’t make up more than 10 percent of total daily calories, aligning with previous advice from both the federal government and the World Health Organization. But it doesn’t add up with the foods promoted on top of the pyramid, and could leave Americans feeling disoriented in the dairy and meat aisles. Plus, the guidelines influence federal food programs, including school lunches and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP).

“I’m very disappointed in the new pyramid that features red meat and saturated fat sources at the very top, as if that’s something to prioritize,” Christopher Gardner, a nutrition expert at Stanford University, told NPR. “It does go against decades and decades of evidence and research.”

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PERPLEXING PYRAMID: The updated food pyramid recently unveiled by RFK Jr. Image by the U.S. Department of Agriculture/U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.

Saturated fats are one of the two main types of fatty acids. We often consume saturated fats from animal products, including cheese, butter, pork, and beef, along with oils such as palm oil and coconut oil. Meanwhile, unsaturated fats are plentiful in foods such as fish, avocados, seeds, nuts, and cooking oils like soybean and olive oil.

Researchers have linked diets rich in saturated fats to high cholesterol and elevated coronary heart disease risk since the 1950s. Among these pioneering scientists were Ancel Keys, a physiologist who was born on this day in 1904. Early on in his career, he created pocket-sized, nutritionally balanced rations for World War II soldiers at risk of starvation. Some soldiers bemoaned these three-meal packages because they were misused and distributed for weeks on end.

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After the war, Keys noticed that heart attacks increased among Americans. He suspected this was connected to lifestyle and diet changes around that time, and wasn’t convinced by the then-common belief that plaque buildup in the arteries naturally resulted from aging.

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

To learn more about the relationship between food and heart health, Keys kicked off a seminal study in the 1950s. His team followed more than 11,000 healthy middle-aged men in seven countries, including the United States, Italy, and Japan, for up to nearly 60 years. The Seven Countries Study was the first large, long-term study spanning multiple countries to examine how risk factors including diet and lifestyle affect people’s odds of developing coronary heart disease. Keys and his colleagues learned that blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, and smoking are “universal risk factors for coronary heart disease.”

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This work continues to influence dietary recommendations around the world. For example, they noticed that eating habits in Italy and Greece in the 1950s and ’60s were linked with a low risk of coronary heart disease. In what’s now commonly called the Mediterranean Diet, these populations got most of their fat from olive oil and dined on plenty of cereal products, legumes, fruits, and vegetables, while consuming moderate amounts of fish and low quantities of dairy and meat.

In the decades since Keys’ research began, other studies have arrived at similar findings: that reducing saturated fat consumption can lower levels of “bad” LDL cholesterol, which is known to increase one’s heart attack and stroke risk. That’s because consuming excess saturated fats can inhibit the liver’s ability to break down LDL cholesterol, which builds up in the bloodstream and contributes to plaque accumulation in the arteries.

But some recent studies have complicated this picture: It’s now uncertain whether all foods with saturated fats do the same amount of damage. For example, low-fat dairy might not be any healthier than full-fat dairy, and the latter is sometimes tied to better outcomes. Overall, though, the findings are mixed. Scientists do think that the make-up of dairy products, including vitamins, protein, and gut-benefitting bacteria, could affect how we process this fat.

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That said, Keys’ main findings still apply, and experts recommend limiting foods and drinks high in added sugars, saturated fat, and sodium. Instead, they urge us to emphasize fruits and vegetables, whole grain foods, healthy protein sources like fish and legumes, and cooking oils like canola and olive oils—beef tallow not included.

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Lead image: thomasmaiwald / Pixabay

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Molly Glick

Posted on January 26, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Do Non-Alcoholic Drinks Actually Help You Stay Sober?

They can make cutting back feel easier, but they might also make sobriety harder

By Zoe Cunniffe    January 26, 2026

Tis the season of the non-alcoholic drink.

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It’s Dry January, after all—the month-long break from booze has become an annual tradition among many in the United Kingdom and the United States in recent years. In fact, sober living in general has begun to attract a following, particularly among younger generations.

Zero proof spirits, near beer, and de-alcoholized wines now pepper the shelves of many supermarkets and hold pride of place on bar menus, while recipes for mocktails have taken off on the internet. The spirit-free beverages have become a popular way to avoid the potential social consequences of cutting back.

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“We still live in cultures where drinking is normalized and non-drinking requires explanation,” says Emily Nicholls, a sociologist at the University of York who studies consumption of non-alcoholic drinks. The virgin alternatives allow people to participate in alcohol-centric gatherings or even “pass” as drinkers. (Many of them also taste pretty good.)

But most of the no- and low-alcohol products, often referred to as NoLos, mimic the taste and appearance of alcoholic beverages and even contain tiny amounts of actual alcohol. Which is why some experts have begun to ask whether these substitutes actually curtail alcohol use in the long run, particularly in people with conditions like alcohol use disorder (AUD). The subject is relatively understudied and research results have so far been mixed.

Read more: “Do Animals Get Drunk?”

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One worry is that booze-free drinks could lead to relapse in people who are trying to quit by triggering alcohol cravings. Some evidence suggests they may provoke not only the subjective desire to drink but also a physiological arousal response similar to what occurs when the person is actually drinking alcohol—with the strength of the cravings tracking the level of alcohol dependence.

Even the packaging of some non-alcoholic beers has been shown to elicit cravings, since it is so close to that of alcohol sold by the same beverage companies. This is especially concerning because non-alcoholic beverages can often legally be sold or advertised in places where alcohol itself is banned.

“Suddenly, those places may become much less inclusive for people who are trying to recover from alcohol use disorders and really can’t cope with that exposure to all that alcohol branding,” says John Holmes, a professor of alcohol policy at the University of Sheffield. Along with increasing the risk of relapse, Holmes says, the presence of such beverages can force some people to avoid otherwise alcohol-free spaces, worsening the isolation that already makes recovery rough.

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On the other hand, booze-free alternatives may be what puts recovery within reach for some people. Most patients are unable to fully achieve abstinence, Holmes says. As a result, traditional approaches that make total abstinence the sole aim of treatment can discourage people from seeking help. While abstinence may be the ideal, Holmes explains, evidence suggests that many people can achieve recovery by cutting back. A moderation-based approach to recovery that allows non-alcoholic beers and focuses on developing a healthy long-term relationship with alcohol may be more realistic for some people.

Overall, the ambiguity around non-alcoholic beverages makes it hard to create clear protocols for their use, including clinical guidelines to help providers treat patients for alcohol use disorder, along with regulations for sales and marketing of the beverages. For example, when non-alcoholic beverages are sold by businesses with no liquor license, such as supermarkets, does the easy access put people with alcohol use disorder at risk of relapse, or does it help them by making it possible to use these drinks in their recovery without setting foot in a liquor store?

What’s tough about answering questions like this is that there’s unlikely to be one right answer. “Every person who has alcohol dependence is quite different,” says Holmes. “The question is sort of, who will this work for? … How do the effects differ across those different types of people?” Non-alcoholic beverages themselves also vary widely—some contain no trace of alcohol, while others have an ABV as high as about 1.2 percent, though the exact cutoff varies by country. “Should guidance be distinguishing between those two different types of products?” asks Holmes. “Those are the kind of questions that we don’t have clear answers to yet.”

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Guidelines also need to recognize that, for some people, non-alcoholic cocktails, wine, and beer aren’t a feasible option. Not only are people with alcohol use disorder at risk of cravings and relapse, they may have court orders or employment requirements that bar them from consuming even a drop of alcohol without consequences. The drinks are also not cheap.

For now, non-alcoholic drinks sit in an uncomfortable middle ground: a lifeline for some, a land mine for others, and a category the science has not yet caught up with.

Lead image: Blan_k / Shutterstock

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Zoe Cunniffe

Posted on January 26, 2026

Zoe Cunniffe is a health writer interested in chronic illness and medical anthropology. Her work has previously been published in the Ethics Press collection Institutionalized Madness: The Interplay of Psychiatry and Society’s Institutions. She also writes a Substack newsletter, Reality Tunnels.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Being a Good Dad Makes for Healthier Children

Paternal warmth before the age of 1 can set the tone for the family and influence physical health years later

By Kristen French    January 21, 2026

In the history of human parenting, childcare has often been treated as maternal by default, paternal by exception. When mothers do it, it’s duty. When fathers do it, it’s help. A father’s love has been tallied as optional in the child’s development.

But decades of research have begun to redraw this map: Scientists are finding that consistent paternal care can help to shape everything from language development and social competence to academic persistence and mental health. And the benefits of dad’s involvement aren’t interchangeable with the ones kids get from mom.

And now, a new study shows a father’s early emotional engagement with his infant may stabilize the whole family system in ways that quietly protect a child’s long-term physical health. The scientists, from Penn State College of Health and Human Development, published their findings in Health Psychology.

Fathers who were emotionally tuned into their babies before their first birthday were more likely to have cooperative, low-conflict relationships with the child’s mother a year later, the researchers found. And in those families, the kids were physically healthier years down the line, at age 7, in ways that showed up in their bloodwork.

The big surprise: Neither the mother’s warmth when the child was an infant, nor her ability to co-parent harmoniously when the child was 2 years old, had much bearing on the kids’ physical health at the age of 7.

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Read more: “My Visit with My Dead Father’s Brain”

“Everyone in the family matters a lot,” said Alp Aytuglu, postdoctoral scholar in Penn State’s Department of Biobehavioral Health, in a statement. “Mothers are often the primary caregivers, and children are experiencing the most growth and development. The takeaway here is that in families with a father in the household, dads affect the environment in ways that can support—or undermine—the health of the child for years to come.”

To conduct their study, the researchers examined videos and other information from the Penn State Family Foundations project, funded by the National Institutes of Health, which covered 399 families in the United States that included a mother, father, and first child. Some 83 percent of these families identified as non-Hispanic white and had higher than average levels of income and education.

The original Family Foundations researchers visited each kid in the study when they were 10 and 24 months old, recording 18-minute videos of the parents playing with the child. Trained evaluators later reviewed the video. They assigned codes to specific parenting behaviors, including response time, warmth, and age-appropriateness of their interactions. They also assessed co-parenting behaviors, such as competing for the child’s attention versus taking turns naturally. They noticed that when one parent competitively gained the kids’ attention, the other tended to disengage.

When the child turned 7, the researchers collected a blood sample that they then analyzed in the lab, measuring four markers of heart and metabolic health: cholesterol, blood sugar regulation, and markers of liver and immune system inflammation. They then ran their data through a statistical modeling approach known as structural equation modeling.

They found that fathers who were less attentive to their children at 10 months old were more likely to have trouble co-parenting later. They tended to either compete for their children’s attention or withdraw from play when the kid was 2. This kind of parenting behavior was linked to higher levels of glycated hemoglobin, which helps to regulate blood sugar and c-reactive protein, a marker of inflammation in the liver that tends to rise rapidly in response to infection, injury, or inflammation.

“No one will be surprised to learn that treating your children appropriately and with warmth is good for them,” said Hanna Schreier, professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State and an author of this study. “But it might surprise people that a father’s behavior before a baby is old enough to form permanent memories can affect that child’s health when they are in second grade. It is generally understood that family dynamics affect development and mental health, but those dynamics affect physical health as well and play out over years.”

The researchers were surprised by the finding about mothers’ care and kids’ health. They thought the influences would be on par for mothers and fathers.

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“In two-parent families like the ones in this study—the mother is frequently the primary caregiver,” explained Jennifer Graham-Engeland, a professor of biobehavioral health at Penn State and an author of the study. “So it is possible that whatever the mother’s behavior, it tends to represent the norm in the family, whereas the father’s role tends to be one that reinforces the norm or disrupts it. It is also likely that mothers affect children’s health in ways other than those specifically examined in this study.”

Mothers may know best, but fathers may sometimes be the ones calibrating the system.

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Lead image: h3x / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on January 21, 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

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.

History

- Did Edison Accidentally Create a Vital Superconductor?

- A Closer Look at an Elusive Ancient Plague

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

- C-Sections Have a Surprisingly Ancient History

- Pompeii’s Early Baths Were Petri Dishes

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Did Edison Accidentally Create a Vital Superconductor?

In 1879, the inventor might have produced graphene, a crucial component of tech more than a century later

By Molly Glick    January 26, 2026

While Thomas Edison was at work on one of his greatest achievements, he may have accidentally produced a substance that wouldn’t be isolated for another century—and it’s currently in high demand.

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In 1879, Edison showed off the invention he’s best remembered for today: the light bulb, the world’s first practical electric incandescent lamp. It was a paradigm-shifting breakthrough, enabling people to safely illuminate their homes. In this design, electricity travels through a skinny filament in a glass vacuum bulb that grows hot enough to glow. Edison wanted to fashion the filament out of tungsten, but it wasn’t yet possible to manufacture tungsten filaments.

Edison ended up testing filaments made out of carbonized plant materials—these are organic substances that have been heated in the absence of air, which breaks them down and creates a residue that’s chock-full of carbon. He tried all sorts of plants, including palmetto and hemp, before landing on Japanese bamboo. This filament was able to light up for more than 1,200 hours before burning out.

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“Before I got through, I tested no fewer than 6,000 vegetable growths, and ransacked the world for the most suitable filament material,” Edison explained of his groundbreaking experiments.

Read more: “Why Physicists Make Up Stories in the Dark”

Edison’s breakthrough not only made it possible to bring electricity into houses—it may have also produced graphene, a super strong and flexible substance that’s only an atom thick. It can serve as a powerful form of semiconductor, which is vital to technologies ranging from MRI machines to computer chips. Graphene could in fact play a key role in the tech of the future. Modern researchers hope to further develop it to make quick-charging fuel cells that can power electric vehicles, for example, and in systems that deliver drugs within the body. But producing graphene remains a challenge.

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When he was a graduate student at Rice University, nanomaterials researcher Lucas Eddy wanted to figure out how to create graphene with easily accessible, affordable materials. One kind of graphene can be created by quickly heating up carbon-based materials to more than 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit, a technique known as flash Joule heating. He had a flash of inspiration, recalling that early light bulbs commonly incorporated carbon-based filaments. And he knew that Edison’s early light bulbs reached the ideal temperature threshold for graphene production.

Eddy tried to find Edison-style light bulbs with carbon filaments, but several of them were actually made with tungsten. “You can’t fool a chemist,” he explained in a statement.

He finally hunted down the right light bulbs at a small art store in New York City, which even had the same type of Japanese bamboo filaments.

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Mimicking Edison’s experimental setup, Eddy attached the light bulb to a 110-volt direct current electricity source. He allowed it to flow for 20 seconds, as bouts of heating longer than that can form graphite, a much thicker form of carbon, instead of graphene.

By beaming lasers at the filament, Eddy and his colleagues confirmed that they had cooked up a form of graphene, a finding reported in the journal ACS Nano.

It’s hard to say whether Edison knew that his experiment produced graphene, and in his 1879 demonstration the bulb burned for over 13 hours—plenty of time for any resulting graphene to have turned into graphite.

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Researchers didn’t even theorize the existence of graphene until 1947, and in 2004 scientists successfully extracted layers of graphene from graphite—a groundbreaking experiment that began with sticky tape. This innovation earned researchers Andre Geim and Konstantin Novoselov the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2010.

The recent finding begs the question: What other secrets might have emerged during historic experiments like Edison’s?

“To reproduce what Thomas Edison did, with the tools and knowledge we have now, is very exciting,” said paper co-author James Tour, a synthetic chemist and nanotechnologist at Rice University. “What questions would our scientific forefathers ask if they could join us in the lab today? What questions can we answer when we revisit their work through a modern lens?”

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Lead image: Wondermilkycolor / Shutterstock

Molly Glick

Posted on January 26, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Closer Look at an Elusive Ancient Plague

Teeth have revealed that victims traveled from far-off homelands

By Molly Glick    January 22, 2026

The same bacterium behind the Black Death that devastated Europe in the 14th century also ripped through the ancient Mediterranean.

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This epidemic was known as Plague of Justinian—it occurred between 541 and 750 A.D., and is one of the earliest known widespread infectious disease outbreaks in the region. Historical texts claim that the disease caused significant damage to cities throughout the eastern swath of the Roman Empire at the time.

Beyond these accounts, it’s unclear what life was like during this outbreak. It’s been tricky to verify suspected mass graves from the epidemic and find out who they belonged to.

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DNA analysis, however, can clear up this ancient ambiguity. Researchers only recently unearthed evidence of the plague bacterium Yersinia pestis in the Eastern Mediterranean that aligns with the timing of the Plague of Justinian. It was found at a mass burial in the former Roman city of Jerash in modern-day Jordan. In a new study, the same team sought to learn more about the hundreds of individuals laid to rest at the site, which seems to be the oldest known mass grave constructed during a catastrophic plague.

ANCIENT PLAGUE: The hippodrome at Jerash that contained the mass grave built during the Plague of Justinian. Photo by Karen Hendrix.

“We wanted to move beyond identifying the pathogen and focus on the people it affected, who they were, how they lived, and what pandemic death looked like inside a real city,” said Rays Jiang, a genomicist and public health researcher at the University of South Florida, in a statement.

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Jerash sat at a major trade crossroads and was recognized for its impressive architecture, including temples, theaters, and a stadium called a hippodrome. Its central location and links to other bustling cities would have made Jerash’s population highly susceptible to the Plague of Justinian—this area isn’t brought up in surviving accounts of the plague, but such texts record outbreaks in nearby urban centers, including Jerusalem and Alexandria. Archaeological evidence also suggests that Jerash’s economy and population dipped in the late sixth and early seventh centuries.

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

Jiang and her colleagues analyzed skeletal remains from this mass grave to piece together the stories of these individuals’ lives, findings reported in the Journal of Archaeological Science. These bodies seem to have been deposited there within days or weeks, a haphazard process similar to pits later created during the Black Death.

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They studied oxygen isotopes in tooth enamel, which revealed that the people buried at Jerash consumed water from a diversity of geographic areas, suggesting they hailed from far and wide. And DNA extracted from people’s teeth pointed to ancestral origins in what’s now Mozambique or Sudan, for one individual, and central and eastern Europe for another—these lineages are common among people who lived in the Levant region around that time.

Ultimately, people from a wide swath of places were “brought together in a single mass grave by crisis,” according to the statement. This offers a rare look at migration patterns that occurred over generations, which are usually hard to detect in regular cemeteries.

“By linking biological evidence from the bodies to the archaeological setting, we can see how disease affected real people within their social and environmental context,’’ Jiang explained in the statement. “This helps us understand pandemics in history as lived human health events, not just outbreaks recorded in text.’’

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Lead image: Freedom’s Falcon / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on January 22, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

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.

Microbiology

- Heartworms Might Be Much More Ancient Than We Thought

MICROBIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Heartworms Might Be Much More Ancient Than We Thought

Understanding their intricate past could be key to future treatments for pups

By Molly Glick    January 20, 2026

Heartworm infections are increasingly common in pups—in 2022, more than 1.2 million dogs in the United States were documented with the condition, and infection rates have risen over the past two decades.

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These spaghetti-like nematodes, formally known as Dirofilaria immitis, grow up to nearly a foot long. They can make their way into an animal’s blood vessels in the heart and lungs and prompt heart failure and severe lung disease, among other serious consequences, if left untreated. The disease affects cats, dogs, wolves, foxes, and ferrets, among other animals, but dogs are the natural host. In dogs, the worms can grow and reproduce, multiplying into hundreds of individuals.

Dog owners are often advised to prevent heartworm infections with drugs called parasiticides, but their widespread use has triggered some resistance among heartworms that make these medications less effective.

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To combat drug resistance, it’s important to understand where and when these pesky worms came along. And, according to recent research, their story seems to stretch far further back in history than previously thought.

WANDERING WORMS: A diagram of possible canid and heartworm journeys throughout the world and across time. Image from Power, R., et al. Communications Biology (2025).

Researchers have long thought that heartworms came from Europe or Asia and traveled the world over the past two to four centuries by way of dogs carried around by people. Past studies have supported this theory with evidence of low diversity among heartworms, but these hints came from small samples that weren’t representative of populations around the globe.

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Instead, it’s possible that heartworms dotted the globe long before people domesticated dogs. For one, heartworms tend to take up residence in a wide range of meat-eating mammals, especially canids, the broader dog family that emerged around 40 million years ago (our species emerged much later, around 300,000 years ago). And mosquitos, which are crucial in the spread of heartworms, have been around even longer.

To trace heartworms’ journey around the world, an international team of scientists examined more than 100 heartworm genomes taken from dogs and their wild canid kin in Australia, the U.S., Central America, Europe, and Asia, enabling them to learn how these parasites diverged over their evolutionary history.

Read more: “Only Street Dogs Are Real Dogs”

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Overall, the team found “distinct genetic differences between heartworms from different continents, indicating a more ancient dispersal in canid hosts than previously recognised,” according to a paper published today in Communications Biology.

“What we can say with confidence is that heartworm evolution is far older and more complex than a simple story of parasites hitchhiking with modern dogs,” said study co-author Jan Slapeta, a veterinary parasitologist at the University of Sydney, in a statement. Instead, it appears that heartworms wandered the world and evolved along with their canine hosts, long before humans turned pups into pets.

Their genetic evidence supports certain canid (and heartworm) migration scenarios during interglacial periods, when canids could move more freely, and bouts of isolation during ice ages. For example, some wolves and coyote-like dogs may have first left North America, where they originally evolved, by traversing the Bering Land Bridge up to around 7 million years ago. As these dogs roamed the globe and formed connected communities, heartworms may have done so in tandem.

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More recently, heartworms could’ve hitched a ride to far-flung Australia with the first dingoes to arrive on the continent, around 4,000 years ago—the genetic analysis suggested that Australian heartworms have shared ancestry with parasites from Asia, where dingoes originally lived. Still, the authors noted, their small sample size means that they can’t yet discount the theory that heartworms spilled into Australia after European colonization. To make more definitive conclusions on heartworm movement and evolution overall, they’ll need to gather more samples.

Now, new heartworm treatments and monitoring strategies can take these geographic distinctions into consideration. While human influence may not have sparked these parasites’ global parade, the authors noted in the paper that climate change and the increasing movement of people and their pets “will all influence the distribution and adaptation of heartworms.”

“Understanding where heartworms come from and how different populations are related helps us respond more effectively to disease and drug resistance,” Slapeta said. “Heartworms are not the same everywhere, and local history matters.”

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Lead image: Pexels / Pixabay

Molly Glick

Posted on January 20, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Neuroscience

- The Brain Might Not Function Like We Thought It Did

- 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

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Brain Might Not Function Like We Thought It Did

Complex thought may be organized by connection, not anatomy

By Kristen French    January 21, 2026

For over a century, scientists who study the brain have linked function to anatomy. This way of understanding the brain emerged in the early 1900s with German neuropsychiatrist Korbinian Brodmann, who stained thin slices of cortex taken from humans and other animals and found that the way the cells layered changed abruptly from one place to the next.

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Brodmann drew lines around these regions, mapping the human cerebral cortex into 52 distinct areas, based on their cellular structure. Later, scientists proposed that these so-called Brodmann areas correspond to specific functions, such as Broca’s area for speech production. Studies of brain injuries and electrical stimulation seemed to bear this out. Damaging the Broca’s area, for instance, interfered with speech, and stimulating specific tissues could lead to specific sensations, movements, or perceptual effects. Today, Brodmann divisions remain standard references for researchers and clinicians, especially in functional MRI studies.

But a new study on mice from the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden, published in Nature Neuroscience, suggests that these maps don’t tell the whole story. When it comes to complex cognition, the brain may be organized not according to anatomy, but according to patterns of neural firing instead. In the prefrontal cortex of a mouse, the scientists found, function emerges not from places but from neuronal networks that are distributed across regions. They also discovered that how neurons fire when the brain is at rest is a good predictor for where it sits in the functional hierarchy—and what kind of cognitive work it does.

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“Our findings challenge the traditional way of defining brain regions and have major implications for understanding brain organization overall,” said Marie Carlén, an author of the study and professor at the department of neuroscience at the Karolinska Institutet, in a statement.

Read more: “The Surprising Relativism of the Brain’s GPS”

Scientists had already determined that the functions of the prefrontal cortex—decision-making, planning, and emotional regulation—don’t correspond to neatly localized parts. They wanted to know if they could build a better map by looking at how individual neurons fire than by relying on anatomy alone. They also wondered if spontaneous activity in neurons could reveal any hidden truths about the way the brain works.

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To find out, the team of scientists recorded activity from more than 24,000 individual neurons in the brains of mice using high-density neuropixel probes, thin silicon shanks inserted into the brain tissue and studded with thousands of tiny recording sites. Half of the neurons they recorded lived in the prefrontal cortex of the mice and the other half in other cortical and subcortical regions. The researchers analyzed how these neurons behaved both when the animal was at rest and when they were exposed to simple sounds: how fast, regular, and consistent the firing patterns were, and whether spikes followed predictable patterns.

Next, using a large independent dataset from the International Brain Laboratory, the researchers examined how neurons in similar regions encode sensory information, decision-making, and reward feedback. That dataset relied on giving mice a behavioral test involving a visual stimulus, wheel turns, a water prize, and white noise for errors. Using statistical analysis, the Karolinska Institutet scientists classified individual neurons based on whether they were tuned to sensory stimuli, decision-making, or reward. Finally, the team mapped the activity patterns they identified and compared them against traditional anatomical atlases and known connectivity-based models of the cortex.

What they found is that the neurons in the prefrontal cortex of the mouse fire according to a unique motif. Unlike most other brain regions, such as the hippocampus or sensory cortex, the neurons here tend to fire slowly, regularly, and without erratic bursts. This activity is stable over time. When they looked at neural firing in other parts of the cortex, they found this slow and steady firing pattern seems to be a hallmark of high-level cognitive regions more generally.

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Surprisingly, neurons governing decision-making, considered a higher-order process, were governed more by fast, irregular bursts. “This suggests that cognitive processes rely on local collaboration between neurons whose activity patterns complement one another,” said Carlén. “Some neurons appear to specialize in integrating information streams, while others have high spontaneous activity that supports quick and flexible encoding of information, for instance, information needed to make a specific decision.”

When the team remapped the prefrontal cortex according to the firing patterns they identified, they found that in some parts, the patterns did follow anatomical lines while in others, they did not, suggesting a network of overlapping functional zones. Sensory responses and decision-making also seemed to mostly ignore anatomy.

The findings suggest function is emergent, not localized, and that higher-order cognitive activity required for planning and abstraction relies on slow and stable activity rather than speed and reactivity. The scientists propose that regular firing neurons may create a stable background that can serve as a kind of scaffold for other neurons that encode specific events and have more erratic firing patterns.

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What emerged was a different sort of map, one that defies strict borders in favor of rhythm and connection.

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Lead image: Master1305 / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on January 21, 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

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.

Paleontology

- Straight-Tusk Elephants Once Roamed Europe. And We Used Their Bones as Hammers

- 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

Straight-Tusk Elephants Once Roamed Europe. And We Used Their Bones as Hammers

A 480,000-year-old battered bone is the earliest known flintstone hammer in Europe

By Devin Reese    January 26, 2026

A little piece of fossilized elephant bone found in southern England offers a window into the life of our human ancestors. Just 4.3 inches by 2.4 inches, the triangular fossil bone came from either an elephant or a mammoth, given its density and thickness. It was recovered from a well-known archaeological site in Boxgrove, England, in the 1990s, but only now—thanks to advances in imaging techniques—recognized as an elephant bone tool, according to a study published in Science Advances.

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Imaging with 3-D scanning and electron microscopy of the bone fragment revealed telltale clues on its surface. The battered pattern of notches, pits, and other impact marks, coupled with embedded flint flakes, suggested it served as a hammer to touch up flintstone tools. Because the bone is softer than the flint, it would have worked as a “knapper” to sharpen a flint stone by knocking flakes off its edges.

“Collecting and shaping an elephant bone fragment and then using it on multiple occasions to shape and sharpen stone tools shows an advanced level of complex thinking and abstract thought,” explained co-author and anthropologist Silvia Bello in a statement.

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Read more: “The Natural World Is an Elephant World”

Whether the bone was scavenged from a carcass or extracted from a hunted animal is unknown. Two of the largest members of the elephant family lived in Europe during the Middle Pleistocene: Eurasian straight-tusked elephants (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) and steppe mammoths (Palaeoloxodon antiquus) that both stood almost 13 feet tall. Hunting them would have been a formidable task, but the study authors conclude that the bone was relatively fresh because it deformed a bit during its use.

Both these elephant species were uncommon in prehistoric southern England, suggesting that the elephant bone tool was a rare find. The carcass it came from may have also provided other raw materials like teeth, tusks, skin, fat, and edible meat. Based on the time and place, the study authors surmise that the bone toolmaker was either an early Neanderthal (Homo neanderthalensis) or a Homo heidelbergensis.

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“This remarkable discovery showcases the ingenuity and resourcefulness of our ancient ancestors,” said lead author and archaeologist Simon Parfitt in a statement. “They possessed not only a deep knowledge of the local materials around them, but also a sophisticated understanding of how to craft highly refined stone tools.”

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Lead image: Brennan Stokkermans / Wikipedia

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Devin Reese

Posted on January 26, 2026

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

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

- Holy @#$%! Half of Parents Ok with Their Kids Swearing

- Motivation Can Profoundly Shape Your Memories

- 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

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Holy @#$%! Half of Parents Ok with Their Kids Swearing

Parents say context and age matter

By Kristen French    January 23, 2026

Not long ago, cursing among kids elicited an almost universal clutching of pearls. It was seen as a major sign of disrespect and lack of education, a pathway to more problematic behavior. Up through the 1970s, it was common for parents in the United States and the United Kingdom to threaten to wash their children’s mouths out with soap if they caught them using foul language.

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But attitudes toward profanity shifted and that kind of threat came to be seen as abusive.

Today, less than half of parents say children should never swear, according to one recent national poll from the University of Michigan. The researchers tallied responses to a survey taken last August by 1,678 parents with one child aged 6 to 17. More than a third said whether swearing was acceptable depended on circumstances. Smaller percentages said it depends on the word or that swearing in general isn’t a big deal. About a quarter of parents admitted that their children use curse words at least occasionally, a number that jumped to 40 percent for teens.

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“Parents are navigating a gray area when it comes to language,” explained Sarah Clark, who co-directed the poll, in a statement. “Many don’t love hearing these words, but they also recognize that context, age, and intent matter.”

Read more: “The Strange Persistence of First Languages”

Children seem to learn most of the profanity they use from friends or classmates rather than parents, according to two-thirds of the parents surveyed. They also learn adult language from popular media, and by listening to adults at home. About a third of parents said social pressure is to blame—that is, their kids swear to fit in. At least, this was the perception for teenagers. For younger kids, parents proposed that their motivation was more linked to attention-seeking or attempts at humor.

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“Swearing can be a form of social currency for kids,” Clark said. “For some, it’s about belonging. For others, it’s about getting a reaction. Understanding the ‘why’ can help parents respond more effectively.”

Clark added that for some kids, swearing could actually be a sign that they need help managing negative emotions. For those parents who do object, worrying that the language is rude or disrespectful was closely linked with feeling that context matters. According to the survey, some parents will say it’s ok when kids swear with their friends, but less so when it happens at school or in public.

Parents of teens are more likely to ignore swearing than parents of younger children. “It can be challenging for parents to maintain a consistent approach to swearing,” Clark said. “Parents should sort through their own attitudes to determine which words and situations will merit a response. Young children may not realize certain terms are inappropriate, so parents may need to explain meaning, context, or social impact to build understanding and empathy.”

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To cut down on swearing, parents say they look in the mirror first. More than half watch their own language at home. But they also limit their kids’ exposure to certain music, movies, or videos and ask others not to swear around their kids. About 20 percent of parents say they go so far as to discourage friendships with kids who curse a lot.

Having a consistent and calm response is more likely to get your kids attention than harsh punishment, the researchers suggest.

And you probably shouldn’t swear at them.

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Lead image: Anastasiia Hevko / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on January 23, 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

Motivation Can Profoundly Shape Your Memories

Different moods may determine what details you remember and how you recall them later

By Kristen French    January 22, 2026

Memory is slippery and mysterious. Some events are indelibly etched into our brains, emerging intact decades later, crucial sensory details flooding our minds unbidden. Other important experiences return to us as atmosphere, the ideas and feelings taking precedence.

Now researchers from the United States and Singapore have shown, across many studies, that certain kinds of motivation can profoundly shape what and how we remember. What you’re motivated to do in the moment changes not only what you remember but the style of memory that gets lodged deep in your psyche. Sometimes you form rich, flexible, web-like memories. Other times, your memories are tightly focused on narrow sets of sensory details.

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Building on recent findings in the field of cognitive neuroscience, the scientists propose that two separate chemical broadcast systems drive these different modes of memory. They published their findings in the Annual Review of Psychology.

“Beyond studying whether motivation helps memory, we investigated how it shapes memory,” said the study author Poh Jia-Hou, a researcher at NUS Medicine in Singapore, in a statement. “Our framework explains that curiosity, stress, deadlines, and rewards result in distinct learning outcomes. This is because each factor induces a different motivational ‘mood’ which in turn modulates how information is processed.”

The scientists described the first of those moods as “interrogative.” This mood helps the brain form flexible memories that connect related ideas, support abstract thinking, and build mental maps for use later. It’s supported by dopamine—a neurotransmitter thought to be involved in reward, movement, mood, and focus—and is linked to a few distinct regions of the brain: the ventral tegmental area, which helps signal what’s motivating or rewarding; the hippocampus, which builds and connects memories; and the prefrontal cortex, which uses those signals and memories to plan, decide, and regulate behavior.

Read more: “The Pasta Theory of Memory & Your Personal Beginning of Time”

The other mood is “imperative,” which is more urgent and high-stakes, dominated by the desire to act. This mood favors goal-directed behavior in the moment and quick processing of sensory information, and can help us remember details relevant to the goal we have in mind. It’s supported by noradrenaline, a neurotransmitter critical for the body’s fight-or-flight stress response, and is associated with activity in the amygdala, the brain’s emotional processing center, as well as sensory systems and parts of the medial temporal lobe that support item or context representations.

“These neuromodulatory systems, dopamine and noradrenaline, act like switches that tune the entire brain for different kinds of learning,” explained R. Alison Adcock, a study author and director at the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience at Duke University. It alters the operating system, Adcock and his colleague write, changing which networks cooperate, which details get noticed and what kind of memory gets inked into storage.

What they found could help us understand why curiosity can improve learning, helping you to remember unrelated information. Why stress can sharpen memory for a single salient thing but shrink attention to peripheral details. And why rewards don’t always support memory, particularly if they dial up the stress to 11.

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The findings could also help educators improve learning environments and help clinicians create better therapies for disorders involving impaired motivation and memory, including depression, schizophrenia, ADHD, dementia, and age-related cognitive decline. “Understanding these switches gives us powerful new levers for designing more effective classrooms and therapies. We hope to help individuals identify these motivational moods and learn to match them to the challenges they face,” said Adcock.

The researchers intend to pursue further experimental work in a few different areas: AI-driven learning technologies that adapt to students’ motivational moods as well as studying how aging affects the relationship between mood and memory. They’re also looking into whether neurofeedback can help tweak the dopamine and noradrenaline systems in ways that might improve memory.

“Our long-term goal is to empower people with the ability to tune their own brains for learning,” said Poh. “By understanding how motivation shapes memory, people can learn to harness urgency to focus learning and support efficient action, or engage their curiosity to prepare for flexibility in an unknown future.”

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Lead image: Jorm Sangsorn / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on January 22, 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

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.

@kareemrahma

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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@zoewrrld

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

♬ Lullaby for Erik – Evgeny Grinko

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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.

Technology

- When Passenger Planes Surpassed the Speed of Sound

- Your Voice Gives Away Valuable Personal Information

- The Quest for the Perfect Lip-Synching Robot

TECHNOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

When Passenger Planes Surpassed the Speed of Sound

We might soon see a revival of these beloved, brisk aircraft in the US

By Molly Glick    January 21, 2026

It was once possible to zip across the pond from New York City to London in under three hours. British Airways set this record in 1996 thanks to the stupendously speedy Concorde, the only successful supersonic passenger plane so far—it reached speeds over 1,300 miles per hour, more than twice the speed of sound. In comparison, today’s quickest commercial jumbo jets can hit around 700 miles per hour at most.

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The jet was developed by various British and French companies in the 1960s, and its first commercial flights took off 50 years ago today. Over the next three decades, Concorde jets whisked passengers around the globe, sometimes in half the time of a normal trip.

It broke records for multiple routes, including Boston to Paris and back in just over six hours in 1974, and in 1995, the jet circled the entire world in under 32 hours.

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HIGH-SPEED REVIVAL: Boom Supersonic wants to bring Concorde-like speeds back to commercial aviation with its Overture aircraft. Image by Boom Supersonic.

Concorde jets owed their mind-blowing speed to powerful turbojet engines that provided 38,000 pounds of thrust—two times more powerful than other large jet engines at the time, allowing the jet to accelerate from zero to 225 miles per hour in just 30 seconds. The plane’s structure, including a triangle-shaped delta wing often used on fighter jets and a skinny passenger cabin, was designed to keep it aloft despite intense drag at such speeds.

This jet also reached dizzying cruising altitudes, between 55,000 and 60,000 feet, where thinner air reduced drag and enabled quick travel. Up there, in fact, passengers could glimpse the Earth’s curvature.

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Flights sat between 92 and 128 passengers, and tickets were far from cheap—round-trip flights cost up to around $10,000 in the 1990s—but their quick turnaround offered an ideal option for the jet-setting elite. Flight crews served ritzy refreshments, including caviar, lobster, and Dom Perignon. One business executive remembers traveling among rock stars like Paul McCartney, Bruce Springsteen, and Sting. Even royalty like Queen Elizabeth and Princess Diana opted for the Concorde on several occasions.

Read more: “Fear in the Cockpit”

Despite its A-list fan club, the Concorde came with a host of issues that ultimately led to its retirement in 2003. For one, the staggering price tag could only attract so many passengers. It also gobbled up to four times more fuel than jumbo jets at the time, making it the least fuel-efficient passenger plane of its era. The jets were also suspected to damage the ozone layer by releasing pollution at high altitudes.

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Adding to these issues, a Concorde jet crashed in Paris in 2000 after a tire hit a piece of sheet metal on the runway. The incident killed 113 people.

The Concorde was loud, too—these jets sent out shockwaves powerful enough to crack windows on the ground below, and some cities sent in noise complaints when a Concorde passed by. One passenger recalled the plane as “extremely noisy.” In 1973, the Federal Aviation Administration effectively banned commercial planes from flying at supersonic speed over the United States, which prevented Concorde routes from traveling inland.

But freakishly fast flights might soon return. The U.S. House Transportation and Infrastructure committee recently passed a bill that would allow civilian supersonic flight over the country, and this past June, President Donald Trump demanded the removal of the FAA restrictions on these planes.

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The regulatory push coincides with a flurry in development of new supersonic planes, including the Overture aircraft from Colorado-based Boom Supersonic. The company’s website notes that it’s received orders from multiple airlines, including United, for which the first commercial flights are slated for 2029.

After more than two decades on the ground, these swift aircraft might soon slice through the skies once again.

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Lead image: SDASM Archives / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on January 21, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

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

- Engineers Build “Bat Accelerator” to Crack Mystery of Stealth Navigation

- How Giant Kangaroos Moved Across Ancient Australia

- The Promiscuous Lives of Beluga Whales

- 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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Engineers Build “Bat Accelerator” to Crack Mystery of Stealth Navigation

Bats demonstrate yet another superpower that robots have yet to master

By Devin Reese    January 26, 2026

The faster you go on a bike or in a car, the more things appear to visually stream past. Your brain synthesizes this “optic flow” to estimate your speed relative to a cognitive map of your surroundings. Bats face an analogous navigation task as they fly through their environments, except they rely on acoustic inputs as they echolocate in the dark. How they synthesize the myriad individual echoes into a coherent perception of speed relative to surroundings has been a mystery.

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A study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B reported evidence that echolocating bats are using acoustic flow to navigate. “As bats fly and emit their calls, echoes return at slightly different rates depending on how close objects are and how fast the bat is flying. This creates a kind of sound flow,” explained study author and University of Bristol sensory biologist Marc Holderied in a statement.

Holderied and his coauthors designed a bat accelerator machine: a conveyor-belt system with 8,000 revolving panels on either side of an eight-meter section of woodland path. The path was known to be a commuting corridor for wild pipistrelle bats (both Pipistrellus pipistrellus and P. pygmaeus) in Bristol. The panels, covered in plastic ivy leaves for a hedge-like acoustic texture, could either rotate in the same or in the opposite direction of bat flight.

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Read more: “Why Bats Are Flying Machines”

The researchers tested a trio of conditions: the panels rotating in the same direction of bat flight, rotating in the opposite direction, or not rotating at all. Over three nights, 104 bats flew the whole length of the panel array. When the panels were rotating in the direction of flight, they flew faster on average. In contrast, when the panels were rotating in the opposite direction, bats flew significantly slower by up to 28 percent.

“We know bats fly swiftly, but we’ve shown that we can make them fly even faster with our corridor of ‘revolving hedges’—our bat accelerator,” concluded study author and aerospace engineer Shane Windsor. The phenomenon is a spin on the principle of Doppler shift, wherein the bats are using motion-induced changes in echo frequency to regulate their flight. Because the effect was the strongest as bats approached the fake hedge rows, they’re likely interpreting echoes from several meters ahead of their flight path.

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The experimental results demonstrated that bats rely on acoustic flow for speed control, which may serve them in navigation. Compared to sonar-based robots that perform poorly as soon as you add clutter to their paths, bats can apparently use Doppler information to estimate their self-motion.

Robots, eat your hearts out.

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Lead image: Rudmer Zwerver / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on January 26, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Giant Kangaroos Moved Across Ancient Australia

Structure of fossil foot and ankle bones was robust enough for occasional hopping

By Devin Reese    January 22, 2026

Ancient kangaroos were huge. A modern kangaroo maxes out at 200 pounds, while some of their forebearers were as massive as 550 pounds. Given their size, paleontologists have analyzed whether the ancestors would have hopped in classic modern kangaroo style. The consensus from studies that have extrapolated body scaling proportions of modern kangaroos to ancient ones has been that their ankle and foot anatomy didn’t offer sufficient strength to propel their weight into a hop.

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But a study published today in Scientific Reports finds otherwise—their hind limbs were robust enough to support hopping. Post-doctoral student Megan Jones and colleagues at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom analyzed the rear limbs of 94 modern and 40 fossil kangaroos and wallabies. Collectively, they comprised 63 species, including the several major extinct lineages of huge Pleistocene kangaroos, such as Protemnodon sp. that inhabited Australia and New Guinea until they went extinct about 40,000 years ago.

For each species, they measured hind-limb bone lengths and diameter of the fourth toe, which is extra-long, thought to be an adaptation for hopping. Estimates of body weight were either taken from other published studies or deduced from the bone anatomy. Then, by calculating the minimum size of the tendon required to withstand the forces of hopping without rupturing, they determined whether each species’ heel and ankle bone structure could support such a tendon.

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Read more: “What Happened to Ancient Megafauna?”

The results found that the hind limbs of all kangaroos, including the giant ones, were sufficiently robust for hopping. Contrary to earlier studies that deemed giant kangaroo hopping impossible above a weight of about 350 pounds, this study didn’t identify any strict physical limitations that would preclude it. The long metatarsals were strong enough to resist the bending movements that happen during hopping, and the ankle bones were stout enough for insertion of the tendons required to provide resistance during hopping.

That said, efficiency is an important consideration in the movement of wild animals. While hopping was possible, it likely wasn’t efficient for the biggest kangaroos. Hopping locomotion relies on the elasticity of tendons that store and release energy. The thicker tendons of giant kangaroos would have been less stretchy and, therefore, not able to store and return as much energy during hopping. The study authors hypothesize that ancient kangaroos hopped periodically as needed—for example to get away from predators.

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After all, Pleistocene giant kangaroos faced hyper-carnivore predators like “marsupial lions” (Thylacoleo carnifex), whose tooth marks have been found on giant kangaroo bones. Even the huge eagles of the time, such as the wedge-tailed eagle (Aquila Audax), might have gone after kangaroos.

So, hopping, even if it couldn’t be sustained in massive Pleistocene kangaroos, could have provided short bursts of movement for emergency escapes. “While hopping may not have been their primary mode of locomotion,” wrote the researchers, “our findings suggest that it may have formed part of a broader locomotor repertoire, for example for short bursts of speed.”

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Lead image: Nobu Tamura / Wikimedia Commons

Devin Reese

Posted on January 22, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Promiscuous Lives of Beluga Whales

A peek into their private lives reveals mate-switching from season to season

By Devin Reese    January 21, 2026

Belugas and other toothed whales such as dolphins are known to live in stable pods, typically ruled by an older matriarch. How the dynamics of reproduction play out in belugas (Delphinapterus leucas), however, has been difficult to ascertain. They inhabit high northern habitats that are often ice-bound, making for chilly, challenging behavior observations.

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In a study published today in Frontiers in Marine Science, wildlife biologists from Florida Atlantic University and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game used genetic tools to uncover the mating habits of wild beluga whales. The team genetically profiled skin samples collected over 13 years from 623 beluga whales inhabiting Bristol Bay, Alaska, in collaboration with local Indigenous communities. In this remote population of about 2,000 whales, movements away from the pod, and therefore genetic exchange, are rare. And so, the genetic profiles should reveal within-population mating dynamics.

The study authors expected to find that males were competing heavily for mates and mating with multiple females, in a polygynous system. Beluga males provide little parental care, and the extreme sexual dimorphism—with males heavier and up to 25 percent longer than females—usually indicates a species with males vying for choosy females.

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Read more: “Overthrowing the Patriarchy Through Ecstatic Sex”

The results showed that father belugas had significantly more calves, on average, than mothers, reflecting their lower investment per offspring. However, both males and females were polygamous, associating with multiple mates across distinct breeding seasons. Most of the calf siblings detected in the genetic data were half-siblings that shared only one parent, rather than the full siblings that you’d see if a whale pair reproduced more than once.

The researchers hypothesize that the long reproductive lives of belugas, whose lifespan may exceed 100 years, reduce the selective pressure for competition between the sexes thanks to the ample mating opportunities over time. “Rather than competing intensely in a single season, males appear to play the long game, spreading their reproductive efforts over many years. It appears to be a ‘take your time, there’s plenty of fish in the sea’ strategy,” explained study author Greg O-Corry-Crowe in a statement.

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As for the females, their mate switching between breeding seasons could spread out their risks of poor choices. If they unwittingly mate with a low-quality male, they’ll still have other opportunities to produce healthy offspring with other males.

The population outcome of all this mate swapping was lower levels of inbreeding than expected, ensuring higher levels of genetic diversity. “Polygynandry across breeding seasons leads to long, loose-chain pedigrees that can lower inbreeding and maintain diversity, even in populations with small [size],” concluded the study authors in the paper.

The mating dynamics may be a strategic way to keep mixing it up in a small, isolated group.

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Lead image: Matthias Brix / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on January 21, 2026

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

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.

Table of Contents

Nautilus: 2026 Jan 26

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