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Astronomy

- The Many Myths of the Blood Moon

- Did We Just See a Black Hole Explode?

- The Farm Boy Who Found Pluto

- Grad Student Homebrews Cosmic Dust in the Lab

- The Geomagnetic Storm That Sparked Panic Across a Continent

- Ann Druyan on How NASA’s Golden Records Got Made

- Why Astronauts Quarantine Before—But Not After—Space Missions

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Many Myths of the Blood Moon

What people throughout the world and across time have made of lunar eclipses

By Molly Glick    February 6, 2026

Next month, the blood moon will show its copper-toned face to about a third of the world, including North America.

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This spooky nickname refers to a total lunar eclipse, when the Earth travels directly between the sun and moon. That cosmic alignment is visible around every 2.5 years from a given spot on our planet, and the next one will arrive on March 3.

We glimpse this eerie red glow because Earth’s shadow, known as the umbra, prevents most sunlight from illuminating the moon’s surface. The light that makes it there gets filtered through the Earth’s atmosphere. Colors with shorter wavelengths, like blues and violets, tend to scatter, while colors with longer wavelengths, including red and orange, reach the moon. This is the same phenomenon that gives our planet’s sunrises and sunsets their fiery hues. “It’s as if all of the world’s sunrises and sunsets are projected onto the moon,” according to NASA.

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BLOOD MOON INCOMING: A map of the spots where the lunar eclipse will be visible on March 3. Image by NASA.

The exact color visible during the eclipse depends on the conditions of the atmosphere at the time, and it can be influenced by things like pollution, wildfires, and volcanic ash from Earth.

Long before we understood the reason for the moon’s occasional bloody appearance, people spun all sorts of stories to account for it—few of which were positive. In many ancient cultures, it signified that “things that shouldn’t be happening are happening.” E. C. Krupp, director of the Griffith Observatory in California, told National Geographic back in 2014.

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In ancient Mesopotamia, home to one of the world’s earliest civilizations, people saw a lunar eclipse as a threat to the king. Mesopotamians made detailed astronomical observations and were able to pinpoint when lunar eclipses would take place. This gave them ample time to plan. During the celestial event, they swapped him with a substitute while the real king hid in safety.

Read more: “The Real Landscapes of the Great Flood Myths”

To the Inca people of what’s now South America, the total lunar eclipse indicated that a jaguar had gobbled up the moon. They worried it would arrive on Earth and consume people, too. The Inca fended off the feisty cat by encouraging their dogs to howl and shaking spears at the moon.

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Hindu stories also feature the moon on a villain’s menu. Some of these folktales claim that eclipses occur thanks to the demon Rahu, who consumed an elixir that enabled him to live forever. Shortly after, the moon and sun cut off his head. His immortal noggin pursued them in order to eat them, and eclipses occur whenever he’s able to grab and feast on them. “Since his head was cut off, the sun or moon just falls out the hole where his neck used to be,” according to an article in the Library of Congress.

Other moon-eating tales have come from China and Korea, where dogs are seen as the culprit.

Christianity also offers unique perspectives on the blood moon. During the First Crusade, for instance, at the end of the 11th century A.D., historian Albert of Aachen claimed that the crusaders saw a blood moon on their way to Jerusalem. “Those who had knowledge about the eclipse as a signal of God’s will, Albert tells us, comforted the fearful,” historian Beth Spacey wrote for The Conversation.

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Albert thought that lunar eclipses portended the downfall of their enemies, while some other Christian scholars from around that time urged people not to get carried away with woo-woo explanations. After all, it was already known by this time that they occur when the Earth blocks the moon. Far more recently, in 2014, some Christians saw a series of blood moons as a sign of Jesus’ return.

Whatever meaning you associate with the lunar eclipse, you can see it most clearly by moving away from bright lights. You can peer through a telescope or binoculars as well for a closer look. Check out the best times to view the eclipse near you on timeanddate.com.

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Lead image: Yathumon M A / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on February 6, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Did We Just See a Black Hole Explode?

An “impossible” neutrino detected by an underwater telescope could be the key

By Jake Currie    February 5, 2026

In 2023, a neutrino telescope submerged deep in the Mediterranean Sea struck quantum gold, detecting a neutrino with 100,000 times more energy than even the Large Hadron Collider, Earth’s most powerful particle accelerator, can produce. Put simply, it seemed to be an impossible event. Now, physicists from the University of Massachusetts Amherst think this particle may be evidence of an explosion from a black hole that originated at the beginning of time.

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Ordinary black holes are created when old stars collapse and die, but Stephen Hawking theorized that another type of black hole could have originated shortly after the Big Bang, before stars existed. Called “primordial black holes” (PBHs), these cosmic dinosaurs would have formed from pockets of subatomic material densely packed together when the universe was in its infancy.

PBHs are thought to be smaller and lighter than ordinary black holes, and able to emit radiation that could eventually lead to an explosion.

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“The lighter a black hole is, the hotter it should be and the more particles it will emit,” Andrea Thamm, co-author of the new research published in Physical Review Letters, explained in a statement. “As PBHs evaporate, they become ever lighter, and so hotter, emitting even more radiation in a runaway process until explosion. It’s that Hawking radiation that our telescopes can detect.”

Read more: “The Black Sheep of Black Holes”

Observing such an explosion could unlock secrets of the universe. Like cracking a cosmic piñata, an exploding PBH would reveal every subatomic particle in existence, including those that have only existed in theory, like dark matter and energy.

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So was the superneutrino of 2023 a remnant from a PBH explosion?

Unfortunately, there was a bit of a complication. A second neutrino telescope, IceCube, buried in ice at the South Pole, failed to detect any highly charged neutrinos or even anything close to them. If, as the UMass Amherst team theorized earlier, PBH explosions occur frequently in the universe, why hasn’t IceCube detected them?

“We think that PBHs with a ‘dark charge’—what we call quasi-extremal PBHs—are the missing link,” study co-author Joaquim Iguaz Juan said. This “dark charge” is basically the same as the electrical force, but instead of a regular electron, it’s carried by a heavier, theoretical particle the team calls a “dark electron.”

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“There are other, simpler models of PBHs out there,” study co-author Michael Baker added. “Our dark-charge model is more complex, which means it may provide a more accurate model of reality. What’s so cool is to see that our model can explain this otherwise unexplainable phenomenon.”

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Lead image: NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center

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Jake Currie

Posted on February 5, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Farm Boy Who Found Pluto

Despite its demotion from planet status, the tiny but mighty world still captivates scientists

By Molly Glick    February 4, 2026

Nearly a century ago, a young amateur astronomer from humble beginnings made his mark on cosmic history by discovering Pluto—though he didn’t live to learn of its shifting legacy.

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Clyde Tombaugh, who was born on this day in 1906, grew up on a farm in Kansas and was captivated by sights of the moon and Saturn through his uncle’s small telescope. By the time he was 20, he started building his own.

He sent his sketches of Mars and Jupiter to Vesto Slipher, director of the Lowell Observatory in Arizona. Slipher enlisted Tombaugh with the mission of hunting down “Planet X,” a mysterious world thought to explain odd features of the orbits of Neptune and Uranus. This planet was predicted to have a similar mass to Neptune’s, orbiting the sun somewhere beyond that giant world.

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A WHOLE NEW WORLD: The plates captured by Tombaugh that led to Pluto’s discovery. Image by Clyde Tombaugh / Wikimedia Commons.

The elusive planet was proposed by astronomer Percival Lowell, who had some out-of-this-world ideas. He initially claimed that a network of canals on Mars pointed to alien life, prompting him to build the Lowell Observatory. But after failing to prove this theory, he shifted his focus to Planet X. Lowell died in 1916, a year after Slipher became assistant director of the observatory. He stepped in as the director a decade later.

Tombaugh arrived at Lowell Observatory in 1929 and started off by capturing images of possible real estate for Planet X on glass photographic plates. In each spot of the sky, he took two photos a few days apart—a possible planet would travel within the frame in this period, enabling direct comparison. In February 1930, he noticed that an object shifted about 3 millimeters between two exposures. He estimated that this object’s orbit fell outside of Nepune’s, aligning with Lowell’s hypothesis.

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The observatory proclaimed this finding to the public a month later. The newly unveiled world received the name Pluto, as suggested by 11-year-old Venetia Burney Phair from England. The moniker references the Roman god of the underworld, whose helmet gave him the power of invisibility.

Read more: “The Carouser and the Great Astronomer”

Around that time, some scientists had their doubts. Astronomer Ernest W. Brown called Tombaugh’s finding “purely accidental.” No telescope at the time could resolve Pluto as a disk, which was possible for all other planets. This hinted that Pluto was quite petite.

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Pluto’s precise size wasn’t pinned down until 1978, when astronomer James Christy found its moon, which he named Charon. It turned out that Pluto’s mass is around two-tenths of a percent of Earth’s, far too tiny to warp Neptune’s orbit. In fact, Pluto is only about half as wide as the United States.

Pluto’s fall from grace arrived in 2006, when the International Astronomical Union adjusted its definition of a planet. The new meaning required an object to circle a star, for example, and to have knocked other debris out of its orbit—this specific factor stripped Pluto of its planet title.

Tombaugh never learned of this news, as he died in 1997, but after his Pluto revelation, he continued his career in astronomy. He went on to discover hundreds of stars and asteroids, along with two comets. Tombaugh also reported UFO sightings on multiple occasions.

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In the same year that Pluto got demoted, NASA launched some of Tombaugh’s ashes into the stars aboard the New Horizons probe. This enabled Tombaugh to finally reach Pluto, in a sense, in 2015, when the probe became the first spacecraft to peer at Pluto up close.

The intimate encounter revealed intriguing details about the dwarf planet, like nitrogen glaciers and hints of volcanic activity that could help scientists better understand other distant, icy worlds.

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Lead image: NASA

Molly Glick

Posted on February 4, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Grad Student Homebrews Cosmic Dust in the Lab

“It’s like we have recreated a little bit of the universe in a bottle in our lab”

By Jake Currie    February 3, 2026

In outer space, floating between the stars, are cosmic dust clouds containing elements and molecules that are essential for the evolution of life. While these dust clouds are too far away to sample by conventional means, astronomers can tell their chemical composition based on their unique infrared signature. Unfortunately, the only way to get a close-up look at interstellar matter is by waiting for a chunk of it to crash to Earth.

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Or at least it was.

SPACE DUST ENGINEERS: Linda Losurdo, (left) and her Ph.D. advisor, David McKenzie, recently recreated cosmic dust in an Earth-bound lab. Photo by Fiona Wolf / the University of Sydney.

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Linda Losurdo, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Sydney in Australia, recently took matters into her own hands and recreated cosmic dust right in the lab. To replicate the conditions found in clouds of space dust, she created a near vacuum in a chamber, added carbon dioxide, nitrogen, and acetylene to it, and passed 10,000 volts of electricity through the mix to simulate plasma found in supernova remnants.

The process broke down the chemical compounds, forming new elements—carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, and nitrogen—essential components for life. The newly minted homebrew space dust settled in a thin layer on a silicon chip inside the chamber. She published her findings with her supervisor, David McKenzie, in The Astrophysical Journal.

Read more: “How to Build a Planet from Dust”

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“We no longer have to wait for an asteroid or comet to come to Earth to understand their histories,” Losurdo explained in a statement. “You can build analogue environments in the laboratory and reverse engineer their structure using the infrared fingerprints.”

Next, Losurdo and McKenzie want to build a comprehensive database detailing the infrared signatures of lab-created cosmic dust to allow astronomers to work backward from their observations of interstellar clouds and better understand the processes that originated them. Ultimately, their insights could give scientists a better understanding of how life evolved on Earth.

Talk about capturing lightning in a bottle.

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Lead image: klyaksun / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 3, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Geomagnetic Storm That Sparked Panic Across a Continent

And how it would affect us now

By Molly Glick    February 2, 2026

Our star has sent out a series of intense flares over the past day, including the strongest of the year so far. This bombardment arrived thanks to a quickly expanding sunspot that spaceweather.com called “a solar flare factory.” One of the flares, which fell into the most powerful “X” category, sparked radio blackouts in parts of the South Pacific.

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In case you haven’t noticed, the sun has wreaked some chaotic space weather recently. In November, our star burped out several X-class solar flares, along with clouds of plasma and magnetic field known as coronal mass ejections. This prompted a dramatic geomagnetic storm that painted stunning auroras in skies around the globe, including displays seen as far south as Florida.

It was no isolated incident: We’ve witnessed some wild space weather over the past few years as solar activity climbed to its estimated peak in 2024. Now, it’s currently following a downhill trend. Around every 11 years, the sun’s magnetic poles flip halfway through its stretch of maximum activity. During this peak, astronomers observe the most sunspots—freckles that form due to a concentration of magnetic field lines. This solar hubbub can result in more coronal mass ejections, which may mess with infrastructure on Earth such as satellite electronics, GPS signals, and electrical power grids.

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SOLAR RAUCOUS: A composite image combining six X-class solar flares from November 2025. Credit: NASA/SDO/Scott Wiessinger.

The November event pales in comparison with the strongest geomagnetic storm on record, which was coincidentally associated with the first solar flare ever documented. On the morning of Sept. 1, 1859, amateur astronomer Richard Carrington peeked through his telescope in Surrey, England, and drew a group of sunspots. Suddenly, he observed “two patches of intensely bright and white light” emerge from the spots—these are now recognized as a flare that hurtled electrified gas and subatomic particles toward our planet.

That evening, vibrant auroras illuminated the night sky in North America and reached as far as Cuba and Chile. It was so bright that confused gold miners in the Rocky Mountains got out of bed and made coffee and breakfast at 1 a.m. At around that time in Boston, The New York Times reported, “ordinary print could be read by the light.”

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Read more: “The Safety Belt of Our Solar System”

This geomagnetic storm interfered with telegraph communications around the globe. Sparks reportedly leapt from telegraph machines, shocking operators. In Boston, employees of the American Telegraph Company discovered that they could harness auroral current to transmit messages to Portland, Maine, without the need for batteries.

Some people thought they were witnessing the end of the world—or at the very least a nearby fire—but they were actually experiencing the aftermath of a solar flare with the force of 10 billion atomic bombs.

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“For observers of the 1859 solar storm, the blood-red displays of the aurora borealis were both beautiful and threatening, a form of contaminating cosmic fire capable of altering day-to-day experience,” wrote Kate Neilsen, then an English Ph.D. student at Boston University, in 2017. Solar phenomena like this storm “brought attention to the unnerving power of the sun to disrupt human activity,” she explained.

At the time, Carrington hypothesized that the solar flare he glimpsed was linked to the geomagnetic storm, but it took more than a century for researchers to discover coronal mass ejections—which typically accompany flares—through direct observation.

Today, scientists know that such an intense geomagnetic storm only occurs about once every 500 years. If a storm of this magnitude were to happen now, blackouts could impact entire regions of the United States and persist for weeks, if not longer. The Midwest and East would likely be most vulnerable, according to a paper published this past October, due to the bedrock beneath these areas that’s more exposed to charged geoelectric fields.

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Thankfully, we now have advanced notice before huge solar storms hit. Multiple satellites, including the Deep Space Climate Observatory operated by NASA and NOAA, keep an eye on solar wind to allow us to prepare for these extraterrestrial interruptions—a luxury not afforded to horrified onlookers more than a century ago.

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Lead image: NASA/SDO

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Molly Glick

Posted on February 2, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Ann Druyan on How NASA’s Golden Records Got Made

A comic about humanity’s love letter to interstellar space

By Mikael Angelo Francisco    January 28, 2026

If there are other life forms across the cosmos, how could we possibly communicate with them? More importantly, what should we say? In 1977, NASA launched twin probes Voyager 1 and 2 on a mission to collect data from the most distant planets in our solar system. In each spacecraft, scientists embedded a special passenger: one of two identical copies of the Golden Record, a 12-inch golden plated copper audio-visual disk, designed to survive the harsh conditions of prolonged space travel.

NASA’s Voyager Golden Record team, led by Carl Sagan, meticulously curated the cosmic time capsule’s contents: 115 images depicting Earthly life and culture, sounds from nature, such as thunder and whale song, a 90-minute compilation track of music clips from the 20th century, and greetings in 55 languages. Ann Druyan, a science writer and documentary producer and director, served as the creative director on the project. But how did she and her team determine what made the cut and what didn’t—a responsibility that, for such a momentous undertaking, could not have been easy? Druyan, who went on to co-write the PBS documentary series Cosmos and to marry its host Sagan, sheds light on humanity’s space-faring message to the universe—and what it says about us.

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Mikael Angelo Francisco

Posted on January 28, 2026

Mikael Angelo Francisco is a science journalist and illustrator from the Philippines who enjoys writing about paleontology, biodiversity, environment conservation, and science in pop culture. He has written and edited books about media literacy, Filipino scientists, and science trivia.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Why Astronauts Quarantine Before—But Not After—Space Missions

Post-flight isolation ended decades ago when scientists no longer feared moon-derived diseases

By Molly Glick    January 27, 2026

Last week, the first astronauts planning to orbit the moon in more than half a century entered quarantine ahead of their much-awaited mission, which is slated to launch as early as February 6.

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The Artemis II crew is currently isolated in Houston, a measure to ensure they don’t get sick before blasting off. This is a standard NASA procedure within the agency’s health stabilization program, which has been used since the Apollo 14 mission to the moon in 1971.

It’s important to ensure astronauts are in tip-top shape so that the launch doesn’t get delayed, and to avoid symptoms cropping up during flight. In the lead-up to early Apollo missions and during flight, for example, astronauts came down with conditions including upper respiratory infections and viral gastroenteritis, but the health stabilization program led to “noticeable reduction in illness” when it was implemented in Apollo 14 and the following missions.

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RELAXING IN QUARANTINE: Apollo 11 astronauts (left to right) Michael Collins, Edwin E. Aldrin Jr., and Neil A. Armstrong chill in isolation in a repurposed Airstream after returning to Earth. Photo by NASA.

Around six days before the launch, the Artemis II team will head to the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where they’ll bunk up in the astronaut crew quarters and continue quarantining while they train for the mission. The astronauts are permitted to maintain contact with friends, family, and colleagues who follow quarantine guidelines. They’ll also wear masks, stay out of public places, and keep their distance from others.

Once the Artemis II crew returns to Earth after orbiting the moon—and potentially venturing farther in space than any previous astronauts—they’ll return home. But this wasn’t always the case: During several Apollo missions, NASA required astronauts to quarantine for three weeks after they touched back down on Earth. Equipment, lunar samples, and spacecraft were also isolated following flights.

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That’s because scientists weren’t sure what sort of life may exist on the moon. They thought that astronauts might come into contact with strange lunar microbes, sparking the spread of some sort of moon-derived disease on our planet. Still, they suspected that these quarantines could probably only, at best, slow the spread of such tiny organisms while they worked on a plan to stop them in their tracks and prevent global disaster.

While the agency spent millions of dollars on a high-tech quarantine facility, which they traveled to from splash-down in a converted Airstream trailer, it “ended up being an example of planetary protection security theater,” Jordan Bimm, a historian of science at the University of Chicago, told The New York Times back in 2023.

This practice ended by the time of the Apollo 15 mission in 1971, when NASA felt confident enough that the crew’s return wouldn’t pose an existential threat to our planet.

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Read more: “The Most Dangerous Job on Earth”

Nowadays, the focus has shifted to medical emergencies that can arise in space, which can prove quite stressful. Earlier this month, NASA abruptly ended a mission at the International Space Station due to a medical incident that required the use of an ultrasound onboard—the first such evacuation from the ISS. The agency didn’t offer any specific details on the astronaut’s health condition.

In addition to rigorous medical screening and quarantining before missions, NASA plans for health emergencies that arise in space. Crews receive medical training before flights, including CPR, first aid, and ways to treat decompression sickness that can result from space walks—also known as the “bends,” which affects scuba divers as well if they ascend too quickly in the water. NASA prepares crews for the event of a death onboard, too.

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During Artemis II and upcoming NASA missions over the next decade, astronauts will participate in experiments to illuminate spaceflight’s impacts on human health in the long term. For example, they’ll contribute saliva and blood samples to reveal how space radiation and microgravity affect the body. Such insights are critical as we prepare for longer space missions in the future, including possible journeys to Mars—but we’ll need to start by sending people back to lunar soil. That milestone is expected during NASA’s Artemis III mission, which is slated to blast off by 2028.

Of course, the members of that crew will only be able to go for their moonwalk if they’re feeling their best.

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Lead image: JSC / NASA

Molly Glick

Posted on January 27, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Communication

- Can We Protect Science?

COMMUNICATION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Can We Protect Science?

It was a burning question at the World Economic Forum last week

By John Steele    January 28, 2026

The question was asked in the cold alpine air of Davos, Switzerland, where ideas are often spoken with confidence and the future is treated as something that can be managed. Can we protect science? It sounded, at first, like a question of defense, as if science were a vulnerable possession, something that might be damaged or lost if not carefully guarded. Yet as the conversation (preserved on video) unfolded last week at the World Economic Forum annual meeting, the question revealed itself to be something else entirely. It was not science that was uncertain, but our understanding of what science is, and why it matters.

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Science, Magdalena Skipper, editor-in-chief of Nature, reminded the room, is so deeply embedded in modern life that it has become almost invisible. We read by artificial light, travel vast distances in hours, and survive illnesses that once ended lives abruptly. These are not miracles; they are consequences of patient inquiry, of experiment, of error corrected by evidence. And yet, she observed, while scientists remain among the most trusted individuals in society, trust in science as a collective enterprise has begun to fray. We live within its achievements, yet increasingly question its authority.

Oceanographer Sylvia Earle responded by returning the discussion to its human origins. Scientists, she said, “are basically kids who never grew up, never stopped asking questions.” Every child begins life with an unembarrassed curiosity. “They want to know who, what, why, where, how, everything. What’s this world about?” Science is not the invention of elites; it is the discipline of a universal instinct. If science now appears distant or inaccessible, it is not because curiosity has vanished, but because language and institutions have sometimes obscured its roots.

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THE KID IN SCIENTISTS: At the World Economic Forum this month, pioneering oceanographer Sylvia Earle remarked that scientists “are basically kids who never grew up, never stopped asking questions. They want to know who, what, why, where, how, everything. What’s this world about?” Video courtesy of WEF.

Earle’s optimism was tempered by perspective. Children today grow up knowing truths that were inaccessible even to the most brilliant minds of the past. Einstein never saw the Earth from space. He never knew the molecular machinery of life. Yet this expansion of knowledge has not brought certainty. It has revealed the scale of our ignorance. “What we’ve learned,” Earle said, “is the magnitude of what we don’t know.” We have mapped only a fraction of the ocean floor; every descent into the deep uncovers new forms of life and unfamiliar systems. Knowledge does not close the book on mystery. It opens it wider.

From the ocean’s depths, the conversation turned inward, to the human body. Daniel Skovronsky, chief scientific and product officer at Eli Lilly spoke of recent medical advances with restraint rather than triumph. “Three years ago,” he said, “we didn’t have medicines that could effectively treat obesity. Today, for most people, we can offer a life without obesity.” Gene therapies now allow children born deaf to hear their parents’ voices. New treatments can slow, and perhaps one day prevent, neurodegenerative disease. These are not promises. They are outcomes.

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Yet Skovronsky insisted that science does not earn trust through certainty. It earns trust through honesty. “There are always unknowns in science,” he said, and pretending otherwise corrodes credibility. Science does not proceed by proclamation; it proceeds by evidence tested and retested, by conclusions held provisionally and revised when necessary. When science is presented as infallible, disappointment is inevitable. When it is presented as a method, grounded in humility, trust has a chance to endure.

Science is not the invention of elites; it is the discipline of a universal instinct.

That sense of science as a living process ran quietly through the room. From the perspective of those who fund discovery long before its usefulness is clear. The president of the European Research Council, Maria Leptin, spoke of freedom as the essential condition of knowledge. “Research of this kind requires freedom,” she said. “Freedom to ask any question, freedom to pursue that question.” Fundamental research rarely aligns with political cycles or economic forecasts. Its value often becomes visible only years, even decades, later. The most transformative ideas begin as curiosities, pursued for no reason other than the desire to understand.

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Freedom, she argued, is not only the absence of censorship. It is also time, trust, and patience. Short funding cycles, constant reporting, and narrow definitions of impact can quietly suffocate originality. “Frontier research is bloody difficult,” she said. Experiments fail. Results resist replication. Reality proves more complex than expectation. This difficulty is not a flaw in science; it is the terrain through which science advances.

Concerns about credibility, reproducibility, publication bias, the pressure to publish, were not ignored. They were placed in context. Science contains within itself the means of correction. Errors are uncovered because work is exposed to scrutiny. Openness is not a weakness; it is the system’s immune response. A culture willing to examine its own failures is not in crisis. It is alive.

From outside the traditional structures of science, Alexi Robichaux, the CEO of the digital coaching and human transformation platform BetterUp, offered a perspective shaped by behavioral research. Science, he suggested, is one of the few human institutions designed to revise itself. Other systems—political, ideological, cultural—often persist in error because admitting mistake carries too high a cost. Science advances because it allows itself to be wrong. Its strength lies not in certainty, but in correction.

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A culture willing to examine its own failures is not in crisis. It is alive.

This strength, however, is easily misunderstood. To those unfamiliar with the scientific method, changing conclusions can look like inconsistency or failure. What is often missing is connection. Trust depends not only on competence and integrity, but on the sense that knowledge is offered in service, not imposed from above. Science must be communicated not as decree, but as dialogue.

Artificial intelligence entered the discussion not as a threat, but as a reminder. New tools can accelerate discovery, sift patterns from vast datasets, and extend human reach. But tools do not choose meaning. They do not ask why. “We’re going to need humans,” Skovronsky said, “to point it at the right questions and understand the answers.” Technology amplifies inquiry; it does not replace judgment.

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By the end of the session, the original question had quietly transformed. Science does not need protection in the way borders or monuments do. It cannot be preserved by decree or defended by force. It survives because it answers something elemental in us. Like the title of Paul Gauguin’s famous painting, Where Do We Come From? What are we? Where Are We Going?

To protect science is not to shield it from doubt or disagreement, but to defend the conditions that allow it to flourish, freedom of inquiry, openness to correction, patience with uncertainty, and humility before the unknown. As Earle said with disarming clarity, “Knowing is the key to caring.” The real danger is not that science will disappear, but that we will forget how to listen to it, and in doing so, forget something essential about ourselves.

Lead image: Triff / Shutterstock

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John Steele

Posted on January 28, 2026

John Steele is the publisher and editorial director of Nautilus.

Environment

- Why Teflon Is Losing Its Sticking Power

- Let There Be Dark

- What Sets Off Bomb Cyclones

- Can Morality Survive Climate Collapse?

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Why Teflon Is Losing Its Sticking Power

The substance that revolutionized cookware and helped build the atomic bomb is facing a reckoning

By Molly Glick    February 5, 2026

The same substance that makes for stress-free stir-fries also played a crucial role in the Manhattan Project.

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The inventor of polytetrafluoroethylene (PTFE), which you likely know as Teflon, received a patent this week in 1941 for his revolutionary creation.

Chemist Roy Plunkett discovered PTFE by accident: In 1938, he was developing new refrigerants for the chemical company DuPont—at the time, common yet often toxic refrigerants had a bad habit of blowing up or leaking into homes, putting people at serious risk.

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At DuPont’s Jackson Laboratory in New Jersey, Plunkett and technician Jack Rebok were tinkering with tetrafluoroethylene gas as an alternative, which they kept in frosty canisters. One morning, they found that this gas had disappeared from a canister—but they did find a mysterious white powder inside.

It turns out that the iron inside the canister had prompted the gas to transform into a solid substance known as PTFE. Plunkett started experimenting with this curious material, and noticed that it stayed intact at sizzling temperatures, and even super powerful acids capable of breaking down human bones failed to destroy it.

KITCHEN INNOVATION: An ad for the first Teflon pan sold to U.S. consumers. Image by trozzolo / Wikimedia Commons.

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That said, PTFE didn’t see its day in the sun until around 1942, when it served as a key ingredient for the Manhattan Project’s success. At a government facility in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, that refined the uranium required to build the atomic bomb, the uranium hexafluoride used in this process kept degrading the valve seals and gaskets that it traveled through.

It isn’t clear how exactly PTFE landed in this facility, but plenty of DuPont employees were working at a nearby plant that refined plutonium. Ultimately, PTFE guarded the Oak Ridge uranium plant’s pipes for decades.

PTFE began its trajectory to our kitchens in 1945, when the Teflon trademark was registered by Kinetic Chemicals, a collaboration between DuPont and General Motors. Not long after, Kinetic Chemicals began churning out more than 2 million pounds of Teflon per year. New versions of PTFE soon emerged that were easier to mold or extrude, and its commercial appeal continued to grow. In 1961, the first Teflon-coated skillet, known as the Happy Pan, hit the U.S. market.

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

Later that decade, Wilbert and Bob Gore invented a waterproof fabric that incorporated a type of PTFE—today, Gore-Tex is found in many hiking boots and raincoats. You can also find PTFE in plenty of other products these days, including makeup, medical equipment, kitchen appliances, sofas, and dental floss.

PTFE prompted the development of a massive family of chemicals known as per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS. They have long proven valuable because they tend to repeal water, heat, and grease, and are super tough. Their extraordinary durability owes to their carbon-fluorine bonds, which are some of the strongest known in chemistry.

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These remarkably tight bonds ensure that PFAS linger in the environment, and these chemicals can make their way into our bodies through air, soil, water, and food, among other avenues. Today, nearly all people in the U.S. have PFAS in their blood, and these substances have also been found in the placenta, brain, and lungs.

Scientists haven’t yet made definitive links between PFAS and health issues, but research suggests that exposure can weaken our immune systems and increase the risk of conditions such as cancer, liver disease, and birth defects.

The Trump administration has recently launched an attack on federal regulations limiting PFAS concentrations in drinking water. But states passed a flurry of bans on PFAS in consumer products last year, and some companies have voluntarily phased out certain substances.

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As evidence piles up against Teflon and other forever chemicals, more people are ditching nonstick pans and increasingly opting for stainless steel, ceramic, and cast iron cookware. While the upkeep may prove more of a headache, it appears that home cooks are keeping their health in mind.

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Lead image: santima.studio / Shutterstock

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Molly Glick

Posted on February 5, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Let There Be Dark

To unleash your imagination, step out of the light

By Regan Penaluna    February 3, 2026

Walking from the RV campground to the village restaurant in the Grand Canyon National Park this winter wouldn’t have been my first choice. But the RV my family had rented wasn’t permitted in the village, and my teenage daughter and I reasoned that it would be better to walk rather than wait 15 minutes for the bus in the cold like the rest of our family. Not long after we started out, I declared we’d made a mistake. The night was pitch black and the sidewalk soon gave way to a ditch where I tripped over dried grasses and fallen branches. I cursed the lack of streetlights.

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I would soon take this all back. Lack of light, especially in our wild places, should be something we cherish. Darkness is good for us.

The next morning, I set out on my own to walk along the canyon’s South Rim when I came across a plaque stating that the Grand Canyon was an “International Dark Sky Park.” It’s one of the few regions in the world where there is so little artificial light that when the Milky Way peeks above the horizon, its brilliance can be mistaken for dawn. A nonprofit called DarkSky based in Tucson, Arizona, certifies places such as parks, urban spaces, and wild sanctuaries, committed to night sky conservation. Grand Canyon National Park is one of 139 parks throughout the world, including the Bükk National Park in Hungary and the Iriomote-Ishigaki National Park in Japan, that have the organization’s stamp of approval.

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DarkSky requires that parks use minimal outdoor lighting and softly lit lamps whose beams only point down. In addition, their skies must achieve a magnitude of darkness after nightfall that approaches a visual-band zenith luminance of 22 magnitudes per square arcsecond. Yet such pristinely inky black places are hard to come by since Thomas Edison ruined everything.

Light pollution has increased worldwide nearly 10 percent every year between 2011 and 2022.

Not that DarkSky is anti-lightbulb. Michael Rymer, the nonprofit’s Communities Program Manager, told me their mission is to protect the night from excessive artificial light: “We want to restore natural darkness to the world as much as we can.”

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A 2023 study discovered that light pollution has increased worldwide nearly 10 percent every year between 2011 and 2022 and shows no signs of slowing down. In fact, most places on the planet do not experience true nightfall and persist under a shield of artificial skyglow through which only a peppering of starlight meets the naked eye. For many of us, the brightest and most memorable constellations we’ll encounter firsthand are from a plane window—not looking up, but down at the starbursts of cities and hubs. And it’s these terrestrial light displays that are wreaking havoc on the natural world.

For many species, a naturally dark night sky is crucial for survival. Studies show that light pollution is a contributor to the worldwide decline in insect populations, including certain species of fireflies, who rely on the darkness as a backdrop for their lightshows to charm potential mates. It has also disrupted the behavior of migratory animals, such as sea turtle hatchlings drawn to streetlights rather than moonlight scattered across ocean waves, or birds who crash into high buildings because of the siren call of city lights. Even the New York City annual September 11 memorial “Tribute in Light” has cumulatively disoriented more than a million birds who have circled its 4-mile-high beams. Skyglow also deters species from traditional hunting grounds, such as bats and pumas, whose predatory habits rely on the dark. Apparently, some of the most biodiverse regions on Earth are now exposed to light pollution.

We are also not immune to the negative impact of artificial light. The encroachment of skyglow threatens to compromise astronomical data collected from some of the most powerful telescopes in the world. A plan is underway to develop a large industrial complex near the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert, which could increase the ambient light pollution by 35 percent. Recent studies suggest that the quality of certain lights and skyglow in general contribute to the disruption of circadian rhythms, which correlate with chronic diseases including heart disease, certain cancers, and mental disorders.

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The contemporary Austrian composer Georg Haas has said, “we have lost the darkness in our lives.” In 2001, he wrote a string quartet to be performed in complete darkness. He wanted to disorient listeners and allow them to experience “new and intense artistic adventures.” The New Yorker critic Alex Ross wrote of a 2013 performance of the work, “What begins as an experience of deprivation becomes one of radically heightened awareness.”

Indeed, darkness has been linked to creativity and shown to be good for our mental and physical health. Some researchers propose that dim light—or even just thinking of the dark—helps unleash our imaginations and generate new ideas that we might have a harder time doing under bright conditions. Want to solve a stubborn problem? Try inviting the darkness in. A recent study connects exposure to a naturally dark sky with positive emotions such as a sense of awe.

Our trip to the Grand Canyon wasn’t just about a treacherous walk. I now recall the park’s night sky and the scent of pine and the conical treetops pointing far above my head into the vast cosmos. Looking up, I saw hundreds of brilliant stars in the pockets between shifting clouds—more than I had ever seen. The naturally dark sky has its own illumination—one that inspires wonderment simply by gazing overhead. Just the thought of it brings me joy.

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Lead image: Alexey Suloev / Shutterstock

Regan Penaluna

Posted on February 3, 2026

Regan Penaluna is a Brooklyn-based journalist who writes about science, philosophy, and the natural world. Her book How to Think Like a Woman: Four Women Philosophers Who Taught Me How to Love the Life of the Mind was a New York Times Editors’ Choice.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Sets Off Bomb Cyclones

This storm category includes some nor’easters, which seem likely to grow even more chaotic in coming decades

By Molly Glick    January 29, 2026

Over the weekend, a bomb cyclone is forecast to hit the Southeast United States. This prediction follows a week of bitter cold for most of the country and record-breaking snowfall in some areas, including New York City and Dayton, Ohio.

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Bomb cyclones—formally referred to as bombogenesis—are quickly strengthening storms that brew at mid-latitudes. They kick up when a storm’s central pressure falls by a certain number of millibars in 24 hours, depending on the location. They can form when cold air masses smash into warm ones; for example, in the Northeast they often occur when cold air from Canada runs into the toastier Gulf Stream.

A HISTORIC STORM: An infrared satellite image of the Storm of the Century in 1993. Credit: NOAASatellites/Wikimedia Commons.

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Bomb cyclones can spark intense winds that whip at more than 80 miles per hour and heavy rain or snow, and they typically form between October and March due to dramatic temperature contrasts during the colder months. Many nor’easters are bomb cyclones, and these tend to crop up in the latitudes between Georgia and New Jersey before reaching their peak around New England and parts of Canada.

“If you’re watching TV at night and the weather report comes on and you’re hearing ‘bomb cyclone’ being used, that usually means there’s quite a bit of active weather going on,” Andrew Orrison, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in College Park, Maryland, told The Associated Press.

Read more: “The Grand Collisions That Make Snownadoes & Arctic Sea Smoke”

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Bomb cyclones aren’t too common—they made up around 7 percent of all nontropical low-pressure systems near North America between 1979 and 2019, an average of some 18 per year over that time period. They’re most prevalent along the East Coast.

Among the deadliest nor’easters arrived in March 1993, known as the Storm of the Century. It barreled from the Gulf of Mexico to Canada and killed more than 250 people in its wake. The storm started as a low-pressure system and picked up as it traveled north. It brought all sorts of nasty weather, including winds up to 144 miles per hour, blizzard conditions, and even tornadoes in some areas. Every major airport and interstate highway along the coast shuttered at some point during the nor’easter, and millions of people lost power.

Like other weather phenomena, scientists think that climate change is intensifying nor’easters—this is probably due to rising ocean temperatures and the warming atmosphere’s ability to hold more moisture. Researchers found that nor’easter precipitation rates increased between 1940 and 2025, and they also noticed an upward trend in the maximum wind speed of the strongest of these storms—so that portion of the country can likely expect more wild winter weather in the years ahead.

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Lead image: brian.gratwicke / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on January 29, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Can Morality Survive Climate Collapse?

Megha Majumdar’s acclaimed novel A Guardian and a Thief explores a near-future where scarcity forces hard choices

By Nick Hilden    January 29, 2026

In the opening lines of her latest novel A Guardian and a Thief, Megha Majumdar drops us directly in the path of the incipient climate catastrophe: “Kolkata in this ruined year, the heat a hand clamped upon the mouth, the sun a pistol against one’s head.” It’s a near-future where rising temperatures haven’t quite pushed society past its tipping point, but the oncoming disaster is already felt in the form of food scarcity, wet bulb heatwaves, and a frantic scramble for dwindling resources or “climate visas” to someplace else where the impact has been more tolerable.

Majumdar explores the moral compromises this world of calamity may force upon us by telling the story of a family on the cusp of emigrating to the United States. At the last minute, their visas disappear. As they attempt to rectify the matter, their increasingly dire circumstances push to behave in ways that cross their typical ethical codes and boundaries.

With her 2020 debut A Burning, Majumdar earned fast recognition for her powerful prose and insightful social critiques. Now her follow-up A Guardian and a Thief was a National Book Award finalist and she is being hailed as one of the most essential literary voices to emerge from her climate-stalked generation. I spoke with Majumdar about the inspiration for her novel and the terrible moral dilemmas we’ll be forced to confront as temperatures rise and food becomes scarce.

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Where did the idea for A Guardian and a Thief come from?

My hometown, Kolkata, India, is one of the cities in the world most profoundly affected by climate change. It has grown hotter and it is predicted to endure more storms in the coming decades—more storms and more severe storms. I was thinking about what the lived experience of that kind of climate change will be. I was thinking about needing shade, needing garments that help you stay cool. I was thinking about carrying not just water when you go out but also electrolyte pills, and I was thinking about how it would affect agriculture, how it would change food.

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Then, thinking through all of that, I started thinking about what love and hope look like in this situation of crisis. And what happens when, in a time of crisis, love and hope gain manifestations that are really different from what we assume they are? We think that these are noble emotions, that there’s something straightforward about them, but what if your love for your family forces you to do things which destroy your sense of yourself as an ethical person? Are you still proud of that kind of love? How do you live with yourself as somebody whose love has forced them into that place? So I think just the moral murkiness that kind of scarcity and devastation can reveal is very interesting to me.

What do you think was the hardest part about forecasting the future?

I think finding the place where the future contains plenty of difference—the book refers to things like robot police patrol dogs and small elements like that—but keeping it really close to our present world, such that the human relationships, the emotions, the concerns like migration and food feel very present to us. That movement between an imagined future and a very real present from which that future could feasibly grow—that movement felt delicate.

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The book has been nominated for a National Book Award. Why do you think it struck such a chord with people?

I hope that what is speaking to readers is the core of the book, which is so much about being a parent during a crisis. And I hope that it’s a book that’s encouraging people to think about how they would behave in a morally difficult situation. I think we all live in a world where we are subject to forces greater than ourselves. We live within networks of power. We live underneath people who possess greater resources and wealth and make decisions that affect us. That truth of understanding that we make moral decisions all the time, and yet we are not making those decisions in a free place—we are making those decisions while being subject to all of these other forces. How do you live? How do you carry out the roles of being a mother, a grandfather, a sibling? How does your understanding of these roles change?

I started thinking about what love and hope look like in this situation of crisis.

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A sub-theme to climate change you explore is how it affects people of different socioeconomic backgrounds, visa situations, and so on. What do you want people to know about that aspect of climate change?

One thing that I think a lot about is class, and how people who have different levels of wealth and privilege and resources will be able to deal with the effects of climate change differently. So who deserves to be safe? Who deserves to have a steady supply of food? Who deserves to be in a cool and dry house, rather than baking in the heat outside while working? Who deserves escape when a situation becomes unsustainable?

And I think that we’re also moving toward a reality where the kind of migration that I discuss in the book will become more and more prevalent. In college when the Darfur conflict was very much in the news, I remember being in a class and the professor saying that so much of this conflict is discussed in terms of ethnicity and stuff like that, but you have to look at it as a resource war. So many of these conflicts are driven by scarcity of water, and that was maybe the first time that somebody helped me see how political framing of conflict can neglect how many of these conflicts are rooted in resource scarcity and connected to climate change—changing river patterns, changing rainfall patterns, changing availability of crops typical for a region, changing patterns of pests that feed on those crops. All of these things are connected to conflict and migration. These realities have been present for a long time, and they will probably only get more pressing.

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Billionaires play a key role in the book’s narrative. Why do you think it’s important for people to understand or to think about the role billionaires have to play in climate change and society?

They are the people who make decisions that affect the rest of us. We are affected by actions that are taken and actions that are not taken, by what knowledge is distributed, by what we get to think about and examine, how the media relay information to us about current research, about the paths that we are on. All of us who are ordinary people are affected by decisions made by very few people, and we have to figure out what moral agency we have while accepting how we are subject to greater powers, and how we are subject to the choices that other people make. How do we live as independent, free-thinking people who still make our own choices within that?

At one point in the book a character hangs a poster of Einstein on his wall. Why Einstein?

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I needed to find an aspirational figure that is recognizable, even to a character like Boomba. I think it represents his hope for his brother, a future of education, a future of educational accomplishment, which will probably resonate especially with Indian readers like me, who are very aware of the emphasis on education and schooling. One of the reasons that this character is so desperate to move his young brother out of the village and into the city is so that he can be safe and go to school.

What do you think people misunderstand about the climate refugee crisis?

In fiction, I think what we can do is allow a reader to enter this kind of question in a very human way—where you enter it not by thinking about groups of people or numbers, but by thinking about the life of one person, or one family. A reader of fiction comes to this question by feeling close to the characters, so my work was to allow a reader to come close to these characters—to make sure that, while I’m writing about this situation of climate crisis, what I am foregrounding is the human experience of it. When a child asks for cauliflower, or a grandfather steals an orange from a kid to give it to his own grandchild—that kind of moment lets a reader be emotionally present within the truth of that reality. I think that’s what fiction can do.

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Of the many issues your book deals with—floods, heat, famine, pollution and so on—which do you worry about the most?

In my reading, one that I felt was less discussed was the future of food. That’s what I really wanted to think about in this book. So much of the food that we take for granted—the fruits and vegetables, the proteins—they might become less nutritious because of changing soil quality. And they might become less available because of changing weather, changing regions of where insects live, and of course, changing rain and drought patterns.

I think a lot about the future of food, also because food has such an emotional charge. Think about having a meal with your family, or celebrating something—we often have a special meal. Having a Sunday lunch or dinner is a special thing in many families. So what happens when the food you sit down to is not your familiar roast or whatever it is you like to eat, but instead it’s made from cricket flour, or some form of algae? How does that change the emotional texture of family life, collective life—the comfort that we get from food?

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Over the course of writing this book, how did it change how you think about climate change and society? And how do you hope it affects your readers?

I think the book helped me face some really terrifying but also very intriguing questions about how we will behave in a disaster. And I think…you know—the disasters are coming. How will we balance the love and care that we have for our loved ones against the love and care that we have for our neighbors and our fellow citizens? And how will that change our understanding of ourselves as people who live in a society—who are grateful to have neighbors, grateful to run into people when you take a walk on the street, and grateful to see your friends? How will it alter the texture of those relationships when everything is scarce? Will we really show our true selves then? Or are we our true selves now, in this time of relative comfort and abundance for most of us?

And what do I hope a reader thinks about? Well, first of all, I hope that they find themselves invited into the story. That’s part of what I tried really hard to do—to write a book that makes you think and feel, but also hopefully entertains you. I care a lot about entertaining the reader, even though that might sound a little strange. I think a lot about how to do that as a writer.

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And then I hope that readers think about who they might be in such a situation of moral crisis. How would they live with the choices that the characters face in the book? What decisions would they make? What do love and hope come to mean for them in a time of scarcity?

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Lead image: New Africa / Shutterstock

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Nick Hilden

Posted on January 29, 2026

Arts, science, and travel writer Nick Hilden contributes to the likes of the Washington Post, Scientific American, Esquire, Popular Science, National Geographic, and more. You can follow him on Twitter at @nickhilden or Instagram at @nick.hilden.

Genetics

- Was the Human Genome Forged by Fire?

- When German Shepherds Got Their Cursed Genes

- Your Lifespan May Depend Much More on Genes Than Previously Thought

GENETICS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Was the Human Genome Forged by Fire?

New research into burn-response genes shows evidence of accelerated evolution

By Jake Currie    February 6, 2026

Our mastery of fire is one of the biggest things that sets humans apart from animals. We’ve used it to cook our food, temper our tools, warm our bodies, and ward off predators. It’s not overstating things to say it’s fueled our evolution, but has our exposure to it changed our genes?

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It’s an intriguing proposition. After all, fire is an indispensable tool but also a dangerous one. Before we developed antibiotics, even a small burn could become a mortal wound. So it stands to reason that after such a long period of our history living by the fireside, natural selection would have granted us some resiliency.

To investigate, Joshua Cuddihy of the Imperial College London worked alongside a team of burn-injury experts, evolutionary biologists, and geneticists to identify burn-response genes for signs of positive selection. This week they published their findings in BioEssays.

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Read more: “Wildfires Are Changing Animal Evolution”

To identify possible burn-injury response genes, researchers examined the transcriptomes (the genes expressed) in both burnt and unburnt skin from humans and rats. Examining the gene sequences, they discovered a subset of burn response genes that showed evidence of accelerated evolution.

So what do these genes do?

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They’re primarily involved in wound closure, inflammation, and immune system response. Unfortunately these genes also respond to general tissue damage, so the team was unable to rule out positive selection in response to other human endeavors, like tool use or fighting. Still, researchers stress that these genes aren’t exhaustive, and they illustrate how fire could have imprinted its unique brand on our genome.

In the future, the team hopes this new framework will help connect evolutionary biology with medicine, changing how we study and treat burn injuries and even help to explain why animal models of burns often produce results that translate poorly to humans.

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Lead image: obsonphoto / Shutterstock.

Jake Currie

Posted on February 6, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

GENETICS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

When German Shepherds Got Their Cursed Genes

DNA from museum specimens help detail the genetic bottleneck

By Devin Reese    January 30, 2026

If you have a German Shepherd, you’re probably familiar with the damaging effects of inbreeding on fitness. The weak hind ends and other health problems of German Shepherds are the result of more than a century of breeding between close relatives. Inbreeding heightens the chance that harmful genetic traits will be expressed. Still, the dog-breeding industry remains popular worldwide.

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A recent study published in PNAS analyzed when German Shepherds accumulated their “mutational load” of bad genes. Was it from when they first became a distinct breed? Or is it mostly from their continued inbreeding of late? Understanding the time frame for the declines in genetic diversity of German Shepherds may help restore their genomic health through the introduction of new genes.

Researchers from Germany, the U.K., the U.S., and Switzerland compared the genomes of German Shepherds from medieval times before breeds were formed; the historic breeding period from 1906 to 1993; and a dataset of more than 2,000 modern dogs. The medieval specimens came with an already published genomic dataset of Lithuanian dogs, whereas the 20th century genomes were extracted from museum specimens of German Shepherds.

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The diversity of the medieval dog genomes suggested a large, randomly breeding population. Their genomes were mostly heterozygous—with a different allele from each parent—with few homozygous sequences (pairs of identical copies of genes that emerge with inbreeding).

Read more: “The Surprisingly Ancient Origins of Your Dog”

Then dog breeding became a “thing” in the 20th century, and the proportion of short sequences of identical allele pairs reached as high as 19 percent circa 1960. But inbreeding levels didn’t skyrocket until later in the 20th century. In modern dogs, the identical allele pairs show up as about 36 percent of the genome, including medium and large sequences of them.

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As for who is to blame, the study authors pointed a finger at male dogs who were disproportionately used as sires. These macho males effectively decreased the genetic population size of German Shepherds. The first genetic bottleneck—or period of reduced diversity—showed up from 1906 to 1934, when the dog Pollux and his grandson Horand von Grafrath sired a bunch of offspring. In around 1927, the gene pool contracted again when Klodo vom Boxberg became a popular male, and again in 1946 with Axel von der Deininghauserheide. Because of World War II, novel genetic stock from Germany was unavailable outside of Germany until reunification in 1990.

And the rest is history. During the 1960s, a favored American sire, Lance of Fran-Jo, introduced the sloped hindquarters you see in modern American lineages of German Shepherds. Continued inbreeding has enhanced the slope while weakening the hips by lowering the pelvis.

“Strong artificial selection and inbreeding by humans during the second half of the 20th century to incorporate or maintain specific aesthetic criteria, rather than the formation of the breed itself, is responsible for the genomic health declines in contemporary GSDs,” wrote the study authors.

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So, it’s a get-what-you-get when it comes to pedigreed dogs. If you want those iconic sloped backs in German Shepherds, you can expect to deal with canine hip dysplasia as well. If you want a more robust dog, get a mutt that originates from a more diverse gene pool.

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Lead image: Tasnuva Elahi; with images by McCoy_LG and Who is Danny / Shutterstock.

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Devin Reese

Posted on January 30, 2026

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

GENETICS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Your Lifespan May Depend Much More on Genes Than Previously Thought

Research published today shows a bigger impact of genetics on aging than previously thought

By Jake Currie    January 29, 2026

It seems like every week there’s a new diet, exercise, or supplement that promises to extend our lives, but how much of our mortality is really in our control? And how much are we at the mercy of our genes?

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In the ongoing effort to determine just how much of who we are is preordained by our genetic code, heritability, a statistical measurement of how much variation in a trait can be attributed to genetic variation, is king. It’s also become a bit of a thorny topic.

Because of a number of confounding variables, getting an accurate measure of the heritability of the human lifespan is challenging. Previous attempts to suss it out have yielded bewilderingly low estimates, with around 20 to 25 percent of the variation explained by genetics. (For comparison, measurements of lifespan heritability in laboratory mice are much higher, around 38 to 50 percent.) Research published today in Science shows that heritability in the human lifespan is double past estimates—up to 55 percent.

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Read more: “Heredity Beyond the Gene”

The reason for the discrepancy has to do with math. The deceptively simple equation for heritability is the additive genetic variation of a given trait divided by the phenotypic variation of the trait. That means that as phenotypic variation increases, heritability goes down. For a trait like longevity, there are obviously quite a few things totally unrelated to genetics that could influence lifespan—for example, a piano falling on someone’s head.

To get a more accurate measure of the heritability of longevity, Ben Shenhar and his colleagues at the Weizmann Institute of Science examined data from twin and sibling studies. They then accounted for deaths due to external factors like homicides, infectious diseases, environmental hazards, and accidents like the random falling piano. By narrowing their focus only to diseases related to aging, genetic mutations, and general biological decline, they arrived at a much higher heritability.

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Still, while this estimate tells us how much of our mortality is caused by genetics, it doesn’t tell us which genes are responsible. But researchers hope that it will pave the way to identifying the genes responsible for our inevitable decline.

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Lead image: Ilya Lukichev / Shutterstock

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Jake Currie

Posted on January 29, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Geoscience

- How the “Atlantic Grand Canyon” Came to Exist

GEOSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How the “Atlantic Grand Canyon” Came to Exist

New research sheds light on the mysterious underwater structure

By Jake Currie    February 3, 2026

On land, most canyons are carved by erosion from rivers over millions of years. In the ocean, things are a bit trickier. The King’s Trough Complex, located more than 600 miles off the coast of Portugal, is a massive canyon that includes one of the deepest points in the Atlantic Ocean—and was once a candidate to become an underwater nuclear waste dumping spot. But how did it get there?

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To find out, geologists from GEOMAR Helmholtz Centre for Ocean Research Kiel in Germany hit the seas in a 300-foot research vessel equipped with high-resolution sonar systems to map the ocean floor and a chain bag dredge to retrieve rock samples. After analyzing the chemical composition of the volcanic rocks, the team was able to determine how and when this deep-sea canyon formed. They published their findings in Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (G-Cubed).

HIDDEN DEPTHS: This bathymetric map of King’s Trough Complex shows the deep basins at its eastern end, based on new data. Image courtesy of Geomar.

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“Researchers have long suspected that tectonic processes—that is, movements of the Earth’s crust—played a central role in the formation of the King’s Trough,” study author Antje Dürkefälden explained in a statement. “Our results now explain for the first time why this remarkable structure developed precisely at this location.”

Between 37 and 24 million years ago, a tectonic plate boundary shifted to the area, resulting in the crust fracturing and the seafloor between Europe and Africa opening like a zipper in an east-west direction. Prior to the shift, the crust was thickened and heated by an upwelling of molten rock from the mantle, making it particularly fragile.

Read more: “Why Is It So Difficult to Map the Ocean?”

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“This thickened, heated crust may have made the region mechanically weaker, so that the plate boundary preferentially shifted here,” added co-author Jörg Geldmacher. “When the plate boundary later moved farther south toward the modern Azores, the formation of the King’s Trough also came to a halt.”

It’s a remarkable example of how activity deep within our planet’s molten mantle can have a dramatic impact on the surface.

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Lead image: Dürkefälden, A., et al. Geochemistry, Geophysics, Geosystems (2025).

Jake Currie

Posted on February 3, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Health

- Can the Keto Diet Treat Mental Health Conditions?

- The Forgotten Epidemic Born Out of Poverty

- The Devastating Disease Neglected for Decades

- The First Time Tobacco Executives Admitted Smoking Is Bad for You

- How Aspartame Came from a Work Safety Violation

- What Exactly Is a Superfood Anyway?

- The Strange Paradox in the RFK Jr. Diet Guidelines

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

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Can the Keto Diet Treat Mental Health Conditions?

How the evidence stacks up against Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s recent claims

By Molly Glick    February 6, 2026

Not long after upending federal diet guidelines in order to prioritize “real food” on our plates, United States Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has offered a new piece of questionable advice. During a tour to promote these dietary recommendations, Kennedy recently claimed that a keto diet can cure schizophrenia—an assertion that experts have quickly thrown cold water on.

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The ketogenic diet promotes fat-rich meals and low amounts of carbohydrates. While keto eating has skyrocketed in popularity in recent years—it ranked the most Googled diet in the U.S. in 2020—it was initially designed in the early 20th century for patients with epilepsy. More recent studies have confirmed that the diet is effective for certain types of epilepsy because it can control seizures.

Meanwhile, we have much less evidence for its impacts on symptoms of schizophrenia. So far, small studies have offered some early evidence that ketogenic diets may help people with the condition.

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“There is currently no credible evidence that ketogenic diets cure schizophrenia,” Mark Olfson, a psychiatrist at Columbia University, told The New York Times.

Read more: “Eat Like a Neanderthal”

Kennedy also proclaimed that the diet can essentially cure bipolar disorder, according to studies he recently read. But as with schizophrenia, keto’s impacts on bipolar disorder have only been examined in limited numbers of patients so far.

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Preliminary findings have also hinted that a keto diet could ease symptoms of depression. It may offer “small antidepressant benefits” for people who don’t respond to medication, according to a recently published JAMA Psychiatry paper. But this work is in the early stages as well and remains far from conclusive.

Scientists are seeking new therapies for these types of conditions because anti-psychotic drugs come with some major limitations. Many patients stop taking such drugs over time due to side effects, which include weight gain, drowsiness, and loss of motivation.

Scientists think that the ketogenic diet might help treat these conditions in a whole host of ways. For one, it can reduce inflammation in the brain, which is linked to anxiety, depression, schizophrenia, and bipolar disorder. It may also contribute to the stability of one’s neural networks, a key component of mental health.

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Right now, several randomized controlled trials—the gold standard in medical research—are in the works to learn whether keto diets can work as effective treatments for bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and other mental health conditions.

While RFK Jr. touted the diet as a cure, researchers have emphasized that it should supplement existing treatments for now. Shebani Sethi, a psychiatrist and obesity specialist at Stanford University, noted that she harnesses this diet as “one powerful therapeutic metabolic tool among many.”

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Lead image: zuzyusa / Pixabay

Molly Glick

Posted on February 6, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Forgotten Epidemic Born Out of Poverty

Joseph Goldberger’s findings on pellagra weren’t welcome at the time, but he paved the way for a simple, life-saving intervention

By Molly Glick    February 4, 2026

In the early 20th century, scientists sought to get to the bottom of a mysterious disease that caused thousands of deaths per year in the United States. By 1912 in South Carolina alone, more than 30,000 cases were reported with a fatality rate of 40 percent.

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This ailment is known as pellagra, and it was discovered as early as the 18th century when it inflicted Spanish peasants. At the time, it was commonly confused with leprosy as it can cause skin sores. The condition also triggers symptoms throughout the body including diarrhea, neurological issues like tremors, and even dementia. In 1869, Italian criminologist Cesare Lombroso suggested that pellagra comes from spoiled corn, as it often affects people with corn-heavy diets.

Lombroso’s theory entered the conversation when pellagra became epidemic throughout the Southern U.S. Some eugenicists suggested that it stemmed from racial or hereditary factors. A 1912 investigation of a South Carolina mill village reported that the disease was infectious, a finding that guided doctors for years.

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DISEASE DETECTIVE: Joseph Goldberger went against the grain and helped the U.S. combat a devastating disease. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia.

Around this time, Congress asked the Surgeon General to investigate pellagra. He tapped Joseph Goldberger, a medical officer in the U.S. Public Health Service, to take the reins. Goldberger was already recognized for his work on epidemics such as typhus and yellow fever.

Goldberger suspected that the disease was linked to a diet lacking key nutrients, not infection—a possibility also raised by researchers in Europe. In the early 20th century, low-income people in the South mostly ate cornmeal, meat, and molasses. Due to the region’s thriving cotton industry, little land remained to grow vegetables.

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It was already known that wealthy people were far less likely to develop pellagra, and Goldberger had observed the condition among patients and residents at the mental hospitals and orphanages he visited, yet not the staff.

Following his intuition, he carried out an experiment on male inmates at a Mississippi prison that began on this day in 1915. These men received pardons for their participation, an unethical exchange that wouldn’t be approved today. He observed how they fared on their usual diet, which included dairy products and vegetables grown at the farm they worked at, versus a typical Southern diet at the time. Eleven subjects stayed on this diet until late October 1915, six of whom experienced pellagra symptoms. “I have been through a thousand hells,” one participant remarked. All of these individuals eventually recovered.

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

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Goldberger had also studied populations at orphanages and asylums in the South, and came to the conclusion that an unbalanced diet can trigger pellagra. In fact, some asylum patients with dementia saw such drastic improvements on an improved diet that they were discharged.

Still, Goldberger’s advice mostly went unheeded. Southern politicians and doctors tended to reject his theory linking the condition to poverty in their region, insisting pellagra was an infectious disease or that it stemmed from moldy corn. This prompted Goldberger to organize “filth parties,” where people took pills containing skin, urine, and other samples taken from individuals with pellagra, yet attendees didn’t go on to develop the condition.

Despite Goldberger’s breakthroughs, he couldn’t pinpoint the exact ingredient required to prevent pellagra. In 1927, he found that a daily dose of brewer’s yeast offered an effective treatment, and a year later he asserted that pellagra likely results from a vitamin deficiency. The next year, though, pellagra reached its peak in the South and killed nearly 7,000 people.

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Before Goldberger could get to the bottom of it, he died from kidney cancer in 1929. But less than a decade later, scientists landed on that specific vitamin: niacin. Biochemist Conrad Elvehjem arrived at this discovery after administering small amounts of niacin to dogs with the canine equivalent of pellagra, and the treatment ended up working for humans, too. Corn does contain niacin, but in a form that our bodies can’t absorb well—Indigenous people in the Americas have rendered niacin easier to digest for centuries by soaking corn kernels in limewater.

Today, pellagra is rare in many countries thanks to flour fortified with niacin, a practice that ramped up in the U.S. during World War II. It’s considered a massive public health success story, effectively wiping out one of the most devastating nutritional deficiency diseases ever documented in the country.

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Lead image: hartono subagio / Pixabay

Molly Glick

Posted on February 4, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Devastating Disease Neglected for Decades

Despite high-tech new therapies, people with sickle cell anemia still encounter stigma today

By Molly Glick    January 30, 2026

It took nearly a century of research and advocacy for people with a rare and painful blood condition to receive effective treatment—and barriers still exist for these patients.

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Sickle cell anemia is an inherited disease where one’s red blood cells are sickle- or C-shaped. They become rigid and sticky, which can slow or stop blood flow and impair the delivery of oxygen throughout the body. It’s one type of sickle cell disease, a group of inherited blood conditions.

Sickle cell anemia can trigger intense bouts of pain called pain crises and severe complications including stroke, organ damage, and vision problems. Sickle cell disease as a whole affects more than 100,000 people in the United States and 8 million people around the world. In the U.S., more than 90 percent of people diagnosed with these conditions are Black, and between around 3 and 9 percent are Hispanic or Latino.

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Sickle cells identified in a blood sample. Credit: Keith Chambers/Wikimedia Commons.

Researchers suspected sickle cell anemia as early as the mid-19th century, when African scientists began describing specific cases in medical literature. And in 1910, physician James Herrick penned the first description of the condition in Western medical literature, documenting the case of Walter Clement Noel, a young dental student from Grenada.

A major breakthrough arrived three decades later: In 1949, researchers linked the disease to an abnormality in the structure of hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that transports oxygen in blood. This marked the first time scientists tied a disease to a shift in protein structure. A few years later, protein chemist Vernon Ingram pinpointed the specific genetic mutation associated with sickle cell anemia.

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Even after scientists learned of the exact cause of the condition, research and medical care lagged for decades due to systemic racism. Beginning in the early stages of research, U.S. scientists perpetuated the myth that the disease only occurs among Black people. Some doctors claimed sickle cell disease proved that white people were biologically superior—misinformation that was eventually wielded to justify racial segregation.

In a 1969 survey conducted in Virginia, only 30 percent of Black respondents had heard of sickle cell anemia, and only 20 percent knew it was a blood disorder. Around that time, 12 states had passed laws that targeted Black people with mandatory sickle cell genetic testing.

Read more: “The Misguided History of Racial Medicine”

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Advocacy by the Black Panther Party, which offered free sickle cell testing and education, pressured Congress to pass the National Sickle Cell Anemia Control Act of 1972. It gave the federal government the power to set up education, screening, and research programs.

Research progressed over the next decade, and scientists announced the first documented cure of sickle cell anemia. In 1984, scientists reported that an 8-year-old-girl who received a bone marrow transplant recovered from the disease—it was originally intended to treat her acute myeloblastic leukemia. This type of transplant became one of the few cures for sickle cell anemia.

Another major treatment milestone arrived this week in 1995, when doctors shared that they had found the first effective medication for the disease. Due to “promising results,” researchers ended a national trial early. The drug, hydroxyurea, was developed as a cancer treatment, but it was shown to attack “the underlying cause of the disease rather than simply combating its painful symptoms.” In 1998, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved hydroxyurea for the treatment of sickle cell anemia.

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More recently, scientists have made major strides with gene therapies for sickle cell disease. The FDA approved two such treatments in 2023, one of which was the first therapy ever approved in the U.S. to use CRISPR gene-editing technology.

While people with sickle cell anemia have far more options than they did a few decades ago, patients still face disparities in care and a lack of research funding compared with other rare diseases. It’s difficult for people with this condition to receive drugs for pain relief due to stigma from healthcare providers, for example, and relatively few doctors have experience treating it.

Despite recent cutting-edge treatments, the medical field has a ways to go to empower these patients.

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Lead image: Corona Borealis Studio / Shutterstock

Molly Glick

Posted on January 30, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The First Time Tobacco Executives Admitted Smoking Is Bad for You

The moment the science finally came to light

By Molly Glick    January 29, 2026

Four decades after top tobacco executives discovered the health risks of smoking, they finally acknowledged these hazards under oath for the first time.

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On this day in 1998, CEOs from top U.S. tobacco companies appeared before the U.S. House of Representatives’ Commerce Committee. Officials asked the business leaders whether nicotine is addictive and if smoking causes health problems like lung cancer—several said yes to these questions, including Steven Goldstone, chairman and CEO of RJR Nabisco.

At the time, the tobacco industry was desperately seeking to shore up its reputation. Four years earlier, tobacco company leaders had appeared before Congress and said they didn’t think cigarettes were addictive, that evidence behind associated health issues was inconclusive, and that they didn’t market to children. Less than a month after the testimony, leaked documents revealed that the tobacco industry had known for decades that their products could cause premature death and acknowledged that they are addictive.

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These revelations contributed to dozens of state lawsuits seeking to recoup billions of dollars in healthcare costs associated with smoking. Later in 1998, the country’s four largest tobacco companies entered an agreement with 52 state and territory attorneys general. They agreed to several terms, including to stop marketing to young people, paying states to fund smoking prevention programs, and to share secret industry documents. This led to further settlements with more than 45 tobacco companies, and today manufacturers are required to make annual payments to involved states in perpetuity.

Read more: “To a Cigarette Maker, Your Life Is Worth About $10,000”

The agreement had a major impact on Americans’ smoking habits: Between 1998 and 2019, U.S. cigarette consumption fell by more than 50 percent. Over that period, regular smoking among high schoolers decreased from a near peak of 36.4 percent in 1997 to 6 percent in 2019.

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These societal shifts were long overdue. Researchers in the U.S. and Europe began suspecting a link between smoking and lung cancer as early as the 1920s, and decades of studies led to a pivotal 1964 report by Surgeon General Luther Terry. This report said that smoking was responsible for a 70 percent increase in mortality rates for smokers versus non-smokers, and it estimated that average smokers were nine to ten times more likely to develop lung cancer—heavy smokers had at least a 20 times higher risk.

The report “hit the country like a bombshell. It was front page news and a lead story on every radio and television station in the United States and many abroad,” Terry said two decades later. But the public generally remained uncertain that these findings were definitive, thanks in part to plotting by the tobacco industry.

Its CEOs had met in December 1953 to plan their response to the ever-increasing evidence of their products’ harms. They landed on an industry-sponsored research group, and “more than five decades of strategic and explicit collusion would follow,” according to historian Allan Brandt.

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This organization, known at first as the Tobacco Industry Research Committee and later the Council for Tobacco Research, worked tirelessly to discredit evidence that their products hurt people, deflect bad press, and market new products that they claimed were safer.

While per-capita cigarette consumption began to fall in the decade following the 1964 report, it was only with the political momentum in the late 1990s that the industry faced real accountability.

More recently, people have drawn parallels between the actions of the tobacco and fossil-fuel industries—denying harms and funding self-interested research—and suggested that fossil-fuel executives might have devised these strategies in the first place. But mounting legal pressure against oil companies across the country and around the globe seems to signify that the tide is turning like it did for tobacco.

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Lead image: Vectorbum / Shutterstock

Molly Glick

Posted on January 29, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Aspartame Came from a Work Safety Violation

Now, the controversial sweetener is facing increasing scrutiny

By Molly Glick    January 27, 2026

The artificial sweetener aspartame, which is found in everything from diet soda to toothpaste to ice cream, was an accidental discovery. In 1965, American chemist James Schlatter was researching drugs to treat ulcers, which at the time were thought to result from too much stomach acid. He sought to develop a drug that could inhibit gastrin, a hormone that prompts stomach acid to form.

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While testing compounds for this medication, he licked a white powder off of his finger as he picked up a piece of paper—a blatant violation of work safety regulations. He noticed that this powder had a “surprisingly potent sweet taste,” and decided to develop it into an artificial sweetener. Schlatter eventually applied for a patent, which was granted on this day in 1970.

In fact, aspartame is up to 200 times sweeter than sugar, yet contains nearly zero calories. This intriguing property led to its widespread use in a variety of drinks and beverages after it came onto the market in 1981. In its early days, aspartame was thought to help lower obesity rates and offer people with diabetes a sugar-free alternative that wouldn’t cause their insulin levels to spike.

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Read more: “Is Fake Sugar Bad for Brains?”

Today, you can find aspartame in more than 6,000 food and drink products, and around 40 percent of Americans regularly consume sugar substitutes. But such sweeteners have attracted tons of controversy in recent years: Some research has linked them to an increased risk of stroke and dementia, anxiety and insomnia, diabetes, cancer, and delayed puberty, among other health consequences. That said, such findings are far from conclusive.

Plus, it’s possible that artificial sweeteners like aspartame mess with the brain’s appetite signals—the sweet taste without the expected calories could actually increase hunger pangs. So while aspartame was intended to aid in weight loss, some studies have tied it to weight gain. In 2023, the World Health Organization even recommended against non-sugar sweeteners like aspartame for weight control, based on evidence that suggests they don’t “confer any long-term benefit in reducing body fat in adults or children.”

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However, the WHO and other major health organizations maintain these sweeteners are safe within the daily limits. The FDA, for example, says that people can safely consume aspartame as long as they’re not exceeding the equivalent of 75 packets of the sweetener each day.

Basically, it’s too early to definitely link aspartame with the health harms explored in studies so far. But it’s also important to recognize that added sugar can come with risks, too, and balance the evidence that’s currently available when you reach for a soda, pint of ice cream, or pack of gum.

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Lead image: Drawlab19 / Shutterstock

Molly Glick

Posted on January 27, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Exactly Is a Superfood Anyway?

Nutrition scholar Marion Nestle on the appeal of a made-up category

By Kristen French    January 27, 2026

The term “superfood” is sticky. It seems as though every few months, a new food lands in this lofty category of nourishments. Bamboo, a popular ingredient in many traditional Asian cuisines, is one of the latest to receive the designation. The superfood label was used by the authors of a peer-reviewed paper covering bamboo’s potential health benefits: When properly prepared, the plant may promote antioxidant activity, probiotic effects, and improved blood sugar management, they reported.

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But it’s unclear what the word “superfood” really means. In popular discourse, the term generally refers to foods that are linked to disease prevention or are considered to have benefits for human health that extend beyond nutritional value. But the word has no standard scientific or medical definition. And yet, in the decades since it was first coined in the 1990s, the list of foods it’s been used to describe has ballooned to include at least 136 plants and animals, according to one recent estimate. Remember kale? Chia seeds? Goji berries? Quinoa? It’s hard to keep track.

I reached out to acclaimed New York University nutritionist, public health advocate, and molecular biologist Marion Nestle to ask her why contemporary culture is so enamored of the idea of the superfood, whether such categories are more harmful than helpful, and how to get the most out of what we eat. Nestle, who has written extensively about the harms of food marketing, was dismissive of the concept’s scientific value, but conceded that if it helps some people eat more fruits and vegetables, she is in favor of it.

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Why do so many people find the language of superfoods appealing? What does it say about our food culture?

“If you eat this, you’ll be healthy.” It’s as simple as that: “You’ll be super healthy.”

What does superfood mean? I know there’s no real scientific meaning, but …

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It’s a marketing term.

But does it designate anything at all? Is there anything about these foods that sets them apart?

No. They have vitamins, minerals, fiber. All fruits and vegetables have some combination of vitamins, minerals, and fiber. And by that definition, every fruit and vegetable is a superfood.

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Are some foods better for you than others?

Well, they may have more of one vitamin, but something else has more of another.

Does kale have more vitamins and minerals than, say, iceberg lettuce?

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Iceberg lettuce has more water so it’s more diluted. But the basic principle of nutrition is variety. Because different foods have different combinations of essential nutrients, and if you mix and match them, you get everything you need.

So there’s no reason to go around looking at the mineral and vitamin contents of different foods and picking them that way?

I wouldn’t bother. It’s a waste of time. They all have vitamins and minerals. No one food has everything that you need in the right proportion. Therefore, you must eat multiple foods. The more the merrier.

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What is lost when we designate some foods this way? What are the risks?

I’m all for encouraging people to eat fruits and vegetables. If that’s what it takes, I’m for it. But it’s marketing.

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

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How does this trend of naming new superfoods fit into the larger ecosystem of wellness grift?

The whole wellness thing is about personal responsibility. It’s up to you to make food choices. So obviously you’re gonna make healthier food choices. And if something is marketed as a superfood, you’re gonna buy it.

Is there any other catchy food terminology that you think is useful for helping people to think about how to eat?

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These are marketing terms. Any ridiculous health claim on a food package is gonna do the same thing.

I know some people describe food as medicine. Is that a useful catchphrase?

That’s a marketing term, too.

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Okay. So it’s not useful.

It is for people who aren’t eating their vegetables. If it encourages people to eat more fruits, vegetables, and grains, I’m all for it.

Do you think of food as medicine?

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No. I think of food as food.

If there were a perfect plate of food, what would it have on it?

There is no such thing as a perfect plate of food. Food should be eaten in variety. You should eat as many minimally processed foods as possible. The new guidelines—eat real food, avoid ultra processed foods—that’s good advice.

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What major questions do scientists still have about how our bodies process foods?

The major nutrition research these days is focused on precision nutrition, which is analyzing individuals’ genetic responses to foods so that you can design perfect diets aimed at their particular genetic composition. I don’t think that’s very useful.

Why not?

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Because you have to be really rich to be able to afford that. And healthy diets are so simple that Michael Pollen did it in seven words: “Eat food, not too much, mostly plants.” That’s all there is to it, really. With those principles, you can put together an infinite number of different kinds of diets and different kinds of meals that will meet those principles, satisfy nutritional requirements, and keep you healthy. You don’t need any more than that. You wanna know about individual vitamins and minerals. Fine. I think it’s a waste of time.

What research questions are you trying to answer right now?

The big science of nutrition questions have to do with how you can get people to eat healthfully. First of all, finding out what it is people are actually eating, which is a difficult question to answer. I’m only interested in public health questions. I’m not interested in individual questions. We have vast numbers of people who don’t eat very well. Seventy-five percent of American adults are overweight or obese. The big question is how do you prevent that?

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What are some of the possible answers?

GLP-1 drugs, these days.

Beyond drugs, how do you change people’s minds about what to eat?

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You make it easier, less expensive, and more convenient for them to eat healthy foods. That’s what you need to do. Right now, the food system is set up to sell as much of the most profitable junk foods as possible to as many people as possible, as often as possible at the highest prices they can get away with.

Back to superfoods, why do we resort to these kinds of labels?

We like them. It makes us feel good. It gives you an excuse to buy something: “Ooh, this is a super food. I’ll eat it, and I’ll feel better.”

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But we haven’t always anointed foods in this way.

The pomegranate people invented the term. I’ll give them credit for it. That was the first time I saw it—with pomegranate juice. They were selling pomegranate juice.

I read that the United Fruit Company may have kicked things off in World War I. They called bananas a superfood, essentially, in marketing materials. And bananas took off. Then some medical journals endorsed their benefits for celiac disease and diabetes.

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It was a good way to sell bananas. It’s a good way to sell pomegranates or blueberries. I think that’s fine. But nobody should confuse it with science.

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Lead image: beats1 / Shutterstock

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Kristen French

Posted on January 27, 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

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.

History

- Ancient Jokes Etched in Clay

- Recreating the Smells of History

- How Richard Feynman Found the Root of the Challenger Disaster

- Did Edison Accidentally Create a Vital Superconductor?

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Ancient Jokes Etched in Clay

These millennia-old punchlines aren’t exactly gut-busters today

By Molly Glick    January 30, 2026

In some ways, people haven’t changed much over the past few millennia. Artifacts from around the world and across time have revealed that we’ve long cracked jokes. The Romans, for example, gave us the oldest joke book ever discovered.

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We can also look to one of the world’s earliest known writing systems to find hints of ancient whimsy. Cuneiform, meaning “wedge-shaped,” was developed around 3000 B.C. It was likely created by the Sumerian people. They built one of the world’s first civilizations, which was located in what’s now Iraq. These texts were often inscribed on wet clay tablets with a pointed instrument, and the first iterations appear to have been penned by administrators for accounting purposes.

HOW RELATABLE: An Old Babylonian tablet with a proverb describing a pesky dog habit we still deal with today. Credit: The Trustees of the British Museum.

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But these tablets weren’t strictly business—they also contained literature that lives on today, including the The Epic of Gilgamesh. And some chunks of Cuneiform-inscribed clay seem to bear traces of humor, even if it doesn’t make us chuckle today.

Take a 4,000-year-old tablet found in Iraq in the late 19th century, which appears to record the world’s oldest bar joke. Written in Sumerian, it translates to: “A dog walks into a bar and says, ‘I cannot see a thing. I’ll open this one.’” The phrase has gone viral on social media because nobody can quite decipher the joke, and it’s puzzled researchers for decades. But it might have something to do with a neglectful guard dog, Philip Jones, associate curator at the Penn Museum, told WBUR in 2022.

Read more: “A Scientist Walks Into a Bar …”

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That tablet documents just one of hundreds of Sumerian proverbs unearthed by researchers. Another cuneiform wisecrack from roughly 1900 B.C., which is said to be the oldest written joke in history: “Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.” Another head-scratcher, perhaps as confusing as this joke about a gardener’s sex appeal.

Some ancient quips, however, have stood the test of time. Sumerians poked fun at their pets, for example, a tendency we certainly can relate to. One tablet dated back to between 1900 and 1600 B.C. reads: “The dog understands: ‘Take it!’ It does not understand: ‘Put it down!’” That tablet came from the Ur, a Mesopotamian metropolis where evidence of plenty of other proverbs have also been uncovered.

Of course, it’s highly possible that future civilizations could come across today’s memes, particularly the absurdist content churned out by Gen Alpha, and respond with similar confusion from a lack of context—but that’s for future historians to figure out.

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Lead image: Purchase, 1886

Molly Glick

Posted on January 30, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Recreating the Smells of History

Using chemistry, archival records and AI, scientists are reviving the aromas of old libraries, mummies, and battlefields

By Kaja Šeruga    January 30, 2026

This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine.

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We often learn about the past visually—through oil paintings and sepia photographs, books and buildings, artifacts displayed behind glass. And sometimes we get to touch historical objects or listen to recordings. But rarely do we use our sense of smell—our oldest, most primal way of learning about the environment—to experience the distant past.

Without access to odor, “you lose that intimacy that smell brings to the interaction between us and objects,” says analytical chemist Matija Strlič. As lead scientist of the Heritage Science Laboratory at the University of Ljubljana in Slovenia and previously deputy director of the Institute for Sustainable Heritage at University College London, Strlič has devoted his career to interdisciplinary research in the field of heritage science. Much of his work focused on the preservation and reconstruction of culturally significant scents.

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Reconstructed scents can enhance museum and gallery exhibits, says Inger Leemans, a cultural historian at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. Smell can provide a more inviting entry point, especially for uninitiated visitors, because there’s far less formalized language for describing smell than for interpreting visual art or displays. Since there’s no “right way” of talking about scent, she says, “your own knowledge is as good as the others’.”

Despite their potential to enrich our understanding of history and art, smells are rarely conserved with the same care as buildings or archaeological artifacts. But a small group of researchers, including Strlič and Leemans, is trying to change that—combining chemistry, ethnography, history and other disciplines to document and preserve olfactory heritage.

A chemist could theoretically whip up the smell of old books centuries from now.

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Some projects aim to safeguard a beloved smell before it disappears. When the library in London’s St. Paul’s Cathedral was scheduled for renovation, for example, Strlič and his UCL colleague Cecilia Bembibre set about documenting the historic library’s distinct smell.

The team first analyzed the chemicals wafting from the collection, which includes books dating back to the 12th century, and the surrounding furnishings, which have barely changed since the library was completed in 1709. They used a process called gas chromatography-mass spectrometry, which helps separate, identify and quantify volatile organic compounds, to examine air samples they’d captured in the library.

“As an analytical chemist, I was able to characterize and quantify those molecules, but how people describe what they felt required a completely different approach,” says Strlič. To whittle down the list of compounds identified by the mass spectrometer to the ones that humans can actually smell, the researchers next invited seven untrained “sniffers” into the cathedral library and asked them to describe its smell using a list of 21 adjectives commonly used to describe the compounds.

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ROBOSNIFFERS: These delicate instruments sample the air wafting through the library of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, picking up volatile compounds that evoke the collection’s distinctive scent of old books and furniture. Credit: Cecilia Bembibre.

The list included words like green and fatty, which people frequently use to describe the smell of the chemical hexanal, and almond, which is associated with benzaldehyde. Both compounds are released by paper as it degrades. The sniffers were also invited to add any descriptors of their own.

One word that all sniffers used to describe the library wasn’t particularly surprising: woody. Others that proved popular were smoky, earthy,  and vanilla. Such descriptors can help conservators assess the state of old paper, since papers that are slightly more acidic due to decay, for example, “smell more sweet,” says Strlič. “And those that are stable smell more like hay.”

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Strlič and colleagues next matched the qualitative descriptors the sniffers had selected with their underlying chemical compounds to create a chemical “recipe” for the scent of the cathedral’s library. Such recipes are published in scientific journals and stored in digital research repositories, so a chemist could theoretically whip up the smell of old books centuries from now, “even if, in the future, people no longer go to a library or no longer read physical books, and only receive all information digitally,” says Strlič.

How musty are mummies?

The work at St. Paul’s Cathedral, which ended in 2016, suggested that it might be possible to capture far older scents—including smells from thousands of years ago. For a study published in 2025, Strlič was joined by scientists from Egypt, Slovenia, Poland, and the United Kingdom to study nine ancient Egyptian mummies. The aim was to learn about the mummification process and recreate a scent that will be available to visitors of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo from 2026 onward.

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One might expect the scent of millennia-old mummified bodies to be off-putting, to say the least. Yet the smell is surprisingly pleasant, “because the ancient Egyptians used so many aromatic compounds, oils and resins that a lot of the original smell still remains,” Strlič says.

To capture these chemicals, Strlič and colleagues extracted air samples from the sarcophagi, separated them into single compounds with a gas chromatograph and identified them with a mass spectrometer.

A WHIFF OF MUMMY: By analyzing air next to these mummies at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, scientists can recreate their scent—and shed light on the embalming ingredients used to preserve them. Credit: Cecilia Bembibre.

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A panel of eight scientists—all trained on the scent of mummification materials—then evaluated the samples’ smells in terms of quality, intensity and pleasantness. After assessing each sample individually, the group discussed their findings to reach consensus: Woody, spicy, and sweet  emerged as common descriptors across all nine bodies.

The scent profiles that the team created based on these chemical and sensory observations can now be used to understand which mummies are more degraded than others, and how some of the bodies were mummified in the first place, says Strlič. For example, the team identified embalming ingredients like conifer oils, frankincense, myrrh, and cinnamon, as well as more modern compounds, such as synthetic pesticides and plant-based pest oils, which museums have used to preserve the mummies, often without documentation.

Strlič hopes that such research will help to expand the use of smell analysis as a noninvasive research technique, since it doesn’t require removing any physical samples from the studied object. The team also intends to apply its findings to create what amounts to a mummy “perfume” for the Egyptian Museum. For this, they will select up to 15 key chemical compounds from the mix and adjust their ratios to reflect the natural scent, with panels of sniffers comparing the new creation with the original until there’s no perceptible difference between them. “This is a repetitive process that involves a lot of trial and error,” says Strlič.

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Creating even the smell of Hell

While old artifacts offer a convenient starting point for olfactory analysis, many historic smells have not been preserved in physical form. To re-create them, researchers must rely on archival documents and a certain amount of creative interpretation. That’s what a European olfactory heritage project called Odeuropa did for a number of historical events, sites and even ideas, including the Battle of Waterloo and 17th century Amsterdam canals. The team even re-created the scent of Christian “Hell” as described in 16th century sermons, including notes of sulfur and brimstone and a whiff of “a million dead dogs.”

“Olfaction helps shape our cultures, although it often does so unknowingly or without us noticing,” says Leemans, who led the Odeuropa project. “When we talk about cultural heritage, we can think about religious rituals, but we can also think about specific scents that we’ve been cherishing and living with for a long time.”

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The team also intends to apply its findings to create what amounts to a mummy “perfume” for the Egyptian Museum.

To reconstruct these complex historic “smellscapes,” Leemans and her colleagues scoured old document archives and images for any related smell references. “We search for nose witnesses, people describing those smells,” she says. “But we also look at the components of that smellscape,” such as architectural descriptions listing building materials.

To accelerate the work, Odeuropa has created an AI-driven database of more than 2.5 million historical smell references, mined from 43,000 images and 167,000 historical texts published in seven European languages.

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When it’s time to create a real perfume based on this data, Odeuropa researchers write a detailed brief outlining the smell’s relevant components as well as the story behind it. Working with a perfume and fragrance company, they begin evaluating iterations of the scent in different ways—by asking panels of sniffers to assess the scent blind or after a short presentation on the subject, or by approaching curatorial, academic and fragrance experts to peer-review the fragrance.

To each their own odors

A person’s perception of smell is inherently subjective and dependent on their unique biology, personal experience and culture, says neuroscientist Gülce Nazlı Dikeçligil at the University of Pennsylvania, and lead author of a 2024 Annual Review of Psychology on human olfaction. “The olfactory system isn’t necessarily optimized for certainty and consistency,” she says. Instead of simply identifying molecules from the environment with computer-like precision, our brains are asking, “What does this molecule mean to me now, in the context of my history?”

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As our oldest sense, evolutionarily speaking, olfaction enjoys priority access to brain regions like the amygdala and hippocampus, which are key in processing emotion and memory, notes Dikeçligil. This means that the memories triggered by scents tend to be especially vivid and emotionally significant.

Scent “sparks thoughts, memories, ideas and gets people talking about and in front of paintings, which is what I want,” says art historian Christina Bradstreet from the Association for Art History in the U.K. She recently worked with the renowned Spanish perfumer Gregorio Sola to create three scents to accompany two paintings in a British exhibition on Pre-Raphaelite art. When, in 2022, the Prado Museum in Madrid created 10 scents to accompany Jan Bruegel the Elder’s painting The Sense of Smell—including jasmine, fig tree, and civet—they found that visitors lingered in front of the painting for 13 minutes, compared to the average 32 seconds.

Museums and galleries worldwide are taking note and increasingly integrating scent into their exhibitions. This attracts new visitors and engages them in a different way, “not only with the collection, but also with each other,” says Leemans. “When people start to smell, they immediately start to talk to each other, exchanging their memories, their emotions, their knowledge about the scents. It’s a really open conversation that you evoke in the museum space.”

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This article originally appeared in Knowable Magazine, a nonprofit publication dedicated to making scientific knowledge accessible to all. Sign up for  Knowable Magazine’s newsletter.

Lead image: Chemists, historians and other scientists are working to design perfumes that recreate and evoke scents from the past. Credit: Knowable Magazine.

Kaja Šeruga

Posted on January 30, 2026

Kaja Šeruga is a freelance journalist based in Vienna, where she enjoys the smell of old coffeehouses and even older libraries. You can learn more about her work on her website.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Richard Feynman Found the Root of the Challenger Disaster

The famed physicist’s persistence led him to uncover shocking failures

By Molly Glick    January 28, 2026

On this day 40 years ago, the nation watched with excitement as NASA prepared to launch the first civilian into space: Christa McAuliffe, a teacher from New Hampshire, trained for months to join six astronauts aboard NASA’s Space Shuttle Challenger. She planned to film a series of science lessons aboard the spacecraft, including two that would be aired on PBS.

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But just over a minute after the Challenger took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida, millions of viewers around the country—including children in schools—watched the spacecraft explode on their television screens. And hundreds of people gathered near the launch site saw the tragedy unfold right before them, including the crew’s families. The accident killed the entire Challenger team onboard.

Days after the tragedy, President Ronald Reagan established a commission to investigate the accident. This group of prominent experts included retired astronaut Neil Armstrong, then-active astronaut Sally Ride, and physicist Richard Feynman. He had reached scientific stardom in the mid 20th century for his role in the Manhattan Project and his work visualizing the complexities of quantum mechanics, and in 1965, he won the Nobel Prize in Physics.

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PHYSICIST TURNED DETECTIVE: Richard Feynman played a key role in both the Manhattan Project and the investigation into the Challenger tragedy. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Feynman was invited to the commission by NASA’s Acting Director William Graham, his former student at the California Institute of Technology. “When I heard it would be in Washington, my immediate reaction was not to do it,” he later wrote for Physics Today. “I have a principle of not going anywhere near Washington or having anything to do with government.”

Despite his initial reluctance to join the commission, it was Feynman who ultimately cracked the mystery behind the Challenger disaster.

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Not long after joining the commission, the famed physicist met with members of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to learn more about the space shuttle. He quickly formed a theory on the system’s fatal flaw: Rubber rings known as O-rings that sealed the joints of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters had been scorched by hot gas multiple times, causing erosion.

Feynman later concluded that some of these rings failed to expand, allowing sizzling gas to escape one of the solid rocket boosters and burn a hole in an external fuel tank that contained hydrogen—prompting the massive explosion. In fact, these rings were never intended to be used to cover expanding gaps, he found.

During the official investigation, Feynman said he felt frustrated by the slow pace and “time-consuming” public meetings and briefings “of so little use.” He did his own research and met privately with NASA officials, and even created his own report that he released publicly.

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In his report, he noted that NASA management had estimated a 1 in 100,000 chance of catastrophe with the space shuttle, while engineers put it at around 1 in 100. Based on the fact that the shuttle had launched plenty of times without incident, he explained that “obvious weaknesses are accepted again and again, sometimes without a sufficiently serious attempt to remedy them, or to delay a flight because of their continued presence.”

And NASA had assembled the space shuttle’s main engine all at once without testing individual parts separately, he pointed out. This makes it harder to determine individual issues.

Read more: “What Impossible Meant to Richard Feynman”

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Feynman also criticized the model used to gauge the safety of the O-rings, and noted that NASA was aware they had been eroding.

Most famously, he found that the rubber can’t expand in temperatures at or below 32 degrees Fahrenheit—on the unusually chilly day of the Challenger launch, morning temperatures dipped to the 20s. Engineers from the company who made the solid rocket boosters had warned NASA the day before the launch about the compounding risks of frigid temperatures and O-ring erosion.

To demonstrate this tragic oversight, Feynman dropped a sample of the O-ring rubber in a glass of ice water. The rubber grew rigid in the glass, proving Feynman’s point. “I believe that has some significance for our problem,” he said at a February 1986 hearing of the Challenger commission.

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For more than two years after the Challenger explosion, NASA put a pause on sending astronauts into space as they redesigned the space shuttle. The agency successfully blasted off space shuttle missions over the following decades, and the spacecraft was used to deliver components of the International Space Station. But in February 2003, Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart when reentering Earth’s atmosphere. Space shuttle missions began again in 2005, but NASA concluded the program in 2011.

Astronauts continue to honor the crews of the Challenger and Columbia missions. In 2017 and 2018, educators-turned-astronauts Ricky Arnold and Joe Acaba performed lessons designed by McAuliffe during their time on the International Space Station—ensuring that her work still reached children around the country.

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Lead image: NASA

Molly Glick

Posted on January 28, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

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.

Microbiology

- Wine That Lights Up When It’s Gone Bad

MICROBIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Wine That Lights Up When It’s Gone Bad

A bottle of red, a bottle of white, just don’t pick a bottle with light

By Jake Currie    January 27, 2026

We might not be able to glow ourselves, but humans have harnessed bioluminescence for all kinds of practical purposes: medical imaging, genetic research, and even experimental cancer treatments. Soon, we might be able to add another: detecting bottles of wine at risk of spoiling.

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Acetic acid, the chemical compound that gives vinegar its pungent taste and aroma, is a natural by-product of the fermentation process. If acetic acid levels get too high, fermentation grinds to a halt, resulting in a truly gnarly vintage.

Unfortunately, current tests for acetic acid concentration, like liquid chromatography, are slow, expensive, and otherwise inconvenient. Now, a team of researchers led by Yael Helman of Hebrew University in Israel has developed a clever early warning system for high acetic acid levels. They published their method in Microbial Biotechnology.

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Read more: “The Neuroscience of Wine”

The team genetically engineered bacteria to express the firefly enzyme luciferase in the presence of acetic acid. When acetic acid is present, luciferase gets produced, and boom—let there be light. This living biosensor proved to be sensitive enough to allow an accurate measurement of acetic acid levels without sampling the liquid itself. Amazingly, it can even detect acetic acid vapors that tend to rise to the neck of the bottle, something sophisticated devices like electronic noses struggle with.

“This system allows us to detect acetic acid in real time, without complicated equipment or sample processing,” Helman explained in a statement.

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And it’s not just for wine either. This novel method could be adapted to other industries that use fermentation, including biofuel production, and more. “It opens the door to affordable, on-site monitoring of fermentation quality and, in the future, may even support medical diagnostics based on volatile biomarkers,” Helman added.

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Lead image: alia.kurianova / Shutterstock

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Jake Currie

Posted on January 27, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Neuroscience

- Sex Changes the Brains of Male Mice

- New Study Throws a Wrench in Our Understanding of Memory

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Sex Changes the Brains of Male Mice

“What surprised us here was the clarity of the signal”

By Jake Currie    January 30, 2026

Sex differences in the structure of the brain are well-documented, hotly debated, and ultimately, kind of fuzzy. In humans, at least, they tend to be subtle with plenty of overlap in the bell curves between the sexes. The same is true for mice, but neurologists recently discovered one area in the little critters’ brains that shows a striking difference in males and females. They published their findings in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

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Tamar Licht and Dan Rokni of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, identified a small cluster of cells that displays a fascinating pattern of activity in males and females. Located in the medial amygdala, an area of the brain that plays a major role in social and reproductive behavior, this previously unknown cluster acts like a kind of neural switch. In female mice, the area is always active, but in male mice, it toggles off when they reach sexual maturity and then back on again after mating.

“Most sex differences in the brain are subtle and distributed,” Licht explained in a statement. “What surprised us here was the clarity of the signal. This is a discrete group of neurons that behaves almost like a biological switch, reflecting sex and social state in a very robust way.”

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Read more: “The Science Behind Better Visualizing Brain Function”

In other words, it’s possible to tell if a male mouse is a virgin just by looking at its brain activity.

To uncover the mechanism behind the switch, the team removed the testes and ovaries of mice. Surprisingly, the on/off switch still worked, meaning sex hormones weren’t the culprits. They then administered prolactin, a hormone released post-mating, to virgin male mice and discovered that it did, in fact, activate the switch. However, when they administered a chemical to block prolactin activity in male mice after mating, the switch still activated, suggesting there’s more to the story.

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So what does this switch do?

Interestingly, it was only active when male mice were housed together with their female mates. When they were separated, the neural cluster toggled off again. The researchers think it could be involved in the neural circuitry that triggers behavioral changes in mice once they become fathers, including suppressed infanticidal behavior.

They say fatherhood changes a man, turns out it changes a mouse, too.

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Lead image: acilino / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on January 30, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

New Study Throws a Wrench in Our Understanding of Memory

Some types of memories may not be stored as differently as we thought

By Jake Currie    January 28, 2026

Studying the inner workings of the human mind is always a thorny endeavor, and models for how our brains operate are continually being reexamined, revised, and reconfigured. While neurologists have mapped which regions of the brain are responsible for different functions, things get hazier when we move into the realm of nebulous phenomena like memory.

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Traditionally, explicit long-term memory (the intentional, conscious recollection of things and experiences) is divided into two subcategories: episodic memory and semantic memory. Episodic memory, as its name indicates, is the recollection of experiences—places, time, and the emotions associated with them. Semantic memory, on the other hand, is the recollection of general facts and information.

To put it simply, you rely on semantic memory to win a game of bar trivia, but you rely on episodic memory while recounting the story of your victory to friends. Or at least that’s what psychologists believed. New research from the School of Psychology at the University of Nottingham and the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at the University of Cambridge published this week in Nature Human Behavior is blurring the lines between the two.

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Read more: “Your Memories Are Like Paintings”

To study the retrieval and processing of information associated with semantic and episodic memory, researchers asked 40 people to recall pairings between logos and brand names that either corresponded to their real-world knowledge (for the semantic portion) or that they learned in an initial study phase (for the episodic portion). While recalling the pairings, subjects were scanned by functional MRI (fMRI), which shows the relative blood flow to different areas of the brain to indicate neural activity.

Interestingly, the researchers found no real difference in brain activity during the two tasks. “We were very surprised by the results of this study as a long-standing research tradition suggested there would be differences in brain activity with episodic and semantic retrieval,” study author Roni Tibon explained in a statement. “But when we used neuroimaging to investigate this alongside the task-based study we found that the distinction didn’t exist and that there is considerable overlap in the brain regions involved in semantic and episodic retrieval.”

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In other words, the same parts of the brain are involved in these two distinct forms of memory retrieval, suggesting they may be more connected than previously thought. Still, fMRI studies have come under scrutiny lately (who can forget the infamous dead salmon experiment?), and these findings will definitely warrant a second look. In the meantime, the study authors hope their results will yield new insights into memory disorders like Alzheimer’s disease.

“These findings could help to better understand diseases like dementia as we can begin to see that the whole brain is involved in the different types of memory, so interventions could be developed to support this view,” Tibon said.

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Lead image: Jorm Sangsorn / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on January 28, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Paleontology

- Inside the Mouth of Earth’s Oldest Bird

- Baby Sauropods Were the Potato Chips of the Jurassic Era

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

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Inside the Mouth of Earth’s Oldest Bird

A new look at an Archaeopteryx skull reveals some familiar and fascinating structures

By Jake Currie    February 5, 2026

If you’ve ever had the misfortune of staring down the gullet of a screaming goose, you know it contains the stuff of nightmares—a thick, barbed tongue surrounded by an array of fleshy, toothlike protrusions. Now, research published in The Innovation about a recently uncovered Archaeopteryx fossil shows that birds got their fascinating structures early in their evolution.

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The Archaeopteryx fossil in question arrived at the Chicago Field Museum in 2022, and chief preparator Akiko Shinya began the painstaking process of chipping away limestone to reveal the full specimen. To ensure she didn’t remove any important parts of the fossil, Shinya used an ultraviolet light, which causes fossilized soft tissues to glow. That’s when she noticed something strange.

“I remember them calling me over and saying, ‘Jingmai, we found something strange, come look at it,’” study author Jingmai O’Connor said in a statement. “They showed me these tiny, glowing dots, and I had no idea what we were looking at.”

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After consulting texts on bird anatomy, O’Connor realized what they were: oral papillae. “Imagine if the flesh on the roof of your mouth just had rows and rows of tiny, fleshy cones—that’s what birds have,” said O’Connor. These structures facilitate feeding by guiding food down the bird’s throat while steering it clear of the windpipe.

Read more: “Conjuring Imaginary Creatures”

But that’s not all, the team also discovered a tiny sliver of bone in the tongue. “This teeny-tiny bone is one of the smallest bones in the body, and it indicates that Archaeopteryx had a highly mobile tongue, like many birds today,” O’Connor added.

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A CT scan of the head revealed even more secrets—little tunnels in the beak, indicating spaces where nerves would have been. Taken together, the articulated tongue, oral papillae, and enervated, sensitive bill all point to an overall adaptive push toward finding and eating food, and O’Connor believes she knows why: While flight confers enormous benefits, it doesn’t come without costs, and the biggest one is the demand for more energy.

“These discoveries show this really clear shift in how dinosaurs were feeding when they started flying and had to meet the enormous energetic demands of flight,” O’Connor explained. “Birds have a super-efficient digestive system—everything is modified to maximize the efficiency of eating and the calories that they can extract from food. And the digestive system starts with the mouth.”

While all birds are dinosaurs, not all dinosaurs are birds, and these structures can help researchers draw a clearer line between the two.

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“For a long time, there have been very few things that we could say really characterize the transition from terrestrial dinosaurs to flying bird dinosaurs,” O’Connor said. “These weird little features in the mouth of Archaeopteryx, that are also found in living birds, are giving us new criteria that we can use to tell whether a dinosaur fossil is a bird or not.”

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Lead image: Photographer Delaney Drummond, (c) Field Museum

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Jake Currie

Posted on February 5, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Baby Sauropods Were the Potato Chips of the Jurassic Era

“Life was cheap in this ecosystem”

By Jake Currie    February 2, 2026

The closest thing we have to a real-life Jurassic Park is the Morrison Formation, a sprawling deposit of fossil-rich sedimentary rock dating back to the Jurassic Period spanning several Southwestern states. While the dinosaurs unearthed there have captivated paleontologists for over a century, they’re only now starting to get a fuller picture of the ecosystem they thrived in.

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Paleontologists led by Cassius Morrison of the University College London used data from the Morrison Formation to assemble a Jurassic food web. By analyzing the wear and tear of dinosaur teeth, the chemical composition of their remains, and even the fossilized remnants of their last meal, the team was able to reconstruct the ecological connections between the species. They published their findings in the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin.

So what was on the Jurassic menu?

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In a blow to anyone who grew up watching The Land Before Time, the team found that helpless baby sauropods were a vital food source for several species. Although these long-necked behemoths were among the largest land animals to ever live, they started their lives relatively snack-sized and free from parental supervision, an irresistible combination for Jurassic predators.

Read more: “T. Rex Was a Slacker”

“Size alone would make it difficult for sauropods to look after their eggs without destroying them, and evidence suggests that, much like baby turtles today, young sauropods were not looked after by their parents,” Morrison said in a statement. “Life was cheap in this ecosystem, and the lives of predators such as the Allosaurus were likely fuelled by the consumption of these baby sauropods.”

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The team also said that dwindling sauropod numbers 70 million years later may have provided the ecological pressure that led to the Jurassic’s most famous killing machine: Tyrannosaurs rex. According to the team, as sauropod populations declined, larger prey may have become more attractive, paving the way for adaptations like stronger bite force, larger size, and better vision that allowed them to prey on dinosaurs like Triceratops.

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Lead image: Fabio pastori / Wikimedia Commons.

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Jake Currie

Posted on February 2, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

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.

Psychology

- Here’s What Makes for an Ideal Scent-Sniffing Dog

- Dream Engineering Could Help You Solve Problems While You Sleep

- Neurotic People Have More Frequent Sexual Fantasies

- Tripping at Death’s Door: Psychedelics in End-of-Life Care

- How Gambling Addiction Is Changing in a Polymarket World

- When Liars Are Perceived as More Moral

- How Brain-Scanning Earbuds Could Build the Perfect Playlist

- Pink Noise Could be Ruining Your Sleep

- How Dissociation Blunts Trauma

- Why Waiting in Line Makes Stuff Seem More Valuable

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Here’s What Makes for an Ideal Scent-Sniffing Dog

Dog trainers and handlers tease out the characteristics that are deal-breakers

By Devin Reese    February 7, 2026

Today, our canine companions help support people with disabilities, conduct search and rescue operations, and sniff out narcotics. The personality characteristics that affect dogs’ suitability for such tasks have life-and-death implications. But, with the myriad modern breeds, what makes for the best scent-detection dog?

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A new study published in PLOS One figured out the ideal dog characteristics for scent detection, based on structured interviews with experts. Veterinary researchers from Utrecht University in the Netherlands interviewed 87 professional Dutch scent dog handlers and trainers, along with a control group of 23 civilian dog owners. The participants were asked to imagine that they could create their “ideal scent detection dog, as if it were a robot created in a laboratory.” They then scored their imaginary ideal dogs on 24 dog characteristics on a scale of zero (preferably not present in the dog) to 100 (preferably present).

Most dog handlers and trainers concurred that the ideal scent detection dog is confident, persistent, and resilient, with little neuroticism or insecurity. Confidence gives a scent dog the courage to deal with new environments; persistence keeps the dog on task until a scent is identified; and resilience confers an ability to rebound from unexpected stressors that may surface in the types of settings scent dogs face (for example, war zones, loud airports, and disaster sites).

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Read more: “The Doctor Will Sniff You Now”

Handlers were also queried about how much deviation was acceptable from their idealized scent dog’s characteristics. Which characteristics could they concede on, and which were deal breakers?

The favored characteristics of “confidence,” “persistence,” and “resilience” were deemed deal-breakers for which the imaginary dog could deviate little or none. Most of the professional participants also refused to make concessions on “scent-oriented,” “independent,” and “imperturbable.”

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“These characteristics [for which no concessions were made] are regarded as part of a dog’s personality and thus not easily influenced by training and/or management,” wrote the study authors. Even the characteristic of “scent-oriented behavior” arguably stems from a desire to seek out and investigate odors that is innately heightened in some dogs.

Professional handlers and trainers, on the other hand, were more willing to concede on the characteristic “precise” for their ideal dogs than civilians. The research hypothesized, from informal interview data, that professionals believed they could improve a dog’s precision through training, while civilians didn’t. Professionals also ranked “possessiveness” as a positive and required characteristic. In contrast, civilians tended to view “possessiveness” as negative, and assessed “impulsiveness” and “excitability” as less desirable characteristics.

So, while anyone handling a dog would like to see confidence, persistence, and resilience, the ideal scent dog to be handled by professionals should also be scent-oriented, independent, and basically unflappable.

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Lead image: olginaa84 / Pixabay

Devin Reese

Posted on February 7, 2026

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

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Dream Engineering Could Help You Solve Problems While You Sleep

“Sleeping on it” comes of age

By Kristen French    February 5, 2026

Dreams have famously led to some pretty spectacular insights. Chemist Dmitri Mendeleev dreamt up the organization of the periodic table. Mary Shelley dreamt the two main scenes that became the famous Gothic novel Frankenstein. Niels Bohr solved the structure of the atom. And Elias Howe hit upon a major invention in his sleep. He had been struggling with the problem of how to design an effective sewing machine. Then, one night, he dreamt he was being attacked by warriors with spears that had holes at their tips. The dream inspired a eureka moment: He realized he could design a sewing needle with an eye at the point instead of at the top, an innovation that led to the first clothing factories.

But can we deliberately harness the fertile realm of dreaming to creatively solve problems? It’s a question scientists have struggled to answer, in part because dreams are elusive and difficult to manipulate in a reliable way. This is the field of dream engineering.

Recently, a team of neuroscientists from Northwestern University set out to see if lucid dreaming might yield some new insights. Lucid dreamers are consciously aware they’re dreaming and can control the narrative, and some estimates suggest that a little over half of us can lucid dream, which is a trainable skill. What the scientists found surprised them: They were able to manipulate the dreams of their participants using auditory cues, prompting them to dream about puzzles that they’d learned to associate with those sounds while awake. But it was the non-lucid dreams that were most often linked to problem-solving. Was it the dreaming itself or other unconscious processes? Many questions remain. Still, the findings suggest that dreaming could one day become a problem-solving tool.

I spoke to American neuroscientist and study author Ken Paller about the relationship between dreaming and creativity and the potential uses and risks of dream engineering.

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Dreams and REM sleep have long been associated with creativity. Why is that?

Sleep is about a lot more than just restoration. We sleep to not be sleepy during the day and to be alert, but there’s a lot more going on. The brain’s not turned off. It’s quite busy. In my work on memory, I’ve looked at how all the things we learn each day need to be processed further, and integrated with other knowledge, so that they can be remembered later. And a lot of that happens unconsciously while we’re asleep. That’s the interesting part of sleep from a cognitive neuroscience point-of-view. Our waking cognition is partly a function of what happens while we sleep.

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This work is an extension of that idea, because creativity is connected to memory. When you put the individual fragments of memories together in new ways, seeing how they relate to problems you have, or questions you have, that’s a creative function. Finding those connections is a foundation for our creativity. That’s why it makes sense that both of those things are happening during our sleep: improving memory storage as well as creativity.

People have been talking about dream engineering for some time now. How has the science changed?

Dream research was a lot harder in the old days, because you could only ask people what they were dreaming about after they woke up. Now we ask them while they’re still asleep. We can present a question to people and have them give a signal with their eyes moving or their nose sniffing to tell us what’s happening at that moment, while they’re still in REM sleep and dreaming. That gives us an additional vantage point, and new opportunities for dream engineering. On top of that, we can look at brain activity at that moment and try to work out what the brain activity means, which is still a hard challenge, but we’re working on it.

Read more: “The Creative Sweet Spot of Dreaming”

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You used soundtracks to influence your participants’ dreams. Why do auditory cues work for dream engineering?

Prior to our 2009 study, there was this great study by Björn Rasch and his colleagues in Germany. They used odors and they thought, “We’ve gotta use odors because odors get in without waking you up, and they bypass the part of the brain called the thalamus.” At that time, people thought the thalamus would block out every sound or sight or any other modality except olfaction. So their thinking was, it’s gotta be olfaction. We came into it and thought, “Well, maybe, maybe not.” So we tried sounds, and in fact, there’s plenty of evidence that sounds do get in during sleep. An alarm clock works, but even soft sounds are processed in your brain, and—as we show—influence what kind of memories you process and the problems you’re thinking of.

This is a method we’ve used since 2009 in a Science paper we published. We call it targeted memory reactivation, where we first have people learn something before sleep. And then, during sleep, we decide which of the things they learned they’re going to process more. Targeted memory reactivation is where we play some sounds that are connected to something they learned, and we know it reactivates specific memories because when they wake up, they’re better at remembering those memories. So we can tinker with memory storage in that way. And we think it also happens naturally. I mean, you don’t need sounds, you’re always reactivating things, but we can bias which things with our method and therefore study how it works.

This isn’t entirely new. Aristotle described how if you hear some dripping water in your sleep, you might dream about water. But we were using this phenomenon in a very systematic way to say, “Here are these sounds that are connected specifically with puzzles you failed to solve when you were awake.”

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You expected that people would solve more problems while they were lucid dreaming as opposed to non-lucid dreaming? Why?

The idea was that you could intentionally try a particular strategy in your lucid dream. So in your lucid dream, maybe you would have some ability to get at the information that’s hidden away in your brain. And you might do that by not just thinking about it as the dreamer, but maybe summoning another character in your dream and saying, “Well, I think my brother might know the answer to that.” That’s a strategy that people use in their lucid dreams. We didn’t find that it particularly worked in this study, though. There might be better strategies, but it’s hard because not that many people have lucid dreams and they don’t have them that often. So we have to keep working on that challenge and on getting more evidence. How could you intentionally use your dreams for certain goals? We’re studying intentional dreaming in other contexts, too, with people who can develop these skills to a very high level.

I noticed in the study you told your participants to ask the dream itself for help on the problem. Why did you give them this prompt, and how do you think that works?

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The thinking is that your unconscious mind has more information than your conscious mind knows about. That’s undoubtedly true, but how to get to it. And you can also say your unconscious mind has more creativity. How do you unleash it? How do you get to that creativity? That’s a really exciting idea—that some people might have more access to that intuitive part of themselves and that playfulness, to get more creativity. And maybe we could learn how to do that using strategies like this. We may find some shortcuts.

Lucid-dreaming experts tell me that they often can’t just will things to happen in their lucid dream. They have to be subtle about it. So just demanding, “Give me the answer, dream!” doesn’t seem to work so well. From what they say, that doesn’t lead to success but other more subtle strategies, where they try to sneak up on the answer, can sometimes work for them. So dream control is possible for lucid dreamers, but it has its limits and can be challenging. It’s more like working with your dream as a partner rather than dominating it.

You write in the study that the findings mostly relate to convergent creativity, where there is a single right answer. Why is this?

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The creativity research field has multiple theories about how you get to answers. Sometimes you go strategically step-by-step and reach the answer. Other times it just sort of appears suddenly in an “aha” moment, and you don’t see the process that brought you there. The problems we gave our study participants all had a single right answer so we could know when they reached the correct solution, but they often had dead ends, too. Like one of the problems was, “You have to plant four trees equidistant from each other. In what arrangement do you plant your trees so that each one’s the same distance from the other three?” You start thinking about it, and you think, “Okay, I plant them in a square.” And then you come to the conclusion, “No, in a square they’re not gonna be equidistant from each other. That doesn’t work.” And you think, “Okay, a diamond, or some other shape, what do I do?”

You struggle with it. But you’re thinking in a two-dimensional way, and the key insight is to think in three dimensions. If there’s a hill, then you could have three in a triangle and one in the middle on top and they could all be equidistant. That’s the solution—to go to that additional dimension. A lot of problems are like that, where the way you initially think is not gonna get you the answer, but you have to unhook from that and try a new way. That’s the creativity. It’s like they say, “You have to think outside the box.”

Do your results change how we think about the relationship between dreams and creativity or problem-solving?

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I think it opens the door to the idea that dreams can offer a wealth of insight and creativity that you could use to your advantage. You might benefit from that, compared to ignoring your dreams. But scientifically, I’m also happy with the idea that your unconscious mind is where that wealth is. And your dreams just provide a little glimpse into it. I’m willing to play both sides of that argument and say dreams could be really important, or maybe not. For now, we’re just trying to understand how the brain works. Everyone knows sleeping on a problem can help you get to the right answer. We’ve just never been sure where dreaming fits in with all that. And I’m still not sure.

How do you ultimately want to use this research?

The next research frontier could relate to mental health. If you’re spending time really bothered by something, or having depressing thoughts all day long, we figure those thoughts are gonna come up again during your sleep and influence how your sleep goes. And how you feel the next day! And so, one of our new research questions is to see, okay, is that contributing to people having anxiety and depression during the day? And can we bias their overnight memory reactivation in a better direction?

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So we might engineer dreams not just to solve problems, but perhaps to improve your psychological well-being. Can we have wearable devices where people would strategically decide what sounds they wanted that could guide them in particular ways? Outside of made-up brain teasers that no one really cares about, can we move this to the life issues that people do have, and beyond that, to the big problems we have in the world today?

Is there any danger that dream engineering could be misused?

There are always dangers, and we always have to think carefully about the ethical issues that could come up. Our techniques could be misused. I wrote a paper that was subtitled “Sleeping in a Brave New World” in 2017. Let’s take an unscrupulous hotel owner, for example. They could rig up something with your hotel bed to play advertising to you when you’re asleep. Would you want advertising when you were asleep? You wouldn’t even know that you were exposed to it, if it came in while you were asleep. We have rules against subliminal advertising, but people push the rules sometimes. That’s one example I could imagine. Also, it could be misused by people interrogating suspected criminals. Sleep tactics are already used in the sense that sleep deprivation is a cruel punishment for people in prison that can mess you up pretty badly.

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Do these techniques of dream engineering and problem-solving carry any other risks?

There could be opportunities, and there could be costs. Some of our studies have shown, in the memory context, that if we play sounds too loud, the sounds can arouse people from deep sleep. So if they disturb sleep, that’s bad. And it’s bad not just for their sleep, but also, the memories get worse instead of better. So, there’s a danger of doing sleep engineering in a way that’s not prioritizing high-quality sleep. We’re really careful to play these sounds very, very softly. In our experiments we watch the ongoing sleep physiology and monitor the sound levels carefully, so that they’re not disrupting sleep.

Another question is that if we reactivate some memories, then are other memories not getting reactivated? Maybe you’re missing out on something important that your natural sleep would’ve accomplished. So we have to consider these issues, that there could be some trade-offs. In each case, one would need to ask whether the trade-off is worth it.

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It might be, if you get a memory boost you genuinely need, an improvement in learning in a rehab context, or an answer to a major problem in your life.

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Kristen French

Posted on February 5, 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

Neurotic People Have More Frequent Sexual Fantasies

Our personalities affect the regularity of our mental dalliances, new research shows

By Jake Currie    February 4, 2026

The so-called “big five” traits psychologists use to describe human personalities are open-mindedness, conscientiousness, extroversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. Neuroticism, the moody black sheep of the bunch, captures our predisposition toward negative emotions like anger, depression, and anxiety. Now, a new study published in PLOS One suggests it could also be linked to our tendency to indulge in sexual fantasies.

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A team led by Emily Cannoot of Michigan State University analyzed data from 5,225 Americans who filled out two questionnaires. The first asked about their sexual fantasy lives, including the type and frequency of any steamy daydreams, while the second measured their big five personality traits.

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

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They found that people who scored high for neuroticism also reported experiencing sexual fantasies more frequently. On the other hand, people who scored high for conscientiousness and agreeableness—which measure our bent toward self-discipline and social harmony, respectively—fantasized about sex less often. Somewhat counterintuitively, extraversion and open-mindedness showed no effect on sexual fantasy frequency.

Zooming in on those findings revealed that neurotics who scored particularly high in depression were more likely to indulge in mental sexcapades, while the chaste thoughts of the conscientious and agreeable types were explained by high measures of respectfulness and responsibility.

Surprisingly, studies on sexual fantasies and personality types are few and far between, something the team hopes to remedy going forward, including by looking into how our personalities and sexual fantasies co-develop over time.

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Jake Currie

Posted on February 4, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Tripping at Death’s Door: Psychedelics in End-of-Life Care

A group in rural California wants to help us understand death through hallucinogens and narrative medicine

By Kristen French    February 4, 2026

How should the living think about death?

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It’s a question humans have grappled with since the beginning of time. Ancient Egyptians built the pyramids and created the Book of the Dead to guide souls through the afterlife. Buddhism set as its goal an escape from the cycle of death and life through enlightenment. Then in the 20th century, German philosopher Martin Heidegger argued that truly living requires confronting your mortality. And French philosopher and author Albert Camus found that death made life absurd, but argued that this is what gives it meaning.

Now, a new narrative medicine project in rural northern California aims to explore the question of how to face death through a set of films about psychedelic care for people with terminal illness. The Institute for Rural Psychedelic Care in Arcata, California, which has been using ketamine with palliative care patients for almost four years, is developing the films, which will feature interviews with patients on four themes: unfinished business and regrets; quality of relationships and love; legacy and meaning making; and finally, what exists beyond death. These are themes they say come up over and over again in their work.

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“How do we engage in longer-term storytelling around these liminal experiences?” asked Carrie Griffin, a trauma therapist and psychedelic medicine practitioner who is working on the project. Through storytelling, they want to not only engage broader audiences in questions about end of life, but help clinicians learn to more fully engage with their patients, and ease anxiety in the terminally ill. Griffin is working on the project with rural palliative care physician Michael Fratkin and photographer Justin Maxon, who recently won a Guggenheim for his work documenting the opioid crisis in the Hoopa Valley, in California.

I spoke with Griffin about what makes psychedelics well suited to end-of-life care in rural settings, the human need for meaning, and the aims of the project.

What about psychedelics makes them so appropriate for end-of-life treatment?

I’m trained as a physician, so I’ll start with the physiology: One thing that psychedelics do is they increase something called brain derived neurotrophic factor, or BDNF, the molecule of neuroplasticity. When people talk about how exercise is so good for you, why sex is so good for you, how do we grow new parts of our brains? BDNF is the molecule that helps that to happen. So you’re taking in a substance that’s clearly creating a state change.

Ketamine in particular increases glutamate. Glutamate is the most abundant neurotransmitter in the cerebrospinal fluid. It’s an excitatory neurotransmitter. So when the neurons release glutamate through these vesicles, glutamate floods the brain, and it causes a downstream effect of serotonin and norepinephrine and other neurotransmitters to be released. And there’s something about our perception, our consciousness, that’s connected to these floods of neurotransmitters. But of course, this is a very mechanistic model of what it means to be alive. It lacks soul, right? It lacks a sense of deep mystery.

You want these films to communicate that mystery?

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Yes. There are all these things about living and dying that are difficult to codify in language or in knowledge. We want these films to help bring some of that mystery to life. The idea is that the films could be used to support anybody’s reckoning with their own mortality. On one level, this will happen to you regardless of whether you reflect on it or not. But for those of us who have been working in medical liminal spaces, so birth and death, we’ve found it makes a really big difference if people have taken some time to reflect and slow down and notice, “What’s my body’s relationship to the fact that I’m going to die? Am I gonna be scared? Is it gonna hurt? Where do I go?”

Those are big questions. Do they have answers?

There’s a lot to reflect on. We don’t need to spend all of our days being contemplators, meditating on graveyards, but doing some of this is a powerful spiritual practice. It’s good fodder for awakening. And I actually think that’s part of what we’re here to do: to help wake us up. We also want people to see how your whole life is art. This whole thing we’re doing on Earth is a creative act. The more we can remember that the more we’re able to connect to this profound sense of agency that it’s very easy to forget.

People want to think and feel deeply. People are hungry for something that actually has substance to it. We don’t just want 32-second videos. These do something, but eventually these little nothing bites just lead us to downloading the gambling app. We’re designed for depth. We’re designed for a different tempo.

Is there an ideal time to give psychedelics to the dying?

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It’s super individual, but there’s a general opening of opportunity if, or when, someone is having discussions with hospice. The general thought is that you have a six-month or less life expectancy, so that’s a really potent window.

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

How do you decide whether psychedelics are the right approach for someone?

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I mean, psychedelics are very alluring. They’ve been alluring for millennia, but they’re definitely having another moment, another season of being hot and being sexy and being interesting. I feel like whenever I see that, my immediate instinct is to harmonize the narrative and say they’re not for everyone. There’s lots of ways to create a change in consciousness. That may be through breathwork or meditation or close reading and close writing, deep reflective practices. It could be through movement. There are lots of ways to create state changes within ourselves.

But one of the first people we recruited for this project has a form of ALS [a fatal neurodegenerative disease, also known as Lou Gehrig’s disease] and he communicates with a speechpad and watch. And he’s had, I think, four treatments at this point with ketamine. He even did a session with his family members, too. They all got medically cleared and all went through their own individual therapy process, and then a group preparation process, before experiencing it together. Of course, if someone can’t consent to that kind of care, you don’t proceed with that kind of care.

Are psychedelic drugs best suited to certain kinds of terminal illness?

I will say that for people who have a neurodegenerative diagnosis like ALS or Parkinson’s, you know that the body is going to fail you. It’s progressive. That’s a little bit different than someone with chronic kidney disease where we could maintain them on dialysis until they stop. Or even someone with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, where eventually they reach a point where they’re requiring oxygen, but not getting relief. There’s that chronic air hunger. But there’s a slow, yet sure progress in neurodegenerative conditions that does feel unique. And the other group, of course, is cancer. So people who have cancer that has metastasized to stage three, stage four, perhaps they’re choosing to use their ketamine-assisted process to determine if they want to continue with some kinds of chemotherapy or radiation.

How do you measure success in psychedelic end-of-life care?

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One way to support a person’s reckoning with a chronic disease process can be to help them reflect on the day-to-day quality of their lives. What are they missing? What are they longing for? What have they minimized to the point that they don’t even realize that they’re missing it?

Then, of course, there are psychological scales that have been confirmed and been validated. There’s an end-of-life anxiety scale. There are a number of regular behavioral health, mental health scales, like the PHQ-9 for depression, or the GAD-7 for anxiety. There’s a quality of life at end-of-life scale.

What made the three rural counties you’re focusing on an especially good fit for this work?

Well, one, bloom where you’re planted. We’re here in a very interesting geographic area. We’re in what’s called the Redwood Curtain, all the way up in the far, far north. It’s hard to get here, and it feels a little bit like living on an island to me sometimes. There’s really a quality of untouched raw earth here. This is where the highest predominance of Redwoods are, the Redwood National Forest. This is where Return of the Jedi was filmed, the Ewok Forest. There’s a kind of primeval quality to the land here.

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Do rural patients face different end-of-life challenges from urban patients that psychedelics can uniquely address?

One of the things that I think is very true about psychedelic medicine in psychedelic practice is that it happens in community. When you look at how all kinds of Indigenous substance work was done, when you look at how ceremony is practiced, it’s in community. You have lots of practitioners around you. It’s a very collaborative model of care, it’s a slow, deep, rich experience. You can’t make it faster. And I’m sure there’s an army of tech bros who would hunt me down and tell me this is not true, but I actually don’t think psychedelics scale. Because to do them well, to do them with intention, it’s slow and it’s deep and it’s held by many people.

That’s why we’re taking this clinical-meets-psychological-meets-spiritual experience and embodying it through short films and then inviting deeper reflection and engagement. We really want to foster conversation and community around this experience that all of us are going to have. Loved ones die. Pets die. The plant next to me will die. We all die.

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Kristen French

Posted on February 4, 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 Gambling Addiction Is Changing in a Polymarket World

The ways in which sports betting and predictive markets are ruining lives

By Kristen French    February 3, 2026

In the last couple of years, the world has become a kind of 24-hour casino. Anyone can place bets on anything at any time from the phone in their pocket. This shift hasn’t been gradual. It’s happened all at once. In the short time since a 2018 Supreme Court ruling took effect, roughly 38 states in the United States have legalized some kind of sports betting. At the same time, so-called predictive markets have taken off, with apps like Kalshi allowing regular people to place financial bets on everything from Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro’s capture, to Bad Bunny’s Super Bowl halftime opener, to Greenland’s fate, to whether it will snow in Salt Lake City this month.

That easy access spells trouble for many people. A recent investigation in Jama Internal Medicine showed that online searches for gambling addiction help have ballooned: They’re up 23 percent nationally since 2018. People in their 20s are the fastest growing group of gamblers, but many start as young as 12 years of age, often through online video games. Many journalism outlets now have partnerships with predictive markets or sports betting sites, at least some of whom report feeling pressured to normalize betting in their reporting. The more normal it seems, the more dangerous it becomes for at-risk groups, says Timothy Fong, addiction psychiatrist and co-director of the Gambling Studies Program at the University of California, Los Angeles.

I spoke to Fong about how the surge in online betting is reshaping gambling addiction and reality itself.

Has the nature of gambling disorder changed in the last few years, as betting on everything and anything has become more accessible?

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No one, frankly, could have predicted, pardon the pun, how exponentially different our world would become in just a matter of years. Two years ago, prediction markets were a niche thing, but it’s really exploded dramatically. I’m an addiction psychiatrist. And for the last 25 years, I’ve been in the business of helping people who call and say, “I have a problem with drugs, alcohol, gambling. It’s harmed my life. I need help.” And these were people who would go to brick-and-mortar casinos, maybe use a bookie here and there—you know, things like that.

But in the last four years, people began getting in trouble with online gambling apps. You can dress it up with different clothes and different makeup and different whatnot, but at the end of the day, what is it? It’s an experience where you’re putting something of value at risk, in this case money, on an event of uncertain outcome, in the hopes of winning a larger reward. Also knowing you can lose that. Any way you slice it, that’s gambling.

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They’ll say prediction is based on your own research, it’s a skill-based activity. These companies say, “We’re not gambling, we’re not gaming, we’re investing, we’re financial. We’re allowing the little guy to get in on making money off his or her knowledge about human events. You can invest in anything you want and potentially be rewarded for it.” But they don’t talk about the risk of losing your investment. And these markets aren’t regulated like casinos. The bottom line is, there’s no doubt every single day we’re starting to get more calls from men and women who are adversely impacted by these financially risky experiences.

Are your patients today different than a few years ago?

I saw a young man today, 19 years old, who has lost two years of his life with these various apps. A mixture of betting on sports, cryptocurrency stuff, meme and coin stuff, stocks, options, prediction markets. At the end of the day, this young man has spent over $180,000, and has tremendous guilt, shame, misery, emotional pain, financial damage. He’s literally not left campus in a year because he’s just been stuck on his phone and his laptop trying to play around with these financial apps. For him, the only reason he came to see me was that he spent everything. He told his parents, “I’m sorry, I don’t know what else to do.” And his parents said, “You need professional help. You’re gambling.” They googled gambling treatment, UCLA, they found me.

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Are the kinds of people who are susceptible to gambling disorders different now versus a few years ago?

In the 1980s, crack cocaine came onto the market, and it created a whole new generation and legions of folks became addicted because it was a product that was much, much more potent and much stronger and much more addictive than cocaine. A similar thing has happened with gambling. The types of products that are out there now are way more addictive, faster, more potent, more accelerated. So for Generation X, if I wanted to invest in the stock market in the ’90s, I had to physically go into an office, wait, put an order in, write a physical check, and wait for that thing to happen. Then E*TRADE came along, and you could do it from your home. And everyone was like, “Oh this is so cool!” The problem is, we’ve accelerated two things: The speed at which you can make financial transactions combined with the addictive nature of some of these products that are expressly designed to get you to spend more money. It offers an incredible experience and lots of things to choose from. Super cheap to get into, powerful advertising, normalization of this behavior so that it’s seen as, “Oh, everybody’s doing it.” And if you don’t get in on it, you’re missing out.

Who’s most vulnerable?

The core is gonna be young people who aren’t fully formed adults. We know it’s people with untreated mental-health conditions that make emotional regulation difficult. So people with ADHD, major depression, bipolar disorder, active substance use disorder, people with head injuries. And we know disproportionately it’s gonna be people from lower socioeconomic classes and minority populations that are already behind the eight ball. But on the flip side, who comes into the clinic at UCLA? White guys, 18 to 24. That’s it. That’s all we see. The last 20 calls I’ve had for help were 18- to 24-year-old white guys with good families, who were highly educated, tech savvy, but had run into some trouble. I haven’t seen a single female in the last two years. At a conference two weeks ago, not a single audience member had a woman that showed up for help. But we know women are doing this. They’re just not coming in.

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How do you know women are gambling on the apps?

Because when I ask women in my world, “Are you gambling on sports?” They say, “Yeah.” And in the gambling industry, when we ask them how many users identify as women on your apps, they say 20-30 percent. Even the national surveys say that. I saw a really interesting ad for the predictive market Kalshi the other day. I wasn’t sure whether it was an ad or a social media influencer they were paying, but it was a female in pajamas on a couch. The idea was basically, “Hey, get into Kalshi. This could be your side gig. Get paid for your opinions.” It was couched as a job, as a safe work-from-home alternative.

So did you not used to see 18- to 24-year-old white men in your practice for gambling addiction?

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I think they’re trending younger. If you look at the profiles of people who call gambling helplines, compared to five or six years ago, there are definitely more younger men calling. But it’s a tricky profile. Is this a brand new population of gambling-disordered people we created from thin air? Yes and no. We’ve created an environment that’s driving these young men to seek help. We can’t say it’s affecting them more than say, older Black men in their 70s or something like that. But we’re definitely seeing that age group, which is very vulnerable to all kinds of addictions. This young man from today, if he doesn’t get into these apps, he doesn’t develop a gambling problem. He’s just a normal sophomore.

And are most of them coming to you having trouble with sports gambling, or all kinds of prediction market stuff?

It’s a mixture usually of five or six different apps, five or six different types of gambling. Sports tends to be number one followed by stocks and meme stocks and crypto. But the vast majority of what we’re seeing is betting on sports. And it’s not traditional sports betting, like my team versus your team. It’s very exotic types of bets on sports they know nothing about, like table tennis from Taiwan or Hungarian soccer leagues. Sports betting used to be about enjoying action and watching a game with friends. Now it’s essentially like a lottery. You’re just using random number generators and you’re hoping the numbers go your way.

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Read more: “Are Fantasy Sports Really Gambling?”

So they’re not betting on global events like, you know, Maduro’s capture in Venezuela, things like that?

That’s part of the problem. A lot of the gamblers that come in, that’s not kind of a standard thing that clinicians ask, because many clinicians don’t even know about it. I ask, and most of the clients I have are like, “That’s not really a thing yet for me.”

Does the normalization and pervasiveness of gambling change the kinds of neurological or psychological hooks that get people into it?

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It’s like other forms of addiction—cannabis, alcohol—when you normalize the activity, you decrease perception of harm. When you promote engagement, that’s when you get folks who are vulnerable or financially illiterate or just unaware, more likely to participate. We don’t see a lot of ads on TV about using cannabis. There are strict advertising laws against cannabis for anyone under 21. But when it comes to gaming, these markets, laws like this aren’t really enforced. Kalshi is gonna have an ad in the Super Bowl. I can’t think of a more publicly endorsed form of advertising than the Super Bowl. Then you have peer pressure, and you imagine what it does. This 19-year-old I saw today, he’s in a frat. I asked him, how many of the guys in your frat are betting on sports? He’s like, “110 percent plus the other 20 percent who are lying that they’re not.” So if he doesn’t bet on sports, he’s an outcast.

And people in their teens and early 20s are already more vulnerable to this kind of addiction?

Anyone whose brain isn’t fully grown is vulnerable when it comes to decision making. They’re vulnerable to impulsivity, understanding the biological urges of wanting something versus needing something: drugs, sexual images, financial reward, images of power, things that are associated with acquisition.

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I understand that in gambling disorder, what really hooks people, when it starts to become destructive, is after their first big win.

It’s similar to what happens with substances. If you don’t get a rewarding experience the first time you use cocaine or heroin, you’re probably not likely to do it again. But what also is super rewarding is the near win, or the almost win—the near miss. It’s been shown through some neuroscience imaging that this is as rewarding as actually winning, and almost even more reinforcing. It’s like, “Oh my gosh, I almost won. If I stick at it, eventually I’m going to win.” Which is why that game ParlayPlay is so attractive. It lets you place multiple bets at once, if you get all of them right, you can get a massive win, which creates the opportunity for a lot of near-misses. These are the powerful kinds of reinforcing mechanisms that we see.

So these betting sites are set up to use our specific psychological vulnerabilities against us?

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People in the casino and gambling industry have been doing this for years. No clocks, free drinks. They do this for engagement and retention. The betting apps also use tricks. They have algorithms that know what kind of bets you like, what kind of sports you like, what kinds of numbers draw you in. So when I log onto these apps, I notice that “Oh, wow, they already pre-made a bet for me. This is great. I don’t even have to do my own research.” It’s like, “Click here if you want in on it.” They have a lot of other tricks, reward systems, mini competitions, track your progress, refer a friend and get a nice jacket. So a lot of it is the standard stuff, but I’ve had a few behind-the-scenes talks with gambling operators, and they’re like, “You know what we get frustrated with? When people sign up, they deposit money, they make one bet, and then the next day they pull their money out. That’s the worst kind of customer.”

Prediction markets are different from sports betting because they’re dealing with real-world events. They claim to aggregate wisdom, the wisdom of crowds, to reveal truth. But does this end up becoming a self-referential loop? With reporting of the odds in turn influencing behavior, which amplifies the odds and so on? Particularly given the cozy relationships that exist and are developing between prediction markets and journalism outlets.

I think it goes back to again, what are these products? An investment or financial tool that’s meant to preserve wealth? A more accurate polling device? Financial tools that hedge against risks? Like if you run a restaurant and you bet on it closing, then you’re protected from, let’s say, a wildfire shutting it down. But I play around with these apps a lot, and all I know is that when I put money in a prediction market, really into sports, it feels exactly like gambling. I have an expectation I’m gonna get paid out. If it were a true investment, I wouldn’t get paid out for 10 years or 20 years like a CD or a six-month treasury. Right?

I think this whole wisdom of the crowd, that’s very useful for certain things. But is the crowd leading the money, or is the money leading the crowd? And it could be driven by insider trading by someone who had an agenda and you’re completely unaware of it, which ends up shaping how you think. I think that’s probably the scariest thing. Someone force-feeding you an idea so that they could benefit from the outcome of that idea.

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Just a few weeks ago, federal prosecutors charged over two dozen people in a college basketball scheme for fixing gains. And then there’s the Polymarket trader who placed the wager on Maduro and made $400,000. And the crazy rumors about Karoline Leavitt, Trump’s press secretary, ending her briefing early in response to a bet on one of the apps. What happens when the corruption and “fixing” extends beyond sports into global politics and everyday events?

You get more distrust in everything. People start believing that everything is rigged. There is a faceless, authoritarian figure or corporation behind every move. Alternative facts become the norm. And conspiracy theories dominate. And any sort of faith that you have in anything is eroded. Do we as humans need faith in order to sustain ourselves? Or can we live in an environment where literally everything we do is constantly questioned by everyone? I see profound distrust in institutions just getting worse, which, in turn, obviously impacts everyone’s mental health, because that creates more fear, anxiety, emotional pain, doubt, pessimism, and well, addiction. But in the patients that come in for addiction right now, it’s a very different story. They’re like, “I just know I could get back to even.”

I had a policy guy at a think tank say to me the other day, “I see no value in gambling ever.” And I said to him, “I see no value in alcohol as a product in the world. Humans don’t need alcohol to live.” And he’s like, “You’re right. I don’t see any value in that either.” So what do we do with things in our world that we know provide no immediate benefit to the survival of the species?

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Do existing frameworks for understanding and treating gambling disorders fit what’s emerging now? Or do you have to rewrite them given how quickly things are changing?

We have to evolve. Standard treatment protocols are about biological, psychological, and social treatments for addiction. A biological treatment is getting a good night’s sleep. It’s eating three meals a day. It’s physical movement. So that stuff is always there. We have certain medications for urges and cravings. No problem.

Psychologically, when it comes to the actual gambling, there’s a lot of cognitive distortions that fuel ongoing gambling addiction. In traditional gambling, it’s like, “Oh, I’ve lost 20 hands in a row at Blackjack, I’m due to win, therefore I should triple my bet.” Or: “You can’t lose on your birthday, so I’m gonna take a higher bankroll to the casino on my birthday.” But it’s a different set of distortions when it comes to online financial gambling. “The Bulls never beat the Knicks on Mondays.” So there’s some similarity, but there are also some different expectations, such as a lot of folks come in and tell me, “No, these things aren’t rigged, and I really believe I have a skill in picking stocks.” Or: “Everyone I see online is making money hand-over-fist, so it’s just a matter of time before I do, too.” And a lot of times people don’t view this stuff as gambling. They see gambling as slot machines.

The social treatment for addiction is things like 12-step support groups—Gamblers Anonymous, connecting with others, learning new skills. This is one of the hardest parts when you have generations now that are really struggling with loneliness. I say, “You need to go out, meet people, do stuff, get out there in real life,” and there’s this resistance. “No, I’m not doing that.” It’s fear of rejection. A lot of these young folks will not go to a GA meeting in person because they’re like, “That sounds so scary.” But they’ll do a GA meeting online. Or they’ll say, “I won’t go to church ‘cause church is full of pedophiles.” Or: “I won’t go get a job because why should I get a job? Because why should I stay for 10 hours making $150 bucks when I can gamble in two seconds and make a thousand dollars.” Even in fraternities, they’re like, “Why should we go out? It’s just too much of an effort.” So that social treatment is about finding real-life activities that are more meaningful. That’s what draws you away from the compulsion to gamble.

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If you have a full life and you’re super busy and you have a lot of interests, you’re probably not on your phone a thousand hours a day. But these people have very different views on real-world experiences. I’ve had a few who are really uncomfortable coming in to see me in person because they don’t know how to be in person with anybody. They’re only used to the digital world.

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Kristen French

Posted on February 3, 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

When Liars Are Perceived as More Moral

New research reveals complex attitudes about prosocial lies

By Jake Currie    February 3, 2026

If asked, most people would say lying is amoral. But if pressed, our true feelings on the matter are a little more complicated. Whether you call it “creative truth telling,” “massaging the truth,” or simple diplomacy, white lies are a vital part of social relationships. New research published in the British Journal of Social Psychology is offering some insights into the morality of telling prosocial lies, or lies aimed at fostering social cohesion.

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In the first part of the study, researchers asked nearly 900 participants to consider someone tasked with evaluating two cooks, Kate and Amy, who have both prepared a horrible dish. While Kate welcomes criticism and uses it to improve her culinary skills, Amy doesn’t like getting negative feedback and finds it demoralizing. Participants then scored the morality of evaluators who either lied to the cooks or told them the truth. The researchers found that most people tended to rate evaluators who lied to Amy as more moral than those who told her the awful truth.

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

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“Interestingly, a socially sensitive feedback provider was not considered less moral than an honest one, suggesting that such an attitude is tolerated when it aligns with social needs,” study co-author Katarzyna Cantarero of SWPS University in Poland said in a statement. “This indicates that people strategically adjust their preferences for honesty based on social cues.”

But just because we may extend some grace to diplomatic evaluators doesn’t mean we want to be lied to. In the second part of the study, the researchers asked participants to pick their desired evaluator: an honest one, or one who would lie to spare their feelings. Seventy percent of participants opted for the honest one.

“The study showed that when participants were selecting a feedback provider for themselves, those who provided honest feedback were more likely to be considered, as opposed to those who used prosocial lies,” Cantarero explained.

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Sure, we all like to think we’re a Kate, but that could be just another lie we’re telling ourselves.

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Lead image: Amanita Silvicora / Shutterstock

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Jake Currie

Posted on February 3, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Brain-Scanning Earbuds Could Build the Perfect Playlist

The scientific quest for a playlist that’s all killer, no filler

By Jake Currie    February 2, 2026

There’s always that one moment in that one song that never fails to give you goosebumps. Whether it comes from the sonic depth charge of an EDM bass drop, the soaring strains of an operatic aria, or the explosive crescendo of a frenetic guitar solo, the feeling is the same. And it’s not just a mere skin tingle; these musical chills represent a bona fide neurological phenomenon, engaging your brain’s reward and pleasure centers.

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While these shivers of auditory ecstasy are universal sensations, the subjectivity of musical tastes makes them difficult to reproduce reliably. Although Spotify’s algorithm might seem clairvoyant at times, it can’t actually read your mind. But what if it could?

That’s the question researchers from Keio University in Japan set out to answer in a study recently published in iScience.

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To increase the frequency of music chills, the team of neuroscientists built a system they termed the “Chill Brain-Music Interface” (C-BMI). Data from compact in-ear electroencephalography (EEG) sensors monitoring brain activity allowed them to build optimized and personalized playlists.

Read more: “Could AI Help Me Compose a Musical Expression of Love?”

The subjects in the study first listened to songs they selected themselves, then songs selected by others, all while the EEG sensors recorded their brain activity. Using this data, the researchers built two different models for playlist construction: one based on the acoustic elements of the songs (similar to current music streaming recommendation algorithms), and one based on the level of pleasure recorded by the in-ear EEGs. Next, they combined the two models into a closed-loop system that generated playlists aimed at either boosting or decreasing pleasure, with some incorporating the real-time neural data and others not.

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The results? The playlists generated by the C-BMI using neural feedback from the EEGs yielded more chills and higher pleasure ratings than the standard “acoustics-only” method.

While creating a more perfect playlist is a noble endeavor on its own, the team thinks this new system could have important mental-health applications. “If this non-invasive system could be integrated with in-ear earphones equipped with EEG sensors and wellness and music-streaming apps, it could offer emotional support during commutes, before sleep, or in daily life,” Sotaro Kondoh, the paper’s first author and a research fellow at Keio University’s Center for Music Science, said in a statement.

As long as you’re ok with your earbuds reading your mind, that is.

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Lead image: Piscine26 / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 2, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Pink Noise Could be Ruining Your Sleep

New research shows the popular sleep sound could be doing more harm than good

By Jake Currie    February 2, 2026

If you’re one of the millions of people who use a white noise machine at night, there’s a good chance it doesn’t actually produce true white noise. Instead, many of these sleep aids produce pink noise, a broadband sound that filters out the higher frequencies many people find annoying or distracting. Pink noise, previous studies have shown, can deepen sleep, but research published today in the journal Sleep suggests it might not be all it’s cracked up to be.

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To study the effect of pink noise on sleep, researchers from the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine monitored 25 adults in a sleep laboratory for seven nights, exposing them to aircraft noise, pink noise, or both. In the morning, participants completed surveys detailing the previous night’s quality of sleep.

They found that exposure to aircraft noise shortened the amount of time spent in the deepest stage of sleep by about 23 minutes, while exposure to pink noise shortened the amount of time spent in REM sleep by 19 minutes. When aircraft noise and pink noise were played, both stages of sleep were significantly shortened, and time spent awake was 15 minutes longer. Understandably, participants reported that their overall sleep quality suffered during nights with noise compared to noise-free nights.

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Read more: “Noise Is a Drug and New York Is Full of Addicts”

“REM sleep is important for memory consolidation, emotional regulation, and brain development, so our findings suggest that playing pink noise and other types of broadband noise during sleep could be harmful—especially for children whose brains are still developing and who spend much more time in REM sleep than adults,” study author Mathias Basner explained in a statement.

It seems like bleak news for the millions of people who cue up a pink noise playlist at night, but the researchers stress that more study is needed on other broadband noise spectrums.

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“Overall, our results caution against the use of broadband noise, especially for newborns and toddlers, and indicate that we need more research in vulnerable populations, on long-term use, on the different colors of broadband noise, and on safe broadband noise levels in relation to sleep,” Basner said.

It’s not all bad news, though. The research team did find one lo-fi sleep aid for restless sleepers bothered by traffic noise: earplugs. Participants who wore them while being exposed to aircraft noise showed sleep patterns similar to noise-free nights.

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Lead image: Rucula / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 2, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Dissociation Blunts Trauma

The most elusive mental health condition is more common than we thought

By Kristen French    January 30, 2026

A few years ago, psychologists began to report a surge in young people presenting with self-diagnosed dissociative identity disorder, a complex mental health condition that features multiple personalities and significant distress and dysfunction. Some clinicians began to worry that these cases could be traced back to TikTok, where a small group of influencers claiming to have the disorder had accumulated large followings. Were their patients’ symptoms real or imagined?

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The phenomenon fed into a larger controversy about dissociative identity disorder that’s brewed for years. Once known as multiple personality disorder, the condition was rebranded in the 1990s to better reflect that it involves a fragmentation of identity resulting from severe trauma in childhood. But some in the mental-health community had continued to question whether the symptoms reflected an authentic response to trauma—and debated how to treat it: Engage the multiple threads of personality, or try to work around them?

Today, some neuroscientists have uncovered a signature of dissociative identity disorder in the brain that cannot be faked by actors, which suggests it has real biological effects. And pathological dissociation seems to be more common than we once thought, affecting up to 4 percent of the population, according to some estimates. But it remains one of the least understood diagnoses in the field of mental health.

That’s why a trio of U.K. trauma experts—psychologists Helena Crockford and Paul Langthorne and Melanie Goodwin, expert-by-experience—have just published a book of essays and articles about the disorder from more than 100 experts, across professional practice, research, and lived experience. They want to dispel common myths about the condition, to drive home the reality that it’s neither rare nor fictitious, and to help to clarify the impacts it has on memory, identity, and perception. They also aim to provide guidelines for clinicians bewildered about how to treat their patients.

I spoke with Crockford about why the disorder is so misunderstood, why the human brain might have evolved such a response to trauma, and what kinds of treatments work best.

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You’ve written that dissociation is as common as other serious mental-health issues, but it’s one of the most misunderstood. Why is that the case?

American psychoanalyst and traumatologist Elizabeth Howell coined the phrase “a disorder of hiddenness.” Its function is to be hidden. Its purpose is to escape from overwhelming circumstances and abuse. That’s kind of contrary to the myth that dissociation is a flamboyant thing. And in a mental-health context, there are issues of power and authority that could echo interpersonal abuse, so it might take time for people to build up trust to be able to say what they’re experiencing. On another level, these experiences are really hard for people to put into words. Not uncommonly, people think, “Well, this is how it is for everybody,” so they’re not even aware that this isn’t the kind of experience that everybody has.

American psychiatrist Judith Herman, who’s based in Boston and has been a trauma writer all her career, wrote that there is a kind of ambivalence in society generally about knowing and forgetting about trauma and acknowledging horrendous acts and the worst things that people can do. So there are layers to why it’s under-recognized. And certainly in the U.K., but I think it’s similar in the U.S., it hasn’t been part of core mental-health training. I stumbled across it about 10 years in, and that’s quite a common experience, which is partly why we decided to set forth these guidelines to give professionals something to go on.

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That’s surprising as I feel like dissociation has long been recognized as part of PTSD, which has been so widely studied.

Dissociation has been in the diagnostic manuals for decades, with really reliable instruments for assessing it. But some aspects of dissociation might be more acknowledged, particularly in the PTSD world, such as depersonalization, derealization, out-of-body experiences. The more compartmentalized forms of dissociation—the altered self-states and amnesia—have been less recognized.

You describe disassociation as an adaptive mechanism to help people deal with overwhelming trauma. Do we know why the human brain can’t handle certain kinds of trauma, and what would happen to the brain if dissociation were not available as a coping mechanism?

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The kinds of trauma where this is more likely is interpersonal trauma rather than large catastrophes. Jon Allen, a psychologist in the U.S., has defined trauma as the state of being in psychological distress and alone. So it’s a combination of something that overwhelms your capacity to cope and there’s no one to turn to. When a child is scared, they seek reassurance from their attachment figure. But if the attachment figure is the source of the fear, through abuse or neglect, it places the child in an impossible paradox—a kind of paralyzing, disorganizing situation in psychological terms. That’s a vulnerability factor for dissociation. One Minnesota longitudinal study of attachment across decades followed a cohort of mothers and babies from birth through adulthood, and found that a disorganized attachment pattern showed a significant association with dissociation in late adolescence.

Do we know anything about when this capacity for dissociation might have evolved in humans?

The parts of the brain that help us integrate a self, draw elements of experience together, and create a narrative that gives a sense of continuity, are more evolutionarily recent. Whereas the fight-or-flight responses are more ancient, including something known as “flop.” These are basic defensive neurobiological biobehavioral systems within us that respond quickly to threat.

Flight-and-flight are more active forms of defense. Flop is sort of playing dead, and is associated with the release of endogenous opioids that numb and maybe evolutionarily were associated with not having a painful death, or maybe it was even survival related.

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I was struck by the variability of potential symptoms in dissociative identity disorder. You note that these can be psychological or physical, and can result in the person feeling too much or too little. Why does it show up in so many different ways?

The way people dissociate and how it looks even within a particular diagnostic category, like Dissociative Identity Disorder, is really individual, so no one person that I’ve met looks the same. Feeling too little would be like depersonalization, out-of-body types of experiences, feeling distant or away or detached from what’s going on, or amnesia, loss of time day-to-day or big gaps for autobiographical memory. Feeling too much is things like intrusions, like trauma flashbacks or partial flashbacks. Some people experience promptings from other parts of themselves or conflict between parts or a lot of noise and argument, a cacophony of voices.

On the physiological end of things, dissociation is often associated with chronic fatigue and fibromyalgia. It’s not uncommon for there to be a lot of physical health things and functional neurological symptoms that are medically unexplained, so real physical experiences that have no biological explanation. People often describe their psychological experiences in physical terms, things like, “Oh, I’ve gone to the top of my head,” or, “I’m somewhere at the back of me,” or they can locate it physically in their body.

The reason it’s so variable is, just think how complex we are as human beings, how many kinds of systems and processes are being integrated together to form a whole sense of self or a sense of continuity. If that becomes fragmented, there’s multiple ways it could present.

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Are certain kinds of people more vulnerable to disassociation than others in terms of personality type?

I’d be a bit cautious about that. These really thorough longitudinal developmental studies are good places to go because they looked at so many factors and disorganized attachment turned up as being a really key one. If we think of this as a survival response, I think people use the strengths they’ve got. And so, that might be a way that people with similar kinds of difficulties in their backgrounds might present to mental-health services in different ways, different kinds of symptoms. With one client, we were able to recognize that they had been a really imaginative child. We could frame this as a strength: “You drew on what you could do well, and this has really protected you.” But I’d see that as part of an individual story. I wouldn’t make generalizations about it. A lot more research needs to be done, because it’s been a bit hidden.

Is there a clear line between daydreaming and dissociation?

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Dissociation is a whole spectrum of experiences. We all dissociate at times, for relaxation or just to give our minds a rest. We could argue that getting immersed in something imaginative, going to see a movie, paintballing where you’re taking on a role, or participating in virtual spaces might come into that category. We need to play and pretend and disconnect a bit from reality as part of normal life and who we are as human beings. So daydreaming would fit into that category. Until it becomes a problem where it’s causing distress or interfering with daily life.

Read more: “The Strange Rise of Daydreaming”

How do you help people who have severe and entrenched dissociation to recover, to restore their sense of self?

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The first thing is accurate identification, including psychiatric diagnosis, identifying the things that a person’s struggling with. That means that mental health professionals need to be aware of how dissociation could present, and what core questions to ask. That should be part of basic mental-health screening and assessment, as much as OCD-type symptoms or psychotic-type symptoms, or depression. The broad guidance isn’t about one kind of treatment over another, although I think psychological treatments are the most important in this field, rather than psychotropic medication, for example.

Why is that?

Because this disorder is typically about complex trauma, so there isn’t a medication, other than to treat symptoms for short-term stabilization. Some psychological therapies have been adapted for dissociative presentations that directly target dissociative symptoms. So you really can’t work around them or say, “You know, when you’ve grounded, we can carry on doing the work.” It’s about actually working with someone on their dissociative experiences.

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And how do you do that? How do you directly target those symptoms?

First, it’s about being curious about them and having conversations about them and them actually being the focus of attention. That hasn’t necessarily happened up until now. So we’d advocate for a trauma-informed treatment framework, in which the first stage is about safety and stabilization. That’s about people being able to manage their day-to-day lives, safely get out of dangerous situations they might be in, and manage issues around risk, self-harm, suicidality, addiction issues, instability in their living circumstances, that kind of thing. So getting safe and stable.

The second stage is the trauma processing and mourning what’s been lost. And the third stage is rehabilitation, reintegration to life, developing new skills, education, and employment. We need to help them build a life.

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Kristen French

Posted on January 30, 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 Waiting in Line Makes Stuff Seem More Valuable

New research explains why we like hard-earned rewards more

By Jake Currie    January 29, 2026

Whether it’s cronuts, ramen burgers, or loaded Instagram-friendly ice cream sundaes, there are always some people willing to line up for hours to get a taste of the latest food fad. What these people might not realize, however, is that those treats are even more psychologically rewarding after they’ve schlepped to a storefront and waited hours in line.

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But why do we enjoy things more when we’ve had to suffer for them?

It’s a question that’s puzzled neuroscientists for decades, but research published yesterday in Nature is shedding light on this phenomenon.

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This kind of “sunk-cost fallacy” isn’t just a common trap in the business world, it also pervades the animal world. Organisms from ants to human beings tend to value those things they had to work for more than those that came easily.

Read more: “Against Willpower”

“We make fallacious decisions based on what we’ve invested in something, even if the probability of actually gaining an objective advantage from it is zero,” study author Neir Eshel explained in a statement. “And it’s not just us. This has been shown in animals across the animal kingdom.”

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It seems counterintuitive from an evolutionary perspective. After all, why would we be hardwired to put a premium on toiling? The answer, according to Eshel, involves our familiar friend dopamine, or the neurotransmitter responsible for pleasure.

In an earlier study, Eshel and his colleagues discovered that mice that received a reward after overcoming a challenge (in this case, a series of mild electrical shocks) released more dopamine compared to those that didn’t suffer for their treat. Now, they’ve added a new piece to the puzzle.

According to their latest research, dopamine gets an assist from the neurotransmitter acetylcholine after mice struggle for a reward. The bigger the effort, the more acetylcholine was released, which in turn, boosted the amount of dopamine.

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That explains the neuromechanism behind the phenomenon, but why does it exist in the first place? Eshel has some ideas.

“In an environment with limited resources (as most are), when we typically get rewarded only after really hard work, we may need high dopamine secretion to get us to do it again.” Eshel said. “Because dopamine reinforces previous behaviors, it may reflect sunk costs. The dopamine release we saw may enable you to pay those steep costs in the future.”

Something to think about the next time you’re waiting in line.

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Lead image: Yisar Andrianus / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on January 29, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Zoology

- Scientists Turn to the Internet to Name New Species

- The Monstrous Appetite of Japanese Giant Salamanders

- The Ape Who Could Play Make-Believe

- The Crucial Role of Cities in the Lanternfly Invasion

- Eavesdropping on Beaked Whales Reveals the Secrets of Their Deepwater Lives

- How Researchers Are Tracking the Elusive Amazon Manatee

- Night Owls vs. Early Birds: Sleep Categories Are More Complicated Than We Thought

- The Birds That Roamed New Zealand a Million Years Ago

- How These Caterpillars Use Their Body Hair to Listen for Danger

- What Brown-Colored Lake Water Does to Fish

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Scientists Turn to the Internet to Name New Species

Followers of Ze Frank submitted over 8,000 names for a newly discovered chiton

By Jake Currie    February 6, 2026

Asking the internet to name something is always a little dicey. For every charming Boaty McBoatface submission, there’s always something a little more … unprintable. But scientists from the Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance (SOSA) must have felt a little safer asking the 4.25 million followers of popular veteran science YouTuber Ze Frank to name a newly discovered species. (After all, Ze Frank already has one named after him.)

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The species in question was a marine chiton, a mollusk that looks like a cross between a snail and a beetle, that feeds exclusively on sunken wood. It’s equipped with an iron-reinforced radula for eating, a series of plates on its back, and a fleshy foot. Like all members of the genus Ferreiraella, its posterior is home to worms that feed on its excrement. In other words, there was a lot for Ze Frank’s followers to work with. They submitted more than 8,000 names for SOSA scientists to choose from.

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“We were overwhelmed by the response and the massive number of creative name suggestions!” SOSA co-chair Julia Sigwart said in a statement. One runner-up for the species’ new name was Ferreiraella ohmu, in honor of a Studio Ghibli creature. Another, Ferreiraella stellacadens, translates to “shooting star chiton” for the shapes of the tiny holes on the mollusk’s back.

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

So which name won?

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In the end, the team decided to go with something that reflected the collaborative approach of the naming. “The name we chose, Ferreiraella populi, translates to ‘of the people,’” Sigwart said.

You can watch Ze Frank announce the winner here.

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Lead image: © Senckenberg Ocean Species Alliance

Jake Currie

Posted on February 6, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Monstrous Appetite of Japanese Giant Salamanders

Body size pushes these river monsters to become apex predators

By Jake Currie    February 6, 2026

There are monsters lurking in the rivers of southern Japan—giant salamanders that can grow up to five feet long. Second only to their Chinese cousins, these wet-skinned leviathans are some of the largest amphibians in the world. New research into their diet published in Oikos reveals they have a monstrous appetite to match, and one that changes dramatically over their lifetimes.

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EAT OR BE EATEN: Example of prey items obtained by stomach flushing of a Japanese giant salamander that was roughly 26 inches long. Photo from Duret, C., et al. Oikos (2025).

To study the feeding habits of the Japanese giant salamander, a team of researchers led by study author Clément Duret of the Laboratory of Ecology and Conservation of Amphibians at the University of Liège in Belgium headed to the Ichi River in Hyogo Prefecture. There, they trudged along the riverbanks, plucking up 160 of the beasts, measuring them, and flushing their stomachs to take a peek at their meals.

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

As the salamanders leveled up their size, they leveled up their rank on the food chain, or trophic position, the researchers found. “The results reveal a spectacular dietary transition,” Duret explained in a statement. “Young, small salamanders feed mainly on aquatic insects. Their trophic position is similar to that of secondary consumers, an intermediate level in the food chain, as is the case with most salamanders.”

Once the giant salamanders crossed the two-foot mark, they were able to feast on crabs, frogs, and fish, catapulting them to apex predator status. This ability to capture larger prey without becoming prey themselves gives them an incredible adaptive advantage, fueling the evolution of stronger jaws and a larger body size.

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The team hopes these new insights will aid in conservation efforts of the species, which is unfortunately flagged as vulnerable.

It can definitely be lonely at the top of the food chain.

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Lead image: Martin Voeller / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 6, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Ape Who Could Play Make-Believe

Kanzi, the bonobo, once again topples barriers between humans and great apes by demonstrating imagination, a cognitive capacity thought unique to humans

By Devin Reese    February 6, 2026

We know that other great apes can do a lot of human-like things. Since Jane Goodall’s pioneering studies of chimpanzees, ethologists have amassed decades of observations of both wild and captive great apes acting in many ways like people. We know that other great apes may use tools; make faces; and show empathy. But questions remain about the limits of their cognition.

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In a study published yesterday in Science, Johns Hopkins University biologists report that a captive bonobo can “play pretend,” which requires imagining things beyond the here and now.

“Imagination has long been seen as a critical element of what it is to be human, but the idea that it may not be exclusive to our species is really transformative,” said study author Christopher Krupenye, a psychology and brain science researcher, in a statement.

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We’ve all witnessed young children pretending to interact with imaginary objects, such as sipping invisible tea from a cup. By about age 2, humans engage in pretend scenarios, but to date, there have been no controlled studies of so-called “pretense” in other animals. It’s not an easy task. If you think about it, pretend play requires forming a mental representation of something that’s absent and keeping it distinct from perceptions of reality.

Read more: “Empathy, Morality, Community, Culture—Apes Have It All”

Krupenye and co-author Amalia P.M. Bastos worked with Kanzi, a 43-year-old captive bonobo (now deceased), famous for his groundbreaking language abilities. Kanzi was the first nonhuman ape known to understand spoken English and communicate using more than 300 symbols. The researchers presented Kanzi with an 18-trial session in which he was rewarded with juice for correctly choosing between two clear squirt bottles—one empty and one with juice.

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Next, Kanzi was presented with two clear, empty cups. After researchers pretended to fill them from an (empty) pitcher and then pour the imaginary contents of one cup back into the pitcher, Kanzi had to answer, “Where’s the juice?” Without receiving any rewards this time, he chose the cup still containing the imaginary juice 68 percent of the time, which is significantly more than chance.

In a related experiment, Kanzi had to choose which clear jar contained pretend grapes after watching a researcher pretend to sample one from each jar, then “empty” one of the jars. Here again, Kanzi chose the jar that still contained pretend grapes significantly more than chance would dictate.

Kanzi’s behavior showed that he could conceive of absent things, which opens new questions about whether behavior observed in wild apes is also imagination-based. For example, wild female chimpanzees carry sticks around, perhaps as an imitation of how mother chimps carry their children.

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“The capacity to form secondary representations of pretend objects is within the cognitive potential of, at least, an enculturated ape and likely dates back 6 to 9 million years, to our common evolutionary ancestors,” concluded the study authors.

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Lead image: Patrick Rolands / Shutterstock

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Devin Reese

Posted on February 6, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Crucial Role of Cities in the Lanternfly Invasion

Research into the spotted lanternfly genome reveals the influence of urbanization on the species

By Jake Currie    February 5, 2026

Invasive species present an interesting paradox for geneticists. Because their founding populations tend to be small, they have less genetic diversity, which means they have a limited evolutionary toolkit to adapt to their new home. And yet, many of them seem to thrive.

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So what gives?

New research into spotted lanternflies, published in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, offers some insights into this ecological conundrum.

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Originally from China, spotted lanternflies first came to the United States in 2014. Since then, their populations have skyrocketed, wreaking havoc on native plant life and threatening vineyards. To combat the scourge, states and municipalities have issued “kill-on-sight” orders, urging citizens to squish any invaders.

To find out why they’ve adapted so successfully to their new home, researchers from New York University sequenced the genomes of lanternflies in both rural and urban parts of China as well as the U.S. They found that while the invasive lanternflies in the U.S. were genetically similar in areas as far as 120 miles apart, the urban and rural lanternflies of China showed significant genetic differences despite only being separated by about 20 miles.

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

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Taking a closer look at these differences, researchers discovered that urban lanternflies in both countries displayed changes in genes related to stress responses, which could allow them to thrive in bustling cities.

“We think that this may indicate how lanternflies have evolved to survive in hot, polluted, pesticide-heavy cities—and not just in their native China, but in the U.S. as well, which may be helping them spread and creating new potential problems with control in the future,” study author Fallon Meng explained in a statement.

The “invasion force” of lanternflies that established a beachhead in the U.S. likely came from the hardened city-dwelling lanternflies of China, which explains why New York City is besieged by the pests every spring. “Cities can act as evolutionary incubators that may help an invasive species to better deal with pressures like heat and pesticides, which then helps them to better adapt to new environments,” Feng said.

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The researchers hope these new findings will lead to a more comprehensive approach to invasive species research that incorporates urbanization trends.

“In our increasingly urban world, we should be studying invasive species and urbanization as interconnected parts of a whole. These two major aspects of global change are too often studied in isolation, but their effects can compound in synergistic and surprising ways, as we are seeing here with the spotted lanternfly,” study co-author Kristin Winchell added.

In the meantime, here’s a pro-tip for lanternfly assassins: They only have three big jumps in them. After that, they become exhausted. Stick with them through the third jump, and you can send them on a one-way trip to squish city.

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Lead image: Jay Ondreicka / Shutterstock

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Jake Currie

Posted on February 5, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Eavesdropping on Beaked Whales Reveals the Secrets of Their Deepwater Lives

Three species off the Louisiana coast detected through echolocation clicks

By Devin Reese    February 5, 2026

Beaked whales, named for their long snouts, are one of the least-studied marine mammals because they spend a lot of time foraging in the deep. Their dives can last more than two hours, during which they can descend to nearly 10,000 feet. Even when beaked whales surface for air, they remain elusive because their blowholes spray water more forward than vertically. A paper published yesterday in PLOS One, however, gleaned information on beaked whales off the coast of Louisiana by following their sounds for six months.

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Several beaked whale species, all in the family Ziphiidae, inhabit the Gulf of Mexico, including goose-beaked (Ziphius cavirostris), Gervais’ (Mesoplodon europaeus), Blaineville’s (Mesoplodon densirostris), and possibly Sowerby’s (Mesoplodon bidens) beaked whales.

Researchers from the University of Miami and NOAA studied beaked whales by listening in on their hunting conversations. As they search for fish and cephalopod prey, the whales continually send out echolocation clicks. Two 4-channel High-Frequency Acoustic Recording Packages were deployed at about 3,600 feet down, yielding 3-D recordings. In this mode of passive tracking, species could be distinguished by their species-specific click frequencies.

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Read more: “Hunting the Most Elusive Whale”

Typically, whale behavior is studied through active tracking, using equipment such as hydrophones towed by whales, which are expensive to deploy. One benefit of passive tracking is getting much larger sample sizes. While you can’t track individual behavior as well, the array of recording packages in this study allowed triangulation to assess the distribution of individuals across depths and directions of their movements.

The recordings revealed three species foraging off the Louisiana coast: goose-beaked, Blainville’s, and Gervais’ beaked whales. For the latter, this study is the first detailed description of their movements up and down the water column. Over the 200 days of recording, goose-beaked whale clicks were detected in 29 events, Gervais’ beaked whale clicks in 54 events, and Blainville’s beaked whale clicks in two events. Goose-beaked and Blainville’s beaked whales were often found swimming alone, whereas Gervais’ beaked whales were in groups of at least two individuals.

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The researchers reconstructed individual paths of diving whales from their clicks using an existing toolkit called Where’s Whaledo. They found that the dives of Gervais’ beaked whales were notably shorter and shallower than those of the goose-beaked whales. The finding may signal variation in foraging behavior among beaked whale species.

“Acoustic tracking is a reliable alternative to tagging for studying the acoustic and diving behavior of elusive beaked whales in the Gulf,” concluded the study authors. Their estimates of dive depths, swimming speeds, movement direction and pitch, and foraging time were consistent with values found using other methods. Acoustic tracking also provided novel information about the behavior of the Gervais’ beaked whale.

Sometimes just being a good listener pays off.

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Lead image: Andrea Izzotti / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on February 5, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Researchers Are Tracking the Elusive Amazon Manatee

Water sampling for eDNA helps us better understand this vulnerable aquatic beast

By Devin Reese    February 4, 2026

As manatee populations in South Florida are threatened by the weight of human impacts, from motorboat strikes to fishing-gear entanglements, it’s imperative to understand how they might survive coexistence with humans. New research explores how one of their sister species, the Amazonian manatee (Trichechus inunguis), is responding to increased human pressures in the Amazon basin. The study, published today in PLOS One, reveals the sensitivity of Amazonian manatees to human proximity.

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In the first study to detect Amazon manatees using environmental DNA (eDNA), a team of researchers from universities in Texas and Brazil mapped their distribution along the Amazon River and its tributaries. Since Amazon manatees are typically spotted only when they surface to breathe, monitoring their presence is a challenge. But DNA is known to persist in flowing water systems for up to 43 hours, so finding eDNA from a particular species is sound evidence that it was recently in the area.

Read more: “We Can Write a Different Ending for Critically Endangered Species”

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River water was sampled along a gradient from highly disturbed urban areas to protected ecological reserves. DNA from Amazon manatees turned up in water from eight sites. Six of those were in a less disturbed area, and two were closer to human populations. “Detection of Amazonian manatee DNA was more than three times greater in the western Amazon (Tefé and Mamirauá Sustainable Development Reserve) where human activity is low,” wrote the study authors.

The areas where most of the manatees were detected included both rural and protected conditions. Whether they were absent from other areas that were busy with boat traffic and urban development, or whether they just occurred in lower densities, remains to be determined, since the detectability of eDNA is known to be tied to the density of animals. The study authors pointed out potential sources of error, such as the influence of water temperature, acidity, and river flow on detecting eDNA.

Still, they conclude that “eDNA appears to have good potential to improve accuracy of animal surveys that are a foundation of biodiversity conservation.” Compared to their Florida cousins, information about Amazon manatees is scarce, despite their status as vulnerable and decreasing.

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Lead image: Diego Grandi / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on February 4, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Night Owls vs. Early Birds: Sleep Categories Are More Complicated Than We Thought

A new study has identified five distinct subtypes

By Jake Currie    February 4, 2026

Some people are night owls, and some people are early birds. For early humans, having a mix of both was likely a boon to the community, allowing some to stand watch at night while others awoke early to get daytime activities started. In fact, a 2017 study of hunter-gatherers in Tanzania found that there was only an 18-minute period when everyone in the group was dozing.

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Even though most people no longer live in hunter-gatherer societies, we’re left with a dichotomy of sleep behavior. Instead of keeping a lookout for predators, those of us with a nighttime sentinel behavior pattern are just left scrolling our phones into the wee hours.

While this might seem like a harmless quirk of evolution, different circadian patterns or “chronotypes” are associated with different health risks. To get a fuller picture of those risks, neurologists from McGill University in Canada used artificial intelligence to comb through 27,000 brain scans and questionnaires from adults in the United Kingdom. They published their findings in Nature Communications.

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

The researchers discovered there were not two distinct chronotypes but five—two kinds of early birds and three kinds of night owls. One group of early birds tended to suffer from depression while another had few health problems (lucky them).

Night owls were a more diverse group—again, with three distinct subtypes. The first performed better on cognitive tests, but showed difficulties regulating their emotions. The second displayed increased risk-taking behavior and a tendency for cardiovascular disease. The third was more likely to smoke, suffer from depression, and had higher heart disease rates.

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“In today’s digital and post-pandemic era, sleep patterns are more diverse than ever,” study author Le Zhou said in a statement. “Understanding this biological diversity could eventually help inform more personalized approaches to sleep, work schedules, and mental health support.”

Next, the team plans to incorporate genetic data into their analysis to shed light on the biological roots of diverse sleep behavior. Until then, we could all probably use a little more shut-eye—whether that’s going to bed earlier or sleeping in later.

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Lead image: photomaster / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 4, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Birds That Roamed New Zealand a Million Years Ago

Early Pleistocene cave fossils reveal unique avifauna that were ultimately wiped out by natural disasters

By Devin Reese    February 3, 2026

Ever since he found a fossilized parrot mandible in 1983, Flinders University paleontologist Trevor Worthy has wondered about the backstory of fossils in Moa Eggshell Cave, North Island, New Zealand. The country is rife with fossil deposits dating to the Late Pleistocene, showing what lived in New Zealand when humans arrived about 750 years ago. Humans played a role in more than 50 species going extinct over just a few hundred years, but whether other provocations caused species turnover earlier in the Pleistocene has been unclear.

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In a recent study, Worthy and colleagues from Canterbury Museum, the University of Auckland, and Victoria University of Wellington show that catastrophic environmental changes about 1 million years ago caused extinctions long before humans made their mark. Published in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology, the study shares findings from the parrot mandible and 15 additional fossils since collected from Moa Eggshell Cave.

After building a fence to keep goats from wandering into their work, the study authors sieved the cave’s fine sediments to trap any fossils. The fossils were found sandwiched between two layers of volcanic ash in the cave, which dated to 1 and 1.55 million years ago, respectively. This means the fossils are about a million years old and from the Early Pleistocene.

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Read more: “Is the Modern Mass Extinction Overrated?”

The fossil finds proved to contain four species of frogs and 12 species of birds, of which at least four, if not six, bird species were extinct by the Late Pleistocene. As such, the bird fauna turned over by 33 to 50 percent during the million years leading up to human arrival.

“This is a newly recognized avifauna for New Zealand, one that was replaced by the one humans encountered a million years later,” said Worthy in a statement. It included species like the newly named Strigops insulaborealis parrot, an ancestor of the modern Kākāpō; and an extinct pigeon, a relative of modern Australian bronzewing pigeons (Phaps elegans).

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What could have prompted the Early Pleistocene bird extinctions?

During that period, oscillations between glacial and interglacial periods were known to have increased in magnitude, which could have “reset” bird populations by shifting their forest and shrubland habitats, said study author and Canterbury Museum paleontologist Paul Scofield. The researchers also point to the cataclysmic volcanic eruption that blanketed the cave a million years ago.

“For decades,” explained Worthy, “the extinction of New Zealand’s birds was viewed primarily through the lens of human arrival 750 years ago. This study proves that natural forces like super-volcanoes and dramatic climate shifts were already sculpting the unique identity of our wildlife over a million years ago.”

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Lead image: Imogen Warren / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on February 3, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How These Caterpillars Use Their Body Hair to Listen for Danger

They may dodge predatory wasps by twitching away at the sound of their approach

By Devin Reese    February 2, 2026

Farmers in North America are all too familiar with tobacco hornworms. These smooth, lime-green caterpillars, which look like they could be made from Play-Doh, are renowned agricultural pests. Tobacco hornworms, the larvae of the hawkmoth (Manduca sexta), feed on plants in the family Solanaceae which, you guessed it, includes tobacco but also tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. New research unveiled at a meeting on animal bioacoustics identifies a superpower of tobacco hornworms that inform their crop menace behavior.

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A biologist at Binghamton University had noticed that tobacco hornworms housed in the lab would jump when she talked. “Every time I went ‘boo’ at them, they would jump,” Carol Miles said in a statement. “And so I just sort of filed it away in the back of my head for many years.”

Until now.

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Read more: “The Caterpillars That Can Kill You”

Miles, with Binghamton colleagues who were experienced in researching how animals respond to sound, set up acoustic experiments. The hornworm caterpillars were exposed to low frequency (150 Hz) and high-frequency (2000 Hz) sounds while inside a specialized “anechoic” chamber that suppresses all echoes. Inside anechoic chambers, the quietest rooms in the world, some humans freak out at hearing their blood flow and joints move.

But it was the perfect place to sort out whether hornworm caterpillars are jumping in response to airborne sound or to sound-induced vibrations of their feet. “They are always on the stem of the plant, so we thought maybe the vibration of the plant is the reason for them to detect sound,” explained study author and mechanical engineer Ronald Miles.

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By controlling the inputs to sound with no vibration, versus vibration with no sound, the researchers discovered that the caterpillars were 10 to 100 times more responsive to the sounds than the vibrations. Since caterpillars are thought to lack ears, figuring out they detected sound inspired more experimentation. Denuded caterpillars, with fine body hair removed, showed a dampened sound response, indicating a sensory role for the hairs.

The research team hypothesizes that this tobacco hornworm caterpillar superpower evolved as an adaptation for evading predatory wasps, which tend to beat their wings at 100 to 200 Hz. If a caterpillar hears an approaching wasp, a quick jump or twitch may edge the soft, tasty larvae out of harm’s way.

Or the jumping could just be a sign of a startled caterpillar in the moments before it expects to get gobbled up.

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Lead image: Daniel Schwen / Wikimedia Commons

Devin Reese

Posted on February 2, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Brown-Colored Lake Water Does to Fish

Some populations of important fish respond better to it than you’d think

By Devin Reese    January 29, 2026

Have you ever wondered why lakes look so brown?

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To many urban dwellers, tea-colored lakes are the norm, but venturing into the wilderness makes it clear that lakes don’t naturally become so murky. And with 40 percent of the world’s fish species living in fresh, inland waters, the browning trend is worth examining.

In a review study published in Biological Reviews, a team of researchers from Canada and the United States explored the effects of freshwater browning on fishes in northern temperate lakes. For 871 lakes in the U.S. and Canada across a gradient of browning, the researchers assessed water hue relative to resident fish populations. They focused on eight ecologically and commercially important species, looking at fish abundance, growth, and survival rates, as well as individual traits like eye diameter, mouth size, and mouth position.

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The cumulative results drawn from 59 research papers showed that more brown was generally associated with lower growth rates of fishes, although it didn’t appear to affect how well they foraged for food. For most fish species, abundance was negatively correlated with browning, but with two notable exceptions. Populations of northern pike (Esox lucius) and walleye (Sander vitreus) were more abundant in browner lakes.

Read more: “The Powerful Allure of the Deep Azure”

“Browner waters had greater abundances of northern pike and walleye, but lower abundances of lake trout, brook trout, yellow perch, largemouth- and smallmouth bass, and whitefish,” said Allison Roth, lead author and former McGill University postdoc.

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A relationship also surfaced between some individual traits and browning. Species with larger eyes tended to respond better to browning, possibly because of superior vision in murky waters.

Browning is usually caused by increased concentrations of dissolved organic carbon or iron on land that enters lakes through runoff that can be augmented by land-use changes such as deforestation, farming, and roads. Because browning signifies both chemical and physical changes to the properties of fresh waters, it’s not surprising that it affects the aquatic ecosystems.

“Fish themselves affect other organisms in the lake,” explained Irene Gregory-Eaves, study co-author and McGill University biologist. “Because they’re predators, feeding on smaller fish, plankton, and invertebrates, changing their populations can have cascading effects.”

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Given that lake browning stunts the growth of some fish species, affects population abundance, and shifts fish community compositions, it warrants further research. Tea-colored water isn’t inherently negative for all species, but it clearly makes a difference.

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Lead image: Martin Prochazkacz / Shutterstock

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Devin Reese

Posted on January 29, 2026

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

Table of Contents

Nautilus: 2026 Feb 7

Astronomy

The Many Myths of the Blood Moon

Did We Just See a Black Hole Explode?

The Farm Boy Who Found Pluto

Grad Student Homebrews Cosmic Dust in the Lab

The Geomagnetic Storm That Sparked Panic Across a Continent

Ann Druyan on How NASA’s Golden Records Got Made

Why Astronauts Quarantine Before—But Not After—Space Missions

Communication

Can We Protect Science?

Environment

Why Teflon Is Losing Its Sticking Power

Let There Be Dark

What Sets Off Bomb Cyclones

Can Morality Survive Climate Collapse?

Genetics

Was the Human Genome Forged by Fire?

When German Shepherds Got Their Cursed Genes

Your Lifespan May Depend Much More on Genes Than Previously Thought

Geoscience

How the “Atlantic Grand Canyon” Came to Exist

Health

Can the Keto Diet Treat Mental Health Conditions?

The Forgotten Epidemic Born Out of Poverty

The Devastating Disease Neglected for Decades

The First Time Tobacco Executives Admitted Smoking Is Bad for You

How Aspartame Came from a Work Safety Violation

What Exactly Is a Superfood Anyway?

The Strange Paradox in the RFK Jr. Diet Guidelines

Do Non-Alcoholic Drinks Actually Help You Stay Sober?

History

Ancient Jokes Etched in Clay

Recreating the Smells of History

How Richard Feynman Found the Root of the Challenger Disaster

Did Edison Accidentally Create a Vital Superconductor?

Microbiology

Wine That Lights Up When It’s Gone Bad

Neuroscience

Sex Changes the Brains of Male Mice

New Study Throws a Wrench in Our Understanding of Memory

Paleontology

Inside the Mouth of Earth’s Oldest Bird

Baby Sauropods Were the Potato Chips of the Jurassic Era

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

Psychology

Here’s What Makes for an Ideal Scent-Sniffing Dog

Dream Engineering Could Help You Solve Problems While You Sleep

Neurotic People Have More Frequent Sexual Fantasies

Tripping at Death’s Door: Psychedelics in End-of-Life Care

How Gambling Addiction Is Changing in a Polymarket World

When Liars Are Perceived as More Moral

How Brain-Scanning Earbuds Could Build the Perfect Playlist

Pink Noise Could be Ruining Your Sleep

How Dissociation Blunts Trauma

Why Waiting in Line Makes Stuff Seem More Valuable

Zoology

Scientists Turn to the Internet to Name New Species

The Monstrous Appetite of Japanese Giant Salamanders

The Ape Who Could Play Make-Believe

The Crucial Role of Cities in the Lanternfly Invasion

Eavesdropping on Beaked Whales Reveals the Secrets of Their Deepwater Lives

How Researchers Are Tracking the Elusive Amazon Manatee

Night Owls vs. Early Birds: Sleep Categories Are More Complicated Than We Thought

The Birds That Roamed New Zealand a Million Years Ago

How These Caterpillars Use Their Body Hair to Listen for Danger

What Brown-Colored Lake Water Does to Fish