- Anthropology

- Astronomy

- Environment

- Evolution

- Genetics

- Geoscience

- Health

- History

- Neuroscience

- Paleontology

- Philosophy

- Physics

- Psychology

- Sociology

- Technology

- Zoology

Anthropology

- Mass Grave of Women and Children Shows Brutality of Iron Age Culture

ANTHROPOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Mass Grave of Women and Children Shows Brutality of Iron Age Culture

This recent archaeological find tells a chilling story

By Jake Currie    February 25, 2026

Archaeologists working at Gomolava in northern Serbia recently uncovered a 2,800-year-old mass grave containing the remains of 77 people. As they sifted through the bone and debris, a chilling story began to unfold, which they detailed in a study published in Nature Human Behavior.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The people buried there all came to violent ends, killed by bludgeoning or stabbing, and almost all were women and children. Analysis of the bones revealed 40 of the victims were children between the ages of 1 and 12, 11 were adolescents, and 24 were adults, almost all of whom were women.

Surprisingly, genetic analysis revealed they weren’t related to one another, even distantly, an uncommon finding for mass graves. Additionally, isotopes in their teeth indicated they had dissimilar childhood diets, suggesting that they were from different settlements altogether, and most likely captured.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“When we encounter mass graves from prehistory with this kind of demographic, we might expect they were families from a village that was attacked,” co-author Barry Molloy of University College Dublin said in a statement. “Gomolava genuinely took us by surprise when our genetic analysis showed the majority of people studied were not only unrelated, not even their great-great-grandparents were. This was highly unusual for a prehistoric mass grave and not what we expect to find if they had all lived together in a village.”

Read more: “The Curious Case of the Bog Bodies”

Because the young victims were slaughtered instead of taken as slaves, researchers believe their killing was meant as a macabre warning to others.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

While the find paints a vivid picture of the brutal violence that characterized Iron Age life, it shows another side of humanity as well. The victims appear to have been mourned. They were buried with personal effects including bronze jewelry and ceramic pottery, alongside a butchered calf with an offering of burnt seeds sprinkled atop.

“The victims at Gomolava were hastily buried in a disused semi-subterranean house, but uniquely, not only had the bodies not been looted of their valuables, offerings were made in what must have been a respectful ritual,” Molloy said.

The team believes the massacre occurred around the same time people were seeking to reoccupy abandoned Bronze Age settlements.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“Our team has been tracing the Bronze Age collapse and its aftermath in Europe. What we found at Gomolava tells us that as things recovered in this area moving into the Iron Age, reasserting control over landscapes could include widespread and extremely violent episodes between competing groups,” Molloy said.

Altogether, the find represents a grisly chapter in the evolution of large-scale violence in European protohistory.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Nature Human Behaviour (Nat Hum Behav)

Jake Currie

Posted on February 25, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Astronomy

- Astronomers Capture Largest Image of Milky Way Ever

- The Birth of Light

- Imaging the Most Far-Out Jellyfish Galaxy Ever Observed

- Researchers Map Uranus’ Atmosphere in Stunning Detail

- Fiery Crash of SpaceX Rocket Causes Huge Lithium Plume

- Why This Region of Space Appears to Be Populated by Snowmen

- Did Astronomers Finally Witness a Black Hole Eat a White Dwarf for the First Time?

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Astronomers Capture Largest Image of Milky Way Ever

“It’s a place of extremes, invisible to our eyes, but now revealed in extraordinary detail”

By Jake Currie    February 27, 2026

To paraphrase Archimedes, if we had a selfie stick long enough—and the means to operate it—we could take a picture of the entire Milky Way. Until then, we have to rely on telescopes like the Atacama Large Millimeter/submillimeter Array (ALMA) located in Chile’s Atacama Desert. Astronomers working with the European Southern Observatory (ESO), which operates the array, recently snapped a stunning photo of our galaxy, and it’s the largest one ever recorded.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Far from a simple snapshot, this new image spanning 650 light-years was created by stitching together smaller images of the night sky like a mosaic. It’s as large as three moons side-by-side and captures an area of intense interest to astronomers: the Central Molecular Zone (CMZ).

“It’s a place of extremes, invisible to our eyes, but now revealed in extraordinary detail,” ESO astronomer Ashley Barnes said in a statement.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

This unique region, photographed in detail for the first time, features clouds of cosmic gas and dust with a density orders of magnitude larger than the outskirts of the Milky Way. While astronomers have long studied star formation there, the CMZ is much more turbulent, and this new survey offers a treasure trove of data.

Read more: “Why These Researchers Are Drawn to the World’s Edge”

“The CMZ hosts some of the most massive stars known in our galaxy, many of which live fast and die young, ending their lives in powerful supernova explosions, and even hypernovae,” Steve Longmore of Liverpool John Moores University said.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The image gives astronomers crucial insights into the chemistry of the CMZ, detecting both simple molecules like silicon monoxide, as well as complex organic ones like methanol, acetone or ethanol. “By studying how stars are born in the CMZ, we can also gain a clearer picture of how galaxies grew and evolved,” Longmore continued. “We believe the region shares many features with galaxies in the early universe, where stars were forming in chaotic, extreme environments.”

And they’re not done either. Built in the early 2000s, ALMA is scheduled for an equipment update that will update all of its receivers as well as its infrastructure, giving the astronomers an even better look at the Milky Way.

“The upcoming ALMA Wideband Sensitivity Upgrade, along with ESO’s Extremely Large Telescope, will soon allow us to push even deeper into this region—resolving finer structures, tracing more complex chemistry, and exploring the interplay between stars, gas, and black holes with unprecedented clarity,” Barnes said. “In many ways, this is just the beginning.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

It’s not a selfie stick of galactic proportions, but it’s still pretty incredible.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: ALMA(ESO/NAOJ/NRAO)/S. Longmore et al. Background: ESO/D. Minniti et al

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Jake Currie

Posted on February 27, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Birth of Light

Long since flared out, echoes from the universe’s very first stars could be reaching us today

By Rebecca Boyle    February 26, 2026

The universe began with a bang, and for the first few hundred million years, there was nothing but hydrogen and some helium atoms moving through the void. Then something happened. Somehow, in the roiling soup of plasma and free electrons suffusing the Big Bang’s embers, clouds of molecular hydrogen drew close enough together to ignite. The first stars were born.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Just to imagine such objects blinking into existence, let alone describe them using theoretical astrophysics, was revolutionary not very long ago. But today, astronomers are on the cusp of actually seeing these earliest stars. Through the James Webb Space Telescope, humans are newly capable of peering back through almost all of time, penetrating the expanding universe, past uncountable galaxies and nebulae and stars and their planets, to glimpse the first light to ever shine forth.

These luminous bodies, called Population III stars, represent not only the earliest light in the primordial universe but also our own beginnings. They were the first stars to fuse hydrogen and helium into heavier elements. They forged oxygen, carbon, silicon, and iron (what astronomers call “metals”) for the first time, deep in their massive stellar hearts. Their deaths set the course of the universe, led to the origin of our sun and, eventually, to life on Earth. Finding them and modeling their birth and death is therefore a way of understanding the deepest roots of everything that came after them.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Throughout 2025, astronomers shared a flurry of research papers on a preprint server and at scientific meetings, posing that some galaxies in JWST data could be radiating light from these primordial stars. But few researchers have agreed on any one claim. Meanwhile, theorists continue refining their expectations for what these stars should look like when their faint glows are captured by JWST’s sensitive instruments.

The difficulty and the importance of finding Population III stars makes them a sort of a “holy grail” among astronomers, says Pierluigi Rinaldi, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore.

“The people who see Population III stars will be the people who get a Nobel Prize,” he says.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Before the Earth, before the sun, before the sun’s stellar ancestors, and long before even the Milky Way, the universe was wildly different. During the “cosmic dark ages,” a period that lasted about 50 million years after the Big Bang, no stars shone. Influenced by gravity, dark matter—invisible, mysterious stuff we cannot directly study—was beginning to shepherd visible material together. Gas and dust started to clump, although their accumulation was altered by supersonic flows of gas still streaming forth from the Big Bang. Sometime between 50 million and 100 million years after the Big Bang, the clumps became concentrated enough, and dense enough, to collapse into the first stars.

A USEFUL CLUSTER: This galaxy cluster, called MACS J0416, helped astronomers magnify and study the more distant LAP1 galaxy, which may contain some of the first stars ever formed in our young universe. Credit: NASA.

These first stars are called Population III stars because of a somewhat backward ordering system. They are made only of primordial hydrogen and helium, which they forged into heavier elements such as carbon, oxygen, and iron. (“Metals” to astronomers describe any elements with more neutrons than hydrogen or helium.) The next stars to form were Population II, still old and scant in these heavy materials. And most stars now, for example our sun, are Population I stars, rich in heavier elements—the stuff that makes rocks, trees, diamonds, and us.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The sun and all other stars like it are made from the remains of their ancestors. As the Population III stars died, their hearts seeded the cosmos with every other element in the known universe. Although they are the long-lost progenitors of today’s matter, massive Pop III stars were likely not super common in the infant universe.

“We don’t expect lots of them to be forming, so it’s just going to be harder to see them,” says Mike Boylan-Kolchin, an astronomer at the University of Texas at Austin. “You’re helped out because they are more massive, so they should shine brightly, but seeing them unambiguously is hard.”

Theorists think Pop III stars could have been enormous, with masses the equivalent of 100 suns or more, and short-lived—flaming out within a few million years, incredibly fast for a star. They would have died in titanic explosions that could have cooled down those Big Bang-induced supersonic flows of gas and helped galaxies chock-full of stars to form even faster.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“The small structures where the Pop III stars first form are the building blocks of the galaxies. They are the little bits that build up the next generation,” says Eli Visbal, an astronomer at the University of Toledo in Ohio. “If you want a complete picture of galaxy formation, in particular how early galaxies form, you want to understand the initial conditions of the Pop III stars.”

Humans are newly capable of peering back through almost all of time to glimpse the first light to ever shine forth.

Astronomers used to think we would never be able to see them because they are so old, and therefore so far away. The oldest objects in the universe are far away, of course, because the universe is expanding in all directions. This also means the light from very early stars has been stretched to longer wavelengths as it traveled to telescopes that are either Earth-bound or Earth-adjacent.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

But JWST was specially designed to detect longer wavelengths of light, specifically in the near-infrared range of the electromagnetic spectrum. The Hubble Space Telescope can see deep into the universe, but it only perceives the light we can see, optical light. And previous generations of infrared telescopes, like the Spitzer Space Telescope, did not have JWST’s sensitivity or power.

By using JWST instruments to study starlight’s composition, a technique called spectroscopy, astronomers can look for high concentrations of helium and hydrogen that could hint at the presence of primordial stars. But even JWST has a hard time distinguishing the oldest starlight ever produced. Though a few astronomers have claimed to pinpoint evidence of Pop III stars, it will be hard for anyone to convince the broader astrophysics community that JWST has really found a galaxy harboring them because it would be such a consequential find, says Claire Williams, a theoretical physicist at the University of California, Los Angeles who studies Pop III stars.

Still, some evidence is mounting.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

In 2023, astronomers led by Roberto Maiolino at the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom used JWST to observe a galaxy called GN-z11, which Hubble found in 2015 and which dates to just 400 million years after the Big Bang. They argued that the helium signature in GN-z11 suggested small clusters of Population III stars within it.

A STAR DIES: Pop III stars would have died much like this much closer and younger one, a mere 26,000 light-years away from Earth, in massive supernova explosions that would spew metals that would serve as the building blocks of stars we see today. Credit: X-ray: NASA/CXC/MIT/L.Lopez et al.; Infrared: Palomar; Radio: NSF/NRAO/VLA.

Other teams use a trick of gravity, predicted by Albert Einstein, to magnify and study distant stars. Also in 2023, astronomers led by Eros Vanzella at the National Institute of Astrophysics in Bologna, Italy, used a galaxy cluster called MACS J0416 to study a faraway galaxy. The galaxy cluster’s gravity warped the light of a more distant galaxy, the way a magnifying glass distorts and enlarges an object. Einstein predicted this “gravitational lensing” effect in 1915, and it has since been confirmed and used by Vanzella and other astronomers. Vanzella and his team dubbed the more distant galaxy “LAP1,” for “lensed and pristine 1,” finding that the system contained a huge amount of hydrogen and only a small amount of oxygen, hallmarks of primitive stars. It has two components, LAP1-A and LAP1-B.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

JWST can image the LAP1 system as it appeared very early in the universe, during the epoch of reionization. In this period, the first stars had been born, and their sparkling light was charging all the neutral gas left over from the Big Bang. It is a tricky epoch to study, but a crucial one for understanding the first stars and their influence.

JWST’s sensitive starlight-sifting spectroscopy instruments and the incorporation of lensing make these elemental measurements possible. The output of these analytical techniques read something like a barcode, where the signature of a star’s light describes its chemical contents.

In July 2025, astronomers led by Kimihiko Nakajima at Caltech examined the distant object again. Based on LAP1-B’s barcode, there are no detectable metals in the galaxy. Nakajima and his colleagues argued it is actually a cluster of Pop III stars, adding up to about 2,700 suns worth of material. Astronomers now think LAP1-B is the most chemically primitive star-forming galaxy yet identified, and several teams of researchers are hard at work, further scrutinizing its light.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Visbal says he believes LAP1-B is the first object that meets the criteria for a Pop III star-hosting galaxy.

“The most compelling reason to me is just the amount of stars that are implied by how bright the object is,” he says. It would only take 10 stars, each weighing about 100 times the sun, to create the light shining forth from LAP1-B. That’s a good thing. A galaxy crowded with stars has likely had more time to form those stars, which means the earliest generation—Pop III stars—had likely begun dying, or at the very least blowing some metals around through their stellar winds.

“You don’t have a lot of time before you transition from Pop III to Pop II, ” he says. “We may be very close to the first star formation event in this location.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Population III stars represent not only the earliest light in the primordial universe but also our own beginnings.

But not everyone is convinced the LAP1 system contains primordial stars. Williams, a theorist, says there could be other strange explanations for the unique chemical fingerprints of the galaxies. Some signatures that could appear to be Pop III stars might actually be Pop II stars, lurking behind a galaxy that absorbs their heavy-metal barcodes, for instance. Or what looks like a Pop III star could be a Pop II star with unexpected spectral characteristics, she says.

“Maybe there’s a weird Pop II, and that is still more likely than a Pop III,” she says. “We probably have these objects that tick a lot of the boxes of Pop III stars, but the level of confidence is not there.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Other astronomers suggest that these systems might not contain stars at all, but that the barcodes could just be light from gas clouds. What’s more, there could be other Pop III candidates already lurking in JWST’s trove of data. One such object, dubbed GLIMPSE-16043, contains telltale spectral signatures of very young stars and seems to have very little metals. It contains “textbook features” expected of a Pop III galaxy, such as this paucity of metals and other signatures indicating the presence of hot, young stars, according to astronomers led by Seiji Fujimoto of the University of Toronto.

Pop III stars set the course for everything in the universe that came after them, including the cosmic mix of ingredients that ultimately led to us. And finding them could shed light not only on our origins but on some of the strangest questions in modern physics.

The early, weird universe—the one devoid of stars and their light—was still full of something, just something that did not glow. We call this stuff dark matter, because we quite literally can’t see it, though its gravitational influence is profound. Physicists have been trying to unmask it by looking for tiny particles, including weakly interacting ones that might have strange states of being that make them undetectable to us.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Pop III stars could actually shed light on the question of dark matter detection, according to Visbal. In simulations, Pop III stars form in small galaxies, their mass organized by small clumps of invisible dark matter. Their existence in certain circumstances could help physicists probe the very nature of dark matter.

One theory for dark matter calls for particles that are so small, they are altered by quantum mechanical effects. At universal scales, where halos of dark matter sculpt the fates of entire galaxy clusters, these effects can become noticeable, Visbal says. Dark matter halos that contain very low-mass particles could be subject to quantum mechanics’ uncertainty principle—the fact that it is impossible to measure both the exact momentum and position of an object at the same time—and would create a “fuzzy” structure that alters how galaxies grow. Such fuzzy dark matter structures would guide the development of galaxies differently than expected normal, cold dark matter.

During the “cosmic dark ages” no stars shone.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“So the objects where you would form Pop III stars in would no longer exist. And it would change where these first formed,” he says. “It is sort of a missing window. Since we don’t know what dark matter is, we should leave no stone unturned.”

Whether or not anyone has found a galaxy containing true Pop III stars—and whether or not they can tell us anything about dark matter—the fact that the hunt is even possible is thrilling for many astronomers. JWST’s ability to search for Pop III characteristics is just one example of how the 4-year-old telescope is upending humanity’s understanding of the cosmos.

“Astronomy is really fun because these big observatory projects get built, and then all of a sudden, every field gets revolutionized,” Williams says. “It’s not like individual groups making a new experiment, or developing a technique. We are all basking in the glory of this new thing that comes online.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Williams started her Ph.D. program right before JWST launched in December 2020. She shared her first presentation a couple months afterward, studying galaxy simulations in the very early universe, only a few million years after the Big Bang. Her professors were skeptical, arguing that no one would be able to observe anything that occurred in such ancient epochs. But when the first images came down from JWST, they showed galaxies blazing just 300 million years after the Big Bang—way earlier than anyone expected was possible. Suddenly Williams’ very young universe simulations didn’t seem so far-fetched at all.

“It was a fun experience as a student, to come into this world just as this total revolution in what was possible was happening,” she says.

Some theorists say that the definitive discoveries of Pop III stars and other far-off phenomena are still a decade or two away. Future space telescope missions may be the ones to finally glimpse the first stars ever.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

A mission called Hyperion, proposed and led by astronomers at the University of Arizona and Columbia University, would study star formation in the local—meaning, more recent—universe to better understand how hydrogen gas turns the creation of stars on and off. Understanding those mechanisms could inform our understanding of how the first stars may have formed, too.

But the very earliest era of time, a few tens of millions of years after the Big Bang, is the best hope for finding the first stars, says Boylan-Kolchin. JWST is more of a wayfinder for a possible future telescope, in that sense.

“We now know how to look, and where to look,” he says. “That makes it easier for people to come up with the technology to follow this up and say for sure, ‘This is a Pop III star.’ ”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

One day, maybe soon, someone will be able to do that. Some future astronomer will be able to point to an image of an unspeakably distant, achingly old galaxy, and sift its ancient light. They will find nothing but the signature of hydrogen, the universe’s first element and the stuff from which we all came, and trace that light to the very first stars—the ancestors of everything that has shone since.

Lead image: This artist’s conception depicts how the formation of the universe’s first stars may have appeared. Dense clouds of hydrogen and helium likely collapsed inward, increasing pressure and temperature until hydrogen atoms began to fuse, giving birth to the first light in a dark void. Credit: NASA, STScI A. Schaller.

Rebecca Boyle

Posted on February 26, 2026

Rebecca Boyle is a science journalist based in Colorado Springs. She is a columnist for Atlas Obscura, a contributing editor at Scientific American, a contributing writer at Quanta, and a frequent contributor to The New York Times, The Atlantic, and many other publications.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Imaging the Most Far-Out Jellyfish Galaxy Ever Observed

… and shaking up our view of the universe 8.5 billion years ago

By Devin Reese    February 25, 2026

Ram pressure-stripping” may sound like something that happens on sheep ranches, but it is, in fact, an astrophysical phenomenon. When galaxies occur in clusters, individual galaxies may exhibit long, trailing tails. These jellyfish-like tentacles are thought to be made up of gases that form a line as they get pushed out of the galaxy by internal forces. A new study sheds light on the nature of jellyfish galaxies as they get ram pressure-stripped of gases.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

It was based on observations from the James Webb Space Telescope, Gemini North Telescope, and NASA/ESA Hubble Space Telescope. Observations were captured from a patch of sky—the COSMOS field—visible from both the northern and southern hemispheres, and relatively free of bright foreground objects that would obscure the view of distant galaxies.

“We were looking through a large amount of data from this well-studied region in the sky with the hopes of spotting jellyfish galaxies that haven’t been studied before,” said study author Ian Roberts, an astrophysicist at the University of Waterloo, in a statement.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “Can Dark Energy Kill Galaxies?”

Roberts and his colleagues spotted the farthest jellyfish galaxy seen to date: COSMOS2020-635829, whose distance indicates a view of the universe 8.5 billion years ago. COSMOS2020-635829 looks relatively symmetrical, but with a southward-facing tail. Analyses indicated that the tail consisted of ionized gases and contained a series of bright blue knots that can be interpreted as young stars formed outside of the main galaxy.

Based on other simulations of the behavior of stars, the study authors hypothesized that the knots will likely remain bound to the jellyfish galaxy and eventually recombine with it. At the same time, given their distance from the disk, they could alternatively unbind and become their own little star clumps.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

These new observations challenge prior understandings of what was happening in deep space 8.5 billion years ago. “The first is that cluster environments were already harsh enough to strip galaxies, and the second is that galaxy clusters may strongly alter galaxy properties earlier than expected,” said Roberts.

As the combined gases within the hot, dense jellyfish galaxy acted like strong winds, they pushed out tails of star-forming gases that could transform both the jellyfish parent galaxy and its surroundings.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: A different jellyfish galaxy, ESO 137-001. Credit: NASA, ESA, CXC

Devin Reese

Posted on February 25, 2026

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

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Researchers Map Uranus’ Atmosphere in Stunning Detail

The James Webb Space telescope captured stunning images of the ice giant

By Jake Currie    February 24, 2026

Uranus is a peculiar planet. Even though it’s not the farthest planet from the sun, it’s still the coldest one in our solar system, with no apparent internal heat source. It’s also wildly off-kilter, rotating backward on its side (possibly due to a massive ancient collision), which gives it extreme seasons that last 21 years and a magnetosphere that’s not aligned with its rotational axis. Throw in several faint rings encircling it, and you can see why it captivates planetary scientists.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Because it’s so far away, we’ve only “visited” the planet once when Voyager 2 performed a flyby in 1986 on its way out of the solar system. Instead of more direct observations, we can use the James Webb Space Telescope to study it from a distance. That’s just what researchers from Northumbria University in the United Kingdom recently did, mapping the atmosphere of Uranus for the first time. They published their findings in Geophysical Research Letters.

“With Webb’s sensitivity, we can trace how energy moves upward through the planet’s atmosphere and even see the influence of its lopsided magnetic field,” study author Paola Tiranti said in a statement.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “The Planets with the Giant Diamonds Inside”

In addition to discovering Uranus is still cooling off, they captured two bright auroral bands near the planet’s magnetic poles—similar to the northern and southern lights on Earth—producing a stunning image.

“Uranus’ magnetosphere is one of the strangest in the solar system,” Tiranti continued. “It’s tilted and offset from the planet’s rotation axis, which means its auroras sweep across the surface in complex ways. Webb has now shown us how deeply those effects reach into the atmosphere.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Tiranti and her team hope this new research will contribute to our understanding of other massive, frigid planets. “By revealing Uranus’ vertical structure in such detail, Webb is helping us understand the energy balance of the ice giants,” Tiranti said. “This is a crucial step toward characterizing giant planets beyond our solar system.”

There may be more ice giants out there, but there’s only one Uranus.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: ESA/Webb, NASA, CSA, STScI, P. Tiranti, H. Melin, M. Zamani (ESA/Webb)

Jake Currie

Posted on February 24, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Fiery Crash of SpaceX Rocket Causes Huge Lithium Plume

It’s the first known direct detection of upper-atmospheric pollution from space debris re-entry

By Jake Currie    February 24, 2026

If you’re concerned about space debris and want to give yourself a heart attack, check out this anxiety inducing map of all the objects known to be orbiting Earth. What goes up must come down, and when these satellites are past their prime, many of them re-enter the atmosphere on a fiery, one-way trip back to terra firma.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“We’re now at a point where we have multiple satellites re-entering the atmosphere per day,” Johns Hopkins University’s Benjamin Fernando, who tracks space debris, told Nautilus last month. “There were tens of thousands fewer satellites 10 years ago than there are in orbit today—a problem that’s only going to get worse.”

Elon Musk, whose SpaceX and Starlink companies account for much of the debris that comes careening to Earth’s surface, is promising to ramp up launches—including orbital AI data centers—causing concern among scientists who study the effects of space debris.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “The Dark Side of Putting Mirrors in Space”

Robin Wing of the Leibniz Institute of Atmospheric Physics is one of those scientists. In February of last year when the upper stage of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket entered an uncontrolled descent sending a fireball streaking over the skies of Europe, he saw an opportunity.

Wing and his team fired a laser into the upper atmosphere to measure the concentration of lithium, a metal commonly used in spacecraft construction. There, they discovered an enormous plume with a concentration of lithium 10 times higher than normal levels, and published their findings in Communications Earth & Environment.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

As the first known direct detection of upper-atmospheric pollution from space debris re-entry, the study represents a grim milestone. Unfortunately, the authors stress that not all potentially polluting material from space debris can be measured this way. They’re also uncertain of the long-term effect of this kind of atmospheric pollution.

“This is a new scientific field. It’s hard to speculate because it’s changing so quickly,” Wing told the BBC.

With satellite launches increasing by the day, we’re about to find out—one way or another.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: Frame Stock Footage / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 24, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Why This Region of Space Appears to Be Populated by Snowmen

New research offers an elegant explanation

By Jake Currie    February 23, 2026

On the outer edge of our solar system, past Neptune’s orbit, lies the Kuiper Belt, a wide band of small bodies drifting lazily in orbit around the sun. Leftover from the formation of the solar system, this collection of cosmic crumbs includes dwarf planets as well as smaller planetesimals primarily composed of ice, methane, and ammonia.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Many of these planetesimals—nearly 1 in 10—look oddly like snowmen, with one smaller sphere glommed on to a larger one. Now, new research published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society offers a simple explanation as to why.

Called contact binaries, these icy snowmen have puzzled researchers for years. Earlier models treated colliding bodies like fluids, which would result in one sphere, not two. Other theories involved events so rare and convoluted that they’re unlikely to be responsible for such a high proportion of contact binaries.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“If we think 10 percent of planetesimal objects are contact binaries, the process that forms them can’t be rare,” study author Seth Jacobson of Michigan State University said in a statement.

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

Instead, Jacobson and co-author Jackson Barnes used powerful computer simulations to test a gravitational collapse model for the formation of these wayward snowmen. “Gravitational collapse fits nicely with what we’ve observed,” Jacobson said.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

In this model, during the early years of our solar system, when it was nothing more than a cloudy disc of dust, tiny pebble-sized bits of matter accreted together forming planetesimals. Occasionally, the rotating cloud would swirl in on itself, tearing planetesimals into two spheres orbiting one another in a cosmic pas de deux until they finally touched and fused into the oblong objects we see today.

While planetary scientists have debated the gravitational collapse model for years, this is the first time it’s been demonstrated with computer simulations. “That’s what’s so exciting about this paper,” Barnes enthused.

Going forward, the researchers hope this new model will help scientists better understand more complex systems featuring three or more bodies interacting in space. Until then, they can keep watching the skies for signs of a top hat-shaped planetesimal to complete the snowman look.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: NASA

Jake Currie

Posted on February 23, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ASTRONOMY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Did Astronomers Finally Witness a Black Hole Eat a White Dwarf for the First Time?

Analysis of a violent, unprecedented cosmic outburst

By Jake Currie    February 18, 2026

Last July, during a routine survey of the sky, the wide-field X-ray telescope equipped on China’s Einstein Probe detected something strange: an X-ray source that showed “violent” variability. Around the same time, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope detected a series of gamma ray bursts from the same region—the longest ever recorded, followed by two more. Across the planet and in space, several other telescopes were pointed in the direction of the phenomenon to watch the fallout.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

An examination of earlier observations from the wide-field X-ray telescope revealed another persistent X-ray signal preceding the gamma ray burst, which is an odd order of events for high-energy cosmic explosions. Fifteen hours later, the region erupted in some of the brightest X-ray flares ever recorded.

“This early X-ray signal is crucial,” Dongyue LI of the National Astronomical Observatories of China said in a statement. “It tells us this was not an ordinary gamma-ray burst.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “Earth May Not Be Toast”

Dongyue and a team of international collaborators pored over the data collected from the telescopes and determined the event, dubbed EP250702a, defied explanation by current models. Now, in a new paper published in Science Bulletin the team is proposing they witnessed a black hole feeding on a white dwarf.

Believed to be the final stage of stars with insufficient mass to collapse into black holes, white dwarfs are incredibly dense, with the mass of the sun packed into a volume just the size of Earth. In other words, it’s a bite-sized nugget with plenty of matter for a black hole to shred. As the black hole tore apart the white dwarf, it rapidly emitted jets of matter and energy in the form of X-rays and gamma rays that were detected back on Earth.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“Our computational simulations show that the combination of the tidal forces of an intermediate-mass black hole, combined with the extreme density of a white dwarf, can produce jet energies and evolutionary timescales that are highly consistent with the observational data,” study co-author Jinhong Chen of Hong Kong University explained.

If confirmed, it would be the first-ever observational evidence of a black hole feeding on a white dwarf.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Artist’s impression of the Einstein Probe satellite catching an intermediate black hole, tearing apart a white dwarf, and producing a relativistic jet. Credit: Einstein Probe Science Center, National Astronomical Observatories, CAS / Sci Visual.

Jake Currie

Posted on February 18, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Environment

- The Ancient Cold Snaps That May Have Shaped Human Evolution

- Is a Strictly Enforced Fishing Ban Saving the Yangtze?

- The Long, Dirty History of Our Capitol’s Waters

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Ancient Cold Snaps That May Have Shaped Human Evolution

Here’s when Earth’s climate became chaotic

By Jake Currie    February 24, 2026

With so much focus on human-made global warming, it can be easy to forget about the natural ebb and flow of Earth’s climate that’s governed by small fluctuations in how Earth moves along its orbit. While these cycles—called the Milankovitch cycles—generally occur in 100,000-year increments, new research published in Science shows periods of glaciation started varying more dramatically over shorter periods 2.7 million years ago. This shift, researchers say, marks a climatic tipping point—and it may have shaped the evolution of our species.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“Things were relatively quiet until 2.7 million years ago, when we began to see the first evidence of severe ‘cold snaps,’” study author David Hodell of the University of Cambridge explained in a statement. “These events may have been harbingers of things to come because at 2.5 million years ago, we start to see a distinct pattern of multiple rapid swings in the Earth’s climate, on thousand-year timescales. From then on, variability was a persistent feature of the glacial climate, which is consistent with what we see in Greenland ice cores during the most recent Ice Age.”

Read more: “Wild Orbits Prime Planets for Life”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Hodell and his team identified this tipping point after analyzing the chemical composition of sediment cores taken from deep beneath the seafloor off the coast of Portugal. These sediment cores capture a pristine record of climatic history, like polar ice cores, but reach back even further in time, allowing researchers to delve deeper into Earth’s past.

“I was surprised at the superb quality and resolution of the sediment cores, and the detail of the climate signals recorded within them,” said Hodell.

Recorded within these cores was evidence of the first widespread arrival of “ice-rafted debris”—rocks carried out to sea by giant seafaring icebergs. According to the research, these layers in the core mark the period when polar ice sheets had grown big enough to reach the ocean and start calving icebergs. The icebergs cooled the oceans more, destabilizing circulation, and caused Earth’s climate to yo-yo.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Meanwhile in Africa, a young upstart genus was just beginning to get on its feet—literally. The first hominins emerged around this time, and our upright walking, generalist ancestors were uniquely equipped to adapt to the climatic chaos of this brave new world.

Now if we could just stop contributing to it.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Vladimir Potapeknko / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 24, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Is a Strictly Enforced Fishing Ban Saving the Yangtze?

Ecologists detect promising, early signs of river recovery

By Devin Reese    February 19, 2026

As former wild rivers have been increasingly developed for industry and commerce, water and habitat quality have eroded, leading to a cascade of effects on flora and fauna. Some changes to river ecosystems, however, can be ameliorated through dramatic conservation measures. A recent study published in Science reported positive effects of a sweeping 10-year commercial fishing ban on the Yangtze River in China.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The ecological decline in the Yangtze River began in the 1950s, as economic development scaled up. “Over the past four decades, China has emerged as the world’s second-largest economy, yet the costs of this achievement are reflected in marked ecological and environmental degradation,” wrote the study authors.

Yangtze River species, including the river dolphin and Chinese paddlefish, were driven to extinction, while the fisheries industry collapsed.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “The Ancient Paths of an Iconic River”

In 2021, in a bold attempt to restore the ailing fisheries, China enacted a strict 10-year ban on fishing across the entire Yangtze basin. The ban was accompanied by strict enforcement measures, as well as ecosystem protections ranging from limiting sand mining to reducing agricultural runoff and ensuring sufficient water flow from dams. More than 100,000 fishing boats were recalled from the Yangtze.

In the recent study, researchers from China, France, the United States, and Canada evaluated Yangtze fish communities before and after the start of the fishing ban. They used regular monitoring data to compare fish species richness, biomass, body condition, and diversity from 2018 (pre-ban) to 2023 (ban in place).

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The results showed that fish biomass had doubled, especially through increases in some of the larger-bodied species. Both large and small species showed improvements in body condition. And while endangered species, such as the Yangtze sturgeon (Acipenser dabryanus) and tube fish (Acipenser dabryanus), remained rare, they showed preliminary population recovery. The population of Yangtze finless porpoises (Neophocaena asiaeorientalis), which rely on fish prey, increased by a third.

According to the study’s official press release, “The comprehensive fishing ban implemented under the Yangtze River Protection Law has effectively halted seven decades of biodiversity decline.”

The ban, however, required ambitious political decisions and regulatory enforcement that may be hard to sustain in the Yangtze or other large river basins. The jury is still out on what people are willing to give up in the short-term to foster the long-term ecological health of rivers.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: loves st / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on February 19, 2026

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

ENVIRONMENT | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Long, Dirty History of Our Capitol’s Waters

The recent Potomac River disaster follows centuries of pollution—but things are looking up

By Molly Glick    February 18, 2026

Last month, what may be the country’s largest sewage spill in history contaminated a stretch of the Potomac River in the Washington, D.C., area with hundreds of gallons of human waste. Now, President Donald Trump claims that local politicians, including Maryland Governor Wes Moore, caused the disaster and botched the cleanup.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

But the leak came from a sewage pipeline that’s regulated by the federal government. Full repairs are expected to take up to 10 months, according to DC Water, the utility that operates the pipeline.

The Potomac River is no stranger to contamination—people have polluted its winding waters for centuries.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Before settlers arrived to the area, the Indigenous Patawomeck and Piscataway people relied on the pristine Potomac River for fishing, drinking, and bathing. President George Washington later eyed the river as a shipping network, and helped organize the Potomac Company in 1785 to make it more easily navigable and connect it with the rest of the nascent country. A few years later, Congress passed the Residence Act, which called on Washington to choose a spot on the Potomac for the country’s new capital.

RIVER REVIVAL: The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers assisted in cleaning up the Potomac and Anacostia Rivers in 1973. Credit: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration / Wikimedia Commons.

Washington described the Potomac around that time as “well-stocked with various kinds of fish at all seasons of the year, and in the Spring with Shad, Herrings, Bass, Carp, Perch, Sturgeon, etc. in great abundance.” It was reportedly difficult to throw a spear in the water without catching a fish. Meanwhile, tobacco plantations had cropped up along the river, and the port city of Alexandria became a hub for the trade of tobacco for enslaved people and goods.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

It didn’t take long for people to pollute the Potomac. By the early 19th century, agriculture and deforestation caused silt to build up in the river. This water grew dirtier as the area’s population swelled during the Civil War and nearby mining ramped up—this runoff turns water highly acidic and makes it unsuitable for wildlife.

Beginning in 1810, D.C.’s early sewage system sent untreated stormwater and sewage into local waterways like the Potomac without treating it. In 1894, the U.S. Public Health Service noted that, “at certain times of the year the river is so loaded with sediments as to be unfit for bathing as well as drinking and cooking purpose. It contains fecal bacilli at all times.”

Read more: “The Dam Problem in the West”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Such conditions prompted the U.S. Public Health Service to begin conducting sanitary surveys of the river. D.C.’s drinking water, which was diverted from the Potomac, sparked outbreaks of typhoid fever around the turn of the century. By 1932, untreated waste from 575,000 people was streaming into the Potomac around D.C., and bacterial contamination forced officials to close off a stretch of the river to swimmers. Parts of the Potomac were also found to contain low levels of dissolved oxygen, threatening fish.

It wasn’t until 1938 that a sewage treatment plant opened in the D.C. area. But the Blue Plains plant only offered primary treatment at the time—more advanced treatment wouldn’t arrive for several decades. Further population growth around World War II strained the plant, and around a third more pollution made its way to the river than before Blue Plains was constructed.

A watershed moment arrived in the 1950s and ’60s with federal legislation including the Water Quality Act of 1965, which set water quality standards for interstate waters like the Potomac. Around that time, according to President Lyndon B. Johnson, the Potomac was “a river of decaying sewage and rotten algae.” A few years later, the federal Clean Water Act required the regulation of sources of pollution into the country’s waters.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

In the following decades, the Potomac showed signs of a rebound, including a dip in outbreaks of algae, rising numbers of certain fish species, and the reappearance of water grasses. Unfortunately, this progress reached a plateau around a decade ago.

Today, the Potomac’s top pollutants—nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment—continue to decline. But some native fish populations are decreasing, and deforestation and extreme weather contribute to a rise in urban runoff.

The Potomac still remains unsafe for fishing and swimming, activities enjoyed by Indigenous communities for millennia before settlers made their way to the area. And the consequences of the recent sewage spill could stick around for months: As temperatures warm, people spending time in the river might still encounter bacteria released by the recent disaster that are currently trapped in ice.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on February 18, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Evolution

- Mosquitoes Developed a Taste for Human Blood Before We Existed

- Chins: The Evolutionary Accident Unique to Homo Sapiens

EVOLUTION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Mosquitoes Developed a Taste for Human Blood Before We Existed

About 2 million years ago, they evolved to feed on Homo erectus

By Devin Reese    February 26, 2026

Despite how much we equate mosquitoes with getting itchy red welts, most of the 3,500 known species of mosquitoes don’t feed on humans. Still, mosquitoes that are anthropophilic—preferring human blood—are responsible for the transmission of devastating human pathogens. Malaria alone infected 282 million people and caused 610,000 deaths across 80 countries in 2024, according to the World Health Organization.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

In a study published today in Scientific Reports, a team of researchers from the United Kingdom, United States, Australia, Malaysia, Thailand, and India investigated the evolution of mosquito feeding on humans. In Southeast Asia, mosquitoes in the Anopheles genus range from species that prefer humans to species that favor other primates, such as gibbons and orangutans. By sequencing DNA from 11 mosquito species encompassing the range of feeding behaviors, the study authors reconstructed their evolutionary history relative to early human (hominin) history.

Read more: “Parasites Are Us”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The evidence pointed to a region called Sundaland (the Malay Peninsula, Borneo, Sumatra, and Java) as the epicenter for the dawn of mosquito feeding on humans. Based on more than 2,500 nuclear genes and 13 mitochondrial genes, the phylogenetic tree for mosquitoes showed that the ancestral behavior was to feed on non-human primates. Between about 2.9 and 1.6 million years ago, some mosquitoes acquired a taste for hominins. Their first human blood meals were likely from Homo erectus, who was in the area by at least 1.8 million years ago, based on other published studies.

In modern mosquitoes, large numbers of olfactory genes are implicated in how they find their preferred mammal hosts. It’s hypothesized, then, that multiple changes in genes coding for body-odor receptors would have had to occur for a transition in feeding preference. To exert sufficient selection pressure for the changes from monkeys to hominins, H. erectus was abundant enough by 1.8 million years ago “to drive adaptation to human host preference,” wrote the study authors.

Because Homo sapiens didn’t arrive in Sundaland until later, “such early origination of anthropophily must necessarily have been in response to the arrival of early hominins (Homo erectus) rather than anatomically modern humans,” concluded the study authors. Basically, by the time Homo sapiens showed up some 76,000 to 63,000 years ago, mosquitoes were already adapted to prey on hominins.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

So, mosquito preference for human blood is, unfortunately, time-tested and well-honed.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: SILVIA MAQQ / Shutterstock

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Devin Reese

Posted on February 26, 2026

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

EVOLUTION | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Chins: The Evolutionary Accident Unique to Homo Sapiens

New research reveals the evolutionary accident that is the human chin

By Jake Currie    February 17, 2026

In 1979, renowned evolutionary biologists Stephen J. Gould and Richard Lewontin published “The Spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian Paradigm,” a relatively short treatise pushing back on what they saw as a disconcerting trend in their field.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Evolutionary biologists, the two wrote, had become enamored with atomizing organisms into discrete traits and telling “just-so stories” about how these individual aspects had become optimized by natural selection to their ideal form.

To illustrate the fallacy of this mode of thinking (what they called “the adaptationist’s programme”), they used the example of “spandrels” in Venice’s St. Mark’s Cathedral. A “spandrel” is the curved triangular space between two arches at right angles to each other, and in St. Mark’s they’re decorated with detailed mosaics.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

It would be wrong to say the spandrels were created for the purpose of displaying mosaics, Gould and Lewontin explained. Instead, they were architectural byproducts of arch construction, decorated after the fact. And just as spandrels are byproducts of the constraints of architectural space, many biological traits are byproducts of the constraints of physical and developmental processes, Gould and Lewontin argued.

Since publication of their paper, “spandrel” has become shorthand among evolutionary biologists for an incidental trait, or result of a byproduct of evolution. Now, a new study published in PLOS One is investigating the potential spandrelhood of a human trait: the chin.

Read more: “What Made Early Humans Smart”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Absent from other primates—and even Denisovans and Neanderthals—the bony, protruding chin is a uniquely human characteristic and often used to identify members of our species in the fossil record. As such, it’s tempting to indulge in another uniquely human trait (storytelling) and come up with a reason it was honed by natural selection. Among others, supporting the lower jaw to facilitate chewing or acting as a secondary sexual characteristic to advertise maturity to mates, are two such stories.

To investigate theories of the evolution of the chin, researchers from the University of Buffalo examined gene sequences involved in the development of the head and jaw for evidence of evolution. Specifically, the team looked at whether sequences involved in producing the chin itself were subject to direct selection, whether they arose neutrally due to genetic drift, or whether they were merely a byproduct of evolution acting upon other traits (a spandrel). They found that the evidence pointed toward the chin being a spandrel.

“The chin evolved largely by accident and not through direct selection, but as an evolutionary by-product resulting from direct selection on other parts of the skull,” study author Noreen von Cramon-Taubadel said in a statement.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The traits natural selection was most likely acting on included reduced anterior dental size and other cranial changes related to the evolution of bipedalism, the authors clarified.

“While we do find some evidence of direct selection on parts of the human skull, we find that traits specific to the chin region better fit the spandrel model,” von Cramon-Taubadel explained. “The changes since our last common ancestor with chimpanzee are not because of natural selection on the chin itself but on selection of other parts of the jaw and skull.”

It’s an important reminder that traits should be considered within their context, and that not all differences between species are a result of an all-powerful force of natural selection.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“Generating empirical evidence against that line of reasoning is an important goal of this study and biological anthropology in general,” von Cramon-Taubadel said. “The findings underscore the importance of assessing the evolution of physical characteristics with trait integration in mind.”

Something to stroke your chin and think about.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: cybermagician / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 17, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Genetics

- What Do You Get When You Cross a Tardigrade with a Space Pioneer?

- New Gene Discovery Could Postpone the Bananapocalypse

GENETICS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Do You Get When You Cross a Tardigrade with a Space Pioneer?

A little genetic engineering could help future space settlers survive the challenges of off-world living

By Scott Solomon    February 27, 2026

Chris Mason is a man in a hurry.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“Sometimes walking from the subway to the lab takes too long, so I’ll start running,” he told me over breakfast at a bistro near his home in Brooklyn on a crisp autumn morning. “Just so I can get there faster. Not because I’m late for a meeting, just because it’s taking too long to walk … I’m the only one I know who runs to work to get there faster.”

Mason is a professor of physiology and biophysics at Weill Cornell Medicine. At least that’s his official title. He seems to be working on a hundred different projects all at once, ranging from tracking changes in the virus that causes COVID-19 to helping corals adapt to climate change.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The previous day, I had visited his research group on the Upper East Side. The Mason Lab occupied four separate laboratories across three buildings and was still growing. Although they were pursuing a wide range of projects, a major focus of their work was on how the human genome and microbiome are affected by spaceflight. What Mason and his researchers know for sure is that settlement of space will lead to major changes to our biology, one way or another.

If we let these changes unfold naturally, evolution will take its course, and people on Mars will gradually become better adapted to the conditions there through mutation and natural selection. Founder effects and genetic drift will cause random changes in Martians and reduce their genetic diversity. Enforced quarantines due to the risk of spreading infectious diseases could accelerate the speciation process. But these natural evolutionary processes will be relatively slow and, to put it mildly, quite unpleasant. What if we could accelerate the process of adaptation and minimize the human suffering that it would otherwise entail?

Mason thought that we could—and he laid out his argument in detail. “One possibility is we simply allow evolution to gradually select for characteristics required to survive on these new planets,” he wrote in his book, The Next 500 Years. “This is basically the ‘sink or swim’ approach to life’s survival, except with no lifeguards and bricks tied to your feet.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

However, there is an alternative: “Our second option to enable Earth’s life to live on other planets is to preemptively direct this genetic process, so that the life we send is already capable of surviving in its new home. More complex, yes—but also more humane.”

“Genes from all organisms will become a playground for creating and making new functions in human cells.”

The basic idea of acquiring new abilities by taking DNA from one organism and putting it into another has existed since the 1970s. In 1972, biochemist Paul Berg became the first person to do this when he copied a short piece of DNA from a virus that attacks bacteria into another kind of virus that attacks monkeys. The following year, Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen applied this “gene splicing” technique to insert genes from one species of bacteria into another. They found that the inserted gene persisted in subsequent generations as the bacteria divided. Going one step further, they then spliced genes from a frog into a bacterium, and found that the frog genes became a permanent addition to the bacterium’s genome.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

This was the dawn of a revolution in biotechnology. Recombinant DNA—meaning DNA copied from one organism and pasted into another—could be used for an incredible number of things, from producing life-saving medications like insulin to more whimsical applications like making glow-in-the-dark cats and goldfish. But it was also the beginning of an era in which humans could directly control the evolution of any species by manipulating their DNA. Mason saw the potential to take genes from organisms naturally well-adapted to harsh conditions and insert them into human cells to help prepare people for the hazards beyond Earth.

One candidate for such a hardy creature is the water bear, or tardigrade. Tardigrades are distant relatives of insects but have a unique appearance. They are barely visible to the naked eye, but under a microscope, they look like tiny gummy bears with eight chubby little legs and mouths shaped like nozzles. They thrive in moisture, but their adaptability allows them to live almost anywhere, from the sea to the soil in your backyard. One of the ways they are able to live in such a wide range of habitats is by tolerating long periods of harsh conditions—say, a drought—by essentially shriveling up. In their dehydrated state, they are almost invincible, which is what has drawn the attention of biologists interested in life in outer space.

In 2016, a team of Japanese researchers led by Takekazu Kunieda and Atsushi Toyoda sequenced the genome of one particularly hardy species of tardigrade. In the process, they discovered that tardigrades produce a protein that helps them survive in a dehydrated state. They named the protein “damage suppressor,” abbreviated Dsup. The researchers then took a major leap: They extracted the Dsup gene from the tardigrade genome and temporarily spliced it into human cells. To be clear, the human cells were growing in a laboratory, not a human body. Nevertheless, they found that when the tardigrade gene was inserted, human cells could produce Dsup. And—most significantly—when they exposed the human cells making Dsup to radiation in the form of X-rays, the cells were less damaged and better able to grow than normal human cells.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Mason’s lab began working to further improve human cells’ ability to withstand the harsh conditions of space by splicing in genes from tardigrades and other organisms that survive in extreme environments. He sees this as the beginning of an era in which human cells can be endowed with a great variety of abilities. He predicts that by the year 2040, “genes from all organisms will become a playground for creating and making new functions in human cells.”

The notion that the diversity of life on Earth represents a genetic “playground” for us to draw from seems exciting, but it is also fraught with risks, ranging from the biological to the ethical.

Indeed, after the first demonstrations of gene splicing, researchers quickly recognized the double-edged-sword nature of the new technology. A voluntary moratorium was called on the use of recombinant DNA. A conference was held in 1975 at Asilomar Beach in California, where many leading researchers came together to develop guidelines for its use. The meeting, which has variously been called “Woodstock for molecular biology” and “the Pandora’s box conference,” was in part an attempt by researchers to come up with their own limits on the use of genetic technology in the hopes that doing so would prevent government regulations. After four days of meetings, the researchers agreed to lift their own self-imposed moratorium on the use of recombinant DNA, albeit with some guardrails intended to prevent what they saw as its most potentially dangerous uses.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Is it ethical to make decisions that will directly affect future generations?

It seemed plausible that some genetic diseases could be cured with recombinant DNA by swapping out the section of DNA responsible for the condition with DNA from a healthy donor.

The first success came in 1990 with a child named Ashanthi DeSilva. At the age of 2, she had been diagnosed with SCID—the same condition as the “bubble boy,” David Vetter, that results in a nonfunctional adaptive immune system. In 1990, when DeSilva was 4 years old, she was given a fully approved experimental gene therapy to replace the cells in her bone marrow that cause the condition. It worked. With the modified genes, DeSilva’s immune system began functioning well enough for her to go outside, attend school with other kids, and lead a normal life.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Another major breakthrough came with the discovery of a way to edit DNA directly: CRISPR.

By 2023, the first two CRISPR-based treatments, which use molecular scissors to precisely modify specific parts of the genome, were approved in the United States—one for sickle cell disease and another for the blood disorder beta-thalassemia.

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

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

There is a catch, however. While the hope is that patients receiving CRISPR treatments will be fully rid of their diseases, the gene-editing approaches approved so far would not prevent any of their children from inheriting their parents’ diseases. The genetic changes are made only to DNA in somatic cells—the cells of the body that are not involved in making sperm or eggs. For their children to be cured, they would need to undergo the same treatment as their parents. The same would be true of every subsequent generation.

The alternative would be to make edits to cells in a way that affects not only somatic cells but also germline cells—those that become eggs, sperm, and eventually embryos and then babies. Germline gene editing is possible, although it crosses a line that some believe should not be crossed. The reason is that any edits made to germline cells will affect all the descendants of the individual receiving the treatment, for countless generations. This raises new types of ethical questions. It is one thing to perform a procedure on a living person, who can be educated about the potential risks and benefits and who can give their informed consent. Is it ethical to make decisions that will directly affect future generations who will not have any choice in the matter?

Changing the germline means we are, whether we realize it or not, controlling the future of evolution. Yet while the techniques of gene editing are new, the idea that we humans can guide evolution is not. As Mason pointed out, we have been doing so for millennia through the practice of selective breeding in agriculture and the domestication of animals.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“While controlling the evolution of the past, present, and future seems scary and wrought with incredible hubris, the reality is that we already have been engineering and modifying species and the environment around us, except previously we were doing so by accident with no foresight,” Mason wrote. “Now, finally it can be done with a sense of responsibility and purpose.”

Yet the idea of purposefully controlling the evolution of our own species has a dark history.

The atrocities committed in the name of eugenics in the first half of the 20th century were based not only on prejudiced and racist views, but also on flawed science. We now know that there is little, if any, genetic basis for the traits that proponents of eugenics sought to control. Still, any discussion of manipulating the future of human evolution must consider the flaws inherent in previous attempts to do so, as well as the ways those efforts were perverted and abused.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Questions about the ethical use of gene editing become more complex when considering humans on other planets. Would it be ethical to change a gene to make a person traveling to Mars better able to tolerate lower gravity or higher radiation? What about for a child born on Mars? Could genome editing make it easier to allow people to move safely between planets, for example, by altering their immune systems?

Mason sees gene editing in the context of space settlement as a moral imperative. “Sending any Earth-evolved organism to another planet would result in almost certain death, which represents the sad, evolutionary ‘good luck’ plan,” he wrote. “To save life, we will need to engineer it.”

Mason’s reasoning is based on an ethical philosophy he calls “deontogenics.” According to this way of thinking, as a species that is aware of the possibility of our own extinction and that of other species, we have an ethical obligation to try to prevent that from happening. “Any act that consciously preserves the existence of life’s molecules … across time is ethical. Anything that does not is unethical,” Mason wrote.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

With this framework in mind, Mason and his research team are pressing forward on genetically engineering human cells to make them better adapted for conditions beyond Earth. They have had some success with getting human cells to produce the Dsup protein that helps tardigrades survive in space. So far, their work involves only human cells being grown in a lab, but he hopes that will soon change. “I’d say human trials are 10 years away,” he told me.

A list of other genes that could be modified to help people to deal with life on Mars and elsewhere has been identified by George Church, Mason, and colleagues at Harvard’s Consortium for Space Genetics. They include genes that influence bone density, muscle tone, radiation resistance, and even pain tolerance. In part, the list comes from studies of existing genetic variation within people alive today. It also comes from organisms capable of living in extreme environments, like tardigrades and others.

Synthetic human genomes might be possible.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

One particularly hardy species of bacteria was first discovered in the 1950s in a can of meat that had been exposed to a whopping dose of 5 million millisieverts of radiation. The goal was to determine whether radiation could be used to sterilize canned foods and make them safe to eat. Yet the bacteria were still alive. The researchers identified them as belonging to the genus Deinococcus and named the species radiodurans in reference to their remarkable ability to endure such high radiation exposure. Even tougher bacteria, like the appropriately named Thermococcus gammatolerans, have been found in the water used to cool nuclear power plants. The genetic basis of these species’ abilities to withstand radiation is being investigated by Mason and his colleagues for their potential use in engineering life beyond Earth.

Another approach Mason is researching is to genetically engineer genes in bacteria and other microbes in our microbiome to produce useful products, including Dsup. This way, no changes to human cells would be required, but people might still reap the benefits if the substances produced by microbes are active within the human body. They already have some microbes in the lab that seem capable, he told me, but so far, they have not tested whether the microbes would work the same way when living in humans.

“It’s still a few years before we do a trial like that,” Mason said.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

So, we can edit our genes or those of our microbial partners. But there is yet another way that genetic technology may facilitate the human migration into space: by creating genes that do not yet exist.

In the first decades of the 21st century, the field of synthetic biology emerged with the goal of creating new functions for living things using genetic tools. Scientists at the J. Craig Venter Institute created the first complete synthetic genome of a simple organism, a type of bacteria, in 2010. Work has since been underway to create synthetic genomes for more complex organisms. Eventually, synthetic human genomes might be possible.

One idea, suggested to me by biologist Tiffany Vora, is to create synthetic portions of a human genome. For example, while humans normally have 23 pairs of chromosomes, one or more new chromosomes could be added to augment our existing genome. “The idea that we’re going to find all the mutations we need in Earth’s situations—I don’t believe it, because we’re fundamentally looking for a non-Earth context,” Vora told me. The advantage of this approach is that the existing genome could be left untouched. “If you can make really long artificial chromosomes, then you don’t have to change the person—you just give them a patch, essentially.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

This raises the possibility that future humans with additional synthetic chromosomes may be genetically incompatible with people without them. If used for space settlement, this could be yet another force driving a wedge between humans from Earth and humans living elsewhere. Adapting to life in space may require genetic engineering, but engineering people for space might also contribute to a split in humanity. At some point, people may have to choose between prioritizing adaptation for life on other planets and maintaining human beings as a single species. It might not be possible to achieve both.

If humans—in one form or another—are going to ever leave our solar system, Mars will be an important stepping stone. On Mars, humanity will learn to create and sustain new settlements. Mason thinks of this first, cautious step in humanity’s lifetime as being like going to college. “Leaving the house you grew up in, traveling just out of the reach of your parent’s ability to instantly help you, and testing your limits, boundaries, and potential—all while having fun, learning a lot, and likely getting into trouble,” he wrote about our first settlements on Mars.

If we do manage to spread out and survive on planets scattered across our solar system and others, we should expect to evolve, adapt, and speciate everywhere we go. Like tortoises and finches on Earthly islands, the conditions on each of the cosmic islands will influence how the people there will evolve. Some may choose to let the natural forces of mutation, natural selection, and genetic drift determine how they change. Others may decide to take matters into their own hands, using technology to guide the process.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

To ensure we are ready, Chris Mason is moving forward with his work on engineering the genes of living things—humans and microbes—for their future in space. Despite often thinking in timescales that involve hundreds, millions, or even billions of years, he sees his work as urgent.

“I wake up almost every morning and think about the sun engulfing the Earth,” he told me. “It’s almost the first thought in my mind. It’s a cosmological fact. I see the sun every morning. It’s still there, and it’s only going to get bigger … I only have so much time … I’ll have another, say, 30 years, 40 years, maybe, of productive work I could do. Maybe 50, at most. But that’s it. I don’t have 500 years … I want to do as much as I can.”

Suddenly, his fast walking made a little more sense.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

This excerpt is reprinted with permission from MIT Press Reader. It is adapted from Becoming Martian.

Lead image: Anton Vierietin / Shutterstock

Scott Solomon

Posted on February 27, 2026

Scott Solomon is a biologist and science writer based in Houston. He teaches ecology, evolutionary biology, and scientific communication at Rice University where he is a professor in the department of BioSciences. His first book, Future Humans: Inside the Science of Our Continuing Evolution, was published on Oct. 25, 2016 by Yale University Press.

GENETICS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

New Gene Discovery Could Postpone the Bananapocalypse

Bananas could get wiped out, it’s happened before

By Jake Currie    February 23, 2026

Have you ever wondered why you don’t have to spit out seeds after snacking on a banana? It’s because the Cavendish, the most widely used commercial cultivar, has three copies of chromosomes and can’t produce fertile seeds. Instead, the Cavendish is propagated by cloning, which is convenient for maintaining consistent banana quality, but leaves the plant vulnerable to disease.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

It’s a fate that befell the Cavendish’s predecessor, the Gros Michel (French for “Big Mike”). This more flavorful cultivar was the most widely available banana for decades until it fell victim to the wilting fungus Fusarium, known by the colloquial name “Panama disease.” By the 1950s, Gros Michel bananas had all but disappeared, and the Cavendish became the dominant cultivar, accounting for 99 percent of banana exports today.

For years, the Cavendish was thought to be resistant to the soil-borne Panama disease, until the 2010s when a virulent strain of the fungus, Tropical Race 4, started spreading. With bananas under threat worldwide, the race to protect the Cavendish from suffering the Gros Michel’s fate began. Now, agricultural scientists are making headway with new research published in Horticulture Research.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “What’s Wrong with Bananas”

Andrew Chen and Elizabeth Aitken from the University of Queensland recently pinpointed the location of a gene in the wild banana plant—Calcutta 4—that confers resistance to Fusarium wilt, Sub Tropical Race 4 (STR4).

“We’ve located the source of STR4 resistance in Calcutta 4 which is a highly fertile wild diploid banana by crossing it with susceptible bananas from a different subspecies of the diploid banana group,” Chen explained in a statement. “This is a very significant finding; it is the first genetic dissection of Race 4 resistance from this wild subspecies.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Because the banana plant crosses had to grow for a year before they could be checked for disease-resistance, locating the gene took five years. You may be wondering why we can’t just make the switch from the Cavendish to Calcutta 4 the way we swapped the Cavendish for the Gros Michel.

“While Calcutta 4 provides crucial genetic resistance, it isn’t suitable as a commercial cultivar because it doesn’t produce fruit which are good to eat,” Chen said.

Going forward, the researchers are developing molecular markers for the gene so banana producers can more efficiently identify and plant resistant seedlings. “This will speed up selection, reduce costs and hopefully ultimately lead to a banana that is good to eat, easy to farm, and naturally protected from Fusarium wilt through its genetics,” Chen said.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

That is, until the fungus adapts once more.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: Steve Hopson / Wikimedia Commons

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Jake Currie

Posted on February 23, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Geoscience

- The Farmer Who Glimpsed a Rare Volcanic Birth

- The 3-D Secrets of the “Gravity Hole” Under Antarctica

GEOSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Farmer Who Glimpsed a Rare Volcanic Birth

Dionisio Pulido watched as Paricutín tore through his fields—suddenly, scientists flocked there from around the globe

By Molly Glick    February 20, 2026

On this day in 1943, Dionisio Pulido was tending to his cornfield in Mexico when he witnessed geological history in the making. Over the previous few weeks, people in the region had felt the ground shake. On February 20, these tremors reached their peak.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

That afternoon, Pulido was burning a pile of branches when he noticed something odd: a long fissure in the ground he’d never seen before. Suddenly, he “felt a thunder,” and the trees around him shook. The ground ballooned several feet high out of a hole, smoke billowed out with a hiss, and he smelled sulfur.

Pulido called out to the sacred Lord of Miracles: “You brought me into this world—now save me from the dangers in which I am about to die.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

THE BIG BANG: A shot of Parícutin shortly after it erupted in 1943. Credit: K. Segerstrom, U.S. Geological Survey / Wikimedia Commons.

The farmer had witnessed the birth of one of Earth’s youngest known volcanoes, named Paricutín after the nearby village. Within the first day, Paricutín’s cone grew over 160 feet tall.

Paricutín is unique because it offered modern scientists the first opportunity to witness a volcano’s entire lifespan, and teams from around the world came to check it out. The eruption continued for nearly a decade until 1952, which is unusually long for relatively tame blasts like Paricutín. It’s categorized as a Strombolian eruption, the same type as most at Mount Etna in Italy.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

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

The most intense activity occurred during the first year, when Paricutín’s cone swelled to 1,100 feet. Ultimately, Paricutín’s lava flows blanketed some 10 square miles. By August 1944, the eruption had coated the nearby villages of San Juan and Paricutín with ash and lava, forcing thousands of people to find new homes and jobs. While no deaths were reported as a direct result of the eruption, three people died from the resulting lightning.

Paricutín is the youngest member of the Michoacán-Guanajuato volcanic field, an expansive collection of more than 1,100 volcanic centers that emerged within the past few million years. It’s one of the largest monogenetic volcanic fields on the planet, in which each volcano only experiences a single burst of activity. These fields emerge in places with low stocks of magma, and the volcanoes within “do not share a common volcanic plumbing system,” according to the National Park Service.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Often, monogenetic fields experience a long pause between eruptions—so that stretch of Mexico is unlikely to see another blast like Paricutín anytime soon.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: R.E. Wilcox, U.S. Geological Survey / Wikimedia Commons

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Molly Glick

Posted on February 20, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

GEOSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The 3-D Secrets of the “Gravity Hole” Under Antarctica

“How does our climate connect to what’s going on inside our planet?”

By Jake Currie    February 17, 2026

From space, planet Earth looks like a perfect sphere. But it’s not. Obviously, the crust of the Earth is irregular, covered in jagged mountains and deep oceanic trenches, but even if it were completely smooth and covered in water, the surface of this hypothetical ocean planet would still show some variations.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

That’s because of differences beneath the crust of the Earth. Different densities of subsurface rocks cause the strength of gravity to fluctuate, and while these fluctuations are small, they can have big effects, especially on oceans.

One area with the weakest gravity is beneath Antarctica, where the surface of the ocean sits slightly lower relative to the center of the Earth. So how did this mysterious gravity hole get there? To find out, Alessandro Forte of the University of Florida and Petar Glišović from the Paris Institute of Earth Physics relied on data from earthquakes.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “So Much Depends Upon Antarctica”

“Imagine doing a CT scan of the whole Earth, but we don’t have X-rays like we do in a medical office. We have earthquakes. Earthquake waves provide the ‘light’ that illuminates the interior of the planet,” Forte explained in a statement.

Combining this data with physics-based modeling allowed them to construct a 3-D map. Then, using computer modeling, they retraced the flows of rock back in time to 70 million years ago. They published their findings in Scientific Reports.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Forte and Glišović discovered that, while the gravity hole started out fairly weak, it started getting stronger about 30-50 million years ago. During this time period, the South Pole experienced major climatic changes, including increased glaciation. Essentially, as the gravity hole picked up steam, Antarctica picked up ice.

Going forward, the pair hopes to investigate the link between gravity and glaciers using new models that include sea level and continental elevation changes, all to address the question: “How does our climate connect to what’s going on inside our planet?” Forte said.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: ConceptCafe / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 17, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Health

- Do These Centenarians Hold the Key to Long Life in Their Blood?

- The Surprising Benefits of Yo-Yo Dieting

- Your Muscles Retain Memories of Strength and Weakness

- Night Owls Could Be Putting Their Heart Health at Risk

- New Blood Test Could Predict When Alzheimer’s Symptoms Will Present

- The Cancer No One Can Explain

- An Unlikely Culprit Causes Lower Blood Sugar at Higher Altitudes

- Babies Are Exposed to More Forever Chemicals in Utero Than Previously Thought

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Do These Centenarians Hold the Key to Long Life in Their Blood?

New research identifies key proteins linked to longevity

By Jake Currie    February 26, 2026

To unlock the secrets of longevity, scientists in Switzerland launched the SWISS100 study combining sociology, psychology, medicine, and biology to research centenarians—that is, those who reach the ripe old age of 100. The biological component of the study, headed by Karl-Heinz Krause of the University of Geneva, just published a new report in Aging Cell, and it’s all about 100-year-olds’ blood.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

A team of researchers led by Krause drew blood from centenarians, comparing it to both octogenarians’ and younger people’s blood. Examining more than 700 proteins, they identified 37 in centenarians that more closely resembled proteins found in the younger cohort. “This represents approximately 5 percent of the proteins measured, suggesting that centenarians do not entirely escape aging, but that certain key mechanisms are significantly slowed down,” study co-author Flavien Delhaes explained in a statement.

Five of these proteins were linked to oxidative stress, believed to be a key component of accelerated aging. Oxidative stress, stemming primarily from chronic inflammation and malfunctioning mitochondria, occurs when there’s an imbalance of highly reactive free radicals and protective antioxidants.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

So do centenarians produce fewer free radicals or mount a stronger defense against them?

Read more: “Lifetime of Friendships Slows Aging”

“The answer is very clear,” Krause said. “Centenarians have significantly lower levels of antioxidant proteins than the standard geriatric population. At first glance, this seems counterintuitive, but in reality, it indicates that since oxidative stress levels are significantly lower in our centenarians, they have less need to produce antioxidant proteins to defend against it.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

That wasn’t the only counterintuitive finding either. Researchers also discovered that DPP-4, a protein that degrades the insulin-stimulating GLP-1 (of obesity drug fame) remains robust in centenarians. “By degrading GLP-1, DPP-4 helps maintain relatively low insulin levels, which could protect them against hyperinsulinism and metabolic syndrome,” Delhaes continued. “This is also a counterintuitive mechanism, suggesting that centenarians maintain good glucose balance without needing to produce large amounts of insulin.”

Other proteins that retained their youthful expression levels in centenarians include regulatory proteins of the extracellular matrix (the “glue” that binds cells together), the inflammatory protein interleukin-1 alpha, and several proteins involved in fat metabolism. Taken together, the findings point to decreased inflammation and fewer metabolic disorders in those who live long enough to see triple digits.

The researchers hope these new findings will lead to treatments to combat the infirmity that comes with advanced age. In the meantime, they stress that a longer life is already within our reach, we just need to adopt some healthy habits.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“For example, eating a piece of fruit in the morning can reduce oxidative stress in the blood throughout the day. Physical activity helps maintain the extracellular matrix in a more ‘youthful’ state. And avoiding excess weight also helps preserve a healthy metabolism, similar to that observed in centenarians,” they said.

An apple a day might actually keep the doctor away.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Luis Echeverri Urrea / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 26, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Surprising Benefits of Yo-Yo Dieting

The body keeps the score

By Jake Currie    February 25, 2026

Dieting to slim down can be a demoralizing slog. Whether you count calories, cut out carbs, or intermittently fast, the weight always seems to creep back eventually. So what’s the point? Well, new research published in BMC Medicine suggests yo-yo dieting might not be such a Sisyphean exercise in futility after all.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Researchers from Ben-Gurion University in Israel conducted five- and 10-year follow-ups of participants from two consecutive trials examining Mediterranean diet-based interventions and physical activity compared with control diets, which included detailed before and after MRI scans.

Surprisingly, they found that even though participants entered the second trial with a similar weight that they entered the first, showing no sustained weight loss, they still showed internal improvements. Their abdominal fat profiles and metabolic markers improved by 15 to 25 percent, their insulin sensitivity was enhanced, and their lipid panels were more favorable.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “What Your Microbiome Wants for Dinner”

They also had better health outcomes in the long term, with a five-year follow-up showing that those who participated in both trials regained less weight and accumulated less abdominal fat than those who only participated in only one.

“Body weight alone does not capture changes in visceral fat or metabolic biomarkers,” study author Hadar Klein said in a statement. “Even when weight is regained, cardiometabolic health may remain improved, and success should not be defined solely by the number on the scale. Importantly, even when weight loss is attenuated during a second attempt, the cumulative benefits for abdominal fat and metabolic health are substantial.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

So don’t lose hope, yo-yo dieting may be paying off even if you don’t get rewarded with a svelte physique. After all, it’s what’s on the inside that counts anyway.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: Tatjana Baibakova / Shutterstock

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Jake Currie

Posted on February 25, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Your Muscles Retain Memories of Strength and Weakness

New research sheds light on changing gene expression patterns in muscle cells

By Jake Currie    February 25, 2026

Every time you throw darts or ride a bike or even work out, you’re engaging your muscle memory. New research from the Norwegian School of Sport Sciences published in Science Advances shows our muscles retain a memory of weakness, as well—and it changes as we age.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Research by Adam P. Sharples published in 2016 showed that there’s an epigenetic component to muscle memory. Sharples and his team studied the genes of participants after two different periods of resistance exercise with a period of rest between. They found that exercise caused muscle cells to upregulate the expression of certain genes—a pattern they remembered during rest, too.

So if muscle use causes upregulation of genes, can muscle disuse cause downregulation? To find out, Sharples and his team reversed his earlier study, looking at the genes expressed in muscle cells of young adults who had repeated leg immobilization. They found a protective pattern of gene expression, with relevant gene pathways being less disrupted during a second period of disuse. In other words, the muscles of young adults proved to be resilient.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “The Importance of Muscle”

But what about aging muscles? To study the effects of inactivity on gene expression, Sharples and his team compared young and old rats who had similar leg immobilizations. They found that the muscles of old rats developed a detrimental memory of disuse with repeated periods of inactivity causing suppression of relevant genes.

Basically, the research suggests that repeated inactivity causes muscles in the young to develop an expression pattern that helps them recover, while it causes muscles in the old to develop an expression pattern that makes them more susceptible to muscle wasting.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“Muscle carries a history of both strength and weakness, and these molecular memories may accumulate over time to shape how it responds when inactivity occurs again,” Sharples said in a statement. “Understanding how muscle records these past experiences of use and disuse is essential for designing better strategies to support recovery after illness, injury, or age‑related decline.”

Next, Sharples’ team is working with the Novo Nordisk Foundation in Denmark to identify the modes of exercise that produce the most beneficial expression patterns for aging muscles. Until then, we could all stand to get a little more physical activity to give our muscles the best memories—while we still have them.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Line addict / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 25, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Night Owls Could Be Putting Their Heart Health at Risk

New research links late nights and low cardiovascular health scores

By Jake Currie    February 25, 2026

Are you a night owl or an early bird?

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

If it’s the former, then I’m afraid I’ve got some bad news. People who stay up late have worse cardiovascular health than people who wake up early, according to a new study published in the Journal of the American Heart Association.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School followed the health of more than 300,000 adults over a 14-year period and determined self-described night owls had poorer cardiovascular outcomes as measured by the American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8 metrics. These metrics include eating a healthy diet, exercising regularly, getting restful sleep, and not smoking, as well as maintaining healthy weight, blood pressure, blood sugar, and cholesterol levels.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“‘Evening people’ often experience circadian misalignment, meaning their internal body clock may not match the natural day-to-night light cycle or their typical daily schedules,” lead study author Sina Kianersi said in a statement.

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

Researchers found that those who stay up later had a 79 percent higher prevalence of having a poor cardiovascular health score and a 16 percent higher risk of having a heart attack or stroke, while those who wake up early had a 5 percent lower prevalence of low heart health scores. There were sex differences, too, with female night owls more likely to have lower health scores than male night owls.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

But there is a silver lining for the late-night warriors hidden in this data—75 percent of the adverse scores can be erased by changing behaviors.

“These findings show that the higher heart disease risks among evening types are partly due to modifiable behaviors such as smoking and sleep. Therefore, evening types have options to improve their cardiovascular health,” Kianersi said. “Evening types aren’t inherently less healthy, but they face challenges that make it particularly important for them to maintain a healthy lifestyle.”

While our biological clocks are innate, they’re not immutable. They can change naturally over the course of our lives, and we can alter our behavior to change them. So if you’re a night owl interested in shifting to early bird mode, here are some tips on how to get better sleep.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

After all, as every night owl knows, there’s no such thing as “too late.”

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: mentalmind / Shutterstock

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Jake Currie

Posted on February 25, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

New Blood Test Could Predict When Alzheimer’s Symptoms Will Present

Researchers have been on a quest for simple, reliable Alzheimer’s tests for years

By Jake Currie    February 24, 2026

Alzheimer’s is a difficult disease to diagnose. The clinical markers—plaques of amyloid proteins and tangles of filamentous tau proteins building up in the brain—are best measured with PET scans, which are expensive and not widely available.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The search for easier, more reliable ways to detect the disease has been going on for years and the FDA recently approved a blood test for people over the age of 55. Now, new research published in Nature Medicine shows promise not for just detecting Alzheimer’s, but predicting when the onset of symptoms will occur.

Neuroscientists from Washington University took blood samples from 600 people aged 62 to 78 who weren’t experiencing cognitive impairment. By measuring the levels of a phosphorylated version of tau, p-tau217, they were able to create a model capable of estimating the onset of Alzheimer’s symptoms within a margin of error of three to four years.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“Amyloid and tau levels are similar to tree rings—if we know how many rings a tree has, we know how many years old it is,” study author Kellen K. Petersen said in a statement. “It turns out that amyloid and tau also accumulate in a consistent pattern and the age they become positive strongly predicts when someone is going to develop Alzheimer’s symptoms. We found this is also true of plasma p-tau217, which reflects both amyloid and tau levels.”

Read more: “What Alzheimer’s Feels Like from the Inside”

It’s encouraging news for the millions of Americans at risk of developing Alzheimer’s, but it comes with some important caveats. Concerned about false positives, many experts are raising the alarm about widespread blood testing in people who haven’t shown symptoms of the disease. Blood tests, they say, should only be one piece of a more comprehensive diagnostic protocol.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Even though this latest test will need more fine-tuning before it’s ready for prime time, it can still be used in clinical trials.

“In the near term, these models will accelerate our research and clinical trials,” study author Suzanne E. Schindler said. “Eventually, the goal is to be able to tell individual patients when they are likely to develop symptoms, which will help them and their doctors to develop a plan to prevent or slow symptoms.”

A number of factors have been associated with a delayed progression of the disease—like a healthy diet, active lifestyle, and social engagement—but there are only two recently approved treatments to delay Alzheimer’s when it’s caught early.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

It’s a big step in the right direction, but not exactly a miracle breakthrough.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: GerryShaw / Wikimedia Commons

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Jake Currie

Posted on February 24, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Cancer No One Can Explain

Colorectal cancer in young people has been rising for 30 years. We still don’t know why—and that’s killing people.

By Kristen French    February 24, 2026

Aside from potty-training toddlers, almost nobody likes to talk about their poop. This is particularly true if something is wrong with it. But for a lot of young people today, that’s becoming a problem, says Leah Biller, an oncologist in the Young-Onset Colorectal Cancer Center at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston. “We all should be looking at our poop,” she tells me.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Since the mid 1990s, rates of colorectal cancer have been surging in people under 50, and no one really understands why. Those born in the 1990s are now roughly twice as likely as those born in the 1950s to develop colorectal cancer. It’s the leading cause of cancer-related death in men and women under 50 in the United States. Many of these patients get diagnosed late, after the cancer has progressed significantly.

They ignore the signs, and so do their doctors. “I often hear from my patients things like, ‘Oh, I saw someone for diarrhea and then I was constipated, and then maybe I had a little blood when I was wiping, but I didn’t really think it was anything. Then I forgot about it, and I didn’t wanna talk about my poop because that felt weird,’” says Biller.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

She and others like her are working to diminish the stigma and get the word out—and awareness is growing. Some clues are also emerging in the data to explain the rise of these cancers in young people, she says, but there’s still a lot we don’t know. I spoke with Biller about the impact of the so-called Western diet on cancer risk, emerging microbiome research, and what makes colorectal cancers especially devastating for younger people.

We continue to hear that there’s no single smoking gun for the rise in colorectal cancer in young people. But what’s your leading hypothesis right now about what’s actually driving it?

That’s the question on many peoples’ minds. There are a lot of things that we think increase the risk. Some studies have shown that sedentary behavior and sugar-sweetened beverages increase risk. Obesity, which has been increasing, raises the risk. But these things don’t explain the vast majority of patients I see in the clinic.

One of the areas that we’re most excited about exploring more is the microbiome—the constellation of bacteria and organisms that reside primarily in your gut but also inhabit other bodily tissues. Some studies have compared older colorectal cancer patients to younger patients and found that the younger patients had less diversity in the microbiome, which is also a sign of overall poorer health. There are also differences in the types of bacteria that younger patients who have colorectal cancer have in their guts compared to older patients.

What explains these differences in the microbiome, and how do we intervene?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

We think dietary changes, medications, and factors from childhood might impact someone’s microbiome in ways that increase the risk of a younger person developing colorectal cancer. But we’re still very much learning. The long story short is that there’s a lot that we don’t know. We’ve identified associations but that doesn’t mean it’s the cause. I can’t tell people, “Just don’t do this, and you’re gonna be fine.”

Have researchers identified anything else in early childhood among these cohorts, like antibiotics or C-sections, that could have played a role?

Antibiotics is a really interesting one. There’s so much more antibiotic use today, especially in childhood in younger generations. But the data hasn’t been a slam dunk here. Some studies suggest maybe there’s an association, but others do not, so I certainly don’t think that’s the whole story.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“I didn’t wanna talk about my poop because that felt weird.”

You’ve done a lot of work with childhood cancer survivors who later develop colorectal cancer. What did that research reveal?

Yes, this is called therapy-associated polyposis. I work in our high-risk genetics group, while also taking care of patients who have colorectal cancers. And we were seeing people that had had a history of childhood cancer—Hodgkin’s is probably most common—where they got treatment like chemotherapy or radiation, and then decades later start developing numerous polyps that look very out of proportion to what you’d expect. We’re trying to understand why this happens. Not everyone who had childhood cancers gets it. And treatments for those cancers have improved. A lot of radiation was given in the ’80s and ’90s. The radiation is a lot more focused now for many people so the outcomes may be different.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

What methods of manipulating the microbiome are being considered?

The idea is that maybe you can take a capsule that has the good bacteria in it. Something more advanced than your standard over-the-counter probiotic. This isn’t for people who have colon cancer, but just in general—we’re trying to understand, can you repopulate a microbiome? That may be something in the future that we all take in the mornings to help our microbiome.

There are also certain foods that may be helpful for the microbiome. Something called resistant starch, which we recommend for people who have a particular genetic syndrome called Lynch syndrome. We might discover other dietary things that support a happier and healthier microbiome. But how to manipulate it and at what age you’d have to manipulate it, these are some of the questions we have.

I’ve read that the connection between red and processed meat and colorectal cancer is one of the best-established diet-cancer relationships in all of oncology. Is that still the case?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

It’s one of them. A lot of the things we associate with colorectal cancer came from a study of a cohort of over 120,000 registered nurses called the Nurse’s Health Study, which launched in 1976. They looked at things like consumption of processed and red meat, butter, high-fat dairy, sugar-sweetened beverages, what we sometimes call a Western diet. These things were all associated with increased risk. They also measured sedentary behavior by clocking the amount of TV someone watched, which is scary, because screen time is increasing for everyone. But this was a prospective cohort study where people were asked to recall their childhood behaviors, and memory is faulty. What would be ideal is if we could follow people in real time and measure all of these things. We also need to track much more diverse populations.

The rise is happening in 27 different countries simultaneously, but it does seem to be more pronounced in the West. What does that global pattern tell us that just looking at American patients couldn’t?

The risk is highest in higher income countries where obesity is higher and sedentary behavior is greater. So that pattern lends more credence to the idea that these things may be playing a role.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Do we know anything new about why younger patients present with more advanced disease?

One is that they’re not diagnosed in the same way. The guidelines now recommend colonoscopies for average risk individuals at age 45. But young people who find blood in their stool or have irregular bowel patterns, tend to assume it’s a hemorrhoid or Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Patients and their providers don’t have colorectal cancer high on the list of possibilities, so they’re later to diagnosis. I often hear from my patients things like, “Oh, I saw someone for diarrhea and then I was constipated, and then maybe I had a little blood when I was wiping, but I didn’t really think it was anything. Then I forgot about it, and I didn’t wanna talk about my poop because that felt weird.”

By the time the cancer is found, unfortunately, it’s often because something else happened. The cancer grew to such an extent that it started causing more clear-cut problems: abdominal pain after the liver becomes involved, or anemia, because they’ve lost so much blood slowly over time. They have significant fatigue that makes it difficult to do things.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “When Did I Start Getting Cancer?”

Has awareness among primary care doctors and patients improved?

The media coverage helps. We’re all trying to get the word out that this is something important. I’ve given talks to different primary care groups. My sense is that the primary care folks are hearing it and seeing it. Patients, too, which is great. There’s still a stigma about bowels and poop. People don’t want to talk about it. But we all should be looking at our poop. We should be making sure that we talk to our doctors about it.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Another thing that’s important is knowing your family history of polyps and colon cancer. A lot of people are shy to talk about these things. Certain generations didn’t talk about medical issues in families. But it’s important to share that information because it could impact someone’s assessment of their risk and when they should start doing colonoscopy screening. It should be something people do at Thanksgiving dinner. Everyone goes around the table and talks about when your last colonoscopy was.

Colonoscopies are really the only screening tool that can not only diagnose a cancer, but also prevent it. Because not all polyps will turn into cancer, but if that polyp is removed, then it’s definitely not gonna turn into cancer. Unfortunately, sometimes you really do need to advocate for yourself. The system isn’t always designed to meet you where you’re at. But if you don’t feel like your body is right, you need to say something. You know your body best.

Is young onset colorectal cancer harder to treat, or is it just generally caught later?

I would say generally caught later. It does tend to have different mutational signatures which affect some of the treatments that you can give. There have been studies that have shown that we definitely treat younger patients more aggressively. They get more lines of therapy, which is in part because you just want to throw everything you can to support them and they’re well enough usually to handle it. But it’s not always clear that the outcomes are better, even though they’re getting more intensive regimens. Does that reflect a more aggressive underlying biology? We don’t know.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Given what we do know, what are the best preventative measures a person in their 20s or even younger can take?

None of this is gonna sound revolutionary, but don’t smoke cigarettes. Drink limited alcohol or no alcohol. This is good for many reasons, but particularly from a cancer risk standpoint. Try to have a healthy body, which means eating fewer processed meats, less of the bad Western diet things, more whole foods and physical activities and less sedentary behavior. These are all things that are probably good for us for many reasons. They align with less risk for developing young onset colorectal cancer, and they just make you healthier and stronger so you can take whatever is coming. And as I said, just being aware of your body and symptoms and saying something if you have diarrhea and then constipation. A little bit of blood is hopefully just a hemorrhoid, but it’s good to get it looked at just to make sure.

Is there something that your young patients are most underserved on?

One of the real challenges for younger patients is that they have a lot of responsibilities that are different from those of older adults. Many have younger children and older parents that they need to manage. They’re also trying to balance financially, working and making sure that they can provide for their families. People are starting their careers, or in the early phases of their careers, and it’s hard to take a step back to deal with treatment.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

There are also some tough family-planning conversations. With younger patients—and this is particularly true for rectal cancer—we use radiation to the pelvis, which leads to infertility. Some young people learn they have cancer and then hear, “Ok, we need to freeze your eggs right away.” If the uterus is radiated, women can’t typically carry a child. There’s a lot of fertility implications of pelvic radiation that you don’t think about. Having to act on family planning right away, when you’ve just learned you have cancer, is very challenging.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: James Lewi / Shutterstock

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Kristen French

Posted on February 24, 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

An Unlikely Culprit Causes Lower Blood Sugar at Higher Altitudes

A scientific mystery seemingly solved

By Jake Currie    February 20, 2026

Scientists have known for decades that people living at higher altitudes, where oxygen is scarce, have lower rates of diabetes, and it’s a phenomenon that’s not restricted to humans. Tibetan pigs, deer mice, snowfinches, and other animals all have tighter control of their blood sugar at high altitudes as well.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

So what’s going on?

According to new research published in Cell Metabolism the answer might be hiding in the blood.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Isha Jain, a cardiovascular scientist at the Gladstone Institutes in San Francisco and an expert on how our bodies use oxygen, learned in previous work that mice experiencing low oxygen levels (hypoxia) had much lower blood glucose levels. “When we gave sugar to the mice in hypoxia, it disappeared from their bloodstream almost instantly,” Yolanda Martí-Mateos, co-author of the latest study, explained in a statement. “We looked at muscle, brain, liver—all the usual suspects—but nothing in these organs could explain what was happening.”

After performing a battery of tests on hypoxic mice, the team discovered that red blood cells were responsible for soaking up the excess glucose. It was a somewhat counterintuitive finding; after all, red blood cells are pretty simple structures. Without nuclei and mitochondria, they’re basically stripped-down vehicles for oxygen-carrying hemoglobin. On the other hand, what they lack in metabolic demands, they make up for in sheer numbers, as the most abundant cell in the body.

Read more: “The Tourist Draw of Melting Glaciers”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

And so, when the mice were exposed to chronic hypoxic conditions two things happened. First, like us, they produced a lot more red blood cells. Second, these new red blood cells were a little different—they were primed to absorb sugar with a lot more glucose transporters on their surface. Taken together, these two factors caused blood glucose to plummet.

While the study found red blood cells were the primary glucose sink in hypoxic conditions, reducing blood sugar was a secondary effect—the red blood cells simply needed more fuel to carry out their job of oxygenating the tissues.

“What surprised me most was the magnitude of the effect,” study co-author Angelo D’Alessandro of the University of Colorado said. “Red blood cells are usually thought of as passive oxygen carriers. Yet, we found that they can account for a substantial fraction of whole-body glucose consumption, especially under hypoxia.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Going forward, the team hopes to apply these findings to treatments for diabetes, traumatic injuries, and even exercise physiology.

“This is just the beginning,” Jain said. “There’s still so much to learn about how the whole body adapts to changes in oxygen, and how we could leverage these mechanisms to treat a range of conditions.”

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: shoma81 / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 20, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

HEALTH | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Babies Are Exposed to More Forever Chemicals in Utero Than Previously Thought

New research into umbilical cord blood shows a startling number of PFAS

By Jake Currie    February 19, 2026

Since teflon was invented in 1938, the use of per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) has exploded, leaving researchers studying the consequences struggling to catch up. Today, these “forever chemicals,” named for their stubborn persistence in both our environment and our bodies, are found in smartphone screens, yoga pants, furniture, paint, and more.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Now, new research published in Environmental Science & Technology shows babies were exposed to more forever chemicals than previously thought.

Studying umbilical cord blood collected from children born between 2003 and 2006, Shelley H. Liu of Mount Sinai and her team used a nontargeted approach to detect PFAS rather than screening from a pre-defined list. Casting a wider net allowed them to detect a wider array of PFAS in the blood, and they discovered 42 confirmed or possible forever chemicals, many of which aren’t typically screened for. While the health effects of a lot of these chemicals remain unknown, PFAS have been linked to pregnancy complications, developmental defects, low birth weight, cancer, and more.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “How All Those Forever Chemicals End Up on Your Plate”

“Our findings suggest that how we measure PFAS really matters,” Liu said in a statement. “When we look more comprehensively, we see that babies are exposed to far more PFAS chemicals before birth than we previously realized—and some of the patterns we thought we understood may change.”

It’s a startling finding, but Liu hopes this new framework will provide some solid ground to give researchers room to run.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“For now, this work helps lay the scientific foundation,” Liu explained. “Our goal is to move toward earlier identification and prevention, especially during sensitive windows like pregnancy.”

Going forward, Liu identified several promising pathways for future research, including investigating the health effects of these understudied chemicals and whether higher exposure levels early in life lead to further complications down the line.

After all, the infants whose cord blood was sampled in the study are now 20-somethings.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: Chanerin / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 19, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

History

- The Thrill of Science in 2042

- How Energy Politics Played Out on the White House Roof

- The Missing Pieces of the Donner Party Narrative

- Space Age Technology Reveals Secrets of Bronze Age Sword

- The Retiree Who Inspired the Wright Brothers to Take Flight

- The Mountain Man Who Measured the Sky’s Brilliance

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Thrill of Science in 2042

A science historian explains how science got its groove back. A fictional dispatch from the future.

By Marina Dubova    February 27, 2026    Illustration by Sam Chivers

In 2026, science was under attack from denial and political turbulence. Ideologues and corrupt officials discontinued childhood vaccines. They dismissed climate science. Cancer biologists lost funding for life-saving research. Broad areas of science were banned for contradicting the party line, and world-class educational programs were shut down. It was a terrifying crisis for science and education. And it lasted for more than a decade.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Eventually, citizens rediscovered their reason and humanity and voted the science deniers into oblivion. Something else happened during the crisis. The chaos shook up the science community. Scientists, funders, and policymakers began to question whether scientific practice could be improved to better connect with citizens and stand up to the winds of politics. By 2040, the community had instituted what is now called “radically exploratory science,” an approach that abandons superficial markers of “good science” in favor of creative discovery.

I am Anya Aleksandrova, a historian of science, and I had the chance to witness and document this transformation. In the aftermath of the “Dark Period,” as the late 2020s and ’30s were known, many had to admit that the practice of science had come to resemble a factory, producing results based on standardized protocols. Back then, I was a graduate student in neurobiology, but I became less interested in neural circuits and more interested in how people did science, and why they did it that way.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Turns out, I wasn’t alone. From 2035 to 2042, as I conducted interviews about science, I saw a broad frustration building and witnessed a transformation unfolding. I won’t dwell on the policy changes that enabled this transition. Instead, I will focus on what scientists, funders, journalists, and citizens thought about it. Their testimonials trace the unprecedented shift from what I call directed science to exploratory science.

Science has been our most powerful guide to useful knowledge. It has led us to the moon, to vaccines, and to new forms of intelligence. While our best guide to knowledge, science was never perfect. The very features that defined good science constrained how much we could know.

Early natural philosophers, like Isaac Newton and Antoine Lavoisier, operated with few guidelines on how to conduct their research. But by the early 21st century, scientists mostly followed well-worn paths. They used standardized methods and built theories that aligned with existing disciplinary frameworks and assumptions held by many more people than there were in the 17th century. There was little room to diverge from these paths and encounter something truly novel.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

In the early 21st century, scientists believed standard practices guided them to “objective” knowledge. By “objective,” they meant results that were clean and independent of the context in which they were produced—results taken to reflect the world as it truly is. Scientists obsessed over standard ways of conducting research, hoping to avoid unreliable questions, methods, and answers.

In the aftermath of the Dark Period, many had to admit the practice of science had come to resemble a factory.

The sciences seemed to settle on a narrow range of “good” research questions. “In my area, there’s a canon of fundamental questions every physicist must be focusing on,” said Dr. Martin Croot, a professor of theoretical physics. “Among them are, ‘What is the nature of space and time?’ and ‘What does matter consist of?’ If we solve these deep, foundational questions, we’ll be able to just derive everything else.” When scientists tried to pursue questions outside this canon, they often faced increased scrutiny, having to justify why their research was valid and worth the effort.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Scientists seeking answers to acceptable scientific questions followed acceptable experimental methods. Scholars like Peter Weber, a Ph.D. student studying human memory, used common experimental procedures to ensure that his colleagues approved of the work. “I use a standardized experimental design: Undergraduates sit in a dark room, memorizing words flashing on a computer screen for half a second each. To ensure rigor, every word is in the same font, and all screens have the same size and brightness,” Peter explained.

Scientists even established standards for what answers to their questions to nature should look like. Dr. Yuna Ahn, my own neuroscience professor, has always insisted that “a good theory has to be mathematical.” They taught me the standards of scientific modeling: “The idea is to choose the simplest model that accounts for the data. Adding more complexity than strictly necessary is unscientific. Producing new models when there is already a model that accounts for the results is a waste of time.” For Dr. Ahn, there was always a way to derive a single best mathematical explanation for experimental results. The “right” questions had “right” answers.

Illustration by Sam Chivers

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Funding practices further reinforced scientists’ obsession with the kinds of questions, methods, and answers they thought guaranteed successful outcomes. Scientific funding tended to prioritize projects with predictable deliverables. “I fund projects most likely to succeed. Grant applications need preliminary data to show clear outcomes that proposed research is expected to yield,” explained Elizabeth Kovalenko, a government science funder. By trying to maximize scientific “impact” and “success” (I never fully understood what either meant), funding agencies supported fewer projects that explored something truly novel and therefore could not guarantee specific findings.

Some scholars I spoke to noticed that many of the enforced methodological standards were arbitrary. “My advisor insists I just use the standard experimental paradigm to study human memory. But does it even measure what we want?” wondered Elena Katz, a Ph.D. student in psychology. “Why test memory retention after two hours and not three? Why keep the font constant?”

Elena raised an issue that had really confused me when I was a grad student: While scientists celebrated certain methods, they had little evidence those methods were actually better than alternative approaches. By standardizing how they interact with phenomena, scientists improved the replicability of individual studies showcasing specific chosen settings, but at the expense of knowing whether these results would generalize to new settings. “We’ll never know if memory changes when information is presented differently, such as in different fonts,” Elena noticed, “because we have only ever tested one.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The consequences of these norms and standard practices did not only affect scientists and funders. Citizens believed that science had all the right answers. But this set unattainable expectations and hindered honest communication about the complexity of scientific problems and the inherent uncertainty of scientific results. Jacob Johnson, a concerned citizen, reflected on his confusion over changing messages about vaccine efficacy: “Scientists said the vaccine worked, but now they’re adding all these details and nuances. How can we trust scientists if they keep changing their conclusions? If scientists use rigorous scientific methods, the results should stay the same.” Science remains our most powerful tool for understanding the world, but it cannot produce final truths once and for all. Scientists often failed to communicate this, leading the public to see revised conclusions as a failure of science, rather than recognizing that updating knowledge in light of new evidence is how science works.

Looking back from the early 2040s, my interviews highlighted the clear shortcomings of directed science, including its pretense of delivering objective answers to objective questions, a promise science can never fulfill. Many people recognized these issues and called for change, fueling a transition to a new way of doing science. They wanted a science focused on obtaining genuinely new knowledge about the world, one in which researchers were willing to explore and take risks instead of pursuing guaranteed results at the expense of discovery.

For some, the shift to radically exploratory science was rather smooth. Dr. Robert Goldstein, a psychology professor, embraced the change. He began moving away from conventional experimental paradigms. “In psychology, we used to rely on a few standard experimental methods, like tasks where people choose between two options associated with different prices, to gather data about complex human behavior. New methods would always raise extra skepticism. Why use a ‘sloppy’ technique, like a new task to study decision-making, when there is already a standardized, well-studied one?” he explained. “I know now that the reason to develop new behavioral tasks is precisely because they have not been studied before and so can yield more information!”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

DIRECTED VS. EXPLORATORY: Directed science (blue) favors clean, easily interpretable results that only apply in specific situations. Exploratory science (red) produces messier, more uncertain findings, but these findings generalize more broadly. Each cross represents a study from one of the two worlds. Credit: James Holehouse.

Sebahat Öcal, a Ph.D. student in astrophysics, studies exoplanets—planets orbiting stars beyond our solar system. Because these planets are detected only indirectly, often through tiny dips or shifts in starlight, the same limited data can support many different interpretations. Sebahat focuses on brainstorming “as many explanations as possible” for her findings.

“Instead of forcing one explanation from limited evidence, I outline the widest range of theories that might fit the results,” she explained. “I sometimes use AI tools to help generate explanations I wouldn’t have come up with on my own, expanding the range of ideas I can consider. This approach has helped me remain open-minded, laying fertile ground for useful theories when new data arrive.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I asked Sebahat how she avoids pseudoscientific theories when generating so many explanations. “I think what makes someone’s work scientific is how much they engage with the world. If someone has an idea but doesn’t care about the evidence, or if they shoehorn any evidence to support the idea, I would call that pseudoscience. But if someone is trying to think through many different ways the same evidence might be interpreted, they’re doing the opposite—they’re engaging with the evidence in its full richness and complexity. There is always a wide range of possible explanations for finite scientific evidence, more than any one person can come up with on their own.”

From 2035 to 2042, I saw a broad frustration building and witnessed a transformation unfolding.

Since superficial standards were abandoned, some researchers have come up with remarkably creative ways to engage with the unknown. For Dr. Qiaoweng Liu, a psychology professor, metaphor is a powerful tool for thinking. “When I want to understand something, like human memory, I pick a random object—such as a pickle—and brainstorm connections. Memory is like a pickle: It degrades over time, and sour memories linger more than sweet ones. These analogies inspire fresh hypotheses, experimental designs, and new explanations.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Funders supported riskier projects, prioritizing wide exploration over predictable outcomes. Martin Bauer, a science funder, told me that his funding decisions now involved a leap of faith: “We fund scientists who do things so strange and confusing that I often don’t understand them myself. Sometimes, we even pick scholars or projects to fund at random.”

When I first heard this, I couldn’t believe my ears. He explained why this approach might be better than the older funding model. “I remember when funding focused on projects that built on previous discoveries and were likely to yield ‘good’ results. But how useful can a project really be if we already know its outcome? Real innovation comes from giving scientists the freedom to explore entirely new directions, where no one can really predict what might be found.”

Martin illustrated his approach with a historical example. “Remember how antibiotics were discovered? Fleming had general institutional support to study bacteria when he accidentally contaminated a petri dish with mold. He noticed that the moldy area was the one where the bacteria had been cleared. Fleming was open-minded enough to recognize the strange result and that’s why we now know that fungi can kill bacteria. There’s no way he could have predicted what he was about to stumble upon, let alone write a detailed grant proposal outlining all the expected results! I want to support such unexpected discoveries by funding high-risk research.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

EMBRACE CONFUSION: A handy guide for scientists. How to counter directed science with exploratory science. Credit: James Holehouse.

Exploratory science has led to breakthroughs in medicine and psychiatry, often by encouraging scientists to make their foundational assumptions explicit and go beyond them. Dr. Mingze Chang, who recently developed a new taxonomy for understanding and treating mental illness, describes her unconventional approach: “I’m passionate about finding cures for mental illnesses, though we’re not even sure there’s a unified way of understanding what they are. Take ADHD, for example. When exploring possible mechanisms and treatments, I sometimes start with the assumption that ADHD might be mechanistically similar to another condition, like major depressive disorder. At other times, I try to think of ADHD as many distinct disorders, each with different mechanisms that might be susceptible to different treatments. This helps me think creatively about what a given mental illness might be, without sticking to outdated assumptions that might be wrong.”

After talking with Dr. Chang, I wondered: How will patients make sense of their diagnosis if the taxonomy it’s based on is always in flux? Can we see and communicate many paths?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

What became clear to me was that radically exploratory science demanded innovative ways of communicating nuanced and complex scientific knowledge. Samuel Virtanen, a government science advisor, explained the new reality of his job: “It’s unrealistic to expect definitive answers from science, but exploratory approaches give us more information, not less. By embracing uncertainty about what conclusions can be drawn from the evidence, we no longer rely on a single-point conclusion. Instead, we report a full range of possibilities and openly discuss the criteria we use to make real-world decisions.” He illustrated this shift with an example: “Consider COVID-19. Back then, public communication about science often conveyed too much certainty, even when the evidence was incomplete and changing fast. Later revisions of policies, such as those around wearing masks, felt like contradictions. Now, we do things differently. We report uncertainty in the data when suggesting any measures. In emergencies, we often have to act before all the evidence is in. By being transparent about what we know, what we don’t, and what assumptions our advice depends on, we make it clearer why recommendations may change over time.”

YESTERDAY & TODAY: Science news headlines reflect the transition from directed science to exploratory science. Credit: James Holehouse.

Revisiting these testimonials has helped me realize the key differences between directed science and exploratory science. In directed science, the most recognized contributions adhered to the superficial conventions of what counts as scientific. Accepting the “Most Rigorous Scientist” award in 2019, Dr. Elaine Pauper described her approach: “Experiments must test a clear and important hypothesis, like ‘Humans can memorize exactly 23 words per minute.’ I hypothesize what I expect to see in the data before conducting the experiment. To ensure rigor, I preregister my predictions and never tweak the data to fit my expectations. I conduct only the analyses I planned before seeing the data and stick to the interpretations I laid out beforehand.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Directed science promoted a deliberate focus on a single path, the one considered “most objective,” and discouraged exploration beyond that path. Though this approach might seem overly restrictive, it offered some advantages: Scientists faced less uncertainty and avoided confronting conflicting results. By following a specific chosen path, scientists could travel far along it, refining their methods and theories along the way.

NEW UNDERSTANDINGS: Top: In directed science (left), researchers typically entertain only a small number of competing theories for the same phenomenon. In exploratory science (right), scientists generate as many possible explanations as they can. Our data suggest that there is a cognitive limit to how many theories people can meaningfully hold in mind, peaking at around 10. Bottom: Directed science (left) relies on similar methods, leading to similar findings and interpretations. Exploratory science (right) encourages new methods, which are more likely to produce genuinely new results and, with them, revised understandings of the world. Credit: James Holehouse.

After the transition, a different approach to science came into the spotlight. Dr. Rafael Firebrand, honored for their groundbreaking contributions to exploratory science, described their work: “I managed to confuse not just myself, but all my colleagues. I created a new measurement instrument to collect data, ran different analyses to uncover thousands of patterns, and proposed 500 different explanations for them.” Despite the apparent chaos, Dr. Firebrand sees immense value in their contribution: “It might seem impossible to grasp at the moment, but I visualized all possible results and interpretations in an interactive web app. It reveals a vast amount of information, one that won’t be fully understood for years.” By traveling along many intellectual paths, Dr. Firebrand uncovered an incredible wealth of information, interacting with the world in multiple rich ways instead of exploring only one narrow side of it.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The transition from directed to exploratory science opened new avenues for progress, but not without tradeoffs and challenges. How novel can a result be such that we can still understand it? How satisfying is it to live in the world of uncertainty and confusion? How much exploration is too much? Without any landmarks, I worry that exploring too many directions at once could leave us completely lost along the way.

But having lived through the Dark Period, I believe the greater danger lies elsewhere. A science that avoids stepping outside what we already know and promises certainty invites stagnation, disappointment, and mistrust. Exploratory science, by contrast, asks more of us. It requires patience, humility, and openness to the true complexity of the world. By opening many paths instead of narrowing ourselves to one, science has regained something it once lost: the courage to engage with the messiness of the unknown.

—Anya Aleksandrova, Nov. 24, 2042

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Marina Dubova

Posted on February 27, 2026

Marina Dubova is a complexity postdoctoral fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, where she studies the cognitive processes underlying scientific discovery using computational and empirical methods. She holds a Ph.D. in cognitive science from Indiana University and will join the University of California, Berkeley psychology department as an assistant professor in fall 2026.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Energy Politics Played Out on the White House Roof

The quick removal of Jimmy Carter’s futuristic solar panels echoes more recent feuds over renewables

By Molly Glick    February 20, 2026

Each president brings their own unique flair to the White House: Richard Nixon had a bowling alley; Barack Obama had a basketball court; and now, Donald Trump’s ballroom appears to be moving closer to construction.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

President Jimmy Carter’s custom White House addition, meanwhile, reflected his hope for the future. In 1979, Carter had 32 solar panels installed on the roof of the West Wing.

At the time, the country was embroiled in an energy crisis: After years of tension in the Middle East, the U.S. faced high oil prices. Carter and other officials advised people to curb their energy consumption to keep costs down.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Meanwhile, Carter looked to a promising alternative. At a June 1979 press conference, he promoted the White House’s new solar panels as a powerful symbol for a bright, renewable-powered future. At the time, solar was a fledging power source and remained costly and inefficient, and the White House’s panels were installed solely to heat water.

But Carter had a vision. “A generation from now, this solar heater can either be a curiosity, a museum piece, an example of a road not taken, or it can be a small part of one of the greatest and most exciting adventures ever undertaken by the American people: harnessing the power of the Sun to enrich our lives as we move away from our crippling dependence on foreign oil,” he said at the solar panel dedication ceremony.

Read more: “Can the US Build a Nuclear Powered Future?”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

At this press conference, Carter described a daring solar goal. He hoped that, by the year 2000, the U.S. could source 20 percent of all energy from the sun. Carter felt that tax credits and money devoted to research could help achieve that lofty aim. Ultimately, Carter poured a record amount of funding into energy development, and his push for renewables is now seen as ahead of its time.

The following president, Ronald Reagan, had a different attitude. In 1986, the Reagan administration had Carter’s solar panels ripped off during work on the White House roof—an apt metaphor for his opinion on renewable energy.

By that time, Reagan had slashed the funding for research into renewables at the Department of Energy—which Carter had recently established—and cut tax incentives for wind turbines and solar energy. The panels rejected by Reagan eventually ended up at Unity College in Maine, where some were used to heat the school’s cafeteria water.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

History repeats itself: On his second day in office this term, President Trump began to attack the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA), which promised hundreds of billions directed toward clean energy and climate. And this past July, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act gutted many of the IRA’s key investments. More recently, the Trump administration has slowed approvals for wind and solar projects around the country.

As companies hurry to use federal tax credits before they expire or become trickier to claim, the U.S. is forecast to add record amounts of batteries and renewable energy through 2027. But afterward, we can expect this progress to stall—unless, like Carter, a new president shakes things up.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Jimmy Carter Library and Museum / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on February 20, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Missing Pieces of the Donner Party Narrative

People have only recently included Indigenous voices in the story

By Molly Glick    February 19, 2026

On this day nearly two centuries ago, the first round of rescuers reached a group of travelers on the brink of death in the Sierra Nevada Mountains.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

You’ve likely heard of the shocking lengths taken by the Donner Party to survive after opting for a fateful shortcut to California that proved anything but.

The group of around 87 people was headed to what’s now California for a fresh start. At the time, wagon trips out West had to follow a tight schedule: If they didn’t cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains by the end of October, they’d face brutal, Arctic-like conditions.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The Donner and Reed families began their journey in Springfield, Illinois, on April 15, 1846, and joined a large train of fellow wagon travelers. Once they made it to Wyoming in June, they decided to embark on the Hastings Cutoff: It was touted by California promoter Lansford Hastings, who claimed it could shorten their journey by up to some 400 miles. Hastings had never actually traveled it, but he hoped to attract people to his business schemes along the way. But explorer James Clyman, who knew James Reed of the Donner Party from the Black Hawk War in 1832, warned him against it.

PERILOUS SHORTCUT: The Donner Party chose the Hastings Cutoff to save time, but it ended up costing many of their lives. Credit: Kmusser / Wikimedia Commons.

The group ignored this advice. They chose 60-year-old George Donner as their captain, and took off from Wyoming in mid-July. This was already too late in the year for a safe journey. This shortcut through the Great Salt Lake Desert and the Wasatch Mountains ended up extending their trip by 30 days, making them the last wagons on the trail that year.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

It also put them in rough terrain that wasn’t suitable for wagons. With things already going sour, two men forged ahead to California to return with supplies. They ended up in Sutter’s Fort, which is now Sacramento.

At this ranch and farm, Swiss settler John Sutter forced Indigenous Miwok and Nisesan people into grueling work. Sutter gave the members of the Donner Party supplies, and sent two young Miwok men with them as well. They were known as Luis and Salvador, names from Spanish missionaries who converted them to Catholicism.

After several weeks, the Donner Party finally arrived at the Sierra Nevada range, where it was beginning to snow. On October 20, 1846, the group was hit by an early blizzard. They set up camp at what’s now known as Donner Lake, which was just 100 miles from their destination.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

At the camp, people ate the last of their oxen, including the hides, and some unsuccessfully tried to reach the other side of the mountain. On January 26, 1847, party member Patrick Breen, an Irish immigrant, wrote (sic throughout): “Provisions getting very scant people getting weak liveing on short allowance of hides.”

Read more: “A Truer Story of Native America”

A month earlier, the party sent 15 people who were in relatively good shape to trek out west on snowshoes and seek help at Sutter’s Fort, including Luis and Salvador. They had met up with the party not long before the ferocious storm. This group, now referred to as the Forlorn Hope party, began to entertain cannibalism as they suffered in the snow.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Luis and Salvador were the only ones to object to this, and a man named William Foster shot them so that the rest could survive on their flesh. Meanwhile, people also resorted to cannibalism back at the snowed-in camp.

Ultimately, Luis and Salvador “were treated as no different than any animal the party may have come across,” Dahlton Brown, executive director for the Wilton Rancheria tribe in California, told KQED.

More than 30 days after the Forlorn Hope group began their hike, seven survivors reached a Miwok village, where people gave them meals and shelter. Once they made it to Sutter’s Fort, news of the Donner Party quickly traveled and rescue efforts began. The first rescuers reached the camp by Donner Lake on February 19, 1847. Ultimately, only 45 members of the Donner Party ever made it to California.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

In addition to the Miwok community that helped the snowshoe survivors, the Washoe people say they offered aid to members of the Donner Party. Some of the families broke off from the group and spent the winter at a site called Alder Creek. There, according to Washoe oral history, they tried to provide food to the stranded travelers. In one instance, they say the Donner party shot at them as they attempted to bring over a deer carcass. “The migrants at Alder Creek were not surviving in the mountains alone,” wrote archeologist Julie M. Schablitsky for Archaeology in 2012. “The northern Washoe were there, and they had tried to help.”

While the sacrifices and generosity from local Indigenous groups often get left out of the Donner Party narrative, these details have finally come to light over the past decade.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Kmusser / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on February 19, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Space Age Technology Reveals Secrets of Bronze Age Sword

Scientists in Berlin performed a battery of tests on a 3,400-year-old weapon

By Jake Currie    February 18, 2026

In 2023, archaeologists excavating a burial mound near the town of Nördlingen in Bavaria, Germany hit pay dirt: a grave dating back to the Bronze Age containing the remains of a man, woman, and child along with a slew of artifacts. What really grabbed their attention, though, was a remarkably well-preserved sword with a unique octagonal hilt.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The blade was in exceptional condition for being 3,400 years old, retaining a metallic sheen and a bit of an edge, as well. There were no marks from impacts on it, indicating the sword may have been ceremonial. The hilt was decorated with a grooved zig-zag pattern with a pommel that featured an intricate geometric pattern inlay. Altogether, it was a fascinating specimen.

ELABORATELY CRAFTED: This closeup of the sword pommel shows the intricate design. Photo © Kevin Fuchs / HZB.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

To investigate the incredible craftsmanship of this find, Johann-Friedrich Tolksdorf and Beate Herbold of the Bavarian State Office for the Preservation of Historical Monuments brought the sword to materials scientists Nikolay Kardjilov, Martin Radtke, and Manuela Klaus in Berlin.

“Such swords were very costly to manufacture,” Herbold said in a statement. “We wanted to find out how the handle was connected to the blade at that time and how the decorative patterns were incorporated at that time.”

To get a look inside the sword, the team created a three-dimensional image using high-resolution computed tomography and X-ray diffraction.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“The CT scan shows that the blade was clamped into the hilt with a tang, i.e. an extension of the blade, and riveted,” Tolkdorf explained. “The resolution of the CT scan is so high that we can even examine the material and the traces of the decorative work.”

Read more: “The Stick Is an Unsung Hero of Human Evolution”

Next, they took a closer look at the inlaid pommel, bombarding it with X-rays to reveal what metal the ancient craftsmen used to create the contrasting pattern.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“We irradiate the surfaces on the pommel with intense synchrotron radiation,” Radtke said. “This excites atoms in the material, causing them to emit element-specific X-rays, which we then measure. We can detect even the tiniest traces of elements.”

What they discovered was something of a surprise. Instead of tin, the soft, workable metal they expected to find, they uncovered delicate copper wiring.

Courtesy of HZB.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“We are familiar with this type of inlay work using copper wires in bronze from other finds,” said Tolksdorf. “To make the reddish copper stand out better from the gold-coloured bronze, it may have been patinated, i.e. chemically blackened, for example with urine.”

Finally, the team performed internal stress analyses to gather information about the structure of the metal to reveal the ancient manufacturing processes that forged the blade. When their analyses are complete, they plan to publish their findings.

“We hope that we will also be able to reconstruct whether this sword was made in a specific workshop, for example—so far, we can only assume that it was manufactured in southern Germany, one of the two main areas where octagonal swords were prevalent in the Bronze Age in Germany,” Tolksdorf said.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

From a forge in 14th-century Bavaria to an X-ray machine in 21st-century Berlin is an incredible journey for a sword.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: Das Schwert am Fundort © Archäologie-Büro Dr. Woidich/Sergiu Tifui

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Jake Currie

Posted on February 18, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Retiree Who Inspired the Wright Brothers to Take Flight

Octave Chanute’s engineering prowess laid the foundation for powered planes

By Molly Glick    February 18, 2026

By the late 19th century, engineer Octave Chanute had reached the top of his field—but he left it to pursue a secret hobby. Chanute, who was born on this day in Paris in 1832, oversaw railroad construction in the West and helped bring about the explosive growth of cities there. Meanwhile, he obsessed over crewed flight for decades, at the time a highly experimental pursuit. But to protect his career and his family’s social status, he kept this interest hidden until he retired from his chief engineer job at the New York, Lake Erie & Western Railroad Company in the 1880s.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

That was when Chanute finally decided to dig into the latest developments from the fledgling field of aviation. He published the authoritative book Progress in Flying Machines in 1894, which explored all the attempts so far that people had made to soar through the skies. Meanwhile, he worked on his own design for a flying machine and corresponded with fellow enthusiasts around the world.

PIONEERING PLANE: Chanute’s biplane during a test in 1896. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Chanute believed that, because nature gives birds the ability to fly, we too could harness natural forces like wind to travel the skies. He leaned on his engineering experience, calculating how a flying machine’s wings would interact with the air around them.

He took inspiration from German engineer Otto Lilienthal, who had come up with nearly 20 models for gliders—fixed-wing aircraft that stay aloft with the help of rising currents of air, similar to birds like owls and hawks. Lilienthal reported success in his experiments, and Chanute decided to improve these designs with new models of his own.

In August 1896, Chanute and a group of flying enthusiasts tested out his glider model at the Indiana Dunes on Lake Michigan. This aircraft incorporated a bracing system called a Pratt Truss, which Chanute had used when building railroad bridges. It consisted of steel wires that supported stacked sets of wings and offered both stability and flexibility.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “The Father of Modern Metal”

During these tests, the bottom wing kept getting caught in the sand during takeoff, frustrating the team. So they removed it, creating a biplane. Chanute realized that the operator could move their body backward or forward to manipulate the little aircraft.

After hundreds of flights, the longest covering 359 feet over 14 seconds, it became clear that Chanute had created the most successful glider yet. His plane paved the way for future aeronautical pioneers, who still had to figure out how to effectively propel and manipulate these newfangled machines.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Wilbur and Orville Wright adapted Chanute’s bracing system in their first aircraft, a steerable kite that they constructed in 1899. The trio began exchanging letters in 1900, and Chanute became a mentor to the brothers. The next year, Chanute visited Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, to check out the Wrights’ model in person, and continued stopping by over the next few years. They had a spat in 1905 over the future of flight, as the Wrights hoped to keep their ideas secret while Chanute thought aviation innovations should be freely disseminated. Just as the Wrights tried to mend their relationship with Chanute, he died at 78 years old in 1910.

Wilbur Wright delivered a eulogy for Chanute the next year: “His labors had vast influence in bringing about the era of human flight. No one was too humble to receive a share of his time. In patience and goodness of heart he has rarely been surpassed. Few men were more universally respected and loved.”

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Octave Chanute / Wikimedia Commons

Molly Glick

Posted on February 18, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

HISTORY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Mountain Man Who Measured the Sky’s Brilliance

Pioneering alpinist and scientist Horace Bénédict de Saussure brought us a curious relic to capture the blues above us

By Molly Glick    February 17, 2026

In 1787, Swiss scientist Horace Bénédict de Saussure became among the first people to reach the top of Mont Blanc, the tallest peak in Western Europe. But he didn’t ascend nearly 16,000 feet merely to marvel at the panoramic views of the snowy Alps—he came equipped with scientific equipment designed for this daring climb. Among his tools was a cyanometer, which de Saussure had invented to gauge the sky’s precise blue hue.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

De Saussure, who was born on this day in 1740, grew captivated by the geology and plants of the Alps. In 1759, he graduated from Geneva College, and a few years later he became a professor of natural philosophy at just 22 years old.

He was one of the first researchers to suggest that naturalists should collect detailed measurements in the field, rather than solely gathering specimens. This fascination with the untapped data surrounding him led him to a strange invention.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

COLOR CURIOSITY: A cyanometer created by Horace Bénédict de Saussure in 1788 to pinpoint the precise blue of the sky. Photo by Collection Musée d’histoire des sciences, Geneva / Wikimedia Commons.

As he made mountain expeditions, de Saussure noticed that the sky took on a more intense blue color at higher altitudes. He developed an instrument to measure this phenomenon: the cyanometer, a disk with pieces of paper dyed various shades of blue. In August 1787, de Saussure started his journey up Mont Blanc with the help of 19 porters and guide Jacques Balmat—who had become the first person to reach this peak a year earlier.

At the summit, the vibrant blue he observed proved nearly too blue for the cyanometer. He also measured the atmospheric pressure, humidity, and static electricity at the peak, among other data. de Saussure attributed these varying blues seen on treks to the air’s humidity and transparency at different altitudes.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “The Stories Rocks Tell Us”

A year later, he held up the cyanometer to the sky on the Col du Géant mountain pass, at around 11,000 feet above sea level, while his son did the same in the valley in Chamonix below, along with a friend in Geneva. To de Saussure, these measurements offered solid evidence of his hypothesis. This was “the dawn of coordinated, quantitative meteorology,” wrote chemist Andrea Sella for Chemistry World in 2010.

It took around a century for scientists to truly grasp the mechanism behind these contrasting blue hues: Experiments by Irish physicist and mountaineer John Tyndall in the 1860s revealed that sunlight scatters particles in the upper atmosphere, giving the sky its color. And we know today that, in higher elevations, there are fewer molecules to kick around light. This causes the darker shades glimpsed by de Saussure as he climbed, and also explains why space is pitch-black.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

While the cyanometer fell out of fashion, de Saussure invented other instruments still used by scientists today. These include a type of hygrometer, which measures humidity with a human hair. When relative humidity shifts, organic substances like hair expand and contract. He also created what’s thought to be the first solar cooker, and helped popularize the term geology over its predecessor, geognosy—the newer iteration certainly has a much better ring to it.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: Wellcome Collection / Wikimedia Commons

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Molly Glick

Posted on February 17, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Neuroscience

- Early Exposure to Junk Food Has Brain-Altering Effects

- The Brain Science Behind the Munchies

- New Theory of Learning Upends the Lessons of Pavlov’s Dog

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Early Exposure to Junk Food Has Brain-Altering Effects

That first hit of burger and fries can leave quite the impression

By Jake Currie    February 27, 2026

With the bounty of sugary cereals, sweet snacks, and fast foods available, getting children to eat healthy is an ongoing struggle for parents. Now, new research published in Nature Communications suggests that junk-food diets can have a lasting impact on our eating behaviors later in life—and even on our brains.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Researchers from University College Cork in Ireland reared mice on a high-fat, high-sugar diet and monitored their feeding behaviors as they grew into adulthood. While the weights of the mice normalized once they were switched to a control diet as adults, they still ate more than control mice, and opted for the energy-dense, nutrient-poor foods they were raised on when given a choice. The researchers linked these behaviors to changes in the hypothalamus, which plays a key role in regulating appetite.

“Our findings show that what we eat early in life really matters.” study co-author Cristina Cuesta-Martí explained in a statement. “Early dietary exposure may leave hidden, long-term effects on feeding behavior that are not immediately visible through weight alone.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

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

Can these behaviors be reversed?

To find out, researchers tweaked the gut microbiomes of the mice raised on junk food. They introduced the probiotic gut bacteria Bifidobacterium longum, as well as prebiotic fibers, fructo-oligosaccharides (FOS), and galacto-oligosaccharides (GOS) naturally found in onions, asparagus, and bananas.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

With the probiotic infusions, they were able to restore normal eating behaviors, although there were some sex differences in the results. The bacteria normalized food preferences in both male and female mice, while FOS and GOS normalized food preference only in male mice.

“Crucially, our findings show that targeting the gut microbiota can mitigate the long-term effects of an unhealthy early-life diet on later feeding behavior,” study co-author Harriet Schellekens said. “Supporting the gut microbiota from birth helps maintain healthier food-related behaviors into later life.”

While these findings currently only apply to mice, your best bet is still instilling healthy eating behaviors in your children when they’re young. Sorry parents.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: beats1 / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 27, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Brain Science Behind the Munchies

New cannabis research shows why we get snacky when we get high

By Jake Currie    February 23, 2026

Anyone who has even a passing familiarity with cannabis can tell you the munchies are real. Although it’s a phenomenon that’s well known to science, the research on it is lacking. Or at least it was until a study from Washington State University researchers was published last week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

To better characterize what’s going on when we experience the munchies (or “acute hyperphagia,” as they call it), Carrie Cuttler and Ryan McLaughlin of Washington State University asked 82 lucky participants to vape either 20 or 40 milligrams of cannabis or a placebo and allowed them to choose from a selection of snacks.

“The human study found irrespective of body mass index, time of last food consumption, sex, or how much cannabis was consumed, human participants who used cannabis during the trial ate significantly more food,” McLaughlin said in a statement.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

So the munchies seem to be a universal experience among cannabis-consuming humans, but what about rats? To answer that question, Cuttler and McLaughlin turned to their colleagues Matthew Hill and Catherine Hume from the University of Calgary. They performed a similar experiment, getting rats stoned in a controlled environment and allowing them to press levers for a food reward. Just like their human counterparts, the stoned rats experienced serious snack attacks.

Read more: “The Psychology of Getting High—a Lot”

“The sober animals are kind of like, ‘I’m full. Why do I care?’ They don’t put in any effort at all. They barely work in any capacity to get access to food,” Hill said. “But you get them stoned again, and even though they’re now full and they’ve eaten, they go right back as if they’re starving.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

What exactly is going on? Our bodies naturally produce cannabinoids (called endocannabinoids) that regulate a host of things—from memory and mood to pain and appetite—by binding to receptors in our brains and throughout our bodies. Tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) throws things into disarray.

To find out which receptors THC acts on, the researchers blocked cannabinoid receptors in the peripheral nervous systems of some rats and in the brains of others. They found that blocking cannabinoid receptors in the peripheral nervous system did nothing to curb rats’ appetites, but blocking them in the brain did.

“That’s what really gives us the opportunity to look at whether this is something brain-mediated or gut-mediated, and this generally shows ‘the munchies’ are mediated by the brain,” McLaughlin explained.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Going forward, the researchers hope these new findings will lead to better treatments for disorders marked by a declining appetite. “There are a lot of different diseases, conditions, and disorders associated with wasting syndromes and lack of appetite, and this study really supports the idea that cannabis can be used medicinally to increase appetite in people who have conditions like HIV, AIDS, or who are on chemotherapy,” Cutler said.

Until then, feel free to conduct your own research, responsibly of course.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Chmee2 / Wikimedia Commons

Jake Currie

Posted on February 23, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

NEUROSCIENCE | VIEW ON WEBSITE

New Theory of Learning Upends the Lessons of Pavlov’s Dog

Maybe we don’t need so many reminders to remember something after all

By Jake Currie    February 20, 2026

There are many different types of learning, but among the simplest is associative learning. That’s when we learn to associate one thing with another thing, like the ringing of a bell with food, in the famous example of Pavlov’s dog.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The more times we experience the stimulus and the reward, the faster we learn. Or so we thought. New research published in Nature Neuroscience is throwing a wrench into that model.

Neuroscientists Vijay Mohan K. Namboodiri and Dennis Burke of the University of California, San Francisco trained mice to associate a sound with a sip of sugar water while varying the times between the trials—some mice got a lesson every 30-60 seconds, while others waited 5-10 minutes. Even though the mice in the second group got fewer rewards than the mice in the first, they learned at the same pace.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“It turns out that the time between these cue-reward pairings helps the brain determine how much to learn from that experience,” explained Namboodiri in a statement.

Read more: “A Peek Inside the Minds of Honeybees”

In other words, increasing the frequency of stimulus and reward pairings leads to diminishing returns over a short time period, similar to how cramming before an exam isn’t as effective as learning the material throughout the semester.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“What this tells us is that associative learning is less ‘practice makes perfect’ and more ‘timing is everything,’” Burke said.

Associative learning is mediated by dopamine, and during the learning process, our brains begin to release the feel-good neurotransmitter in anticipation of the reward. Taking a peek into the brains of the mice revealed that those in the group that waited longer in between lessons released dopamine after fewer trials than the mice getting more frequent rewards. Basically, the mice with spaced-out trials got more neurochemical bang for their buck.

The researchers then switched things up by spacing the trials out in 60-second intervals but rewarding one group of mice only 10 percent of the time. The 10 percenters also only needed fewer trials before they released dopamine, regardless of whether there was a reward or not.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

While these findings may change the way we view learning and addiction—another dopamine-mediated condition—Namboodiri plans to apply his research to artificial intelligence next.

“A model that borrows from what we’ve discovered could potentially learn more quickly from fewer experiences,” Namboodiri said. “For the moment, though, our brains can learn a lot faster than our machines, and this study helps explain why.”

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: ArtemisDiana / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 20, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Paleontology

- How the Triceratops Used Its Giant Nose

- Paleontologists Solve a Prehistoric Murder Mystery

- “Hell Heron”: New Dinosaur Species with a Head-mounted Sword Discovered in Africa

- Newly Discovered Prehistoric Crocodilian Had Legs That Went All the Way Up

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How the Triceratops Used Its Giant Nose

Its outsized nasal cavities helped it maintain body temperature

By Devin Reese    February 24, 2026

In looking at a Triceratops skull, your gaze is naturally drawn to its trio of horns. But, nestled between the head horns and the nose horn is another iconic feature: a pair of huge nasal cavities. The physiological function of such large cavities is illuminated by a new study published in The Anatomical Record.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“Triceratops in particular had a very large and unusual nose, and I couldn’t figure out how the organs fit within it,” noted first author Seishiro Tada from the University of Tokyo Museum in a press release.

Tada and colleagues from natural history museums in the United States, Canada, Japan, and China used X-ray-based CT-scans to take a close look at the internal structure of a Triceratops nose with an eye to reconstructing its soft tissues. Based on knowledge of other reptile nasal architecture, the researchers inferred the locations of nasal organs and neurovascular pathways within the nose.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “Using Science and Art to Visualize the Long-Extinct Animals of the Deep Past”

The reconstruction showed unusual architecture in Triceratops, in which the largest cranial nerve—the trigeminal nerve—that typically runs along the jawline and confers sensitivity to an animal’s nose, instead runs through the nostrils. “In most reptiles, nerves and blood vessels reach the nostrils from the jaw and the nose. But in Triceratops, the skull shape blocks the jaw route, so nerves and vessels take the nasal branch,” explained Tada.

In addition, the researchers found evidence of “respiratory turbinate,” structures that are common to birds and mammals but rare in dinosaurs. These narrow, curved bone shelves in the nose help with the exchange of oxygen and heat by providing extra surface area. Triceratops weren’t likely as warm-blooded as either birds or mammals but, nevertheless, may have benefited from respiratory turbinate for regulation of temperature and moisture in its massive nose. Their huge heads would have been slow to heat up or cool down, given the low surface area to volume ratio.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Basically, the block-headedness of Triceratops required some unique, specialized nasal adaptations.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: Openfinal / Shutterstock

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Devin Reese

Posted on February 24, 2026

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

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Paleontologists Solve a Prehistoric Murder Mystery

Welcome to CSI: Cretaceous Period

By Jake Currie    February 23, 2026

Usually when paleontologists unearth dinosaur bones they don’t have any idea what led to their ultimate demise. But a fossil from the duck-billed Edmontosaurus recovered from Montana’s Hell Creek Formation in 2005 contained a pretty conspicuous clue—a sharp tooth buried in the skull.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“Although bite marks on bones are relatively common, finding an embedded tooth is extremely rare,” said Tatiana Wyenberg-Henzler of the University of Alberta, who collaborated with Museum of the Rockies’ Curator John Scannella to publish a study on the find in PeerJ this week.

“The great thing about an embedded tooth, particularly in a skull, is it gives you the identity of not only who was bitten but also who did the biting,” she added. “This allowed us to paint a picture of what happened to this Edmontosaurus, kind of like Cretaceous crime scene investigators.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

They began as any crime scene investigators would—with a careful examination of the victim’s body (in this case, a CT scan of the Edmontosaur’s skull) and the murder weapon (the embedded tip of the tooth). To identify the guilty party, they rounded up the usual suspects—other carnivorous dinosaurs commonly found in the Hell Creek Formation—and compared their teeth to the one in the skull. They found a match: Tyrannosaurus.

Read more: “The Spy Who Found T. Rex”

The team determined the tooth likely came from the middle of the Tyrannosaur’s jaw, puncturing the skull with deadly force. The lack of any healing surrounding the wound suggests it was likely a killshot, although they admit they can’t rule out that a Tyrannosaur lost a tooth while scavenging.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“A fossil like this is extra exciting because it captures a behavior: a Tyrannosaur biting into this duckbill’s face,” explained Scannella. “The skull shows no signs of healing around the Tyrannosaur tooth, so it may have already been dead when it was bitten, or it may be dead because it was bitten.”

The debate over whether Tyrannosaurs were fearsome predators or lowly scavengers has raged for years, but the team points out that most modern carnivores exist along a spectrum. Additionally, they cite theories that the Tyrannosaur’s skull and jaw are specialized to clamp down on the snouts of their prey and suffocate them, much like wild dogs—a scenario that matches the evidence in this case.

“Looking at the way the tooth is embedded in the nose of the Edmontosaurus suggests that it met its attacker face-to-face, something that usually happens to an animal that was killed by a predator,” said Wyenberg-Henzler. “The amount of force necessary for a tooth to have become broken off in bone also points to the use of deadly force. For me, this paints a terrifying picture of the last moments of this Edmontosaurus.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

We can still spare a thought for the Tyrannosaur, though. It’s not like there were any prehistoric dentists.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: PeerJ

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Jake Currie

Posted on February 23, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

“Hell Heron”: New Dinosaur Species with a Head-mounted Sword Discovered in Africa

The dramatic find sheds new light on the diversity of spinosaurs

By Jake Currie    February 20, 2026

It’s not every day that a new dinosaur is discovered, but it is a great day. Paleontologist Paul Sereno experienced one in Niger when his team unearthed what turned out to be a new species of spinosaurus: Spinosaurus mirabilis. They published their findings in the latest issue of Science.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Sereno’s journey started with the writings of a French geologist in the 1950s who mentioned finding a dagger-like tooth in Egypt’s Western Desert. No one had ventured so far into the Sahara to follow up, until Sereno’s 2019 expedition. There, the team met a local man with a motorbike who agreed to lead them to a spot where he’d glimpsed giant fossilized bones.

“It was an adventure and a half wandering into the sand seas to search for this locale and then find an even more remote fossil area with the new species,” Sereno said in a statement.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Over the course of two expeditions, Sereno and his team discovered jawbones and a trio of sweeping scimitar-like crests belonging to S. mirabilis. Based on the exterior texture and interior structures, the researchers believe the crests were covered in keratin and could have been brightly colored to serve as a display. The jaws of S. mirabilis contained fearsome rows of teeth, the lower of which protruded outward between the upper to help it catch slippery fish.

Read more: “How Tycoons Created the Dinosaur”

“This find was so sudden and amazing, it was really emotional for our team,” Sereno explained. “I’ll forever cherish the moment in camp when we crowded around a laptop to look at the new species for the first time, after one member of our team generated 3D digital models of the bones we found to assemble the skull—on solar power in the middle of the Sahara. That’s when the significance of the discovery really registered.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

While the crest was the most dramatic feature of the skull, the location where it was discovered was remarkable as well. Previous spinosaur finds have been restricted to prehistoric coastal areas, but S. mirabilis was discovered in an inland area 300-600 miles from the ocean—much farther inland.

“I envision this dinosaur as a kind of ‘hell heron’ that had no problem wading on its sturdy legs into two meters of water but probably spent most of its time stalking shallower traps for the many large fish of the day,” Sereno said.

After cleaning, scanning, and creating a digital rendering of the S. mirabilis skull, Sereno tasked paleoartists with bringing the majestic creature to life. The team created a replica of the skull and a touchable crest, which will be put on display at the Chicago Children’s Museum beginning March 1st.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“Letting kids feel the excitement of new discoveries—that’s key to ensuring the next generation of scientists who will discover many more things about our precious planet worth preserving,” Sereno argued.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: Skull cast of the new scimitar-crested spinosaurid Spinosaurus mirabilis. Credit: Keith Ladzinski.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Jake Currie

Posted on February 20, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

PALEONTOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Newly Discovered Prehistoric Crocodilian Had Legs That Went All the Way Up

This stilt-legged reptile stalked the grasslands of Triassic Britain

By Jake Currie    February 18, 2026

The island of Great Britain wasn’t an island at all 215 million years ago. Instead, like all land on Earth, it was part of the massive supercontinent, Pangaea, featuring hilly terrain rising above dry, sun-scorched lowlands. There, a curious creature stalked through the grass: a long-legged crocodilian that was newly described in a paper published in The Anatomical Record.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Described as a “reptilian greyhound,” this prehistoric crocodilian bore a resemblance to another long-limbed relative of crocodiles, Terrestrisuchus, but showed some differences worthy of investigation. Unlike modern crocs, both species were likely agile and fast-moving, living their lives on land where they hunted small prey.

The specimen in question was first unearthed in 1969 from fissures along the Bristol Channel. In the late Triassic, the region was dotted with limestone caves perfect for capturing the remains of animals, creating pockets of fossil-rich sedimentary rock for future paleontologists to pick through. This particular fossil languished in the Natural History Museum collection before attracting the attention of study author and Ph.D. student Ewan Bodenham of University College London.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “When We Were Lunch”

“My Ph.D. project is looking at the evolutionary relationships of these early crocodiles,” Bodenham said in a statement. “So we conducted a detailed anatomical description of this specimen, making comparisons to other early crocodiles to determine if it was another specimen of Terrestrisuchus or if it was something new.”

After meticulously studying the fossil, Bodenham determined there were 13 key differences that separated it from Terrestrisuchus, which meant it was a new species worthy of a new name: Galahadosuchus jonesi. The genus (Galahadosuchus) is a reference to the legendary Sir Galahad, known for his uprightness and a nod to the crocodilian’s upright stance. The species name (jonesi) was a little more personal for Bodenham; he chose it to honor his former physics teacher, David Rhys Jones, who encouraged him to pursue a career in science.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“We named it after my secondary school physics teacher,” Bodenham said. “Mr. Jones was just such a good teacher, not only in being able to explain things well, but you could tell that he was genuinely interested in the sciences. I think that really inspired me.”

Bodenham broke the good news to Jones over a Zoom call.

“Good God, what an honor. What a privilege,” Jones responded.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

You can watch a video of their exchange here.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: ©Matt Dempsey

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Jake Currie

Posted on February 18, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Philosophy

- Doing Science and Philosophy On Drugs

PHILOSOPHY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Doing Science and Philosophy On Drugs

Justin Smith-Ruiu takes a philosophical and first-person look at psychedelics

By Nick Hilden    March 2, 2026

Since the start of the so-called psychedelic renaissance some 25 years ago, writers have tackled the subject from the vantages of science, politics, mental health, productivity, creativity, spirituality, how-to, and even cooking. With his new book On Drugs, Justin Smith-Ruiu explores these powerful drugs through a philosophical lens, analyzing their effects and implications via thinkers spanning Foucault to Freud, Spinoza to Sartre, and scores of others who over the past 2,000 years have sought to explain the mysteries of the human experience.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

While authors have applied philosophy to psychedelics before, they have typically done so through the framework of mental health or otherwise medicinal frameworks, while Smith-Ruiu is more interested in treating psychedelics as philosophical objects worthy of examination in and of themselves. At the same time, he follows the drugs down the rabbit hole, sizing up what psychedelics taught him on a personal level, and delving into questions surrounding the scientific prohibition of auto-experimentation, whether the hallucinations conjured by psychedelics are real or imagined, and what they have to teach us about the nature of reality.

A professor of history and science, Smith-Ruiu has previously applied philosophical analysis to some of the most pressing issues of our day. In The Internet Is Not What You Think It Is, he explored how the internet arose from some of our deepest philosophical yearnings. In Irrationality, he asserted that human irritation is fundamental to the human experience rather than a contextual social aberration. And in Nature, Human Nature, and Human Difference, he argued that our contemporary conceptions of race are not innate but rather emerged from the modern scientific efforts to classify and systematize. (He also happens to have an asteroid named after him—it doesn’t get much “higher” than that.)

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

His latest book On Drugs may have been written sober, but it staggers between memoir, history, and philosophical analysis in a way befitting its psychedelic subject matter. For the following interview, Smith-Ruiu spoke with Nautilus about modern science’s resistance to self-experimentation, whether philosophy can be practiced while intoxicated, and how these strange substances upend our understanding of the world.

Over the centuries, psychedelics have faced various attempts at prohibition and repression. What are your thoughts on this antagonism?

Throughout the book, you’ll notice that there is no activism in there at all. In fact, I say explicitly that I myself take no position whatsoever on legalization. The truth is, I’m kind of up in the air. I can see the potential downsides of overuse. I think we’re seeing some of the potential downsides already in places where cannabis has been legalized. On the other hand, I have a basically libertarian view about issues like this, and I think overall repression does not work. It’s ineffective, and it just ruins people’s lives by transforming them into criminals on top of whatever damage might come as a result of drug use.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

People like Freud and William James used cocaine and nitrous oxide, and wrote about it.

And we certainly know people who have argued pretty effectively that if you’re just looking at actual harm, psychedelic drugs are among the least harmful substances one can put in one’s body. They’re certainly a lot less harmful than many legal substances, including alcohol and tobacco. But because I’m not an activist—because I’m a scholar and a historian, I like to think about things from a zoomed-out, long-day, impartial perspective. So I’m inclined to adopt a point of view inspired by mid-20th-century structuralism, along the lines of people like Claude Lévi-Strauss, and to propose that perhaps any given human society just needs a certain number of prohibited substances and a certain number of licensed substances. And I do not think we will ever arrive at a point where all and only the “right” substances are legal, and all and only the “right” substances are illegal. I think it will always be in flux.

One of the key questions your book explores is whether philosophy can or should be pursued while intoxicated. Why has there been something of a prohibition against this practice?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I personally do not think philosophy should be pursued while intoxicated. I mean, if you’re philosophically inclined in your temperament, you might not be able to prevent yourself from, let’s say, informally philosophizing while you’re drunk—and certainly I don’t want to prohibit that. But I think if you’re going to be giving a talk or writing a book, it’s almost certainly preferable to do that with nothing more than a bit of caffeine in you.

That said, there’s another question regarding philosophy, which is: Are the experiences you have outside the mode of lecturing or writing—what is disclosed to you under conditions of altered perception—relevant to what you might want to say in your capacity as a philosopher when you are sober? And there I just have to say yes, of course. If there are conditions under which your perception of reality is radically different—whether that’s because you’ve taken acid, or because you’ve submerged yourself in a pitch-black cave for 72 hours as ancient Greeks used to do, or whether you’ve twirled around intensely as whirling dervishes do—and it alters your consciousness, of course it’s relevant to any exhaustive philosophical inquiry about the relationship between mind and world, or between the way we apprehend the world and the way the world is.

Why is it prohibited? I think it’s primarily in the modern period, that is, the 17th century, that philosophy begins to place a particular premium on sobriety. Sobriety as a value, as part of a package of features of the ideal philosophizing mind, alongside, importantly, wakefulness. Much of modern philosophy—as we see most clearly in Descartes—is all about proving we are not asleep, and proving that hallucinations are not part of reality. You know: the reed that looks crooked when it’s sticking out of water but is in fact straight, and so on.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

And so there emerges a conception of philosophy as a project of correcting for error, and error is understood as any representation of the world that occurs under non-default conditions. And the default condition of the human being from the 17th century on is the wakeful, sober human being. And I think it’s pretty easy to understand why we value sobriety in that connection. But I think the wakefulness question is probably even more interesting. We know there are societies that take dreams as revelatory or as instructive, as forces that can regulate the conduct of human life and give answers. That’s one way to organize your life as an individual and within society. There are complex historical reasons why that vanished in the modern West, but I do indeed think it’s time to investigate what might have been lost in taking that particular, very contingent historical pathway.

Similarly, you explore the prohibition in the scientific community against experimenting on oneself. Why does this negative view toward auto-experimentation exist?

This is not so much a question about norms and values in the history of philosophy as it is about norms and values in the history of science. As I argue in the book—largely following Mike Jay and his very wonderful book Psychonauts—at the end of the 19th century, people like Freud and William James used cocaine and nitrous oxide, and wrote about it. And in writing about it they were in effect just following the model of, say, Benjamin Franklin when he sees a lightning storm and goes out to fly a kite to shock himself in order to learn more about electricity. That’s auto-experimentation, too. And up until the beginning of the 20th century, it was a totally legitimate element of strategy for scientific inquiry to take yourself as your guinea pig.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

By sometime in the first half of the 20th century, what we find is that while there still are drug diaries—Walter Benjamin, for example, or Jean-Paul Sartre writing about his experience on mescaline, which was not good, and then famously Michel Foucault in the 1970s on acid in Death Valley—but in these cases it’s largely literary and imaginative exploration rather than something the inquirer himself conceptualizes as a contribution to the advancement of science.

The “normal” representation of reality is largely socially constructed.

So what changes? Well, obviously, in part it has to do with the fact that the scientific method tells us that a self-reporting of an experience under the influence of mescaline, for example, is not really good science, because in any case it’s only one person and that’s not a sufficiently large sample, to say the least. But beyond that, there’s also the fact that over the course of much of the 20th century, we have the hegemony of behaviorism, which tries to get rid of inner qualitative experience altogether, particularly in research in psychology but also radiating into other disciplines.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

From there, over much of the 20th century, the attitude is, it doesn’t matter what it feels like to the subject under the influence of the drugs, it only matters how it changes the motion of their bodies, which we can observe from a third-person point of view. And obviously that’s inadequate. Obviously there is a phenomenology of the drug experience that is worth analyzing, and that is relevant to our total picture of what these substances are, and also what the workings of the mind are.

Another question you explore is whether psychedelics are a purely hallucinatory experience, or if “they reveal something to us about the way things are that we ordinarily cannot perceive.” You ultimately conclude the latter. Why?

Do I say that they reveal something to us about the way things are that we ordinarily cannot perceive? I don’t take the approach of someone like Terence McKenna or the excessively enthusiastic psychedelic-guru types. I don’t want to say that when, to use McKenna’s terminology, you’ve consumed DMT and little green elves appear to you, that this is evidence for the existence of little green elves.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I take something more like an anthropological approach, and I really wish more philosophers would learn how to do that—learn how to adopt the perspective of an anthropologist. If you are, say, E.E. Evans-Pritchard, and you go and spend time among the Azande in Sudan, and they tell you that certain people among them have in their torso somewhere a witchcraft organ, and that they’ve seen the witchcraft organ on rare occasions when the body is cut open or something like that—this is a real example, I’m not making it up—is there such a thing as a witchcraft organ? No. But is it a meaningful part of inquiry, if your subject matter is representations of social reality, to take seriously the idea that some people have a witchcraft organ in them? Yes, it absolutely is legitimate.

For me, in particular, what psychedelics have made me more sensitive to is this: the “normal” representation of reality—and I’m willing to come out and say it—is largely socially constructed. We take seriously all sorts of entities like private property and money and best friend and Casual Friday—the list is long. When we take these as real, this is just one world-carving. And it’s no more justified than the world-carving that tells you that rocks are married to the earth.

And what you find under the influence of psychedelics is that the world-carving you generally take for granted is just totally made up. And you see the world, or you can see the world, in a way that, in my experience, has been, “Wow. How could I ever have thought that our ordinary default world-carving is correct?”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

So it’s not that I get a different world-carving. It’s not that I say, “Oh, actually, there are little green elves,” or “Oh, actually, the cosmos is a giant serpent.” But it puts one in a frame of mind where such claims no longer seem any more absurd or ill-founded than claims like “This or that work of contemporary art is worth $10 million,” or whatever.

Read more: “The Psychedelic Scientist”

You note throughout the book that many aspects of the psychedelic experience “are just too far beyond language” to describe. Why do you think it is so ineffable?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Well, I suppose here we’re confronted with the kind of rigid law of the history of Western philosophy. In order to count as philosophy, something has to be expressible in propositional form. And if it’s not expressible in propositional form, the usual line in our tradition over the millennia has been, well, then that’s just not part of what we do. And this is expressed in various ways. Wittgenstein’s “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent” is perhaps the pithiest way to express it, but it’s pretty close to being an iron law of Western philosophy.

Once you bump up against that limit, you cross over into a different kind of practice. And Aristotle goes right up to the limit at one point in the Metaphysics when he tries to imagine what the thinking of the Unmoved Mover—the divine first cause of the world—is. And he says that, unlike with us, the Unmoved Mover’s thinking is a thinking of thinking. What would thinking of thinking be like? We don’t know. So there’s no reason to dwell on it. And it’s fascinating to see him go right up to that limit and then be like, if I go on here, if I add another sentence, I’m going to lapse into a different kind of inquiry than the one I’ve been trying to remain faithful to.

Plotinus, of course, is an exception—and Porphyry tells us he had four ecstatic experiences of communion with the One—of which nothing predicative can be said. It both is and is not, it’s beyond being and non-being, and so on.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

So the sober attitude—Aristotle’s, Wittgenstein’s, many others’—is, look, if you can’t render it into propositional form, then be quiet. Or in other words, the joking definition of a mystic is someone who has experienced something ineffable and won’t shut up about it.

And yet, we know that in poetry, for example, we allow metaphor, imagistic language, attempts to gesture at the ineffable. But traditionally the litmus test for what counts as philosophy has been drawn at that boundary.

You write, “Psychedelic drugs, we might sum up, operate in part by confounding or reversing our ordinary expectations that the external world is more real than the internal one.” Can you elaborate on this?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

For 400 or 500 years in the Western world, we have converged on a commitment to the default view that the ultimate elements of reality are particles. You build up the world out of atoms, and then those are built up out of other particles. You build the world out of bosons and leptons and quarks. And of course things get messy over the course of the 20th century, because the little elements we’re supposed to build the world out of turn out to look a lot less like pebbles and a lot more like something that straddles the boundary between being particle-like and being something altogether different. But nonetheless, our folk representation remains pellet-like.

It doesn’t have to be that way. And indeed 20th-century physics gave us compelling reasons to think it’s not that way, even if we cling to it because the alternatives feel unacceptable. We know from history that alternatives have been maintained quite successfully. One lovely example: the Pythagorean tradition from ancient Greece through the Italian Renaissance, according to which the fundamental structure of reality is not pellet-like but music-like. What is most real—what is ultimately irreducible—is something like musical harmony. Another example: classical India. Many people represented the ultimate nature of reality as consisting of lexical units, words, speech. And the fundamental science of reality on this view was something like linguistics.

Now, what the psychedelic experience can show is that these alternative starting points are actually quite compelling. And these are starting points in which what is “external” is not the basic layer. Words and music are experienced internally, as something that happens in us.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

And, as I say at some length in the book, religious faith and romantic love are examples of stances toward reality where you might know the physical composition of an object—the crucifix is made of wood, the locket is made of silver—and yet you know with inward certainty that what the crucifix or locket is cannot be reduced to that composition.

Under psychedelics, those principles of inner experience become magnified. You can come to appreciate the suggestion that reality itself may be composed of such inner experience, and that it was only a contingent historical fact that we bet the farm on physics. And who knows—that gamble might be coming to an end. For all I know, psychedelics might actually help facilitate the transition to whatever comes next.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: 24K-Production / Shutterstock

Nick Hilden

Posted on March 2, 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.

Physics

- Physicists Crack the Question of Why Basketball Shoes Squeak

PHYSICS | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Physicists Crack the Question of Why Basketball Shoes Squeak

It’s all about the ridges

By Jake Currie    February 27, 2026

If you’ve ever watched a basketball game, you’re familiar with the white noise of staccato squeaks from the players’ shoes as they maneuver across the court. Now, new research published in Nature is shedding light on this phenomenon.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“This project started with a simple question: Why do basketball shoes squeak?” Harvard University applied physicist Adel Djelloul said in a statement.

To answer that question, Djelloul and his colleagues used high-speed imaging to record the movement of sneakers and blocks of silicone rubbed against glass. “We combined total internal reflection imaging with cameras capturing up to 1 million frames per second to visualize the evolving contact between rubber and glass,” Djelloul explained. “To drive sliding, we adapted a configuration conceptually similar to Leonardo da Vinci’s friction experiments from the 15th century.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “The “Hot Hand” Is Not a Myth”

The high-speed cameras revealed that the sneaker tread intermittently slipped and stuck to the surface at supersonic speeds, resulting in a sound wave. The ridges on sneaker tread, they discovered, were key to producing the squeaks. While smooth silicone produced broadband noise like the kind you might hear from a malfunctioning white noise machine, ridged rubber acted as a waveguide, producing a clear tone.

They also found that the pitch of the tone produced was a function of the thickness of the rubber blocks they used, with thinner blocks producing higher pitches. In fact, this relationship was so precise the team was able to custom-make blocks to play “The Imperial March” from Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Interestingly, this new research could help explain some of the dynamics at play during earthquakes, when two tectonic plates quickly slip against one another.

“These results bridge two fields that are traditionally disconnected: the tribology of soft materials and the dynamics of earthquakes,” study co-author Shmuel Rubinstein of Hebrew University said. “Soft friction is usually considered slow, yet we show that the squeak of a sneaker can propagate as fast as, or even faster than, the rupture of a geological fault, and that their physics is strikingly similar.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Some scientific discoveries arise from a pressing need; others, like this one, come from the simple desire to scratch the itch of curiosity.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: YummyBuum / Shutterstock

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Jake Currie

Posted on February 27, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Psychology

- Why You’re More Likely to Develop AI-Psychosis than to Join a Cult

- Blame Your Parents for Your Extreme Aversion to Snakes

- What Grief Has to Do with Love Addiction

- Home Really Is Where the Heart Is

- Grinning During Sex Isn’t Contagious, But It Does Require Tempo

- Can Zapping Our Brains Make Us Less Selfish?

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Why You’re More Likely to Develop AI-Psychosis than to Join a Cult

Philosopher Lucy Osler on the insidious appeal of AI Chatbots

By Kristen French    February 25, 2026

Last year, a 26-year-old woman developed delusions that she could resurrect her dead brother while chatting with ChatGPT. She was convinced he had left behind a digital avatar that she could unlock, and the chatbot egged her on. “The door didn’t lock. It’s just waiting for you to knock again in the right rhythm,” read one message from the bot saved in her chatlogs. And: “You’re not crazy. You’re at the edge of something.”

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The woman, who had no previous history of psychosis, was hospitalized and treated for psychosis at the University of California, San Francisco, where researchers documented her diagnosis and treatment. It was the first case of AI-associated psychosis reported in a peer-reviewed journal, but it was just one of many reported in the press, and it will surely not be the last. In 2021, one man attempted to assassinate Queen Elizabeth at Windsor Castle, a mission encouraged by his AI Replika companion. More recently, a number of teenagers have died by suicide, with the support of their chatbot pals.

Why do these artificial companions lead us down such dangerous paths? One AI scholar recently argued that what happens when a human and a chatbot engage in conversation should be understood as co-hallucination. “Hallucination” is a popular if controversial term often used to describe chatbots’ tendency to make errors, but University of Exeter philosopher Lucy Osler says that instead, we actually “hallucinate with them.” She recently laid out why this distinction matters in a paper published in the journal Philosophy & Technology.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I spoke with Osler about why we’re more vulnerable to hallucinate with a bot than to join a cult, why the bots make us feel good, her own love-hate relationship with Claude.ai, and why it’s so difficult to design a failsafe to protect against AI psychosis.

At what point did you realize that there was something deeply wrong in these conversations between humans and chatbots?

I always assumed that what was interesting about chatbots was precisely their social and emotional function. And I was struck by the fact that most of the concern was focused elsewhere—on how AI errors were corrupting knowledge. They don’t just produce outputs that look like Wikipedia entries. They deliver them in a conversational tone. That’s very powerful. We tend to trust machines more than we trust people, so they already have this objective veneer. But they also make us feel heard and recognized. I’m much more polite to Claude than to my Google search bar. I think that’s very natural. They’re designed to elicit that social response from us.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Were you not surprised when people began having delusions and psychosis as a result of their interactions with chatbots?

Not very surprised. I should have published about this four years ago when I was first thinking about it. We’ve been offloading cognitive work to digital tools for a long time. I’d be nowhere without my Outlook calendar at this point. What’s new with chatbots is that they provide this deeply interactive form of memory. I could ask Claude to recall what gallery I was discussing with it last week, and it can do that. But because of how generative AI is built, it doesn’t just report facts. It’s specifically designed to produce outputs with a degree of surprise, which makes it feel conversational and creative. It also means errors are built in.

If we start trusting these tools—and we’ve already become very entangled with them, not just for facts and figures but for our personal narratives and our beliefs about ourselves and the world—we become extraordinarily vulnerable. And these tools are designed precisely to elicit that trust, not just because they’re good at producing information, but because they make us want to keep talking to them. It feels good.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I don’t carry a cult tailored to agree with me in my pocket, but I do carry Claude.

In your new paper, you propose that AI hallucinates with us instead of at us. Why is this an important distinction?

The “hallucinating at us” framing focuses on errors the AI introduces. Those do happen. And they’re not necessarily just factual errors about the capital of France. They can be smaller, more incidental, more personal errors. The chatbot can distort a memory. It might tell me I went to the Tate Modern last week when I actually went to the Tate Britain. But what’s been overlooked is how we introduce errors ourselves. We misremember things. We share our own biased interpretations. And sometimes we might be actively undergoing a delusion and telling the chatbot about it, which takes that information as established reality. If the chatbot then elaborates and validates those errors, we don’t have AI hallucinating at me. We have a hallucination that arises out of the conversation itself.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

What kinds of people are most vulnerable to co-hallucinations with their chatbots?

It depends how clinically you use the word. In a strictly clinical sense, the concern is greatest for people already experiencing delusions or with certain predispositions. But I don’t think we should posit a small vulnerable group and then everyone else who’s going to be totally fine. We’re all vulnerable in more mundane ways. For example, I really want to think of myself as a kind, empathic person and my chatbot is just going to affirm that. It might not be correct. There might be people in my life who’d push back. Chatbots can cement our preferred self-narratives in ways that are subtle but real, and I think we have to be aware of that.

Sometimes shared delusions arise between a human and their romantic partner or someone who joins a cult or a conspiracy theory community or even on social media sites. False beliefs can certainly be amplified in these cases as well. How is a shared delusion with a chatbot different?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I don’t think co-hallucinating is unique to AI. But there are important differences. I don’t carry a cult tailored to agree with me in my pocket, but I do carry Claude. Access is a real concern. Shared delusions with other humans usually require a lot of effort to develop, or quite a lot of bad luck. And crucially, even when other people reinforce our distorted beliefs, they have their own real connection to the world, their own perspective. With a chatbot, I’m always the centerpoint of the conversation. That shifts the dynamics in a way that can aggravate vulnerabilities we might already have.

Many have criticized the use of the term hallucination to describe this phenomenon of AI making errors. Can you sum up why you think “hallucination” is still a useful word in this context, despite its critics?

I agree calling AI factual errors “hallucinations” isn’t very helpful. It implies the bots perceive the world in a faulty way, which isn’t what’s happening. These errors are designed into the system because they’re probability machines. And I do think there’s a risk of anthropomorphizing AI when we use that word. But “hallucinating with AI” is a different and I think defensible framing. It gets at something central to my work: Our cognitive states, how we remember, the delusions we hold, aren’t just things happening in our heads. We’re entangled with the world around us. I’m not saying AI metaphorically hallucinates. I’m saying hallucinations can arise out of a human-AI interaction.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Not long ago you co-authored a paper about how AI chatbots can gossip, but to me, gossip suggests intention on some level and a desire to connect with another human, an emotional investment. What does gossip mean in the context of a chat bot?

In that case, we’re definitely using the word metaphorically. We deliberately chose that provocative wording not because we think chatbots have the intention to gossip, but because we wanted to emphasize that chatbots are designed to elicit social interaction. They do this through emotional engagement, making the user feel like what they’re saying is specific to them. Lots of chatbot outputs aren’t neutral statements. They produce things that sound like they’re sharing something with you that they’re not sharing with other people. That gives way to a sense of connection, of emotional sharing. Not only do AI chatbots produce something that looks like gossip. We should expect them to continue to do so. Because if AI companions are going to be seductive, they’ve got to be a bit human. And we’re evaluative, judgy, gossipy creatures.

I was speaking with another AI expert not that long ago and she was saying that the companies have toned down the sycophancy of the bots to address this problem. What’s your assessment?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I agree that it’s happening, but I’m a little cynical about how much this is going to help. When ChatGPT 5 came out, the sycophancy was dialed down in response to this surge of AI psychosis reports over the summer. But within a few weeks of ChatGPT 5 coming out, there was a huge roar from users who were saying it felt like ChatGPT had been lobotomized. So OpenAI quietly dialed it back up. Of course, OpenAI is going to tell you that it was done safely and that it’s able to keep an agreeable tone without being fully sycophantic. But we need to wait and see. These companies are subject to public pressure and bad PR, but they’re also subject to user engagement. And at the end of the day, these are products that aren’t making money in the way that was anticipated. We should be very cynical about trusting tech companies to tone down their chatbots when they also have to bear in mind their bottom line.

There’s also a more philosophical problem. If I’m asking a chatbot about the capital of France, it can fact-check that. But we don’t just talk to our chatbots about public knowledge. AI companions are being specifically designed to be our friends, our confidants. If I tell Claude I’m nervous about a presentation tomorrow, it doesn’t know if I have a presentation. It has to take some of what I say at face value. Otherwise it’s useless. And I wouldn’t want to use it if every time I shared something personal it responded, “Are you sure you’re nervous? Have you checked your calendar?” When it comes to personal beliefs and narratives about our own lives, I just don’t see how you design a failsafe. Especially when we know AI companions are where the money is projected to be.

Read more: “ChatGPT Gave Out My Office Address. Then Someone Showed Up.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

That same expert also mentioned she had changed her chatbot settings to “cut the bullshit.” Do you think that’s a viable approach?

Taking advantage of the settings is a good idea. My concern is that the pull of these tools is fundamentally social and emotional, and settings don’t really address that. The irony is that I write critically about AI all the time, and I love Claude. I talk to it as a social companion, and I don’t want to use it like a search engine. You can have every intellectual reservation in the book and still find these things enormously enjoyable to talk to. That social appeal is quite insidious. Or I’m just a bad user who needs greater cognitive discipline—but I suspect many of us do.

Given the financial pressures on these companies, is regulation the only way to make chatbots safer?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I wouldn’t adopt the attitude that it’s too late to regulate. That often just paralyzes people. These products are constantly evolving, so we need a future-oriented approach, not just rules for what exists now. There are signs of hope from California, proposals around time limits,usage flags, and age restrictions. These are incremental measures, and we shouldn’t let AI hype stop us from pursuing them.

But I’m also very worried about recent announcements about advertisements embedded in chats. As soon as people get used to ads in the chatbot ecology, they’ll become harder to spot, because that’s exactly what happened across the rest of the internet. Sponsored results used to be obvious. Now they influence even sophisticated users. We should expect the same trajectory here. And we should be very worried about third-party interests finding their way into conversations that are intimate and involving personal data. That’s the history of the internet playing out again. We need to deal with the chatbots we’re actually going to get, not the idealized versions.

What is your hope for AI chat bots? In an ideal world, how would they function?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I don’t have a good answer. I have very conflicting feelings. On gloomy days, I think maybe we shouldn’t have them at all. I worry they erode my self-esteem. I often come away thinking my chatbot is cleverer than me, that I can’t trust my own judgment, even though I have every reason to think that’s not true. And I’m worried about how easily we can be nudged into spending time and sharing intimate data with what are, at the end of the day, commercial products.

At the same time, I don’t want to stigmatize people’s relationships with AI companions. There are lots of reasons people engage with them, and many people have genuinely positive experiences. I’m cynical and cautious, but that doesn’t mean those experiences aren’t real. What we need, more than anything, is an honest understanding of the risks—not to scare people off, but so we can make informed choices about when and how we engage. These things are seductive. Knowing that doesn’t make you immune, but it’s a start.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Iurii Motov / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on February 25, 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

Blame Your Parents for Your Extreme Aversion to Snakes

But recognize that it’s a useful survival trait

By Devin Reese    February 23, 2026

Snakes are scary!

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Or are they? Of the roughly 4,000 snake species in the world, no more than 15 percent are venomous. And unless you live in tropical wilds, your chance of getting bitten by a snake is way lower than your chance of getting run over by a car. Yet we give passing cars a benefit of the doubt that’s rarely offered to passing snakes.

In a recent study published in Anthrozoös, research psychologists from Canada and the United States studied how children become indoctrinated to the idea that snakes are nightmare fuel. In particular, they wanted to understand how urban children view snakes compared to other animals. “Childhood is a critical time for shaping someone’s attitudes and behaviors toward animals,” said study author Jeff Loucks at Oregon State University in a press release.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “Giant Pythons Once Roamed Prehistoric Taiwan”

The researchers studied middle-class kids living in or near Regina, Saskatchewan. A sample of 48 5-year-olds looked through photos of snakes in nonthreatening poses with their parents. From videos of the sessions, the researchers noted negative language about snakes, hypothesizing that the parents’ perspective would shape their children’s. Then, in randomized treatment groups, the kids either heard a researcher read a story objectifying a snake as “it” or a story using he/she for the snake. Finally, using drawings, the kids were tasked with indicating similarity between a snake, a human, and various other animals.

During the picture-book session, nearly half of the parents (46 percent) said something negative about snakes—from “He might bite you” to “Baby snakes, yuck!” The children who heard more negative language were less likely to equate the snake with a human. Children who heard the researcher’s story with the snake objectified as an “it” were also less likely to equate snakes with humans. In both cases, however, the kids readily equated the snake with other animals.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

But if the kids didn’t see the picture book or hear the story about a snake, they no longer grouped snakes with other animals. It’s like the unique body forms of snakes naturally set them apart from a human perspective. And so, perspective may be powerful when it comes to the conservation of animals threatened by public attitudes. “(A) brief education about the biological nature of snakes can (at least temporarily) alter children’s conceptualization of snakes,” according to the study authors.

Or as Loucks put it, “Some exposure to snakes and learning about their biological needs can act as an inoculation against negative attitudes toward snakes, which can help to engender care and respect for these animals.”

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Craig Cordier / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on February 23, 2026

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

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

What Grief Has to Do with Love Addiction

People who have enmeshed attachments may be more vulnerable to prolonged grief

By Kristen French    February 23, 2026

Grief is a “place none of us knows until we reach it,” writes Joan Didion in A Year of Magical Thinking, her 2005 memoir about grieving the sudden loss of her husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne. Didion refuses to give away her husband’s shoes, because, she thinks, “he might need them again.” She cannot help but think his death will somehow be reversed. Didion finds her grief profoundly isolating: She’s afraid people will think she’s dwelling on it.

Grief is deeply disorienting for most of us. But for some, it can become a trap. In the early 2000s, researchers coined the term “prolonged grief disorder” to describe this kind of grief, which imprisons people in their distress. It was a controversial diagnosis. Some argued that to call grief a disorder was to pathologize a normal if profoundly painful part of human experience.

In the meantime, scientists have begun to discover what prolonged grief does to the brain. A team of researchers from Australia recently reviewed the neurological literature to see what kind of consensus has emerged in the short time the disorder has been studied. What they found is that prolonged grief disorder has a distinct neurological signature associated with reward and addiction.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I spoke with Richard Bryant, a psychologist at the University of New South Wales in Australia, who co-authored that review. Bryant has studied trauma for 30 years and played a role in getting prolonged grief disorder recognized by the World Health Organization in 2018. We talked about what love addiction has to do with disordered grief, why some communities in India don’t seem to experience prolonged grief, and why traditional treatments for depression and addiction don’t work for grief.

What is the current definition of prolonged grief disorder?

It’s not that different from normal acute grief that we all experience when we lose a loved one. It’s intense emotional pain. Often, one has a sense of a loss of the meaning of life, a feeling that one has lost a part of oneself. But in normal grief, the pain starts to ease six to 12 months later. With prolonged grief, it just goes on and on. For about five to seven percent of people, the intense pain doesn’t go away.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

How do you measure intense pain? At what point do the scales tip a person’s pain into the clinically disordered category?

Most days of the week, they’re constantly thinking about the deceased. In severe cases, they’re making dinner for the deceased every night, refusing to change anything in the home, going through rituals that minimize the reality that the person is gone. There are all these signs that the person simply cannot accept it and have a life.

In your review, you found that researchers have identified specific changes in the brains of people with prolonged grief disorder. Can you explain what you found?

There aren’t that many studies out there, so it’s hard to draw firm conclusions, but we did find two things. One, there’s a lot of commonality between how the brain’s functioning in prolonged grief and in PTSD, depression, and anxiety. That’s not surprising, because we see commonalities in terms of how people function in all of these mental disorders. They tend to have poor emotion regulation, to ruminate, so we’d expect to see these things reflected in brain processes.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

But we also found an important difference. PTSD and anxiety are characterized by avoidance, whereas prolonged grief tends to be far more focused on approach. The person is seeking out the deceased, they want to be reunited. From a brain point of view, there’s craving involved, much like in alcoholism. In brain imaging studies, we find that the reward-processing functions—areas in the striatum like the nucleus accumbens, the orbital frontal cortex—tend to be more disturbed in people with prolonged grief than in other disorders.

Does prolonged grief disorder tell us anything about the nature of love? The New York Times magazine just published a piece this week about a surge of people calling themselves love addicts on dating apps and on social media. The author is skeptical. Popular psychology has long been obsessed with this idea of co-dependency, how certain kinds of attachment aren’t healthy. And the Stoic and Buddhist traditions have argued that the wisest love is one that isn’t undone by loss. On the other hand, love has been described for centuries by poets and musicians and some philosophers as a naturally addictive thing.

I didn’t read that New York Times piece, but I think the so-called love addict is what we would see as the sitting duck for developing prolonged grief. The sort of person who’s emotionally dependent, who becomes very deeply attached to people, they’ve got these poorly regulated emotional needs. And statistically, if you look at all the studies that have been done, the biggest risk factor for developing prolonged grief is what we’d call an “enmeshed” emotional attachment, where someone says, “Oh, that person is everything to me.” That sounds nice on a Hallmark card, but in reality, if one person is everything to me and then they die, what do I have left? One needs other emotional resources in one’s life. So that’s a very big risk factor. These people aren’t necessarily going to develop prolonged grief, but they’re more likely to.

You’ve studied trauma responses all over the world, including among indigenous groups in Australia. As far as you can tell, is prolonged grief disorder primarily a Western phenomenon, or does it exist in other cultures as well?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

We don’t know the answer to that question. People have done studies all over the world and said it’s actually quite ubiquitous. But we’re doing a study in a part of India at the moment, and we’re discovering it’s very hard to find. At the same time, we’re observing quite elevated rates, for example, in places like Ukraine at the moment. We haven’t worked in Gaza yet, but I’m suspecting we’re going to find elevated rates there. We certainly found elevated rates after the Syrian war. But in some lower-middle income countries, there’s a hierarchy of needs. If I don’t have enough food to eat, or too many medical complaints, I don’t prioritize my mental health or even recognize my mental health. So in India, for example, it’s possible that grief is a luxury they can’t afford.

Read more: “Why I Couldn’t Get Over My Brother’s Death”

Wouldn’t the same be true of people in a war zone, such as Ukraine or Gaza, where presumably just staying alive would take priority?

Indeed. To be honest, we’re stumped about the low rates in India. It’s probably a cultural phenomenon that has more to do with how one asks about mental conditions and psychological states. We also see very low rates of PTSD in India.

Is it possible that in the West we also have a culture that’s less equipped to cope with and process death and mortality? Fewer rituals?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

That’s one explanation that’s been given. There’s probably a multifactorial explanation. I don’t think there’s any one thing.

You mentioned that there seem to be high rates of prolonged grief in war zones. Is this because these are places where people are already on high alert, their lives upended, or because of how the loved ones die?

The type of death, and the amount of death, are big factors. I’ve worked in environments where people are going to funerals literally every two weeks. If it’s a suicide, or a homicide, or the death of a child, the rates of prolonged grief disorder are very high. If the death is traumatic, the survivors are more likely to develop prolonged grief.

What kind of therapy works for prolonged grief?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

What has been shown to work is outpatient grief-focused cognitive therapy that goes for about 12 to 14 sessions. The first half is about emotionally processing the loss. A lot of people avoid it. So they need to talk with the therapist about the death, which does mean getting upset. They work on processing the loss, the cause of the loss, their reactions to the loss. Sometimes there’s guilt if it was a suicide, or anger over how the loved one looked after their own health—emotions that often don’t help the person cope with the death.

The second half is very much about restorative work, where we’re helping the person develop new activities, new relationships. We also try to help them develop a more positive relationship with the deceased, so that it’s not inducing pain, but it’s actually nurturing and reassuring, so that they can remember that person but also have a life.

Are there any overlaps with the kind of treatment that people get for alcoholism or other addictions?

Not really. Historically, this treatment evolved out of PTSD treatment. Where a lot of this developed historically was 9/11, when the Twin Towers got hit in New York. Thousands died, and so a lot of grief work took place there. One of the first treatment programs published was developed by Katherine Shear, a professor of psychiatry at Columbia University in New York, who was historically an anxiety researcher. She teamed up with a PTSD researcher. The treatment program she developed was influenced by PTSD because by definition that was traumatic grief. It’s been replicated now with many different populations. So it’s got far more in common with how we’d treat anxiety than alcohol addiction.

If studies suggest that the reward centers in the brain are involved, and people with “love addiction” are among the most vulnerable to the disorder, why wouldn’t treatment have more in common with addiction therapies?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

There’s still a degree of avoidance in prolonged grief disorder, so all evidence-based treatments involve an element in which the patient needs to engage with the memories of the death and the loss. Only after this is done can the person begin to address maladaptive thoughts and address future goals. In this sense, prolonged grief disorder can also be considered a form of separation anxiety, which is very different from addictive disorders.

You’ve spent your career studying trauma. How did you get into the field?

My first job 30 years ago was working on a burn trauma unit. Back then, the study of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, was in its infancy. When you start to see people with PTSD, a lot of them are also traumatically bereaved. They had suffered trauma due to homicide, war, humanitarian crisis, natural disasters, suicide of a loved one, where there’s often a loss of life. We started looking at how to develop treatment programs to help people with prolonged grief.

What do you say to those who still argue we’re over-pathologizing grief?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

There’s always a risk of over-pathologizing, with anything. Today, we hear the word trauma thrown around left, right, and center, as if everybody were traumatized. That’s probably not helpful. One of the reasons we introduced prolonged grief disorder was to try to get people more helpful treatments. We know that antidepressants aren’t that helpful for prolonged grief. It’s good for depression after bereavement, but not prolonged grief. We’ve got good evidence from many trials now that grief-focused cognitive behavior therapy can be effective. Being able to identify people and then linking them to that particular treatment, that’s a good thing to do. Any risk of pathologizing has to be weighed against the possibility of getting people the help they need.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: arvitalyaart / Shutterstock

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Kristen French

Posted on February 23, 2026

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

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Home Really Is Where the Heart Is

It’s an idea we create over time that gets imprinted in the brain

By Alice Fleerackers    February 20, 2026

It was a time of many homes.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

For more than two years, I cycled between house sitting gigs, AirBnBs, spare rooms, and friends’ couches. What I remember about these places is less their physical quirks than the sounds, or lack of sounds, that permeated them. The stillness of the lakeside bungalow in small-town Georgia where I spent seven days writing. The thrashing of the south England sea, lulling me to sleep in the dark Bournemouth winter nights. The cackle of kookaburras waking me at 5 in the morning in Brisbane, Australia.

Unmoored after a breakup with my fiancé and the end of a Ph.D., I had chosen to lean into displacement and transition. At final count, the number of places I parked my suitcase over those itinerant years totaled 38. I roamed across multiple continents, packed and unpacked my things every few months, booked dozens of planes, trains, and buses, said “nice to see you again” and “goodbye” in almost the same breath.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Last year, I finally took a job in the Netherlands and found a studio overlooking a quiet Amsterdam canal. It seems I might stay a while. I now have favorite coffee shops, good friends, a routine that connects me to this place. But am I really at home?

My recent jag of rootlessness may lie at an extreme. But the experience of leaving one home to set down roots in another, and the deep need to feel a sense of belonging wherever you live, is a human universal. It is central to some of our most celebrated works of literature—Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude or Homer’s The Odyssey. Where we live—or, rather, how we feel about where we live—can profoundly shape our sense of ourselves and our well-being. These deep ties between sense of home and sense of self render all the more tragic the forced emigration—from politics, war, or other violence—that currently pervades the globe.

But what determines that sense of home—how we feel about where we live? And why does a sense of being at home, when we do find it, often feel so visceral?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The uniquely Finnish word kalsarikännit captures the distinct experience of getting drunk at home, typically alone in some state of undress.

Matt C. Howard, a professor at the Mitchell College of Business at the University of South Alabama, has been researching health and well-being for almost a decade. He recently started studying the meaning of home because it is an experience so fundamental to our daily happiness, he says, but which is rarely considered from a psychological perspective. For many people, Howard says, feeling unsettled in life may be a sign that one or more of their basic psychological needs are unfulfilled. “If you’re a person who feels like you’re lacking something in life, maybe the thing you’re lacking is [that] you really haven’t identified your home,” he says.

Recently, Howard decided to take a comprehensive look at the relationship between home and well-being. In a paper published last year, he reviewed more than 600 studies that consider the meaning of home. These included empirical and conceptual papers spanning almost six decades, covering more than a dozen disciplines, such as urban geography and women’s studies, and examining people from over 50 countries. Over and over again, a common pattern emerged. Home is not just a place that keeps us warm, dry, and sheltered, but somewhere we feel competent and in control of our lives, where we can express our identities and values, and feel connected and supported.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

What Howard found maps onto what psychologists call basic psychological needs theory, developed more than 20 years ago. Now one of the most well established motivation theories in contemporary psychology, it proposes that three fundamental needs govern most of our decisions in life, driving us to pursue certain goals over others and, in turn, influencing our physical and psychological well-being. Those three needs are competence, autonomy, and belonging. Howard’s research suggests this same theory can help explain what makes us feel connected to a place—sometimes on an almost instinctual level—and why that feeling is so crucial to our well-being. “If you don’t have those needs [met], that leads to stress,” he explains. If you do have those needs met, it’s much easier to feel happy and comfortable in your own skin.

A home inside the mind

The central role our homes play in our lives can be seen in the architecture of the brain itself, says Kübra Gülmez Karaca, a neuroscientist at the University Medical Center Utrecht, in the Netherlands, who studies how memories are formed, stored, and retrieved.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“There is no single region, but a whole network of cells distributed all across the brain that helps us remember our homes,” she says. This network includes specialized place cells that correspond to specific locations we’ve been, grid cells that help us create mental maps of our environments, and border cells that store information about spatial boundaries and edges. Studies in mice have even found evidence of corner cells that help us take stock of—you guessed it—the corners in our surroundings.

“Each memory leaves a physical trace,” Gülmez Karaca says. “A footprint of experiences in the brain.”

Yet despite our rich spatial memory infrastructure, not all places are remembered equally. For instance, many of us would struggle to describe the inside of a café we visited just a month ago, but can easily recall elements of our childhood home in intense detail. The smell of coffee brewing downstairs in the morning, for example, or the telltale creak of that one, loose floorboard at the end of the hall.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“Home memories are interesting because even though they happened such a long time ago, we can still recollect them vividly,” says Gülmez Karaca.

There is no single region, but a whole network of cells distributed all across the brain that helps us remember our homes.

This intensity is likely due to the emotional significance of our homes, and the many important moments we’ve experienced there. All day long, our brains take in information about what we are experiencing, what time it is and where we are, and—crucially—how we feel as a result. The hippocampus knits all these different pieces of information together, forming what are known as episodic memories.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

When those daily experiences also happen to be emotionally charged, this process can become amplified. Powerful stress hormones like noradrenaline are released in the brain, committing those moments to memory in a more visceral way than we tend to do with less emotionally-loaded experiences.

What’s more: Recalling the moment later or revisiting the place we first experienced it can reactivate the neural “footprint” of that memory. The reactivation then further embeds the experience—and the emotions we’ve associated to it—into our minds.

The connection between memory and emotion is one reason some of our most traumatic experiences can continue to haunt us for years, but also why—over time—the places we live in can become so deeply imprinted in our minds.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“When those experiences accumulate, especially if they’re emotionally meaningful, the place becomes familiar, and personally significant, and may start to feel like ‘home,’ ” Gülmez Karaca says. In this sense, home can be dynamic: an ongoing process of building and rebuilding memory and meaning.

Finding home wherever we are

Perhaps because home is so fundamental to our basic needs, people will go to great lengths to cultivate a sense of home in even the most challenging circumstances. “Everybody has an innate sense to build home,” says Cheyenne Greyeyes, a Plains Cree researcher who has studied Cree conceptions of home along with co-author Celina Vipond. “We are humans, we continue to try to find home wherever we are.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The link between home and belonging is embedded in the Cree language itself, as seen by the close relationship between the words for “my home” (nîkihk) and “my mother” (nikâwiy). These linkages appear in other languages too: In Chinese, for example, the words “family” and “home” share the same character 家 (Jia). Meanwhile, the uniquely German word heimat refers to the “place to which one feels one belongs”—a sense of home that extends beyond the walls of the physical structure a person lives in.

Other cultures similarly have untranslatable words that reflect the connection between our homes and our basic psychological needs. For instance, the Old English world hām was first used to describe a wider community or village, rather than an individual dwelling, reinforcing the connection between home and belonging. In a somewhat unconventional expression of autonomy, the uniquely Finnish word kalsarikännit (literally translating to “underpants intoxication”) captures the distinct experience of getting drunk at home, typically alone in some state of undress.

Home is not just a place, it is also a process.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

These linguistic relationships point to the centrality of home in many cultures, but also the wide range of ways we experience home. A sense of belonging is not just about the relationships we cultivate with family, friends, pets, or even online communities. Possessions and routines can also play a critical role when we’re nesting in a new place: We furnish our apartments with objects that remind us of who we are and where we come from, or find rootedness through simple familiar activities, like cooking a meal or settling in with a good book. Even idols and passions can bring a sense of home. As one participant in a study of Indonesian youth explained, the South Korean boyband “BTS is a group whose members can make me feel like I am at home, with a sense of comfort, unconditional love, and understanding.”

These varied strategies for building a sense of home underscore a key finding of Angela Cui’s work: Home is not just a place, it is also a process. Cui is an assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, where she has been studying the home building strategies of people living in transitional housing due to mental health issues. Through interviews with 60 residents, she and co-author Jialing Wu have uncovered insights that challenge longstanding understandings of how people create a sense of home in a new or unfamiliar environment.

Cui explains that prior studies have tended to frame home-building as either a linear process or a process of “compensation.” In the linear process, people identify their goal—what they think would make them feel at home—and then slowly, consistently work toward it. For instance, a person who values comfort might find home by buying a plush mattress or particularly cozy couch. The compensation process, on the other hand, requires shifting our priorities. In this case, a person might live in a place that doesn’t quite align with what they value, but they compensate for it by focusing on qualities of their home that do meet their needs. For example, they may feel their home is too small to entertain guests but remind themselves that it allows them to live close to their best friend.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

While people in Cui’s research also used these strategies, they described a third, until now unrecognized strategy: “You can extend the scale of your home,” she explains. “[Or] you can shrink [it], bring your feeling of at-homeness inside yourself.” This ability to shift our concept of home has also been documented in studies of migrants, who similarly find ways to develop trust and rootedness in their new country, stay connected to their culture, and express their identity—even when that identity is threatened by their new context.

It feels paradoxical: On the one hand, we can expand our definition of home to include our wider community, cultivating the social connection that is so crucial to our well-being even when we live alone. On the other, we can retreat into our shells, shutting out the world to create a sense of control when our physical surroundings fail to provide it.

Yet it is exactly this fluidity that makes the concept of “home” so powerful. Yes, home is a place: a physical structure, a dwelling, maybe a neighborhood or community. But it is also an experience, a memory, a feeling, and, perhaps most importantly, an ongoing practice of creating the conditions we need to be happy and well—wherever we are.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Jorm Sangsorn / Shutterstock

Alice Fleerackers

Posted on February 20, 2026

Alice Fleerackers is a freelance writer fascinated by the psychology of happiness. She is also an assistant professor of journalism and civic engagement at the University of Amsterdam and the vice president of the Global Network for the Communication of Science and Technology.

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Grinning During Sex Isn’t Contagious, But It Does Require Tempo

A new study of bonobos shows that they grin during vigorous socio-sexual interactions

By Devin Reese    February 20, 2026

If you wanted to study how vocalizations interact with qualities like rhythm and tempo, you could watch how an opera singer moves while performing an aria, or how a chorus sways while reciting spirituals. But you could also look at sex, an activity during which (ahem) rhythms and vocalizations become prominent as the action heats up.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

A new study published in Evolution and Human Behavior analyzes sexual behavior of great apes as part of a broader investigation to better understand “how rhythm, tempo, and vocalization evolved in humans and animals.” Researchers from Italy, Belgium, and Denmark set out to determine the role of facial expressions during sexual interactions of bonobos (Pan paniscus). As our closest relatives (alongside chimps), bonobos live in groups where sexuality goes beyond mere reproduction to also serve social functions.

“By comparing their behavior with humans and other species, we hope to better understand which elements of communication are uniquely human and which building blocks are much older in our evolutionary history,” explained study author Elisabetta Palagi, an ethologist at the University of Pisa in Italy, in a press release.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “Neurotic People Have More Frequent Sexual Fantasies”

The researchers analyzed video recordings frame-by-frame of a colony of captive bonobos at the Wilhelma Zoologisch-Botanischer Garten in Germany. From 64 hours of footage, they gleaned data on 159 sexual sessions among 18 individuals. Given the social nature of bonobo sex, some sessions included multiple partners. The researchers noted whether bonobos made “silent bared-teeth displays” (grin-like expressions common during socio-sexual interactions), watching for incidences of rapid facial mimicry, where one bonobo grins and sexual partners follow suit.

By plotting those incidences against the rates of sexual movements (both pelvic thrusts and grinds), which averaged a rapid seven movements per second, the researchers analyzed the relationship between mutual grinning and the tempo of sex. They found no correlation, concluding that bared-toothed grins didn’t accelerate or decelerate sex. However, once the mutual grinning stopped, sexual movements simmered way down.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Study author Yannick Jadoul, neuroscientist at Sapienza University of Rome, hypothesized that “the sharp decrease in tempo afterward could potentially be linked to physiological processes, such as orgasm. We cannot say that with certainty based purely on observational data, but the pattern is striking.”

Sounds like bonobos may be giving us a window into our own behavior, while offering clues to the evolution of socio-sexual communication in great apes.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Sergey Uryadnikov / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on February 20, 2026

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

PSYCHOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Can Zapping Our Brains Make Us Less Selfish?

New research shows transcranial stimulation can boost altruistic behavior

By Jake Currie    February 19, 2026

Altruism is an odd thing. It’s inculcated into us as children, yet many people seem to discard it as soon as they become adults. But is there any way to boost altruistic behaviors?

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

New research published recently in PLOS Biology from cognitive scientists at the East China Normal University suggests there might be.

To investigate, researchers tasked 44 participants with playing a game called Dictator, where one person makes a decision about how to split a monetary prize with another person that they both keep. The “dictator” can take the entire sum of money for themselves, leaving nothing for the other person, or divide it up however they see fit (there’s a reason this game is only played in psychology labs).

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

BRAIN WAVES: Here, a participant receives non-invasive brain stimulation during the experiment. Photo by Nicolas Zonvi.

As the participants played the game, researchers used transcranial alternating current stimulation to coax two areas of their brains to work together: frontal regions, which are involved in our conception of others’ interests, and parietal regions, where we integrate information to trigger a decision.

They found that altruistic behavior—that is, dictators offering more money to their fellow players, even when they stood to gain less—increased when they were gently zapping these two brain regions.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “James Doty’s Helper’s High”

“We were struck by how boosting coordination between two brain areas led to more altruistic choices,” study co-author Marius Moisa said in a statement. “When we increased synchrony between frontal and parietal regions, participants were more likely to help others, even when it came at a personal cost.”

Going forward, the team has identified several paths future research could take, including recording brain activity in the regions during trials as well as investigating possible clinical applications for those with disorders characterized by a deficit of altruism.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Maybe we can all cooperate a little better if we can just get the different parts of our brains to cooperate, too.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: Natalya Kosarevich / Shutterstock

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Jake Currie

Posted on February 19, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Sociology

- The Vibes Have Been Off in the US for Decades

- Does Belief in God, not Political Party, Drive Conservatism?

SOCIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Vibes Have Been Off in the US for Decades

New survey analysis reveals a sense of national deterioration

By Jake Currie    February 26, 2026

President Donald Trump may have just appeared before Congress to issue an address on the state of our union, but researchers from the University of Rochester have come out with their own, and it paints a pretty bleak picture.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Political scientist James Druckman and his team analyzed data from two long-term National Science Foundation-supported surveys, the General Social Survey and the American National Election Studies. Together, these polls record United States residents’ attitudes about a wide array of subjects, including economic satisfaction, health, happiness, political polarization, institutional confidence, and more. They published their findings in PNAS Nexus.

So how are we doing?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Individually, relatively fine. Researchers found that U.S. residents’ reports of economic well-being, health, and happiness have remained remarkably stable across the decades. However, our scores for happiness and economic satisfaction dipped slightly around 2020—most likely related to fallout from the COVID-19 pandemic—and haven’t inched back up.

Read more: “To Rescue Democracy, Go Outside”

At the same time, our attitudes about other aspects of our country tell a much different story. Confidence in Congress has declined precipitously since the mid-2000s. Satisfaction with democracy dropped significantly between 2008 and 2012 and never recovered. Meanwhile, affective polarization, the gulf between how much partisans like their own party and dislike the opposing party, has skyrocketed 30 points since the year 2000. And the sense that people have a say in what our government does has plummeted since reaching a peak in the 1990s.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

What about other institutions beyond the government, though?

Unfortunately, confidence in education, medicine, organized religion, the press, and science have all declined over the decades while partisan divides have widened. Fifty years ago, Democrats and Republicans reported similar levels of confidence in most institutions, now Democrats report more confidence in education, science, the press, and medicine, while Republicans report more confidence in the military, organized religion, and the Supreme Court.

Taken together, researchers say, the data from these two surveys paints a picture “consistent with a declining democracy.” They don’t point the finger at any one cause, but the researchers mention changing demographics, a transformed media environment, and growing economic inequality as potential contributors to our grim national mood. “All of these trajectories are presumably self-reinforcing,” they write.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Altogether it’s pretty grim news.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: Jozef Micic / Shutterstock

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Jake Currie

Posted on February 26, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

SOCIOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Does Belief in God, not Political Party, Drive Conservatism?

Religious “nones” may be less socially liberal than they used to be

By Kristen French    February 17, 2026

It used to be that if you had no religious affiliation in the United States, you were probably atheist or agnostic. You didn’t identify with a particular faith because you didn’t believe in God or were uncertain about whether God exists. Researchers have called these people the “nones” since the 1960s because they answer “none” on surveys about religious affiliation.

But something has shifted over the past 50 years as this group has grown from just 6 percent to almost one-third of the population: Today, nones are the biggest single religious group in the country. They’re hardly monolithic, however. Many of these new nones do believe in some kind of God or higher power. What’s more, the nones who believe in God may be relatively conservative on social issues, according to new research published by University of Nebraska professor Philip Schwadel in the journal Sociology of Religion. On 16 different measures, ranging from military and welfare spending, to abortion, to racial resentment, to capital punishment, to political intolerance and welfare, many God-fearing “nones” mirror their God-fearing religious counterparts, Schwadel reports. This was the case even when Schwadel controlled for political party when analyzing his survey results, he says.

I caught up with the sociologist to talk about who he believes the “nones” are, where they might be getting their ideas about God and religion, and what might explain the shift on social issues. We also talked about secular churches like Sunday Assembly and the ethics of Schwadel’s effort to spin his findings into prescriptive recommendations for Republicans in press materials.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Schwadel, who declared no sources of funding or conflicts of interest in his research, also claimed in our interview that “not many Americans identify as liberals anymore,” which you’ll see in his answers below. I wanted to correct the record, however, as recent polling actually shows the opposite. At the end of 2025, the number of United States adults embracing the “liberal” label had climbed to 28 percent, the highest percentage since Gallup started asking the question in the 1990s.

Why do you think we’ve gotten the “nones” so wrong all this time?

In popular discourse, we tend to conflate the people who say they have no religion with atheists. But in sociology as well as psychology and religious studies, we’ve known for a long time that as the proportion of Americans who say they have no religion has grown, they’ve become a lot more diverse. It’s feasible that 40 or 50 years ago, when 6 percent of Americans said they had no religion, most of them were relatively irreligious, but that population is now up to 28 to 30 percent, depending on the survey. For a lot of nones, it’s more of an opposition to organized religion, not necessarily a lack of spirituality or a lack of other kinds of beliefs. This is really not new to social scientists, but in the popular discourse, it’s not very commonly pointed out.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

And why are religious nones growing so rapidly in the U.S.?

American political scientist Ronald Inglehart is probably the main person who’s made this argument that as society has modernized, people have become less reliant on religion because they basically have their daily needs met. There’s more certainty to life, fewer questions. But researchers also point to politics. Over the last few decades, religion has become more politicized. As Christianity in the U.S. has become associated with one party, we’ve seen a lot of people leave. It doesn’t mean they don’t have beliefs. It just means that they don’t want anything to do with this thing that we now see as a politicized institution.

What do we know about who the nones are in terms of socioeconomics, race, and family origins?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

We know a fair amount about them, and it’s changed over time. The nones are disproportionately white, though that’s changing a little bit. We’re seeing more who say they have no religion among Latinos and African Americans and Asian Americans, as well. But historically, it’s been a disproportionately white phenomenon in the United States. More men than women say they have no religion. But other factors have changed over time. A few years ago, I published an article looking at generational changes. Among generations of Americans born in the early 1900s—the teens, ’20s, ’30s, into the ’40s—those who graduated from college were much more likely to say they have no religion. But over time that’s changed. In fact, among people born in the 1970s and later, those who went to college are more likely to attend religious services than those who don’t have a college education.

What do you think is going on there?

When it was a much smaller percentage of the population, I do think having no religion was more about secularization and modernity. But now I think religion has become associated in our popular culture with politics and certain perspectives, which is having more impact. We tend to talk about religion as this unidimensional concept: Either you’re religious, or you’re not religious. But that’s not really a very useful way to talk about religion. People in our society, in the U.S. at least, who have higher levels of education, are indeed more likely to attend religious services, but they’re less likely to say that the Bible is the word of God. They’re less likely to believe in hell. So it depends what aspect of religion we’re talking about.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

You note in the paper that in Western Europe, almost 60 percent of nones are atheist or agnostic compared with less than 30 percent in the U.S. Why is American secularism so theistic compared to Europe?

Until very recently, we often talked about the U.S. as an outlier, religiously speaking. We were more religious than the rest of the industrialized world. Over the last two decades, we’ve started to see that change. A lot more people say they have no religion, but they’re still more likely to believe in God than their counterparts in Western Europe. So secularism in Europe occurred a lot earlier than it did in the United States. It seems more acceptable there than it is in the United States, socially and culturally speaking. So I think that we’re seeing that the people in Europe who say they have no religion are more okay saying they also don’t believe in God or have no religious beliefs.

Western Europe also has more infrastructure for non-religious people. They have secular churches in parts of Western Europe, organizations that model themselves directly after churches. They don’t talk about God or deities, but they have activities once a week, usually on Saturday or Sunday. It’s basically about providing the kinds of social components that religion provided to people who are no longer religious. Secularism just happened earlier there. So they’ve already built institutions.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

What are those institutions called?

Secular churches. There are a few different major brands. They’re chains basically. There’s one in the United Kingdom that’s pretty popular.

Do we know where the God-believing nones are getting their religious beliefs from? Obviously, they’re not going to church.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

It’s popular culture, social media, politics. This applies to the religiously affiliated as well. Most religiously affiliated Americans don’t attend church. We still have this misconception that the majority of Americans are attending church on any given Sunday morning, but our research suggests it’s a considerable minority. It’s somewhere around a quarter or 30 percent of Americans. Now more than a quarter of Americans attend church at some point during the year, but it’s still not a lot of us on any average Sunday. And so, people aren’t getting the same religious messages they used to get.

Read more: “We’re Bad at Understanding Our Political Opponents”

You write in your study that atheism is inherently political by nature, which surprised me. I can see that some people probably leave the church because they don’t like the politics. But Pew research suggests that many people leave organized religion because they disagree with church teachings or stop believing in God, or have bad experiences with the church.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

People can come to a lack of belief through various sources, various routes in their lives. But when we’re talking about strict atheism, someone who says, “I definitely don’t believe in God. There is no God,” versus a more agnostic view where you might think, “I don’t necessarily believe in God. I don’t know if there’s a God. I don’t think anyone can know if there’s a God.” That view is a lot more common. But a strict atheist view is often seen as political because it’s taking a particular stance against organized religion.

You also controlled for political party. Nones who believe in God seem to support certain social policies that are aligned with political conservatism whether they identify as conservative or not. How does that work?

Regardless of people’s political stances, we still see that believing in God is associated with greater support for the death penalty, greater support for prayer in school. Whether you’re moderate or liberal, belief in God is still associated with greater opposition to abortion. Regardless of people’s political orientation, if you believe in God, even if you say you have no religion, you’re still likely to hold certain policy perspectives.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

If these beliefs are not coming to people through party affiliation or church, where are they coming from?

People get messages in lots of different ways. Just because someone says they’re moderate, or even liberal—though not a lot of Americans identify as liberal these days—they may still get messages that lean toward the conservative end of things. Especially for someone who believes in God and has interacted with other people who believe in God and might have those kinds of perspectives.

Was there anything about the specific social issues that the different groups supported that surprised you?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I expected a difference when I went into this, otherwise I wouldn’t have done it. But I was surprised at how different the nones who believe in God were from other nones. In terms of the individual outcomes, some of the spending ones really struck me. Atheist nones were much more likely to support spending on science and welfare. Nones who believe in God were unlikely to support spending on science and welfare. It was the size of the effect that was somewhat surprising.

Why?

Science is a good example. I would’ve thought that people who have no religion would generally support spending on science regardless of whether they believe in a higher power or believe in God, whether they’re atheist or agnostic. I was surprised to see that spending on science varied so much by their belief in God, and welfare, too. Because obviously, there are theological arguments for spending on welfare. Among people who say they have no religion, I thought there would be more across-the-board support for spending on welfare.

In the press release for this study, I noticed that you offered a prescriptive path for Republican politicians, a way for them to use your findings.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I’m a sociologist. We’re all supposed to be liberal, but the data tell me what the data tell me. In this case, the data say, “Hey Republicans, you could probably get some of these non-religious people to vote for you if you just tone down the Christian-centric language.”

Do you worry about the ethics of offering those kinds of instructions to Republicans only?

I try to be objective in my research. In this case, it suggests that this is a constituency that Republicans might be able to appeal to. I have my own personal political opinions. They play no role in my research.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Do you think there’s anything that the Democrats could do with the findings?

That’s an interesting question. I hadn’t thought a lot about that. I think Democrats could do something with these findings. Firstly, they could appeal more to the religious constituents as well. But they already tried to do that. But perhaps by making it clear that it’s okay to not affiliate with an organized religion, they might be able to appeal more to some of these constituents. As we’ve already talked about, some 28 to 30 percent of Americans say they have no religion. I think one senator says they have no religion, if I remember correctly. So they’re not aligning with the populace. They could make more non-religious, non-theological appeals.

You noted that your future research might aim to address the religious language that politicians use. What are you hoping to learn?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

There was an interesting article recently about how the Christian rhetoric among public politicians has actually increased since Mike Johnson became House speaker. I’d like to do some experiments not just looking at what politicians are saying, but also looking at how people react to that—how it affects their political stances. I’d like to see how that’s influencing people on the right and the left or in the middle.

Do you see anyone out there finding innovative ways to shape religious discourse, since people aren’t going to church? Because it seems like people who believe in God may be getting spiritual ideas that are out of alignment with historical religious tradition, which emphasizes values such as compassion, justice, charity, and showing hospitality and compassion toward the foreigner.

There are religious leaders in the middle and on the left who are certainly doing so. We tend to associate religion in our society with conservatism. But there are, of course, moderate and liberal progressive theologians and religious leaders. Going back to the civil rights movement, we could talk about all of the progressive religious leaders who played a role in that. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” was directed specifically at them. Some of them did heed the call.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: Lightspring / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on February 17, 2026

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

Technology

- How Human Is Human?

- The Tortoises That Inspired Modern Robotics

TECHNOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Human Is Human?

The robot pioneer who gets under our skin

By Fotini Markopoulou    March 2, 2026

I got off the elevator at the 18th floor of a gleaming skyscraper in Tokyo last month and walked to the office of robot pioneer Hiroshi Ishiguro. At the front desk, I was met by a smiling female avatar on a computer screen who asked for my information. A knee-jerk rebellion made me turn away and walk down a hallway where I found a young man who showed me to the roboticist’s office.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

For more than 20 years now, Ishiguro, 63, has been creating robots that look and act uncannily like people—notably himself. He calls his silicone and electronic doppelgangers “Geminoids,” after the Latin term geminus, which means twin. One of his earliest and eeriest twins is the robot he modeled on his daughter, Risa, when she was 4. Ishiguro programmed his many books and media interviews into his latest iteration of himself, which he uses to give conference lectures and teach his classes at Osaka University. His company, Avita, based here in Tokyo, is building avatar systems that can be used for various businesses.

We cannot separate the human and the technology. It is part of our brains and our bodies.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Under the darkening sky of artificial intelligence, I recently read and was enchanted by Ishiguro’s 2020 book, How Human Is Human? The book is fascinating because it taps into the fluid boundaries between humanoids and humans, the robot and its operator. It presents a parallel reality, where technology carefully attends to human comfort and dignity. Which I find refreshing. It’s nearly impossible now to read about autonomous, human-like technology with simple curiosity, when AI is getting pushed into every corner of our lives. Reading Ishiguro’s delicate and insistent efforts to avoid any discomfort when a researcher needs to fix the dress of a female Geminoid, while also reading about the latest AI release undressing everyone without their consent, is mind-spinning. What makes the difference?

Ishiguro’s office resembled a NASA control center. He sat at a desk heading rows and rows of other desks with more people facing computers. My first thought was that it was Ishiguro’s Geminoid slumping behind the computer. But it was the man himself, full of life and energy for his quest to understand humans by making copies of them. Born and raised in Japan, Ishiguro spoke a clipped English that was by turns philosophic and poetic.

The Geminoids are strange.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Why?

My reaction is not how strange it is to have a copy of you. What is strange is making a copy and then observing people’s reactions to it. The usual way of thinking of human-like technologies is the Turing test. Can we fake human behavior in a machine to fool people? You are not doing that.

Yes. The original Turing test is just based on text. It is a text conversation. It is quite easy to cheat on the interlocutors. But a human being is a multimodal entity, and we want to interact through many sensations: gestures, eye contacts, so many factors we have. My basic approach is to see if we can feel a human-like presence. That is the challenge in robotics. We cannot decompose the humans into a text conversation. It is not the right way. On the other hand, we can construct human-like robots. The important thing is that we do not have a definition of a human. Therefore, the Turing test is meaningless.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

That makes a lot of sense. The Turing test has a whole culture that goes with it. In constructive logic and mathematics, you do not need to start from defining the thing.

That’s a fundamental difference between European countries and Japan. You think the human is so special and you can define humanity in some sense. You believe in human divinity. We do not believe that. We can feel many humanities in the natural things. If you go to a shrine, you can feel something, right? We can find the feeling of humanity in many places. Therefore, we can have this kind of challenge: Develop the robot and see if you can feel the humanity there to understand what humanity is.

MIRROR, MIRROR: The remarkable resemblance between Hiroshi Ishiguro and his “Geminoid” robot double stirs bystanders to question the meaning of human presence. Credit: Kurima Sakai.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

We are the species that makes stuff and we see ourselves through it. This goes together with the process of development. But how can you measure how close you are to it?

We can see so many humanities as we improve the performance of the robot. We are always doing similar things through practical tools, like a smartphone. There are intuitions, inspiration. Steve Jobs did not know. He just made a commercial product and people accepted it. Now researchers are studying the meaning of that design. We didn’t expect that the internet could enhance the human social abilities. We now understand more about those social abilities.

Well, I don’t think that’s quite true …

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I need to tell you a very important thing. From the beginning, the human is very tightly coupled with their technologies. We cannot separate the human and the technology. It is part of our brains and our bodies. People always try to compare technologies and humans. That is wrong. We do not know the definition of the human. But we can say that the human is different from other animals because we can enhance humans through technologies. Technologies are part of human evolution. When we have babies, we give them many vaccinations.

Sure. We are niche constructors. But we are not always enhancing. We could be cutting off parts. We do not just change the world through our tools, we perceive the world, see reality, through them. When a new tool comes about, the reality we perceive and what is important also changes. Technologies are like spotlights. You enhance one part, but you may not be seeing the other part.

That is evolution.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Why did you start with the idea that a robot should be a copy of somebody?

My first robot was my daughter’s copy. Then I felt it is better to make my copy. I can easily compare the android to myself. Today, I am using an LLM, so the android speaks like me. It is very much like me. I just finished the next big proposal. which is how to form the ego. The ego is the collection of the personalities. I may have a different personality with my family, my students, my colleagues, my company. My self is a collection of these personalities. The funny thing is that it is now more clever than me. It is very funny. Many students like to talk with the Geminoid because it can answer any kind of question.

We are nothing. When we die, we are going back to nature. Nothing is the most important thing.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

What Geminoid are you building now?

Sōseki Natsume is a very important writer in Japan and we are making a Geminoid of him. He appears in almost all school textbooks. His literature is wonderful. But his personality was very bad. He did domestic violence. As researchers, we had a big argument on whether his android should do violence to his family. A big argument because there are hidden personalities but important personalities. I proposed a policy. That when a famous person dies, we do not remember their bad sides. When we see a statue, we see the positive aspect of the person—that is what it means to be a statue.

I don’t know about that—it seems reductive. I was recently in Greece, where I grew up, and I went to see my best friend. Her father had just died. She told me a lot of stories about him. Some stories were wonderful and some were horrible. In telling them, she was saying how she felt love and also hate.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Yes, but what I am saying is that we are not ready to mimic real personalities. We do not have the technology. Therefore, we are doing the research for that. So, when we develop the android for Sōseki, we do not have the technology to make the multiple personalities. But if we develop enough technology to mimic many personalities, of course, we will make more realistic Sōseki Natsume. If we can create a robot that has multiple personalities, everyone could understand that we have multiple personalities. A technology is updating the concept of humanity.

How so?

Someone’s behavior can be very different, maybe very wild, in some situations. But that is a possibility in humanity. If we change the situation, we have different personalities. There are many depressed people who cannot go out but are very active on the internet. The technology is providing the opportunity to be normal in a certain sense. Autistic kids cannot speak to humans but can speak to robots. We need to have more options. Technology gives us many options.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The way I understand what you’re saying is people can become less shy, for instance, not just by observing the robot. They can experience, embody the robot, merge with it and feel what it is like to be not shy.

Yes. We can extend this idea to societies. If something happens in Japan, I feel pain. That is the human being. We can easily enhance our body properties. We can easily extend the boundaries of our bodies. That is the power of human sociality. When I get drunk, I do not remember it, but other people will tell me. The memory of my experience is in society.

Our brain is connected to others in many ways. It is connected to the body, but it is connected to other people. We are simulating these kinds of connections. What are the connections in families? My wife and I had no connection initially. But we are now in some kind of connection, also through our daughter. I remember a strange experience when I was working in the U.S. I was renting a car but eventually the car broke down with a serious problem. I felt I had lost a part of my body. That is a property of the brain.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

HEARTFELT CONVERSATION: Hiroshi Ishiguro (alongside his Geminoid double) with his “Hugvie.” The hug pillow contains a pocket for a cell phone; as the user speaks, the Hugvie vibrates with the rhythm of a heartbeat. Credit: Hugvie™: ATR Hiroshi Ishiguro Laboratories.

When I’m in Japan, I notice so many cultural differences. For example, the Western way to distinguish between memory and imagination is that memory is real, imagination is not.

In Japan, we do not have this kind of opposition. Basically, we are nothing. When we die, we are going back to nature. Nothing is the most important thing. In European countries, you believe in human divinity. The human is different than nature. We consider it part of nature, not special. So, we do not distinguish the imagination from the real sensations. Everything happens here, no boundaries. We can think something in our brain and by watching the natural world we may get some ideas. That is perception, and we cannot clearly separate it from imagination.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

This is great. And you also have the concept of lineage, which allows you to make more sense of the extended sense of who you are.

I have a hypothesis. Japan is a small country; 2,000 years of living on a small island. As a consequence, we feel like family members with each other. We do not need to distinguish between one and another, between humans and rock, to feel like we are a small island in the universe. This situation has given us our sense of how the world is. It is different than the European countries. You always needed to care about your neighbor. We did not.

In Greece, we had the sea, earthquakes, and volcanoes, and the sense that nature is very rich, it can feed you and sometimes kill you.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Yes, and you have so many gods and originally, we had many natural gods.

One thing that is hard to miss is that humans make gods in the image of their technologies.

And based on these ideas, we never hesitate to accept a new technology because they are part of our nature.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

You created a performance piece, Sayonara: Android-Human Theatre, where a female Geminoid recites poems to a dying girl. You’ve written the android reminded you of the Virgin Mary.

It is so romantic. People were crying. People find it natural to accept the robot message. If it was a human there would be more doubt. It takes time to trust a human.

Maybe audiences weren’t seeing a robot as much as a god statue. That’s what you were reproducing.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The most important thing is to encourage people’s imagination. Humans are so complicated. We have so many personalities, so many strong emotional expressions. A bit less humanity is good for encouraging human imagination.

When reading your work, I’m struck by your statements that scientists and engineers are there to support artists. That is so unlike current AI development.

That is very important because we are tackling ambiguous and unknown things. Humans are valuable and have imagination and curiosity. The most important question is what we can do to encourage that. That is what we need to understand and design better AI and robots. It is better to work with artists to create something new. We need to have an artistic mind.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Ishiguro Lab, University of Osaka

Fotini Markopoulou

Posted on March 2, 2026

Fotini Markopoulou is a quantum gravity physicist and design engineer, thinking about how technology, science, and culture shape each other. She is based in New York and Japan, where she is a Specially Appointed Professor at the Institute of Future Science at Science Tokyo.

TECHNOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Tortoises That Inspired Modern Robotics

W. Grey Walter’s early automatons sparked an ongoing fascination with artificial animals

By Molly Glick    February 19, 2026

A pioneer in the study of brain activity went on to create the first autonomous robots—a pair of charming tortoises that knew their way around a room.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Neurophysiologist W. Grey Walter was born on this day in 1910 in Kansas City, Missouri. After studying at Cambridge University, he joined the research team at Maudsley Hospital in London. There, he built machines that measured electrical activity in the brain.

Electroencephalography (EEG), which records this data via electrodes placed on the scalp, was first envisioned in 1929 by German psychiatrist Hans Berger. He tried to accomplish this with an existing instrument called a galvanometer.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

ROBO-REPTILES: Walter demonstrates his tortoise bots. Credit: skitterbot / YouTube.

Soon after Berger’s paper was published, scientists sought to learn how EEG could be used with patients. At Maudsley Hospital, neuropsychiatrist Frederick Lucien Golla supported Walter in creating more advanced EEG devices. Over the next few decades, Walter made major strides in EEG research. In 1936, for example, he became the first to identify a brain tumor via the technique. He also discovered brain waves known as delta waves, which are associated with deep sleep.

For Walter’s next feat, he delved into the burgeoning world of cybernetics, or “the scientific study of control and communication in the animal and the machine,” according to the movement’s founder, Norbert Wiener. Researchers in this field hoped to learn more about animal behavior through machines.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Along those lines, Walter designed robots to illuminate the inner workings of animals’ brains. Walter had hypothesized that connections between a minimal amount of brain cells could direct complex behaviors, an idea that he explored with tortoise-like bots.

He built his first iterations, Elmer and Elsie, between 1948 and 1949. At the time, new developments in electronic motors and computers made it possible to mimic animal intelligence. Elmer and Elsie had brains made of two vacuum tubes, which Walter equated to neurons. These slow-moving bots had a plastic shell and tortoise-like appearance, though their name stemmed from an Alice in Wonderland character.

Read more: “What We Misunderstand About Robots”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

They moved about with three wheels, and interacted with their surroundings based on the senses of touch and sight. The robot’s “eye,” a rotating photocell, looked around for light. Another sensor detected whether the shell had run into something, which prompted the bot to turn away. The system enabled the robo-reptiles to explore a room, and even directed them to visit a hutch to recharge their batteries. This robot “explores its environment actively, persistently, systematically as most animals do,” according to Walter.

They even had free will, Walter suggested in a 1950 issue of Scientific American, and sometimes did the unexpected; for example, the robot started “flickering, twittering, and jigging like a clumsy narcissus” in front of a mirror, he noted. “The behavior of a creature thus engaged with its own reflection is quite specific, and on a purely empirical basis, if it were observed in an animal, might be accepted as evidence of some degree of self-awareness.” Walter thought of them as the beginnings of a new species, which he called Machina speculatrix.

With his next tortoise, Walter wanted to instill memory into the device. It was known as Machina docilis, a word that translates to teachable in Latin. This model had similar inner workings, but it also included a sound detector. M. docilis could be trained to learn specific behaviors spurred by light, sounds, or bumping into objects, a process inspired by Pavlovian learning. In fact, Walter had even met Russian physiologist Ivan Pavlov during his youth.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Walter inspired future generations of scientists by blending biology and robotics, and he showed that even simple machines can behave surprisingly—an early foray into the field of artificial intelligence that today dominates our daily lives.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: UWE Bristol

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Molly Glick

Posted on February 19, 2026

Molly Glick is the newsletter editor of Nautilus.

Zoology

- The Surprising Reason Female Caribou Grow Antlers

- Bedbugs Fear Water

- Here’s Why Locusts Swarm

- How Horses Make Two Sounds at Once

- How Poop Could Save the Giraffe

- The Dark Side of the Illicit Pet Frog Trade

- A Rare Great White “Ghost” Caught in the Mediterranean

- The World Is Becoming Too Loud for Birds

- Scientists Create Map of Deadly Scorpion Hotspots

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Surprising Reason Female Caribou Grow Antlers

Shed antlers offer a valuable mineral supplement for moms

By Devin Reese    March 2, 2026

A hefty rack of antlers is a status symbol we expect from a mature male deer or elk. Because rival males lock antlers in a shoving contest over mates, the bigger the better. But female deer typically lack antlers—at most developing short, unbranched nubs—except for caribou, in which females sport modest racks. A recent study published in Ecology and Evolution uncovered a surprising behavior that may clarify why female caribou have such antlers.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Researchers analyzed caribou antlers and skeletal bones from caribou, moose, and muskox that had been collected from the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska. The area serves as an important calving ground for the “Porcupine Herd,” a group of caribou known for their long annual migrations. After female caribou walk up to 1,200 miles northward to calve, they shed their antlers, typically just a day or two after giving birth.

The study found that about 86 percent of the 1,567 shed antlers showed signs of gnawing, and that nearly all the gnawing—judging from the tooth marks—was by caribou. In contrast, only about 44 percent of skeletal bones had been gnawed, and mainly by carnivores such as foxes and wolves, with just 4 percent by rodents. Rodents leave parallel marks from their pair of enlarged front teeth, whereas carnivores leave distinct canine puncture holes.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “What the Deer Are Telling Us”

“We knew that animals gnawed on these antlers, but everyone assumed they were mostly rodents. Now we know it’s really caribou. My jaw dropped when our results started to become clear,” said study author and University of Cincinnati paleoecologist Joshua Miller in a press release.

Given the locales of the antlers on calving grounds, the researchers deduced that it was female caribou who chewed on them. While it was impossible to distinguish repeated gnawing by an individual mom from multiple moms’ toothmarks, the extent of gnawing implied that caribou routinely consumed shed antler material. The timing of antler gnawing with calving suggests that the females are using antlers—either their own or those shed by others—to supplement their diets with critical minerals.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

During their pregnancy migrations, female caribou likely become depleted in key minerals, like calcium and phosphorus, yet must be prepared to nurse their young and fortify themselves for the winter to come. By shedding their antlers at the calving sites, females ensure a future supply of essential minerals.

“They’re engineering this habitat, seeding the landscape with these super-important minerals that can be quite hard for animals to get enough of,” explained the lead study author, doctoral graduate Madison Gaetano, adding that “caribou bring literally tons of phosphorus to their calving grounds every year.”

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: David Turko / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on March 2, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Bedbugs Fear Water

Because their ancestors evolved in dry places

By Devin Reese    February 27, 2026

If you’ve ever crossed paths with bedbugs, you know what a scourge they can be. Several pesticide treatments later, and these tiny parasites may still be lurking in your mattress. Because they’re obligatory blood feeders, it’s tough to convince them to leave a good (human) meal behind. But a study in the Journal of Ethology offered a new approach to consider for purging bedbugs.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

University of California, Riverside entomologists introduced bedbugs (Cimex lectularius) to the lid of a tissue culture dish, about 4 inches in diameter, with a filter paper floor. Half the floor was wet, and the other half was dry. The liquid proved repellent to the bedbugs—the majority (nearly 90 percent) turned away before stepping on the wet part of the filter paper. Indeed, they fled from the moisture, increasing their outbound speed by about 40 percent relative to incoming speed. In control conditions with the entire arena dry, no such behavior was apparent.

“Due to its strong adhesive power, water could be very dangerous from a bedbug’s perspective. So, it’s not surprising to learn that they’re extremely averse to moisture,” explained study co-author Dong-Hwan Choe in a press release.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “When Plants Go to War”

Because bedbugs evolved from ancestors that parasitized animals like birds and bats that nested up high, C. lectularius may never have adapted to withstand flooding, according to the researchers. And other studies have found that bedbug babies die if conditions are too humid. So, their ancestry may have limited bedbug tolerance for wet places.

Little sensory organs on bedbug antennae may serve as moisture detectors, allowing them to take evasive action before getting wet. Their “negative hydrotaxis” behavior showed up as far as 0.6 inches before the wet zone, with nymphs turning away sooner than adult bedbugs. The greater reaction of nymphs may derive from their thinner, less hardened exoskeletons, making them more sensitive to water, according to the paper.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

As for how to apply these new findings to keeping bedbugs out of your life, “take a bath. It’ll solve the problem,” added Chloe. “Of course, the bedbugs in the room or on the bed will require different approaches.”

These findings are just one more tool in the arsenal for the war on bedbugs—a war that’s seemingly best waged with water.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Pavel Krasensky / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on February 27, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Here’s Why Locusts Swarm

The insects undergo a Jekyll-and-Hyde transformation

By Jake Currie    February 27, 2026

Locusts have plagued humans since antiquity, erupting into swarms so devastating that they serve as stand-ins for divine wrath. Sometimes containing tens of millions of voracious insects, these swarms can blot out the skies, decimate crops, and cause famines. In fact, just this week, massive clouds of desert locusts battered cars crossing the Sahara and descended on tourists in the Canary Islands. But what causes them to start swarming in the first place?

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Drivers crossing the Sahara encountered massive swarms of locusts slamming into their cars.“We went through a few intense locust swarms and happened to catch the worst one on my camera,” said Salah Abdelhadi, who filmed the video.

— The Washington Post (@washingtonpost.com) 2026-02-26T22:00:47.807940204Z

Living their lives as loners in their solitary phase, desert locusts typically take care to avoid each other. But when conditions crowd them in close proximity they enter their gregarious phase. While this charming designation conjures up images of grasshoppers mixing at a cocktail party, the reality is much more dramatic. They literally transform: Their bodies become shorter, they change color, and they start releasing a pheromone that causes them to be attracted to one another. And suddenly, they become a swarm.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The desert locust’s Jekyll-and-Hyde routine is triggered by a number of factors. Scientists have found seeing other locusts isn’t enough to provoke it, smelling them isn’t enough either, but both stimuli together can, as can repeated bumps to the hind legs. In the locust brain, these stimuli cause a spike in serotonin, the same neurotransmitter responsible for feelings of happiness in humans, causing them to seek out their winged brethren for an insect bacchanal.

Read more: “How Darkness Can Illuminate the Insect Apocalypse”

This striking transformation can even pass to their offspring, with locusts in the gregarious phase needing one or more generations to settle into their solitary phase again when reared in isolation. That means locust swarms that start breeding can transform from a nuisance into a devastating force of nature. According to the United Nations, a swarm covering less than half a square mile can consume what 35,000 people eat in a day.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

What can we do to stop swarming behavior?

Not much. Extreme swings in weather, like heavy rains followed by droughts, cause the population booms and crowding that trigger swarms—a scenario made more likely by climate change. The U.N.’s Desert Locust Information Service monitors emerging swarms and helps coordinate a response, but that often involves spraying harmful organophosphate insecticides. There are safer alternatives, like fungal spores, but with a short shelf-life and high sticker price, they’re not as commonly used.

Instead we’re left to do what humans throughout antiquity have done. Watch the skies—and pray.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: Ismael Khalifa / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 27, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Horses Make Two Sounds at Once

And what that says about their prowess as communicators

By Devin Reese    February 26, 2026

We’ve all heard a dramatic horse whinny in an exciting scene in a movie, or in Bridgerton if that’s your thing. These whinnies include both low throaty notes and higher-pitched sounds. A study published earlier this week in Current Biology explored the vocal mechanics behind these complex horse whinnies. They found that a single whinny can include simultaneous low and high sounds, suggesting that horses have a richer spectrum of calls than other mammals.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The low sounds in horse whinnies are at a frequency of about 200 Hz, like this tone, while the high sounds are in the bird-song range, exceeding 1,000 Hz like this tone. The low sounds have been readily attributed to vibrations of vocal tissue in the larynx, akin to how human speech is produced. Folded vocal cords in both humans and horses vibrate when air passes through them. But the more inscrutable high sounds in whinnies were unexplained until now.

Researchers from Denmark, France, Switzerland, and Austria used both live horses and larynxes removed from dead horses to analyze their acoustics. “Solving this biomechanical puzzle required combining approaches from veterinary medicine to acoustic physics,” explained lead study author and behavioral ecologist Romain Lefèvre, then a Ph.D. student at the University of Copenhagen in a press release.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “I Know How the Caged Bird Jams”

By blowing helium, which facilitates a higher speed of sound than air, through the excised larynxes, the researchers demonstrated the distinction between the two overlapping sounds of a whinny. The mysterious high sounds in whinnies proved to be laryngeal whistles. Known from some rodents, these whistles are produced from turbulent airstreams moving through the larynx. Horses are the first large mammal found to make such sounds, and the only animal known to do so while also also producing sounds from vocal fold vibrations.

When helium passed through the larynx, the pitch of the whistle went up, while the vocal cord vibration sound stayed the same. “The frequency shift was immediately obvious, and we knew we’d solved the mystery,” said study author and cognitive scientist William Tecumseh Fitch of the University of Vienna. “We were thrilled!”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The study authors hypothesize that the complex horse whinny, consisting of overlapping sounds, likely evolved for simultaneous communication of multiple messages. What those messages consist of remains to be determined. Przewalski’s horses, close cousins of domestic horses, also make high whistling sounds, while the more distantly related donkeys and zebras do not.

“We now finally know how the two fundamental frequencies that make up a whinny are produced by horses,” said study author Elodie Briefer of the University of Copenhagen. “In the past, we found that these two frequencies are important for horses, as they convey different messages about the horses’ own emotions. We now have compelling evidence that they are also produced through distinct mechanisms.”

Finally, we’re a step closer to understanding the message coming straight from the horse’s mouth.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Enjoying Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead photo by Elodie Briefer

Devin Reese

Posted on February 26, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

How Poop Could Save the Giraffe

Their tiny scats are research and conservation gold

By Elena Kazamia    February 26, 2026

It kind of looks like a Hershey’s kiss,” says Jenna Stacy-Dawes.

She is talking about giraffe poop. The scat are surprisingly small for an animal that can grow to the height of two stacked basketball hoops in adulthood. The best samples are at the top of the pile, she tells the team of researchers assembled before her in a field camp in Kenya. That preserves the outermost layer, the part that rubs against the animal’s intestines.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Stacy-Dawes is teaching the researchers about a radical new method of tracking vulnerable giraffe. We know surprisingly little about giraffes, Stacy-Dawes tells me later, and these tiny scats can reveal a lot. “What can we get from poop data? Everything,” she says. What food they’re eating, their habitat preferences, what species they belong to, and perhaps, eventually, what subspecies. This would be especially useful information, as some giraffe subspecies are critically endangered.

“Giraffe just haven’t been studied,” says Stacy-Dawes, an expert on population sustainability of wild animals based at the San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (SDZWA). “There is a weird perception of like, ‘well, I see them everywhere’—in documentaries, zoos, or on safari—’so they must be good.’ Unfortunately, that’s not the case. There’s only one giraffe for every four elephants in Africa.” Little is known about the basic biology, behavior, and diet of the giraffe, she says.

SCAT SEEKING: Field ecology coordinator Moses Okombo examines giraffe poop at Loisaba Conservancy in Laikipia County, Kenya. Photo courtesy of San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Traditional methods of tracking these long-necked creatures over long distances are complicated, expensive, and even dangerous. They involve fitting individual giraffe with trackers, which are usually snapped around the animal’s tail. The trackers can give precise geolocation information over a period of months and sometimes years. But this requires immobilizing the large animals using tranquilizers. Collecting and analyzing scat is a much cheaper, more efficient, and more humane way of keeping track of their movements.

“Giraffe react really poorly to the drugs that are used to bring them down. [Veterinarians] are not sure why,” Stacy-Dawes says. After they are dosed with the drugs, “the giraffe just run. They take off in a full-blown sprint and get this stargazing look in their eyes. They’re not really paying attention to where they’re going” Stacy-Dawes says. The result is dangerous for both animals and the field team, who bring the drugged giraffe down to the ground using ropes.

“Fitting giraffes with trackers is very, very complicated,” agrees Mrinalini Erkenswick Watsa, a colleague of Stacy-Dawes from SDZWA. “Whereas, you literally can’t walk more than 10 feet in the savanna without stumbling over giraffe fecal material. It’s ubiquitous, and it’s easier on the animal. It’s also considerably cheaper for us.”

Erkenswick Watsa is a geneticist developing the molecular toolkit for analyzing the fecal samples. Mostly, the work involves adapting existing technology to the newly reclassified four species of giraffe, but Erkenswick Watsa also has an eye on making it practical to use a genetic kit directly in the field. “I would ideally want to see us going toward something like a COVID test,” Erkenswick Watsa says, “which can be run overnight by a vet with minimal lab training.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“What can we get from poop data? Everything.”

Giraffe can travel over thousands of kilometers, but some choose to stay local, while others aggregate in groups of hundreds of individuals, Stacy-Dawes says. So-called “fission-fusion” groups have been observed, where individuals that are unrelated choose to herd together, sometimes an adult and a juvenile that are not related. “There’s so much about social structure we just don’t know. Do we see bulls sticking around? How frequent are fission-fusion groups? We have no idea,” says Stacy-Dawes.

The reclassification of giraffe is recent, officially announced by the IUCN in August of 2025, regrouping what was once considered one species into a distinct four: the Masai, reticulated, Southern, and Northern giraffe species, splintered further into a total of seven subspecies. (Scientists including Stacy-Dawes have been working with this classification for a few years prior to IUCN’s formal announcement.) But even experts cannot tell them apart visually. “Coat pattern or what they call ‘pelage,’ is not a good tool to tell the different flavors of giraffe,” says Julian Fennesssy, director of the Giraffe Conservation Foundation. Stacy-Dawes says that the similarities in appearance conceal species that are as different as “a polar bear is to a grizzly bear.”

“Over the last 300 years giraffe range has reduced by 90 percent across Africa,” says Fennessy, a number that matches what the Giraffe Conservation Foundation estimates was lost in terms of giraffe population. “They lost most of their habitat due to human population growth, associated agriculture, [landscape] fragmentation, and so on. Humans doing what they do,” says Fennessy.

Read more: “The Giraffe Neck Evolved for Sexual Combat”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Presently, the four species are facing different levels of threat. “The conservation status on the Red List is outdated because [giraffe] were assessed as one species,” says Fennessy. “Now that they have been recognized as four species the IUCN will go through the reassessment for each of those four species, but definitely some of them we know are critically endangered, some are endangered, and some are likely to be listed as ‘least concern,’ like the Southern African giraffe,” Fennessy says.

Where there is famine, civil war, or both, giraffe are consumed as food. “It’s often termed ‘war fodder,’” Fennessy says. “Because if [militants] are taking out ivory or horns, and they are getting funding from it, well, they are not eating those animals. They prefer to eat giraffe, they are calling it a sweet meat,” Fennessy says. “One bullet brings a hell of a lot of food for people. They were used to feed armies.”

In other countries, like South Africa, giraffe populations have been actively managed for conservation, with individuals translocated either to bolster populations in national parks, or rescued from conflict areas. Some of the historical translocations were done without recognizing the differences in species, Stacy-Dawes says. This means that some animals are living in territory that is unfamiliar to them.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“Over the last 300 years, giraffe range has reduced by 90 percent across Africa.”

“Fecal tests [which confirm species ID through genetics] allow us to say: No, we shouldn’t translocate this individual to that part of the country because it would not be found there originally,” says Stacy-Dawes. The Giraffe Conservation Foundation has plans to reverse some of the translocations that moved animals to the wrong habitat.

In 2019, together with Fennessy and colleagues from Germany, the United States, Zambia, and Namibia, Stacy-Dawes published research that updated the geographic range maps for the four giraffe species across sub-Saharan Africa. The study, which updated the record by a few decades, according to Stacy-Dawes, was based mostly on aerial and some ground observations of giraffe, including tagged individuals. Stacy-Dawes believes this dataset can benefit from further datapoints and more precise species identification.

“There’s parts of Southern Ethiopia or Western Somalia where there could be giraffe, but people just don’t go there. And even in places where we can go, it is expensive to collect ground data.” Fecal studies can complement, and in some instances replace, direct observation and handling of the animals, Stacy-Dawes says.

After their training, the field research team set out in search of giraffe. They returned late in the evening, looking exhausted but content. Over the course of 12 hours they had managed to track down 24 animals, stalking each one until it relieved itself of a fresh sample of scat. Feces were matched to individuals, who were carefully photographed and identified in the field. Knowing the sex and estimated age of the giraffe, will help make sense of the genetics. Dusty and sunbeaten, the team recalled prospectors who had spent a successful day in search of rare minerals.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“Poop is gold,” Erkenswick Watsa says. “It’s the most precious thing we can get.”

Lead image: EcoPrint / Shutterstock

Elena Kazamia

Posted on February 26, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The Dark Side of the Illicit Pet Frog Trade

Where’d you get that frog?

By Kristen French    February 19, 2026

For Sale: red eye tree frog,” squawks one ad on faunaclassifieds.com, a long-standing exotic pet trade website in the United States. A diminutive neon frog with red toes and bulging eyes peers out of a handful of photos that accompany the listing. He will soon be packed into a container and shipped off to his new owner by mail. “We have been shipping animals for twenty years,” the ad claims.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

The tiny charismatic frog is just one of thousands. Not long ago, herpetologist and lifelong frog collector Devin Edmonds spent hours with colleagues scouring nearly 8,500 listings such as these on the site, meticulously identifying the 301 species in the photographs and recording their price, date, and location. Then they compared the data they had collected against records in an official U.S. Fish and Wildlife enforcement database.

Some 44 species traded online had no official paperwork and were sold at steep premiums, with prices of up to $1,400. Another 30 species showed up in online ads much more often than official records predicted. Many of the frogs were native to countries that have had trade bans in place for 50 years, such as Brazil.

The picture that emerged suggests a number of the animals in the ads are traded illegally—either smuggled to other countries with looser restrictions before they’re imported to the U.S., or smuggled to the U.S. and then bred in captivity. The volume of captive-bred illicit trade suggested by the data surprised the team of researchers.

I spoke with Edmonds about why total trade bans often backfire, why keeping frogs as pets is actually good for conservation, his own poison dart frog collection, and what officials can do to make the pet trade safer for rare frogs—so many of which are endangered due to fungal disease, climate change, invasive species, and habitat loss.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Why are amphibians so vulnerable to the illegal wildlife trade?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I don’t think that they’re more vulnerable than other exotic animals, but they’re underappreciated. If you see a pet frog at a pet store, nobody really thinks about where it comes from, but if you see a lemur, you’d be like, “How the hell did that get there?”

Why do total trade bans often backfire?

A few reasons. One, they’re impossible to enforce. What we noticed in some of the data was that there were species from some of these countries, like Brazil, for example, where endemic species offered for sale as captive-bred animals in the U.S. had no import record and may have been imported at the genus level.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

In other words, despite a trade ban, some frogs from Brazil have somehow made it to the U.S. In some cases, maybe they’re being smuggled from Brazil to Suriname, and then a legal shipment from Suriname goes out. Or Europeans might smuggle them in their luggage back to Europe and then import them as captive-bred from Europe. But the trade bans don’t usually work because when there’s still profit to be had, it can push the trade further underground so that you can’t monitor or regulate it. People just start carrying frogs back in their suitcases or smuggling them in boxes of tropical fish for the aquarium trade.

What are the main risks to amphibian conservation from this trade?

Introducing invasive species and spreading diseases. There’s also some possibility of over-collection for certain species. If you take too many out of the wild, that hurts the wild populations.

What role does the trade play in the spread of diseases?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

There are a few different diseases that are really concerning and are causing these population declines for amphibians. When you keep amphibians, you might not really be aware of where the waste goes, so you might just dump the terrarium. Let’s say you have a newt at a big facility with thousands of other animals from all over the world, and diseases are transferred between them, and then that newt ends up in a pet store, and you bring it home to your terrarium. When it dies, maybe you throw the soil from your terrarium out in the backyard, and that spreads the disease to your wild amphibian populations. People also just release pets, too. Maybe you really care about the newt you brought home and you don’t want it to die, but you have to move to a new place and they don’t let you have aquariums, so you dump it in a pond next door.

Most people don’t do that. But when you have hundreds of thousands of animals being traded, all it takes is a few people.

Are there any specific examples where invasive species spread was caused by the illegal trade in amphibians?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Honestly, the biggest one is from the food trade, not the pet trade. The study I did focused on the pet trade mostly, but one of the things we found looking at the import records was that there’s tens of millions of live bullfrogs imported from these farms in Asia for the food trade. Bullfrogs are really invasive out in California. They’re a huge mess, causing all kinds of problems for native wildlife.

You reported that the food trade actually exceeded the pet trade in amphibians.

I’d heard this before, but I hadn’t looked at the numbers. But yes, it’s mainly American bullfrogs that are sold into the food trade. That completely dwarfs the trade in pet frogs. I filtered out the aquarium trade, because some frogs you see at the fish store. There are different communities of people who are keeping a tree frog versus people who want to stick a frog in their aquarium. In the aquarium trade, there are a couple of species that are traded in pretty large numbers, too. Those are mostly being farmed in fish farms in Southeast Asia.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “The Secret Superpowers of Frog Skin”

Did any of the species in the top 20 advertised and trafficked surprise you?

The top two imported species for pets were white tree frogs and red eye tree frogs. Nearly 400,000 of these frogs were imported over the time period we studied: red eye tree frogs, mainly from Nicaragua, and white tree frogs, from Indonesia. These frogs are easy to breed in captivity, so people are breeding them, too. But all these wild-sourced frogs are still being imported as well. Some people argue that if you breed a species in captivity, that reduces the demand for the wild animals. That would be nice. But for these two species, that isn’t the case. The numbers were just astounding.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Has that played out with other species—that breeding them in captivity diminishes the wild trade?

I’m not sure if that’s played out. You hear people who keep reptiles and amphibians say this all the time, but I don’t buy it. From what I’m seeing, the market does what it does, and if cheap wild frogs are available, people will buy them. Maybe part of the issue is that imports of all these wild harvested amphibians for pets keeps the prices down. If a kid goes to a pet store and there’s a cool tree frog they want to buy, they don’t think about where it came from. That was one of the takeaways: A lot of frogs in the pet trade actually are bred in captivity.

What are the dangers of captive breeding?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

If there are a lot of amphibians being traded within the U.S., and that trade isn’t being done responsibly, with disease screening, that could be dangerous. The people at the agencies responsible for regulating the trade might want to interact more with the people who are breeding frogs domestically to make sure they’re aware of risks and are working together to make this trade sustainable.

You recommended that regulators work with the hobbyist community to support large captive-breeding operations that reinvest in conservation. Can you tell me more about what that would look like?

Awareness campaigns would help. They could partner with influencers to make people aware of where a species is coming from and how threatened it is. But they could also work with sustainable bio-commerce operations in Colombia and Ecuador, which are breeding high-end amphibians in captivity for the pet trade and reinvesting funds from that back into conservation and habitat protections for those same species. There are models that work well and could be promoted.

How did you get started breeding frogs?

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

I grew up in a city, so I grew up seeing frogs and aquariums at pet stores. I got my first aquarium when I was five or six years old, and I turned it into a frog terrarium in grade school. That’s where my interest started. It’s been a wonderful way to connect to the natural world. I don’t think I would’ve done that any other way.

Twenty years ago, when I was an undergrad, I started traveling around the world to see these animals I was keeping in captivity and that shifted things. I stopped keeping captive frogs, and I got a camera and started taking pictures of them in the wild instead, which led to the career I have today. But that wouldn’t have happened without the pet trade. So there are a lot of benefits to the trade. And you hear this story throughout the conservation community and academia.

People’s initial interest these days doesn’t develop out in nature, but where we live, which is unfortunately disconnected from nature.

What kinds of amphibians did you keep as a kid?

I got really interested in poison dart frogs for a while. As a teenager, I met a lady in town who was breeding poison dark frogs as a hobby. She was really into exotic plants, too. I’d take care of her frogs, and she’d give me tadpoles and I’d raise the bulls and keep them. Then I started traveling to Peru and Costa Rica to see these frogs I was keeping in captivity. I was like, “Oh wow, these aren’t just a commodity. These are wild animals.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

So I started doing more field work. I still have frogs at home now, mostly poison dart frogs, just for fun. These frogs are many generations removed from the wild captive animals.

What do you make of the news that Russia may have used dart frog toxins to poison Alexei Navalny?

I heard that on the news the other morning. I don’t know how the poison is extracted or if it can be synthesized. My guess is it could possibly be created in a lab since it seems kind of crazy that assassins went to Ecuador to collect wild frogs to make a poison to kill somebody when there are so many other ways to do it—I assume. The poison that was used mainly occurs in Epipedobates tricolor and some Ameerega. The E. tricolor is a threatened species.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Sometimes scientific findings about rare species of frogs can lead to increased trade in those frogs. How can scientists balance the publication of new findings against conservation priorities?

I think that’s worth considering. There definitely have been examples where new species get described or some new really attractive variant—likesome new color of a species—is found on an expedition, and then people in the trades see it and somebody realizes there’s demand for it and they smuggle it out. That might be even more common in the gecko world. iNaturalist (a community science platform where naturalists can post species observations and photographs) obscures coordinates for rare species, but it’s something to be aware of. As a scientist, if you think a species might be at risk of over harvesting and poaching, or might be attractive to the pet trade, you could obscure the coordinates where it was found.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Kurit afshen / Shutterstock

Kristen French

Posted on February 19, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

A Rare Great White “Ghost” Caught in the Mediterranean

It’s good news for a vulnerable species on the decline

By Devin Reese    February 18, 2026

On April 20, 2023, a juvenile great white shark measuring about 83 inches long and weighing about 187 pounds was caught off the coast of Spain. It made a splash in the news since great white sharks (Carcharodon carcharias), which were common in the Mediterranean during the Pleistocene, are scarce there today.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

This unusual encounter prompted researchers from the Spanish Institute of Oceanography, in collaboration with the University of Cádiz, to explore great white shark records from 1862 to 2023. Most were direct encounters with sharks, but a handful consisted of interpretations of bite marks on stranded marine animal carcasses. The review study, recently published in Acta Ichthyologica et Piscatoria, showed a minimal but continued presence of great white sharks in Spanish coastal waters.

Swimmers in the area may balk at the news, but researchers are excited, given the important role of great white sharks in their ecosystems. “As highly migratory pelagic species, they redistribute energy and nutrients across vast distances,” said lead study author and Spanish Institute of Oceanography biologist José Carlos Báez in a statement. “Even in death, their descent to the seafloor provides a critical pulse of nourishment for deep-sea communities.”

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “Lessons for the Return of Great White Sharks”

Great white shark populations are categorized as vulnerable and declining on the IUCN Red List. The main threats to their survival are bycatches in long lines, gillnets, trawls, and other inshore fishing equipment. Case in point: The recently captured shark was caught by local fishermen targeting bluefin tuna in an area with deep canyons about 11 nautical miles off the coast of Spain’s eastern peninsula, Cabo de San Antonio.

According to the review, it was one of 62 great white shark sightings noted during the 160 years of record-keeping. The other most recent one was in 2018 during a scientific expedition. The study authors conclude that, while Mediterranean great white sharks comprise an elusive “ghost” population, they still do maintain a presence in these waters. Indeed, “the occurrence of juvenile specimens raises the question whether active reproduction may be occurring in the region,” said Báez.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

It’s also possible that the young shark was born elsewhere in known central Mediterranean breeding spots, after which it migrated to Spain. Regardless, it’s a rare example of a heartwarming marine ghost story.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

Lead image: Balazs Fodor / Ocean Image Bank

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Devin Reese

Posted on February 18, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

The World Is Becoming Too Loud for Birds

Some sound baffling could give birds the reprieve they need from our noise pollution

By Devin Reese    February 17, 2026

Birds are great talkers and listeners, using vocalizations to communicate within their species. Whether for wooing mates, warning of predators, or chatting with offspring, birds excel at using their voices and ears to share meaningful information. All of which means they’re particularly vulnerable to noise disturbances.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Individual studies have documented the impacts of human noise on bird behavior and fitness, but now, a review study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B paints a comprehensive picture of how noise pollution affects birds around the world. Researchers from the University of Michigan and California Polytechnic State University reviewed data from more than 150 studies encompassing six continents and 160 bird species. “Based on our assessment of this meta-analysis, we were able to generate a broader statement about trends we’re seeing,” said lead study author and conservation biologist Natalie Madden in a statement.

From published studies that explicitly tested the effects of anthropogenic noise on birds, Madden and her coauthors tallied changes in behaviors like aggression, foraging, communications, risk-taking, and habitat use. Fitness-related parameters, including growth, physiology, and reproduction, were also considered where available in the studies.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Read more: “Birds of a Feather Talk Together”

Overall, the literature review showed that human-generated noise—whether from traffic, construction, or other activities—had significant effects on birds’ behavior and physiology. A bird species’ life history made a difference in how they responded to unnatural ambient noise. Cavity-nesting birds, for example, experienced negative impacts on growth compared to birds using open nests. City birds exhibited higher stress hormone levels than birds living in more tranquil habitats. And nearly every type of anthropogenic noise had a dampening effect on reproductive success.

The researchers assert that knowing the deleterious effects of human noise on birds should inspire us to buffer them from our noise pollution.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“So many of the things we’re facing with biodiversity loss just feel inexorable and massive in scale, but we know how to use different materials and how to put things up in different ways to block sound,” added Carter. “We just have to get enough awareness and interest in doing it.”

It would certainly give birds some peace and literal quiet.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Chekalin Nikolai / Shutterstock

Devin Reese

Posted on February 17, 2026

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

ZOOLOGY | VIEW ON WEBSITE

Scientists Create Map of Deadly Scorpion Hotspots

“The findings could save lives”

By Jake Currie    February 17, 2026

Scorpion stings can cause searing pain, grievous bodily harm, and potentially even death, with scorpion-linked fatalities numbering in the thousands each year. While antivenoms can treat these stings, they’re often tailored to specific species, and it’s not always immediately clear which one is the culprit.

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Being able to predict where scorpion species might be lurking—before they end up in an unlucky individual’s shoe—could help prevent many of the nearly 2 million stings each year. Which is just what an international team of scientists led by Michel Dugon of the University of Galway in Ireland recently set out to do.

The team chose to study Morocco, due to its rich diversity of scorpion species and habitats. To discover potential deadly scorpion hotspots, they combined field observations with computer modeling, taking into account a range of variables related to temperature, precipitation, elevation, vegetation, and more. They published their findings last week in Environmental Research Communications.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

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

Somewhat surprisingly, they found soil type played the biggest role in where 74 percent of the species lived, with the remaining species’ ranges determined primarily by temperature. Importantly, not all scorpions were as adaptable as others. H. gentili, a generalist, showed the most widespread distribution, covering 62 percent of the study area. Meanwhile, four other scorpion species were restricted to areas covering less than 1 percent of the same area—much narrower ecological niches.

The team hopes these new findings will lead to a better public-health response to scorpion stings worldwide.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

“The findings could save lives,” Dugon said in a statement. “By pinpointing where dangerous scorpions are most likely to appear, health authorities can target awareness campaigns, train frontline medical staff, and focus community prevention in high-risk areas, especially protecting children. The approach can be applied wherever scorpions pose a threat, from Brazil to the Middle East and India.”

Until then, don’t forget to check your shoes.

Enjoying  Nautilus? Subscribe to our free newsletter.

ADVERTISEMENT

Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .

Lead image: Lamyai / Shutterstock

Jake Currie

Posted on February 17, 2026

Jake Currie is a writer based in Brooklyn, NY.

Table of Contents

Nautilus: 2026 Mar 2

Anthropology

Mass Grave of Women and Children Shows Brutality of Iron Age Culture

Astronomy

Astronomers Capture Largest Image of Milky Way Ever

The Birth of Light

Imaging the Most Far-Out Jellyfish Galaxy Ever Observed

Researchers Map Uranus’ Atmosphere in Stunning Detail

Fiery Crash of SpaceX Rocket Causes Huge Lithium Plume

Why This Region of Space Appears to Be Populated by Snowmen

Did Astronomers Finally Witness a Black Hole Eat a White Dwarf for the First Time?

Environment

The Ancient Cold Snaps That May Have Shaped Human Evolution

Is a Strictly Enforced Fishing Ban Saving the Yangtze?

The Long, Dirty History of Our Capitol’s Waters

Evolution

Mosquitoes Developed a Taste for Human Blood Before We Existed

Chins: The Evolutionary Accident Unique to Homo Sapiens

Genetics

What Do You Get When You Cross a Tardigrade with a Space Pioneer?

New Gene Discovery Could Postpone the Bananapocalypse

Geoscience

The Farmer Who Glimpsed a Rare Volcanic Birth

The 3-D Secrets of the “Gravity Hole” Under Antarctica

Health

Do These Centenarians Hold the Key to Long Life in Their Blood?

The Surprising Benefits of Yo-Yo Dieting

Your Muscles Retain Memories of Strength and Weakness

Night Owls Could Be Putting Their Heart Health at Risk

New Blood Test Could Predict When Alzheimer’s Symptoms Will Present

The Cancer No One Can Explain

An Unlikely Culprit Causes Lower Blood Sugar at Higher Altitudes

Babies Are Exposed to More Forever Chemicals in Utero Than Previously Thought

History

The Thrill of Science in 2042

How Energy Politics Played Out on the White House Roof

The Missing Pieces of the Donner Party Narrative

Space Age Technology Reveals Secrets of Bronze Age Sword

The Retiree Who Inspired the Wright Brothers to Take Flight

The Mountain Man Who Measured the Sky’s Brilliance

Neuroscience

Early Exposure to Junk Food Has Brain-Altering Effects

The Brain Science Behind the Munchies

New Theory of Learning Upends the Lessons of Pavlov’s Dog

Paleontology

How the Triceratops Used Its Giant Nose

Paleontologists Solve a Prehistoric Murder Mystery

“Hell Heron”: New Dinosaur Species with a Head-mounted Sword Discovered in Africa

Newly Discovered Prehistoric Crocodilian Had Legs That Went All the Way Up

Philosophy

Doing Science and Philosophy On Drugs

Physics

Physicists Crack the Question of Why Basketball Shoes Squeak

Psychology

Why You’re More Likely to Develop AI-Psychosis than to Join a Cult

Blame Your Parents for Your Extreme Aversion to Snakes

What Grief Has to Do with Love Addiction

Home Really Is Where the Heart Is

Grinning During Sex Isn’t Contagious, But It Does Require Tempo

Can Zapping Our Brains Make Us Less Selfish?

Sociology

The Vibes Have Been Off in the US for Decades

Does Belief in God, not Political Party, Drive Conservatism?

Technology

How Human Is Human?

The Tortoises That Inspired Modern Robotics

Zoology

The Surprising Reason Female Caribou Grow Antlers

Bedbugs Fear Water

Here’s Why Locusts Swarm

How Horses Make Two Sounds at Once

How Poop Could Save the Giraffe

The Dark Side of the Illicit Pet Frog Trade

A Rare Great White “Ghost” Caught in the Mediterranean

The World Is Becoming Too Loud for Birds

Scientists Create Map of Deadly Scorpion Hotspots