More than a decade ago, a team of scientists decided they wanted to shoot neutrinos from Fermilab outside Chicago to a target buried in an abandoned gold mine 810 miles away. It was a big idea, one that promised to finally answer decades-old question

When Summer Praetorius, author of this issue’s cover story, shared this photo of her brother, Jebsen, with me, I was enchanted beyond belief. It’s like a Norman Rockwell painting, I told her. It conjures up the boy’s entire world. “It’s one of my fav

When I first heard it, it sounded like a brief, blustery outtake. A momentary lull in an outdoor event captured by an old camcorder. A sonic slice of a windy afternoon anywhere on Earth. The sound was indeed wind whipping past a microphone. But wind

In 1879, the German botanist Anton de Bary coined the term symbiosis. People usually think of symbiosis in terms of mutually beneficial relationships, but scientifically it’s a catch-all for any relationship—harmonious or antagonistic, parasitic or n

One question for Jon Rueda, a Ph.D. candidate and La Caixa INPhINIT Fellow at the University of Granada, where he studies the intersection between bioethics, ethics of emerging technologies, and philosophy of biomedical innovations. Can AI help us be

For most of the year, Iceberg Alley is gray and cold. The largest city on its shores, St. John’s, is known as “Canada’s Weather Champion.” Among major Canadian cities, the capital of Newfoundland and Labrador is the snowiest, windiest, wettest, and c

George Church looks like he needs a nap. I’m talking to him on Zoom, and his eyelids have grown heavy, inclining toward slumber. Or maybe my mind is playing tricks on me. He assures me he is wide awake. But sleeping and waking life are often blurred

Silence. Eerie, unnerving silence. Despite all our work, all our straining efforts to hear a whisper from the void, that’s all we have. Silence. More than 60 years ago, the pioneering radio astronomer Frank Drake and his colleagues laid the groundwor

When Gertrude Stein famously quipped that “we are always the same age inside,” she certainly wasn’t referring to the conglomerate of cells, carefully organized into tissues, that form a human body. We all understand that despite our best efforts to p

One question for Thomas Nicholas, a computational plasma physicist and former fusion researcher who now studies climate science at Columbia University. He was the lead author of the 2021 paper, “Re-examining the role of nuclear fusion in a renewables

A mother gives her baby her all: love, hugs, kisses … and a sturdy army of bacteria. These simple cells, which journey from mother to baby at birth and in the months of intimate contact that follow, form the first seeds of the child’s microbiome—the

Local Honduran fishers mostly avoid fishing in Tela Bay on the country’s Caribbean coastline. Nonetheless, they have a name for the shapes and forms on the seafloor that waft in and out of view with the shifting glint of the sun. They call them “roca

Computers and information technologies were once hailed as a revolution in education. Their benefits are undeniable. They can provide students with far more information than a mere textbook. They can make educational resources more flexible, tailored

One question for Paul Sutter, author of “The Remarkable Emptiness of Existence,” an article in Nautilus this month. Sutter is a theoretical cosmologist at the Institute for Advanced Computational Science at Stony Brook University, where he studies co

I’m a pediatrician and recently saw a patient whose parent very much wanted a certain test, even after I tried to explain why the test wasn’t helpful or necessary. She wasn’t persuaded, and rather than look obstinate or finicky, I ordered it. In my s

As the new coronavirus began seeping through national borders three years ago, government responses varied wildly. Some issued travel bans. Others ordered complete lockdowns. Some suggested residents keep to themselves and wear masks when they couldn

Scuttling through the brush in the dark of a Dominican Republic night, a rare Hispaniolan solenodon comes into view in the sudden beam of a flashlight. This small animal has an exaggerated shrewlike snout and is one of the few venomous mammals on Ear

Along Canada’s rugged Pacific coastline, late fall is a subdued season. A steady patter of rain falls on ferns as grizzly bears, bellies full of salmon, den down for winter. As the days grow short, the dense temperate rainforest sinks into a foggy wi

One question for Joseph Silk, an astrophysicist at Johns Hopkins University and the author of Back to the Moon: The Next Giant Leap for Humankind. Should people live on the moon? Why not? We have to start somewhere if we ever want to leave Earth. And

In the 1958 science fiction movie The Blob, an amorphous alien hitchhiked a ride to Earth on a meteorite. Upon landing, the translucent extraterrestrial began to devour humans, growing larger and redder with each meal. While the amoeba-like alien in

A mouse is running on a treadmill embedded in a virtual reality corridor. In its mind’s eye, it sees itself scurrying down a tunnel with a distinctive pattern of lights ahead. Through training, the mouse has learned that if it stops at the lights and

In 1654 a German scientist and politician named Otto von Guericke was supposed to be busy being the mayor of Magdeburg. But instead he was putting on a demonstration for lords of the Holy Roman Empire. With his newfangled invention, a vacuum pump, he

One question for J.D. Haltigan, an assistant professor of child and youth mental health in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Toronto, where he conducts interdisciplinary research informed by a life history, evolutionary perspective. H

We just love opening the Nautilus hatch to readers, welcoming you to join us as we travel the byways of scientific discovery. When we look back at the stories we’ve told this year, we’re thrilled at the range of their insights. The stories venture fr

This year has been a huge one for astronomy. This spring, a haunting picture of the black hole and the center of our galaxy emerged for public viewing. The world marveled over stunning inaugural images released this summer from the long-overdue James