nautil.us - Profile | ThreadSky | a Reddit-style client for Bluesky

Along the bayous of Louisiana, five Native American settlements are clinging to disappearing earth, slipping away into the Gulf of Mexico.

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Killing 1.6 trillion wild fish every year—the estimated toll of global fisheries—might also have subtle, long-term consequences on the animals’ minds and bodies. Over many generations, it could even influence fish evolution. 🧪

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Optical advances have yielded an unprecedented look at the rapid, fine, and turbulent corona dancing around our nearest star in incredible detail. 🧪

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The world's largest herring population used to migrate from northern Norway to the southwest coast to spawn. But a few years ago, they stopped partway and have stayed there since. The cause may be older, wiser fish being harvested. 🧪

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Early explorers felt the powerful pull of the poles. Humanity's journey to understand magnetism spans millennia of discovery, navigation, and wonder. 🧪

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When a memory is remembered, or retrieved, it can be momentarily destabilized with a drug therapy, numbing its emotional pain. 🧪

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Catherine Lord has worked with autistic people for 50 years. We recently spoke to her about the mendacity and danger of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s comments, and clarified the state of autism research and science. 🧪

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A new photograph from the Perseverance rover on Mars shows the smaller of the planet’s two moons—named Deimos—glowing in the Martian sky shortly before sunrise. 🧪

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Fossils from an 85-million-year-old marine reptile, previously described using the generic term “elasmosaurs,” have received a new genus and species name, Traskasaura sandrae. 🧪

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If the brain can’t tell the difference between fiction and reality, what can? 🧪

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Scientists have given the megalodon new life with revelations about its own ancient quarries. The extinct shark's teeth may reveal a secret to their ancient super-predator status. 🧪

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Off the coast of Hawaii, a red pencil urchin and a type of sea snail known as a horned helmet face off in a slow-speed, high-stakes chase. 🧪

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Saving the seas may depend on connecting people to hidden landscapes. 🧪

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The gunk that seems to inevitably proliferate in our household appliances, from dishwashers to air conditioners, could be home to tiny organisms unknown to science—and with potentially very useful futures. 🧪

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The eight arms of an octopus contain two-thirds of its half billion neurons. Is it possible for humans to comprehend what that feels like? 🧪

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In their quest to track illegal fishing boats, scientists have attached GPS-equipped cameras to seabirds, who tend to follow and feed off the boats' waste. 🧪

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Ants are pretty smart when you get them together. When they join forces, they are able to more efficiently navigate an odd-shaped load through the maze than a group of humans trying to do the same thing. 🧪

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Problem gambling is addiction stripped to its core—compulsive behavior that persists no matter what the negative consequences. 🧪

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Good news for anyone around in 5 billion years: When our sun expands into a giant red star, it might not devour its third planet, after all. 🧪

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Paul McCartney has said he dreamed the tune for “Yesterday” and “woke up one morning with this tune in my head.” In dreams, as in play, writes Andreas Wagner, “our minds are at their freest.” 🧪

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Scientists discovered Tetragoniceps bermudensis, a new cave-dwelling copepod species in Bermuda's limestone caves—the first of its genus found there. 🧪

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A TikTok experiment led me into a strange world of cyborg cockroaches, imposter fish, and the ethics of care. 🧪

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In a recent study scientists tracked the brain signals of baby Zebra finches while they were singing. They found that dopamine levels matched the birds’ performance of the song, suggesting it plays a central role in the learning process. 🧪

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In a startling black and white timelapse video by French audiovisual artist Thomas Blanchard, potassium phosphate crystals bloom and explode on the screen into a kaleidoscope of patterns and shapes. 🧪

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Conservationists said bringing back wolves would restitch the ecological tapestry in the areas from which the wolves had been excised. Conservative politicians claimed it would be a major affront to developers, ranchers, and hunters. 🧪

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Scientists have coined the term "thirstwave" to describe extreme periods of agricultural drought. New research tracks 40 years of these events across the US, offering a better way to measure climate impacts on farming. 🧪

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"When you don’t know something, you think of it as an absence. But I think of uncertainty as a presence of ignorance." 🧪 Two physicians get frank about uncertainty in medicine:

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This Ecuadorian Pinocchio lizard uses its remarkable proboscis for love, not war. 🧪

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Hilma af Klint imbues her watercolors with traces of the occult, probing the connective tissue linking humanity and greenery. Her eccentric botanic illustrations are now on view publicly for the first time. 🧪

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Western scientific methods—such as statistical models and satellite imagery—provide insights that would be otherwise unattainable. But we also need the wisdom of the First Nations to preserve aquatic ecosystems. 🧪

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The world’s largest iceberg was born in 1986, when it broke off from Antarctica. Now it seems to be stuck on a shallow shelf in the Atlantic Ocean, losing its ice at a rapid clip. 🧪

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Commonsense is just one area of intelligence wanting in large language models. There’s so much they still can’t grasp. 🧪

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People’s monikers can reveal subtle insights into their societies, according to a new look at stone and clay artifacts from more than 2,500 years ago. 🧪

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Our ability to experience pleasure from listening to music is partly written in our genes. Specific genes may decide whether music inspires some of us to dance, but not to feel emotionally soothed by music. 🧪

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In this episode of Nautilus Narrations, coral biologist and science Communicator Summer Collins reads 'A Wild Idea to Protect the Great Barrier Reef' by Juli Berwald and explores some of the fascinating new ways scientists are trying to protect reefs from extinction.

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Researchers have tallied the first direct population estimate of the giant sea bass, thanks to more than 1,600 photographs taken by recreational divers and fishers between 2015 and 2022. 🧪

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Researchers from the University of Pennsylvania studied the subreddit r/AITA (Am I The Asshole?) and found that people put dishonesty—cheating, lying, and secret violation—at the top of the list of morally egregious behaviors. 🧪

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Researchers recently used AI to show that sperm whales may have a “phonetic alphabet” from which they construct complex communications and that elephants might address each other by name. 🧪

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In Marianne Moore’s poem "The Fish," she does not merely describe the ocean; she invites us to perceive it as an organism of meaning—layered, ancient, and alive. 🧪

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Plants around the world like common purslane (Portulaca oleracea) are adapting their reproductive strategies to survive on an increasingly urban planet. 🧪

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Most hailstones that fall to Earth range in diameter from that of a pea to small pocket change. Once the diameter of a hail stone is about 1 inch it is labeled “severe.” Scientists predict climate change will make larger hail more common. 🧪

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Scientists can now trace poached birds' origins by analyzing chemical elements in feathers, overcoming the limitations of forgeable paperwork in the massive illegal wildlife trade. 🧪

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Despite the latest forecasting science, climate change threw a wrench into @davidfilipov’s latest seafaring voyage. 🧪

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Do you have intense emotional reactions to certain everyday sounds, such as other people chewing, drinking, or sniffing? You might have a condition known as misophonia. 🧪

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Exposure to gentle green places can help calm our nervous systems. In Ukraine, war-torn families are trying "adventure therapy" to cope with the trauma of war. 🧪

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Researchers have observed a phenomenon called “ice piracy” occurring at an unprecedented pace among glaciers at the fringes of Antarctica: One glacier stealing ice from a neighbor as it flows toward the sea. 🧪

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Conspiracies are a devil to untangle from a believer's mind. But psychologists from MIT and Cornell suggest that when artificial intelligence presents sufficient counterfactual evidence, believers are more apt to change their minds. 🧪

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The consensus amongst ornithologists, bird-watchers, farmers, etc., is that starlings rank somewhere between a low-grade pest and a waking nightmare. Author Mike Stark asks, how do we decide whether a species is a worthy one, deserving of our protection and admiration? 🧪

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Fluid dynamics can explain how groups of people move and give us a better understanding of how to make large gatherings safer. 🧪

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The paradoxical mood boost from sleep deprivation has been studied since 1818, when it was found to help "melancholia" in ~60% of patients. 🧪

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