Nautilus

The novelist William Golding suggested to James Lovelock that he name his now-famous hypothesis after the Greek goddess of the Earth, Gaia. It was a good fit: Lovelock believed that the living and inanimate parts of the Earth formed a single, interac

By the time Cornelis Drebbel built an oven with a simple thermostat, one of the first manmade feedback mechanisms in history, in the 1620s, he was regarded in Europe as a magisterial, if not mad, inventor. He had already enchanted royalty and common

Sometime in the 1860s, five recent Oxford graduates took a trip to Egypt. Together they sailed down the Nile, a tourist attraction even then. To remember their trip, they bought a souvenir in the mummy pits of Deir el-Bahri—the coffin lid of a priest

Even in the 1990s, the procedure seemed primitive. Laura Niklason watched it repeatedly as a medical resident at Boston’s Massachusetts General Hospital. When patients undergoing cardiac bypass surgery needed a new vessel to bypass the blocked one, s

Imagine a test that could tell you how good you can ultimately get in any foreign language, from Hindi to Welsh, from Igbo to Spanish, before you’ve even learned how to say “hello” or “please pass the butter.” Très alléchant, non?1 Most adults would

Jon Boeckenstedt devours data. As DePaul University’s associate vice president for enrollment management, he studies how the institution’s 16,000 undergraduates are doing, trying to forecast their performance. Many in his position would turn to stand

The records of the Old Bailey, London’s central criminal court, tell the tale of one John Randal, who was tried on Sept. 9, 1674. He was charged “with two Indictments, one for Fellony for stealing several pieces of Plate, and other Goods…, and the ot

I first met James Lovelock in 1988 at a conference on his controversial Gaia Hypothesis that was sponsored by the American Geophysical Union. Gaia, to remind you, was the mythical Greek goddess who embodied Mother Earth. The Gaia Hypothesis is the id

Bitterness functions like an alarm blaring, “Beware!” Its wretched1 taste can repulse, but also rescue, as with a roach population whose survival has befuddled exterminators since 1987. That’s when Jules Silverman, an entomologist at a New Jersey-bas

In a recent New Yorker cartoon, a hotel clerk facing two patrons says, “If there’s anything we can do to make your stay more pleasant, just rant about it all over the Internet.” It is a humorous jab that feeds the popular perception that online consu

Opioid addiction can be seen as an infinite loop, a bug in the brain’s programming. Take drug. Feel better. Come down. Repeat. Of the people who use opioid drugs recreationally, between 8 and 23 percent become addicted—sometimes fatally. That’s true

Deborah Gordon spent the morning of August 27 watching a group of harvester ants foraging for seeds outside the dusty town of Rodeo, N.M. Long before the first rays of sun hit the desert floor, a group of patroller ants was already on the move. Their