Nautilus

The bags are packed, the car is loaded, and the neighbor will pick up the mail. Now there’s just one last thing to do before heading out the door for vacation: It’s time to turn off the dog. You lead Sparky to his fluffy bed inside a small chamber fi

An American man and a French woman meet on a train in Eastern Europe. They live on different continents. But before the sun comes up, they have spent the night together. What happens next? You’d expect the answer to be, nothing. It’s just a one-night

In case you haven’t heard, doomsday is coming—more droughts, floods, famine, class warfare, entitled children, and, brace yourself: a bourbon shortage! Yes, traditional Kentucky distillers didn’t predict or prepare for this Mad Men-inspired mixology

As I now live on an island in the sea and am not an expert on anything but hoverflies, we will simply have to start there. In short, my artistic sense remained relatively undeveloped, and my past, as always, caught up with me. When anyone asked, ther

So I’m reading The Fly Trap by Fredrik Sjöberg, a slim book by a writer I’ve never heard of, and I’m riveted for reasons I can’t explain. I honestly have no idea what the book is about. The author begins by talking about the time he worked as a prop

The San Gabriel Mountains are waging war on Los Angeles and Ed Heinlein’s chainsaw is screaming in the late afternoon sun. It’s January 2015 and Heinlein, who has a friendly paunch and paws sheathed in mud-stained work gloves, is carving up avocado t

A low-flying airplane buzzes along the coast of Greenland, hovering over a glacier. The belly of the plane holds a laser that bounces light off the glacier’s face. As the light beam returns to the plane, it enters a black box that slows it to a crawl

The universe is the grandest merger story that there is. Complete with mysterious origins, forces of light and darkness, and chemistry complex enough to make the chemical conglomerate BASF blush, the trip from the first moments after the Big Bang to

Last fall, I went to an egg freezing cocktail hour. The downstairs bar of the glossy SoHo hotel was thronged with women in heels and sleek business attire. Club music thumped, cameras flashed, and I narrowly missed being hit by a videographer angling

I had little idea of what I would discover when I set out to find and photograph the oldest living things in the world. I expected that researching, traveling, and photographing would stretch my perspective, and force me to learn a lot of science: bi

In February 1987, Neil Gehrels, a young researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, boarded a military plane bound for the Australian Outback. Gehrels carried some peculiar cargo: a polyethylene space balloon and a set of radiation detectors he

On a hillside in the southeast corner of Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge Massachusetts, a human’s entire life stands summed up in six lines: The lines adorn the remains of a house-shaped slab of sandstone. Most of its inscribed face has sheared o

In 2011, Hanli Prinsloo decided she wanted to break the woman’s world record in free diving. She would need to dive to 213 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea and hold her breath for about four minutes. Until the 1960s, scientists believe

The most arrogant astronomer in Switzerland in the mid-20th century was a solar physicist named Max Waldmeier. Colleagues were so relieved when he retired in 1980 that they nearly retired the initiative he led as director of the Zurich Observatory. W

It’s always a mistake to read,” Philip Marcus, a computational physicist and a professor in the mechanical engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley, tells me in a coffee shop near campus. “You learn too many things. That’s how