Maps

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Nautilus is a new kind of science experience, weaving together the endeavors of human knowledge, belief and ideas into broad conversations that challenge, illuminate and educate.

Nautilus7 min de lecture
Red Planet Ride-Along: Hit the trail with the Mars rovers, on the hunt for water and life.
For human travelers, the iconic moment of space exploration occurred a half-century ago, when Neil Armstrong planted the first human boot-print on the moon. But if you don’t mind using robots as our stand-ins, the greatest era is unfolding right now
Nautilus14 min de lectureScience & Mathematics
An Existential Crisis in Neuroscience: We’re mapping the brain in amazing detail—but our brain can’t understand the picture.
On a chilly evening last fall, I stared into nothingness out of the floor-to-ceiling windows in my office on the outskirts of Harvard’s campus. As a purplish-red sun set, I sat brooding over my dataset on rat brains. I thought of the cold windowless
Nautilus5 min de lectureScience & Mathematics
The Brain Cells That Guide Animals
It may seem absurd to compare a tiny fruit fly’s brain to that of a majestic elephant. Yet it is the dream of many neuroscientists to find deep rules that very different brains share. As Gilles Laurent, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute fo
Nautilus10 min de lecture
We Are All Ancient Mapmakers: Why we still see the world like the mathematician and poet who first mapped it.
In the first half of the sixth century B.C., a Greek man named Anaximander, born in Turkey, sketched the world in a way no one had previously thought to do. It featured a circle, divided into three equal parts. He labeled those parts Europe, Asia, an
Nautilus7 min de lecture
These Maps Reveal Earth’s Unspoiled Places: A revolution in archaeology is happening just when we need it most.
An underreported aspect of the climate crisis is that archaeological sites, cultural landscapes, biodiversity, and distributions of flora and fauna—much of which modern people will never even know about—are disappearing at an alarming rate. I’m an ar
Nautilus9 min de lecture
The Hidden Warning of Fall Colors: Did autumn reds and yellows evolve to repel insects?
Drifting above North America in the autumn of 2014, a NASA satellite named Terra partook in some high-altitude leaf peeping. In an aerial photograph snapped that September, swaths of orange and red saturate the green landscape, as if igniting the pla
Nautilus5 min de lectureScience & Mathematics
The Brain Cells That Guide Animals: New evidence the neural rules of navigation are universal.
It may seem absurd to compare a tiny fruit fly’s brain to that of a majestic elephant. Yet it is the dream of many neuroscientists to find deep rules that very different brains share. As Gilles Laurent, a neuroscientist at the Max Planck Institute fo
Nautilus5 min de lecture
How Ancient Light Reveals the Universe’s Contents
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. In early 2003, Chuck Bennett learned the precise contents of the cosmos. By then, most cosmologists had concluded that the universe contains much more than meets the eye. Observation
Nautilus7 min de lectureMathematics
Why Astrology Matters: Seeing meaning in the stars is a vital part of the scientific story.
A few years ago, I went to an astrologer as research for a radio show exploring strange beliefs. Vishal knew only my name, and date and place of birth, and didn’t tell me anything terribly profound until I asked him about the car I had just bought. H
Nautilus11 min de lecturePsychology
The Cultural Distances Between Us: Mapping the world’s psychological traits.
If you ask Siri to show you the weirdest people in the world, what images might you see? In fact, none. Siri showed me different links to the same scientific paper, published a decade ago, with the questioning title, “The weirdest people in the world
Nautilus7 min de lecturePsychology
This Psychological Concept Could Be Shaping the Presidential Election
Last summer, I briefly met Elizabeth Warren in a restaurant in Cambridge, near Harvard, where I’m a postdoc in psychology. My dad and I saw the Massachusetts senator, a 2020 presidential candidate, walking in as we were walking out. “Give ’em hell,”
Nautilus7 min de lecture
Why Shouldn’t a Horsefly Be Named After Beyoncé?
David Bowie and Beyoncé never shared a stage, but they share the distinction of having cleverly eponymous species names in their honor. Bowie, the British glam-rock and pop sensation, is immortalized in the name of a Malaysian huntsman spider, Heter
Nautilus7 min de lecture
Never Say Wolf: How taboo language turned the wolf into a monster.
Listen to them, the children of the night. What music they make!” So says Count Dracula to the hapless Jonathan Harker in Bram Stoker’s novel. Dracula is talking about the wolves howling in the valley below his castle in the Carpathian mountains. Thi
Nautilus7 min de lecture
Mapping Gay-Friendly Cities Through History: A data analyst uncovers a timeless message about correlation.
Claudius Ptolemy’s monumental astronomy book, the Almagest, established a unified mathematical framework for computing the positions of the sun, moon, stars, and planets at any time in the past, present, or future. So comprehensive and so compelling
Nautilus12 min de lecture
How Geology Can Ease Your Mind: Take comfort that we live on a very old, durable planet.
As a geologist and professor I speak and write rather cavalierly about eras and eons. One of the courses I routinely teach is “History of Earth and Life,” a survey of the 4.5-billion-year saga of the entire planet—in a 10-week trimester. But as a hum
Nautilus5 min de lecturePsychology
Why We Love to Be Grossed Out
Nina Strohminger, perhaps not unlike many fans of raunchy comedies and horror flicks, is drawn to disgust. The University of Pennsylvania psychologist has written extensively on the feeling of being grossed out, and where it comes from. The dominant
Nautilus4 min de lecture
Color-Changing Material Unites the Math and Physics of Knots
Reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine’s Abstractions blog. One sunny day in the summer of 2019, Mathias Kolle, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, took a couple of eminent colleagues out sailing. They talked about their
Nautilus6 min de lecture
What Really Inflamed the Coronavirus Epidemic: Censorship didn’t worsen the deadly virus outbreak. Incompetence did.
Last year, in late December, Li Wenliang, a young ophthalmologist, wrote 150 of his friends from medical circles. He said he had seen a number of cases of viral pneumonia come into the Wuhan Central Hospital, where he worked, and that they all seemed
Nautilus8 min de lectureMedical
There’s No Homunculus In Our Brain Who Guides Us: Why the cognitive-map theory is misguided.
In the early 1980s, the psychologist Harry Heft put a 16 mm camera in the back of a sports car and made a movie. It consisted of a continuous shot of a residential neighborhood in Granville, Ohio, where Heft was a professor at Denison University. It

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