Nautilus

Embracing the dominant language comes at a price. Like a household that welcomes a new child, a single mind can’t admit a new language without some impact on other languages already residing there. Languages can co-exist, but they tussle, as do siblings, over mental resources and attention.

Burgers and fries have nearly killed our ancestral microbiome.

As nature scales, complexity gives way to universal law.

The contest between gravity and quantum physics takes a new turn.

If the Gobi Desert represents all of the matter flung across the cosmos, living matter is a single grain of sand. Vitalism in the age of modern science.

Scientists are slowly scaling up quantum effects from atomic to human size.

There is no known physics theory that is true at every scale—there may never be.

Turn back the clock to 1965. Science appeared to be marching forward at an unrelenting pace. Biochemists had cracked the genetic code (how DNA translates into proteins), inspiring Life magazine to envision “superbabies with improved minds and bodies.” In an article for the trade magazine Electronics, computer engineer Gordon Moore predicted that the number of…

Forty years ago, scientists found alien life. Not on another planet, but on Earth, in the deep sea, in places where plumes of steam and nutrients heated by volcanic activity fed entire ecologies of creatures adapted to harness chemical energy rather than energy from the sun.