Author: Bo Nacy

We predicted cell phones, but not women in the workplace.

Stephen McGreevy looked nervously at the sky. Outside his camper van in Nevada’s Black Rock Desert, angry black clouds gathered on the horizon as 30-mile-per-hour winds whipped across the flat expanse. At his feet, an array of copper wire—hundreds of feet of it—writhed like snakes. As rain beat against the roof, McGreevy hastily gathered the […]

The mysteries of avian migration at night are being solved with computational power.

Glial cells are the brain’s architects, doctors, police, janitors, and gardeners.

The surprising performance and physics of the fish kick.

Tinder—in case you’re not active in the young-person dating pool—is a dating application that shows you pictures of other Tinder users in your area. If you are not interested in meeting the person you see, you swipe their picture to the left. If you are interested, you swipe right. If two people right-swipe each other’s […]

It’s hard to imagine any signal coming from space that would be of no interest. Our modern definition of noise, as unwanted sound or signal, is a relatively recent one—the word used to mean strife, and nausea. Is the new meaning useful? Or does it encourage us to dismiss what we can’t interpret?     […]

Headlines and apocalyptic notions about designer babies proliferated last month after Chinese scientists published the results of a curious set of experiments on human embryos. The researchers were looking to understand whether gene-editing technology could correct, before birth, a malformed gene that can cause a potentially devastating blood disease. They found that the method introduced new […]

The September/October 2016 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Learning and Scaling, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: award-winning science writer James Gleick; research scientist Kate Marvel; award-winning author Philip Ball; and best-selling author Tom Vanderbilt. The issue also features original artwork from […]

The July/August 2016 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Noise and Sport, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: science journalist Sally Davies; best-selling author J.B. MacKinnon; environmental journalist Courtney Humphries; and author Moises Velasquez-Manoff. In addition, the issue features original artwork […]