Author: Charles Humphreys

A mother wonders if we are all born with synesthesia.

Penn and Teller famously skewered the bottled water craze on their myth-busting Showtime series, Bullshit, setting up a hidden-camera sting operation in a fancy New York restaurant. A fake “water sommelier” stopped at each table, offering diners a special selection of high-end bottled water at $7 a pop. The catch: All the bottles were identical, […]

Problems of power resist solution. As other aspects of our lives have been entirely transformed for the better—the ability to communicate with each other, for example—just a little over a tenth of the world lives in a full democracy, and democratization has stalled or reversed in many parts of the world. Why is power a […]

The March/April 2016 Nautilus print edition combines some of the best content from our issues on Adaptation and Boundaries, with new original contributions and gorgeous full-color illustrations. This issue includes contributions by: award-winning scientist Hope Jahren; prominent biologist Sean B. Carroll; award-winning author Philip Ball; and science journalist Amy Maxmen. Plus, original artwork from Angie Wang, Aad Goudappel, Julia […]

A climate scientist asks whether nature can save us from ourselves.

How one psychologist is tackling human biases in science.

A complexity theorist explores how science and culture co-evolve.

You’re dead meat without special molecules that kill rotten proteins.

Thinking of nucleobases as a long sequence of letters may contribute to the illusion that DNA is a language.Neil Palmer / CIAT via Flickr When we talk about genes, we often use expressions inherited from a few influential geneticists and evolutionary biologists, including Francis Crick, James Watson, and Richard Dawkins. These expressions depict DNA as […]

Let’s consider the fear that once surrounded another powerful technology: recombinant DNA.