Author: Terrence Cons

We recently asked you to share your most unlikely stories—the kinds of things that make you scratch your head and think, “What are the chances?” Here’s one of our favorite stories submitted by readers so far, submitted by a Nautilus reader who wishes to remain anonymous. (We’ll call him “Mateo.”) Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free […]

A look back at a career spent looking back.

Chance encounters in the life of Andrei Kolmogorov.

January 1996 was, in most respects, a month like any other in Jefferson County, Colorado, the “Gateway to the Rocky Mountains.”* But one thing distinguished that particular month in that particular county in Colorado: an outbreak of salmonellosis among children, most of whom were under 13 years of age. The Colorado Department of Public Health and […]

We humans take a lot for granted. Pizza delivery, email, smartphones, dishwashers. All of this occurs in the background, making our lives simpler. None of it requires any explicit effort. Our minds also do a lot of subconscious work that we take for granted. Have you ever seriously thought about how you know that the […]

Past disasters help us prepare—and make us pay attention.

Building new lands requires sacrifice.

Can outfitting bees with tiny radio transmitters solve colony collapse disorder?

When looking at the “Nutrition Facts” label on a package of food, the familiar Helvetica text laid out according to the FDA’s exacting specifications, you could easily end up with the impression that the information there is consistently accurate. That the can of minestrone soup will always have the same amount of sodium (a lot), […]

There is more to the world than meets the human eye, a fact that hit home for the 18th-century astronomer Sir Frederick William Herschel when he discovered infrared light—a wavelength of light that lies just outside the visible portion of the electromagnetic spectrum. We can feel its heat, but we can’t see the light—not without […]