Author: Roxana Scopa

In the span of nearly 5 years, Uber has gone from a limited launch in San Francisco to offering rides in more than 300 cities worldwide. In China alone, despite existing in a legal gray zone, the company claims it arranges 1 million rides per day. That means 35 Chinese people hop into an Uber […]

As nature scales, complexity gives way to universal law.

When Hurricane Sandy destroyed much of the New York and New Jersey coastlines, in October 2012, the looming threat of climate change abruptly became personal for a large portion of the East Coast—specifically Miranda Massie, a former public-interest lawyer. Seeing her city wasted, she realized that there was nowhere for the public to assemble and […]

While biology shows us gender can be fluid, our brains struggle to see it that way.

As an illustrator, I often struggle to decide how far I should push the boundaries of creativity. I’ve noticed that there is a fine line between art that is accessible to my peers and art that is accessible to everyone. And I don’t always know where to draw that line. In a Nautilus post, Jim […]

It begins with the smallest anomaly. The first exoplanets were the slightest shifts in a star’s light. The Higgs boson was just a bump in the noise. And the Big Bang sprung from a few rapidly moving galaxies that should have been staying put. Great scientific discoveries are born from puny signals that prompt attention. […]

There was a place in Iowa in 1995, tucked away in the dark-green fields of soybeans and corn, where a flooded rock quarry shimmered aquamarine. I stood on its edge one hot summer day with two friends. Like most teenagers, we were drawn to the rebelliousness of it. To get there, we had to trespass […]

As a philosopher who studies the meaning of color, Mazviita Chirimuuta is well aware that philosophy can easily get stuck on that topic. In her recent book, Outside Color, Chirimuuta tries to move beyond one of the major hang-ups when thinking about color, arguing that the property should be defined not by the world outside or inside […]

Why your wardrobe is wine-hued this year.

This classic Facts So Romantic post originally ran in July, 2013. On July 4, 1776, representatives of 13 colonies on the eastern shores of North America signed a Declaration of Independence from England. Winning independence was still a bloody war ahead, an unlikely outcome. Declaring independence was rashness, potentially carrying a death sentence for treason. Not, perhaps, what you […]