-
4 days ago | 
nautil.us | Elena Kazamia
The full Nautilus archive • eBooks & Special Editions • Ad-free reading The full Nautilus archive eBooks & Special Editions Ad-free reading The red handfish is a surly-looking creature native to seas surrounding Tasmania, with a boxer’s face and a ruddy complexion that’s eerily translucent.
-
3 weeks ago | 
nautil.us | Elena Kazamia
Humans love their conspiracy theories. The Apollo moon landings were faked by covert agents in NASA to broadcast America’s technological prowess over Soviet Russia. (It was too expensive and risky to actually go to the moon.) Big Pharma covers up cures for diseases to boost their bottom lines with ineffective vaccines. The United States government secretly allowed 9/11 to take place to justify its preplanned war on the Middle East.
-
1 month ago | 
nautil.us | Elena Kazamia
When you first enter Waterton Lakes National Park, just north of the Canadian border from Montana, you may be forgiven for not immediately examining the prairie grass.
-
1 month ago | 
nautil.us | Elena Kazamia
Under the blazing Africansun, I trained my binoculars on Najin and Fatu in Ol Pejeta, a wildlife reserve on the plains of northern Kenya. From a distance, the two rhinoceroses could be mistaken for boulders, propping up the sky. Alongside other travelers in 2021, I watched the pair graze peacefully in the field, their heads bowed down to the dry grass, munching in unison. Although we were far from the animals in a safari truck, everyone spoke in hushed tones.
-
Jan 22, 2025 | 
nautil.us | Elena Kazamia
It all started with a Roman pot. A new laser imaging technique revealed Greek inscriptions on the pot that had been hidden, which surprised archaeologists. But when Judyta Bak, a Polish archaeologist from Krakow, read the study, she didn’t care much about the pot. She wondered what would be revealed if she shone the laser on the 100 mummies she was studying in coastal Peru, some of which are more than a millennium old. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .
-
Jan 8, 2025 | 
nautil.us | Elena Kazamia
Yoda, the legendary Jedi Master who hardly needs an introduction, spent his last days on Dagobah, a swamp-covered planet. When Luke Skywalker, the protagonist of the Star Wars saga visits him there in Episode V: The Empire Strikes Back, he finds Yoda sitting on a sunken log carpeted by moss. Yoda is pensive, the end of his walking stick submerged in the shallows, and a mist hovers low above the water. The vegetation is dense, the atmosphere mysterious.
-
Dec 13, 2024 | 
nautil.us | Elena Kazamia
Luis May Ku was intent on finding the plant. He felt certain that somewhere among the shrubs of his home village in Mexico or in the surrounding jungle grew the wild ch’oj. He needed the plant to extract indigo, a dye he could experiment with to unlock the recipe of “Mayan blue”—a pigment no longer available in the markets of the Yucatan peninsula, and a favorite color of the Mayan gods. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .
-
Dec 4, 2024 | 
nautil.us | Elena Kazamia
I was not allowed to see the bones of the dead when I visited Jennifer Raff. They were fragments of teeth and skulls held in a small metal cabinet in the basement of Fraser Hall, the University of Kansas’ hub for anthropology research. The bones can be thousands of years old and belong to some of the earliest-known settlers of the Americas. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now .
-
Nov 21, 2024 | 
nautil.us | Elena Kazamia
A few years ago, Valerie Trouet, a tree scientist from Belgium, began to notice something curious. When her summer holidays at home were marred by cold rainy days, countries like Greece and Italy in the Eastern Mediterranean appeared to be battling unseasonal droughts and heatwaves. The reverse seemed to also be true—hot dry summers in Belgium and the British Isles coincided with cool wet weather in southeast Europe.
-
Oct 31, 2024 | 
nautil.us | Elena Kazamia
Thirty-one Japanese house cats recently participated in an experiment. Animal behavior researcher Saho Takagi recruited 23 of them from cat cafés near Tokyo, and eight friends volunteered their pets: 20 tomcats and 11 queens, most of them roughly around the age of 4. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Takagi traveled from one cat’s home to the next.
