From bulging biceps to 7-foot wingspans to a striking paucity of fat, elite athletes’ bodies often look quite different from those of the rest of us. But it’s not only athletes’…

Its achievements are undeniable. Having hosted what some historians call the greatest creation of wealth in human history,1 the San Francisco Bay Area had the fastest growth rate in…

One icy night in March 2010, 100 marketing experts piled into the Sea Horse Restaurant in Helsinki, with the modest goal of making a remote and medium-sized country a world-famous…

We called them fairy rocks. They were just colorful specks of gravel—the kind you might buy for a fish tank—mixed into my preschool’s playground sand pit. But my classmates and…

In the foothills of the Sierra Mountains, a few hours east of San Francisco, are the Moaning Caverns, a cave system that begins, after a narrow, twisting descent of 30-some feet, with…

When we asked Robert Sapolsky what he might like to write about for the Nautilus Turbulence issue, he responded, “adolescence.” We had to laugh because the idea just seemed so…

The women that come to see Deane Aikins, a clinical psychologist at Wayne State University, in Detroit, are searching for a way to leave their traumas behind them. Veterans in their…

In one important way, the recipient of a heart transplant ignores its new organ: Its nervous system usually doesn’t rewire to communicate with it. The 40,000 neurons controlling…

The first thing we asked Michio Kaku when he stopped by Nautilus for an interview was what was a nice theoretical physicist like him doing studying the brain. Of course the outgoing…

You’ve heard it before: Symmetrical faces are more beautiful, healthy, and genetically fit than others. But this story misses some important details. For one thing, the human brain…