Keep an eye on the sky in the wee hours of August 13: We’re due for the peak of the Perseid meteor shower. In this annual spectacle, considered by space nerds to be the primo shooting star show, our planet whizzes into the dusty remnants left by the comet 109P/Swift-Tuttle. Nautilus Members enjoy an
Guangzhou Circle, Guangzhou, China, via @sci_fi_infra.Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at microplastics in the air, the Blanchard lathe, the report on the OceanGate sub disaster, a plan
<p>Good post on what the meaning of <a href="https://dynomight.net/heritable/">heritability</a>. </p> <p>Only a crazy <a href="https://www.experimental-history.com/p/face-it-youre-a-crazy-person">person</a> should do any given job</p> <p>A while back I noted that <a href="https://nintil.com/everythi
Five years ago, a medical breakthrough saved an estimated 14 million to 20 million lives in just one year. At its core is a miniscule piece of harmless genetic code that can help train the body to fight off pathogens. And now the current United States Health and Human Services Secretary, Robert F. K
“Happy 100th birthday, quantum mechanics!” a physicist bellowed into a microphone one evening in June, and the cavernous banquet hall of Hamburg’s Hotel Atlantic erupted into cheers and applause. Some 300 quantum physicists had traveled from around the world to attend the opening r
In life, a T. rex’s teeth were fearsome. Arguably the majestic carnivore’s most valuable weapon. But 66 million years after the king of dinosaurs exited the Mesozoic scene, its fossilized, banana-size flesh rippers are finding a new purpose. Fossilized T. rex teeth—along with gnashers from other din
Few figures loom larger over Western culture than Plato, whose The Republic has profoundly shaped Western thinking for centuries and is among the most assigned texts at English-speaking universities. In it, Plato describes his vision for a perfect society ruled over by what would later be described
What can a cell remember? More than we once thought, a revelation that's altering the meaning of memory
Every time data travels — from smartphones to the cloud, or across the vacuum of space — it relies on a silent but vigilant guardian in the form of error-correcting codes. These codes, baked into nearly every digital system, are designed to detect and repair any errors that noise, interf
Industrial improvement systems — strategies for making a business more profitable, more efficient, or better operated — rise and fall in popularity over time. Today, the most widely known improvement systems are probably various flavors of "Lean methods," the adaptation of the Toyota Production Syst
Four thousand years ago, a woman had a very fancy artificial eye that she probably wore while she was alive. It was possibly made of natural tar and animal fat or maybe bitumen paste; it had a gilded surface and a central circle where the iris would be, with lines radiating outward, sunlike. Gold wir
I’ve long ached to greet the greenery around me by name—I don’t want to be surrounded by strangers while hiking in a dense forest, or wandering through a meadow bursting with wildflowers. Conveniently, I’m now dating a horticulturalist, who’s helping me achieve some familiarity with the native plant
Washington State’s Mount Rainier is one of the snowiest mountains in the world. Over the years, all of that snow has birthed dozens of living glaciers, which flow across the landscape. One such resident, the Paradise Glacier, drapes onto one side of the mountain at more than 8,400 feet above sea lev
If you want to solve a tricky problem, it often helps to get organized. You might, for example, break the problem into pieces and tackle the easiest pieces first. But this kind of sorting has a cost. You may end up spending too much time putting the pieces in order. This dilemma is especially releva
When Doyle Ivie, a 77-year-old farmer and sheepdog trainer in northern Georgia, received an email from Saad Bhamla and Tuhin Chakrabortty, two biophysicists from the Georgia Institute of Technology, he was intrigued. The researchers wanted to know if he would let them record the to-and-fro-ing of hi
Hunting for butterflies need not go the way of other childhood summertime idyls. With the animals in decline due to a panoply of factors, keeping track of their populations has become increasingly urgent. We recently covered a report that tracked 4.3 million butterfly observations across 90,000 volu
If you wandered through a Midwestern meadow in 1992 to look for butterflies, the odds are good you would have seen many more than if you returned to the same meadow today. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . It’s no secret of course that much of the order Lepidoptera—w
The term propaganda has long been associated with authoritarian regimes, lies, and manipulation. Nathan Crick, a professor of rhetoric and philosophy at Texas A&M University, wants us to see it in a different light. Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. Log in or Join now . Crick, who has be
Lithe necks, blown-out lips, eyelashes worthy of a cartoon princess. The camels that compete in Saudi Arabia’s annual King Abdulaziz Camel Festival are a striking bunch. Many contestants, who are mostly female, have undergone cosmetic enhancements, including Botox injections and surgical procedures
All the activity on Earth’s surface — erupting volcanoes, shifting tectonic plates, restless seas and myriad forms of life — depends on the two-part engine under the hood. Directly beneath Earth’s crust lies the mantle: rock that melts, churns and flows like putty, driving th
Goddess of Kannon statue, Japan, via @sci_fi_infra.Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week we look at European multifamily construction, a robot lamp, China's self-driving car test, a "mini Moravec's p
It’s not that anyone ever said sophisticated math problems can’t be solved by teenagers who haven’t finished high school. But the odds of such a result would have seemed long. Yet a paper posted on February 10 left the math world by turns stunned, delighted and ready to welcome a b
Deep within a limestone cave in the foothills of Australia’s Victorian Alps, the walls twinkle—and if you look closely, you can make out the movements of the ancestors of the Aboriginal GunaiKurnai people. Finger grooves on the walls of the cave, known to the GunaiKurnai Elders as Waribruk, allow us
In the next section of Chapter 3, Communities of Practice, Steward Brand writes about history's great stewards of maintenance: blacksmiths. Stewart writes:For millennia, it was the greatest show in town. The distant rhythmic clanging of metal on metal was an invitation to draw near. Up close, you sa
The planet’s 3,000 or so known centipede species don’t initially seem like the nurturing type. Some are so big they prey on mice, bats, and songbirds, while others reportedly munch on human corpses. There are those that hiss like snakes, and those that are aquatic, swimming through tropical waters b
As well as the newsletter writer job below, which can be fully remote, we're recruiting for a growth marketing lead based in London. Find out more and apply for that here.Works in Progress is looking for someone to run a new daily newsletter that aggregates and links to news stories, essays, podcast
In 1983, the octogenarian geneticist Barbara McClintock stood at the lectern of the Karolinska Institute in Stockholm. She was famously publicity averse — nearly a hermit — but it’s customary for people to speak when they’re awarded a Nobel Prize, so she delivered a halting a
Historian Anton Howes discusses how Henry VIII turned Britain into an economic backwater – making it the unlikeliest place for the Industrial Revolution to happen. But, he explains, it only took a small cabal of people who understood the problems of the time to turn the fate of the country (and thus
Humanity's ability to produce enough food for 8 billion people is impressive.1 In fact, we could produce enough calories for far more than 8 billion; we just feed a lot of those calories to farm animals, allocate crops to biofuels, and lose a lot of food in our supply chains.2 The extremely dire pre
<p>So I went down to the beach. "Kinda nice", I thought. The sky had a particularly vibrant blue color, the waves had 'the right size', their roar was pleasant. I started to walk around trying to continue meditating. I focused my awareness on an arising sensation of open heartedness and th