Ingenious: Helen Fisher - Issue 22: Slow
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Ingenious: Helen Fisher - Issue 22: Slow
▻http://nautil.us/issue/22/slow/ingenious-helen-fisher
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A Photographer Who Tinkers with Time - Issue 22: Slow
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Adam Magyar’s gone viral. His recent series Stainless, in which video recordings of subway platforms are played out in super-slow-motion, has been rippling across the web. Magyar first films people on the platform from a speedily arriving train and then slows the footage down, highlighting details and expressions that are often missed and rarely remembered. Regardless of station—Berlin’s Alexanderplatz, Tokyo’s Shinjuku, or New York City’s Grand Central—Magyar’s video excerpts show crowded subway platforms that are at some times haunting, at others elegant. Waiting for the next train never looked so compelling. Grand Central An excerpt from Stainless, 42nd Street.Adam Magyar This two-minute excerpt is one small piece of the Grand Central clip; the entire video runs almost 11 minutes, (...)
The Impossible Physiology of the Free Diver - Issue 22: Slow
▻http://nautil.us/issue/22/slow/the-impossible-physiology-of-the-free-diver
In 2011, Hanli Prinsloo decided she wanted to break the woman’s world record in free diving. She would need to dive to 213 feet below the surface of the Mediterranean Sea and hold her breath for about four minutes. Until the 1960s, scientists believed it was not humanly possible. The increased water pressure at that depth, they argued, would crush her lungs. The then-33-year-old, South African, former acting student knew the feat would require rigorous training and commitment. But Prinsloo felt at home in the water. She’d grown up on a dusty, 200-hectare horse farm outside Pretoria, chasing her sister from dam to stream to swimming pool and back and dreaming of becoming a mermaid. So in the spring of 2011, Prinsloo packed a bag and traveled to an ashram in the foothills of the Indian (...)
Jupiter Is a Garden of Storms - Issue 22 : Slow
▻http://nautil.us/issue/22/slow/jupiter-is-a-garden-of-storms
It’s always a mistake to read,” Philip Marcus, a computational physicist and a professor in the mechanical engineering department at the University of California, Berkeley, tells me in a coffee shop near campus. “You learn too many things. That’s how I got really fascinated by fluid dynamics.” It was 1978, and Marcus was in his first year of a post-doctoral position at Cornell focused on numerical simulations of solar convection and laboratory flows using spectral methods. But he had wanted to study cosmic evolution and general relativity; the problem, as Marcus told me, was that there was talk of no one seeing results of general relativity within their lifetime. As a result, “the field kind of collapsed on itself a little bit, and so everybody from general relativity was going to other (...)
The 315-Year-Old Science Experiment - Issue 22: Slow
▻http://nautil.us/issue/22/slow/the-315_year_old-science-experiment
The most arrogant astronomer in Switzerland in the mid-20th century was a solar physicist named Max Waldmeier. Colleagues were so relieved when he retired in 1980 that they nearly retired the initiative he led as director of the Zurich Observatory. Waldmeier was in charge of a practice that dated back to Galileo and remains one of the longest continuous scientific practice in history: counting sunspots. The Zurich Observatory was the world capital for tallying sunspots: cool dark areas on the sun’s surface where the circulation of internal heat is dampened by magnetic fields. Since the 19th century, astronomers had correlated sunspots with solar outbursts that could disrupt life on Earth. Today scientists know the spots mark areas in the sun that generate colossal electromagnetic (...)
What a 9,000-Year-Old Spruce Tree Taught Me - Issue 22: Slow
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I had little idea of what I would discover when I set out to find and photograph the oldest living things in the world. I expected that researching, traveling, and photographing would stretch my perspective, and force me to learn a lot of science: biology, genetics, chemistry, geology, and so on. But what I didn’t expect to learn was that sometimes the right person for a scientific endeavor is an artist. The Oldest Living Things project was motivated not by a narrow interest or a traditional scientific question, but by the idea of something called deep time. Deep time is not a precise demarcation in the way that geologic eras and cosmological epochs are. Rather, it’s a framework in which to consider timescales too long for our shallow, physical experience, and too big for our brains to (...)
The Rise and Fall of the Living Fossil - Issue 22: Slow
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In May 1997, the same month that The Lost World: Jurassic Park debuted in the United States, the U.S. Postal Service released 15 gorgeous stamps depicting various dinosaurs and extinct reptiles. The stamps caused a sensation among dino enthusiasts and paleontologists alike. “We all rushed out to get them,” remembers Christopher Brochu, who teaches paleontology at the University of Iowa. As an expert on crocodiles and their ancestors (known collectively as crocodilians and crocodyliforms), Brochu was particularly ecstatic to see that one stamp featured Goniopholis, a crocodyliform from the late Jurassic. When he looked closer, however, he noticed a few oddities: The checkers on its tail, the shape of its scales, and the arrangement of its teeth were not quite right. This drawing, Brochu (...)
The Secret History of the Supernova at the Bottom of the Sea - Issue 22: Slow
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In February 1987, Neil Gehrels, a young researcher at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, boarded a military plane bound for the Australian Outback. Gehrels carried some peculiar cargo: a polyethylene space balloon and a set of radiation detectors he had just finished building back in the lab. He was in a hurry to get to Alice Springs, a remote outpost in the Northern Territory, where he would launch these instruments high above Earth’s atmosphere to get a peek at the most exciting event in our neck of the cosmos: a supernova exploding in one of the Milky Way’s nearby satellite galaxies. Like many supernovas, SN 1987A announced the violent collapse of a massive star. What set it apart was its proximity to Earth; it was the closest stellar cataclysm since Johannes Kepler spotted one in (...)
Trying Not to Try - Issue 22: Slow
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In a famous story from ancient Chinese philosophy, Butcher Ding has been called upon to play his part in a traditional religious ceremony. The ritual, to consecrate a newly cast bronze bell, requires the butcher to sacrifice an ox in a public space, with the ruler and a large crowd looking on. The still-smoking bell is brought fresh from the foundry and cooled with the blood of the sacrificial animal—a procedure that demands precise timing and perfectly smooth execution. Butcher Ding is up to the task, dismembering the massive animal with effortless grace: “At every touch of his hand, every bending of his shoulder, every step of his feet, every thrust of his knee—swish! swoosh! He guided his blade along with a whoosh, and all was in perfect tune.” Ding’s body and blade move in such perfect (...)
Why Egg Freezing Is an Impossible Choice - Issue 22: Slow
▻http://nautil.us/issue/22/slow/why-egg-freezing-is-an-impossible-choice
Last fall, I went to an egg freezing cocktail hour. The downstairs bar of the glossy SoHo hotel was thronged with women in heels and sleek business attire. Club music thumped, cameras flashed, and I narrowly missed being hit by a videographer angling a tripod over the crowd. The evening was hosted by Eggbanxx, a startup that sells financing for egg freezing, framed as fertility insurance for the forward-thinking urban professional woman. At the bar, where they were serving up free “Banxxtini” cocktails, I spoke with a 27-year-old who was “95 percent sure” she would freeze her eggs and a 36-year-old data scientist who claimed to be “skeptical.” Together, we filed into a screening room adjoining the bar, where three New York-area endocrinologists lectured us on a new technique that, they (...)
How To Clock a Glacier - Issue 22: Slow
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A low-flying airplane buzzes along the coast of Greenland, hovering over a glacier. The belly of the plane holds a laser that bounces light off the glacier’s face. As the light beam returns to the plane, it enters a black box that slows it to a crawl, turning it into a moment-by-moment report on the glacier’s speed. Each flight, each glacier measured, allows researchers to map the diminishment of the Greenland ice cap. Similar planes skirt Antarctica and the coast of Alaska, charting the damage to the ice cover. These airplanes and their experimental equipment don’t exist yet. But the need to measure glacier flow in real time does exist. The latest report by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projected that melting ice may result in as much as one meter of sea-level rise (...)
Los Angeles Should Be Buried - Issue 22: Slow
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The San Gabriel Mountains are waging war on Los Angeles and Ed Heinlein’s chainsaw is screaming in the late afternoon sun. It’s January 2015 and Heinlein, who has a friendly paunch and paws sheathed in mud-stained work gloves, is carving up avocado trees. They were drowned the previous year when a series of mud freight trains roared out of the hills above his house. “Welcome to mud central,” says Heinlein, “The assistant fire chief tells me it’s the most dangerous property in L.A.” Heinlein is a retired elementary school teacher, current Christian minister, and has a preacher’s tendency to speak in terms of fire and brimstone. He lives in Azusa, a scenic nook in the foothills of the San Gabriel Mountains, which rise 10,000 feet above the city of Los Angeles. Aware that the mountain range’s (...)
The Philosopher King of the Hoverflies - Issue 22: Slow
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As I now live on an island in the sea and am not an expert on anything but hoverflies, we will simply have to start there. In short, my artistic sense remained relatively undeveloped, and my past, as always, caught up with me. When anyone asked, therefore, I said succinctly that hoverflies are meek and mild creatures, easy to collect, and that they appear in many guises. Sometimes they don’t even look like flies. Some of them look like hornets, others like honeybees, parasitic ichneumon wasps, gadflies, or fragile, thin-as-thread mosquitoes so tiny that normal people never even notice them. Several species resemble large, bristly bumblebees, complete with in-flight drone and coats flecked with pollen. Only the expert is not deceived. We are not many, but we grow very old. Nevertheless, (...)
Announcing Nautilus Prime - Issue 22: Slow
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Nautilus is proud to announce the launch of Nautilus Prime, our digital subscription service. Free for print subscribers, and a buck or two a month on its own, Nautilus Prime delivers PDFs of each of our print magazines to read on your tablet or desktop; eBooks of each of our issues; and exclusive subscriber-only feature content (marked with a key). In other words, the full Nautilus experience, sans print. Nautilus Prime means you can read us on your phone while riding the subway, or on your iPad on a flight. It means you can read our print magazine, with all of its art and design, even if your actual print magazine is sitting at home. And it means you have a cheaper, digital-only subscription option if you want one, without missing out on any of our content. Of course, most of (...)
Before There Were Stars - Issue 22: Slow
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The universe is the grandest merger story that there is. Complete with mysterious origins, forces of light and darkness, and chemistry complex enough to make the chemical conglomerate BASF blush, the trip from the first moments after the Big Bang to the formation of the first stars is a story of coming together at length scales spanning many orders of magnitude. To piece together this story, scientists have turned to the skies, but also to the laboratory to simulate some of the most extreme environments in the history our universe. The resulting narrative is full of surprises. Not least among these, is how nearly it didn’t happen—and wouldn’t have, without the roles played by some unlikely heroes. Two of the most important, at least when it comes to the formation of stars, which produced (...)
Casual Sex May Be Improving America’s Marriages - Issue 22: Slow
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An American man and a French woman meet on a train in Eastern Europe. They live on different continents. But before the sun comes up, they have spent the night together. What happens next? You’d expect the answer to be, nothing. It’s just a one-night stand in a faraway place. But in director Richard Linklater’s trilogy, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight, their romance blooms into commitment and kids. While some might dismiss this as Hollywood romanticism, it is actually a common experience. For the past five years, my colleagues at Match.com and I have conducted an annual national study called Singles in America, and in each year, a majority of survey respondents have reported having a one-night stand. And 27 percent of our 2014 respondents reported having had a (...)
How Music Hijacks Our Perception of Time - Issue 22: Slow
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One evening, some 40 years ago, I got lost in time. I was at a performance of Schubert’s String Quintet in C major. During the second movement I had the unnerving feeling that time was literally grinding to a halt. The sensation was powerful, visceral, overwhelming. It was a life-changing moment, or, as it felt at the time, a life-changing eon. It has been my goal ever since to compose music that usurps the perceived flow of time and commandeers the sense of how time passes. Although I’ve learned to manipulate subjective time, I still stand in awe of Schubert’s unparalleled power. Nearly two centuries ago, the composer anticipated the neurological underpinnings of time perception that science has underscored in the past few decades. The human brain, we have learned, adjusts and (...)
Casual Sex Is Improving America’s Marriages - Issue 22: Slow
▻http://nautil.us/issue/22/slow/casual-sex-is-improving-americas-marriages
An American man and a French woman meet on a train in Eastern Europe. They live on different continents. But before the sun comes up, they have spent the night together. What happens next? You’d expect the answer to be, nothing. It’s just a one-night stand in a faraway place. But in director Richard Linklater’s trilogy, Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight, their romance blooms into commitment and kids. While some might dismiss this as Hollywood romanticism, it is actually a common experience. For the past five years, my colleagues at Match.com and I have conducted an annual national study called Singles in America, and in each year, a majority of survey respondents have reported having a one-night stand. And 27 percent of our 2014 respondents reported having had a (...)
How to Turn Your Dog Off - Issue 22 : Slow
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The bags are packed, the car is loaded, and the neighbor will pick up the mail. Now there’s just one last thing to do before heading out the door for vacation: It’s time to turn off the dog. You lead Sparky to his fluffy bed inside a small chamber filled with a continuous stream of hydrogen sulfide gas. While you’re away, he’ll stay—completely still. No breath. No pulse. But Sparky’s neither sleeping, nor dead. He is in a state of suspended animation, as if you simply put his body on pause. And when you return home, he’ll reboot back to normal in the fresh air. This slightly unnerving scenario belongs to Mark Roth, a biomedical scientist at Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center in Seattle, Washington. The good-natured Roth offers it not as a business plan for futuristic pet care, but as an (...)
Why Your Brain Hates Slowpokes - Issue 22 : Slow
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Not long ago I diagnosed myself with the recently identified condition of sidewalk rage. It’s most pronounced when it comes to a certain friend who is a slow walker. Last month, as we sashayed our way to dinner, I found myself biting my tongue, thinking, I have to stop going places with her if I ever want to … get there! You too can measure yourself on the “Pedestrian Aggressiveness Syndrome Scale,” a tool developed by University of Hawaii psychologist Leon James. While walking in a crowd, do you find yourself “acting in a hostile manner (staring, presenting a mean face, moving closer or faster than expected)” and “enjoying thoughts of violence?” Slowness rage is not confined to the sidewalk, of course. Slow drivers, slow Internet, slow grocery lines—they all drive us crazy. Even the opening (...)