Nautilus Magazine

01/19/2026

Josh Rottman, a developmental psychologist who specializes in disgust, claims that the emotion is better understood by examining the social forces that inform it.

If disgust were an adaptive behavioral mechanism for avoiding biologically harmful substances, Rottman argues, children would exhibit disgust in their most vulnerable years, when their immune system is still developing.

But infants and toddlers are willing to put just about anything in their mouths, and only begin to show signs of disgust around ages five to seven, long past their vulnerable weaning period.

This could, perhaps, be explained by the fact that children’s immune systems benefit from their exposure to a variety of substances.

However, most of the helpful bacteria and immune-building germs that children encounter come not from steaming mounds of dung and worm-eaten corpses, the hallmark triggers of disgust, but rather from invisible air and water-borne pathogens.

Rozin attributes the delayed onset of disgust to the omnivore’s dilemma, the fact that we must balance our ability to consume a wide variety of foodstuffs with the potentially steep consequences of poisoning ourselves.

Nina Strohminger, perhaps not unlike many fans of raunchy comedies and horror flicks, is drawn to disgust. The University of Pennsylvania psychologist has written extensively on the feeling of being grossed out, and where it comes from. The dominant idea, developed by Paul Rozin and April Fallon, is...

01/19/2026

For parents, all those dirty diapers make it pretty hard to get grossed out about anything at all.

How Having Kids Makes Parents Disgust-Proof: All those dirty diapers make it pretty hard to get grossed out about anything else.

01/19/2026

It takes more than good chemistry go restore a centuries-old painting.

Conservation starts with material analysis, whether the artwork in question is a textile, sculpture, or painting.

“In the beginning of the 18th century, and increasingly into the 19th century, we started to define our practice as science-based, with a sort of rationalist philosophy,” says Glenn Wharton, Chair of the UCLA/Getty Interdepartmental Program in the Conservation of Cultural Heritage.

“The idea is driven by this thought that through material analysis, we can know the object, we can know how it was made, how it’s deteriorated, and options for conservation treatment.”

https://nautil.us/how-to-restore-a-rembrandt-1230774/?

It takes more than good chemistry

01/19/2026

Today’s Trivia

🧐 How long did it take for a Tyrannosaurus rex to grow to its maximum size of about 17,000 pounds?

A) 18-21 years
B) 35-40 years
C) 50-55 years

Answer at link in comments.

01/19/2026

Valeria Pfeifer is a cognitive scientist at the University of Arizona. She is one of a small group of researchers who has studied how emojis affect our thinking.

Emojis “convey this additional complex layer of meaning that words just don’t really seem to get at,” she says.

It’s complicated. And that’s good.

01/17/2026

"Two things motivated me to get into boredom research.

One was that, as a late teen, early 20-something young person, I started to experience boredom a lot and hated it. I wanted to find ways to eliminate it from my life.

I no longer think that that’s either possible or desirable. But around about the same time, my brother had a motor vehicle crash where he suffered a fairly serious brain injury. Months later, after serious rehabilitation, he’d report that he was bored a lot.

And to me, that suggested that something organic had changed in his brain. Some consequence of that brain injury made things that were once pleasurable seem boring.

And so, I wanted to understand what had happened in the brain to make that the case for him."

01/17/2026

During pyramid construction, bakeries the size of football fields stood near the worker villages.

Every morning, battalions of men and women would grind up bushels of emmer—the main grain eaten in Egypt—into flour on stone hand mills called querns.

Still more bakers mixed and kneaded the dough, probably with their feet. To bake the bread, rather than waste time making thousands of mud ovens, crews used conical clay molds.

They’d dig holes in the ground, fill them with glowing embers, drop the molds in upside-​down, plop some dough in, then cap each mold with a second one and heap hot ash over the top.

And the beer that gave rise to civilizations, too.

01/17/2026

TRIVIA

🧐 A Nautilus contributor described one famous scientist as "the loneliest genius," writing that getting this person to socialize was "like convincing cats to gather for a game of Scrabble." Which scientist was he describing?

A) Marie Curie
B) Albert Einstein
C) Charles Darwin
D) Isaac Newton
E) Galileo Galilei

01/17/2026

Whether baby talk helps babies learn language has been a somewhat controversial subject. “Previous research has consistently shown that infants prefer to listen to IDS,” said researcher Varghese Peter in a statement. “But whether it has any significance beyond this is under debate.”

Your Infant Knows Exactly What Your Baby Talk Means: It may help infants learn vowel sounds.

01/17/2026