The Most Beautiful Science of the Year

As Einstein saw it, this is where science begins: “The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: His eyes are closed.” Illustration by Mathias Ball Illustration by Cornelia Li Illustration by Jorge Colombo Illustration by Maria Fedoseeva Illustration by A. Kendra Greene Illustration by Myriam Wares Lightspring / Shutterstock Einstein’s view was an inspiration for “ More Than a Feeling ,” a Nautilus article this year by Sean B. Carroll, in which the evolutionary biologist portrays a wonderful world of scientists who found their callings in the emotion of awe. That spirit, too, drives our journalism and essays, and as 2025 winds down, we look back at some of the beautiful insights and writing that defined Nautilus this year. On a sticky, late-spring night in parts of the eastern United States, you might witness one of the wonders of the animal kingdom: a constellation of hundreds of fireflies blinking in unison . Illustration by Mathias Ball We needn’t get down to neurons and base pairs and biochemicals to be reminded of our animalness . Sometimes it’s as simple as a 4-year-old Homo sapiens standing in quiet stillness, mouth agape, gazing up at the towering Barosaurus and Allosaurus in the foyer of the American Museum of Natural History, momentarily unaware of the buzz of other humanity around her. Maybe the emergence of beings like us is not hindered by hard steps but is simply slow. Perhaps the universe is teeming with alien civilizations -or will be before very much longer. Illustration by Cornelia Li In the beginning, I was chasing Peter Putnam the fantasy, a forgotten janitor who’d discovered the structure of the mind. But the deeper I read, I found myself thinking, Wait, did a forgotten janitor seriously discover the structure of the mind? Bullie was the most caring in the group. Whenever someone else was ill, she would sit with her and comfort her. Bram and Wezel had the strongest friendship. There was just the two of them after their friends had died, and they did everything together: eating, sleeping, pottering about like an old married couple. Bullie, Bram, and Wezel were three of the 25 ex-laboratory mice with whom I lived between 2020 and 2023. Jackson Pollock’s paintings look like beautiful accidents. As I walked through the freezer room, I continued to think about my dad’s brain , nestled in a shelf among other frozen brains, and my fear gave way to a strange mix of wonder and sadness. The once active neurons that fired electrical and chemical signals from axons to dendrites inside the crevices and folds of the left frontal lobe, home to the language center, were now quiet. The memories produced in the hippocampus were now frozen. These parts worked in concert to convert my dad’s experiences into...

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