Dan Falk
Verified- Freelance Science Journalist, Freelance
- Science Correspondent, Smithsonian Magazine
- Correspondent, UNDARK
Toronto
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Covering #science for @undarkmag @SmithsonianMag @QuantaMagazine @DiscoverMag @NautilusMag etc; 3rd book = The Science of Shakespeare. Mostly @ the other place.
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Articles by Dan Falk
New Clues to How Life on Earth Began
The movies are short, barely a minute long. To the untrained eye, they show little circular blobs moving slowly from one edge of the frame to the other. The blobs are actually tiny bundles of protein, a few microns across, and the films show how they move spontaneously along chemical gradients – from low pH to high pH, for example. They’re hardly Citizen Kane – but to Alan Moses, who saw the films at a scientific conference in Switzerland in 2024, they were an eye-opener.
Book Review: The Messy Business of Making Science Happen
Stereotypes die hard. If we’re asked to picture a scientist at work, it’s tempting to reach for an old stand-by: the astronomer at the eyepiece of an enormous telescope, or the chemist surrounded by test tubes. Even more entrenched, perhaps, is the notion that science advances by a chain of “aha” moments, sparking one earth-shattering breakthrough after another: Think of Einstein figuring out that E=mc2, perhaps, or Marie and Pierre Curie discovering radium.
The Return of a Discredited Pseudoscience
The pseudoscience of eugenics, founded on the mistaken notion that nature envisions some “right” combination of genes, and that selective breeding can improve the human race, is making a comeback. While the heyday of eugenics was a century ago, the idea was never really forgotten. In the 19th century, the modern science of biology was in its infancy, but took a leap forward with the work of pioneering researchers like Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.
Book Review: The Mind-Boggling Science of Enormous Numbers
When a child learns all 26 letters of the English alphabet, they’re “done” — but numbers, amazingly, just keep on going. A particularly enthusiastic kid might decide to see just how far they can go: Start from one and keep going into the hundreds, perhaps into the thousands, and — well, eventually they get tired or bored, and the exercise comes to a close. Jeremy Harper, with an eye on the record books, counted out loud to a million in 2007, a task that required 89 days.
Time Brings Order to the Universe
If there was an award for the most depressing law of physics, the prize would go to the second law of thermodynamics, hands down. The second law says, roughly, that the amount of disorder in the universe keeps increasing. Stuff breaks down. You and I will break down, and one day the universe itself will run out of steam.
Book Review: How Evolution Is Driving Us Further Into Space
Sometime next year, NASA is hoping to send the crew of Artemis II around the moon and return them to Earth; if the mission goes as planned, the four astronauts will travel farther from Earth than any humans previously. Meanwhile, our robotic probes have travelled much farther; the Voyager 1 spacecraft, for example, is now in interstellar space, some 25 billion kilometers (almost 16 billion miles) from our planet.
Book Review: How Evolution Is Driving Us Further Into Space
Sometime next year, NASA is hoping to send the crew of Artemis II around the moon and return them to Earth; if the mission goes as planned, the four astronauts will travel farther from Earth than any humans previously. Meanwhile, our robotic probes have travelled much farther; the Voyager 1 spacecraft, for example, is now in interstellar space, some 25 billion kilometers (almost 16 billion miles) from our planet.
BookLab 040: The best science books of 2025
An investigative podcast hosted by world-renowned literary critic and publishing insider Bethanne Patrick. Book bans are on the rise across America. With the rise of social media, book publishers are losing their power as the industry gatekeepers. More and more celebrities and influencers are publishing books with ghostwriters. Writing communities are splintering because members are at cross purposes about their mission. Missing Pages is an investigative podcast about the book publishing ind ...
How 3 imaginary physics demons tore up the laws of nature
There is a long history of doing physics by imagination. Albert Einstein built his special theory of relativity after imagining himself chasing a beam of light. Erwin Schrödinger gave us a cat that was both alive and dead. The German mathematician David Hilbert demonstrated the counterintuitiveness of infinity by imagining a hotel with an infinite number of rooms and guests. By taking creative liberties, physicists use thought experiments to stress-test ideas and so better understand them.
Giant Mirrors in Space Could Bring Sunlight After Dark, One Startup Says-and Astronomers Are Concerned
Critics argue the satellites, billed as a way to harness solar energy at night, could hamper sky observations and may pose a threat to human and animal health The sun comes up, and we have daylight; it goes down, and we have night. At least, that’s how it’s been for 4.5 billion years. But now, a California-based startup is aiming to change that pattern.
The Ten Best Science Books of 2025
From “experimental archaeology” to the mysterious appeal of exploration, the wide-ranging subjects detailed in these titles captivated Smithsonian magazine’s science contributors this year In 2025, our science reporters followed the first confirmed glimpse of a colossal squid and a rare look at dinosaur blood vessels. We watched the odds of a future asteroid impact climb to higher-than-normal levels—then drop back down to zero.
The Ten Best Science Books of 2025
Hemp shop owners aren't just worried about their own futures, but also that of their customers, many of whom rely on the products to deal with pain, …
How to See Comet Lemmon and the Orionids Meteor Shower Peak
A comet discovered earlier this year, now just bright enough to be visible to the naked eye, is poised to be among the top celestial events of 2025. Known as C/2025 A6 (Lemmon), this celestial wanderer is currently in the western sky after sunset, not far from the Big Dipper, and is well placed for viewing as the sky gets dark.
Book Review: A Call to Arms About the Threat of Anti-Science
This article was originally published on Undark. In the 1995 book “The Demon Haunted World,” the astronomer Carl Sagan warned that the United States was turning its back on science, and that the consequences would be dire. Near the start of their new book, “Science Under Siege: How To Fight The Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World,” Michael E. Mann and Peter J.
Book Review: A Call to Arms About the Threat of Anti-Science
This article was originally published on Undark. In the 1995 book “The Demon Haunted World,” the astronomer Carl Sagan warned that the United States was turning its back on science, and that the consequences would be dire. Near the start of their new book, “Science Under Siege: How To Fight The Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World,” Michael E. Mann and Peter J.
Book Review: A Call to Arms About the Threat of Anti-Science
In the 1995 book “The Demon Haunted World,” the astronomer Carl Sagan warned that the United States was turning its back on science, and that the consequences would be dire. Near the start of their new book, “Science Under Siege: How To Fight The Five Most Powerful Forces That Threaten Our World,” Michael E. Mann and Peter J. Hotez cite Sagan’s vision of science as a “candle in the dark,” and argue that what the astronomer feared is now coming to pass.
Una misteriosa partícula podría explicar la antimateria que falta en el universo
Todo a nuestro alrededor, desde el suelo bajo nuestros pies hasta las galaxias más remotas, está hecho de materia. Para los científicos, esto ha supuesto un problema durante mucho tiempo: según las teorías actuales, la materia y su contrapartida, la antimateria, deberían haberse creado en cantidades iguales en el momento del big bang. Pero la antimateria es extremadamente rara en el universo. Entonces, ¿qué pasó?
What’s Wrong with Having an AI Friend? Original
ADVERTISEMENT Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. or Join now . Psychology Psychologist Paul Bloom on why chatbots make good companions. And why they don’t. The full Nautilus archive • eBooks & Special Editions • Ad-free reading The full Nautilus archive eBooks & Special Editions Ad-free reading Earlier this year professor of psychology Paul Bloom came to the defense of artificial intelligence chatbots as human companions.
How Prepared Are We for a Rare and Powerful Solar Event?
A coronal mass ejection could knock out power and disrupt communication on Earth In August of 1859, astronomers noticed an unusually large number of dark spots on the sun’s surface. One of those observers was Richard Carrington, an amateur skywatcher who lived just outside London. One day as he was projecting the sun’s image onto a screen, he noticed an intense “white light flare” that lasted about five minutes.
How a mysterious particle could explain the universe’s missing antimatter
How a mysterious particle could explain the universe’s missing antimatter Everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of matter. For scientists, that has long posed a problem: According to physicists’ best current theories, matter and its counterpart, antimatter, ought to have been created in equal amounts at the time of the Big Bang. But antimatter is vanishingly rare in the universe. So what happened?
How a mysterious particle could explain the universe’s missing antimatter Original
remotevfx.com // Shutterstock Everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of matter. For scientists, that has long posed a problem: According to physicists’ best current theories, matter and its counterpart, antimatter, ought to have been created in equal amounts at the time of the Big Bang. But antimatter is vanishingly rare in the universe. So what happened?
How a mysterious particle could explain the universe’s missing antimatter
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Book Review: When the Red Planet Drove Earthlings to Distraction
There’s something about Mars that tugs at the imagination. More than dazzling Venus, the brightest object in the night sky after the moon, and more than Saturn with its mesmerizing rings, the red planet beckons as something like a parallel version of our own world — similar enough to our home planet that we might fantasize about going there, different enough to make it more exotic than even our remotest deserts or ice-covered polar regions.
How a Mysterious Particle Could Explain the Universe’s Missing Antimatter
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How neutrinos could explain matter-antimatter asymmetry
Everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of matter. For scientists, that has long posed a problem: According to physicists’ best current theories, matter and its counterpart, antimatter, ought to have been created in equal amounts at the time of the Big Bang. But antimatter is vanishingly rare in the universe. So what happened?
How a mysterious particle could explain the Universe’s missing antimatter
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How a mysterious particle could explain the Universe’s missing antimatter
New experiments focused on understanding the enigmatic neutrino may offer insights. Everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of matter. For scientists, that has long posed a problem: According to physicists’ best current theories, matter and its counterpart, antimatter, ought to have been created in equal amounts at the time of the Big Bang. But antimatter is vanishingly rare in the universe. So what happened?
How a mysterious particle could explain the universe’s missing antimatter
Generate Key Takeaways Everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of matter. For scientists, that has long posed a problem: According to physicists’ best current theories, matter and its counterpart, antimatter, ought to have been created in equal amounts at the time of the Big Bang. But antimatter is vanishingly rare in the universe. So what happened?
How a mysterious particle could explain the universe’s missing antimatter
Everything we see around us, from the ground beneath our feet to the most remote galaxies, is made of matter. For scientists, that has long posed a problem: According to physicists’ best current theories, matter and its counterpart, antimatter, ought to have been created in equal amounts at the time of the Big Bang. But antimatter is vanishingly rare in the universe. So what happened?
Does Anybody Really Know What Time Is?
ADVERTISEMENT Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. or Join now . Neuroscience Yes, your brain does. It created it. The full Nautilus archive • eBooks & Special Editions • Ad-free reading The full Nautilus archive eBooks & Special Editions Ad-free reading I’ve been fascinated by time for as long as I can remember.
With Space Junk on the Rise, Is a Catastrophic Event Inevitable?
Debris from capsules and satellites can fall back to Earth or collide with other objects, and wreckage that burns up can harm the ozone layer When astronomer Samantha Lawler got an email from a journalist in May 2024 saying that space junk may have landed in a farmer’s field an hour’s drive from her home in Regina, Saskatchewan, she was skeptical.
Unpacking the flaws of a techbro dreams of the future
This story was originally published by Undark and is reproduced here as part of the Climate Desk collaboration. Elon Musk once joked: “I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” Musk is, in fact, deadly serious about colonizing the Red Planet. Part of his motivation is the idea of having a “back-up” planet in case some future catastrophe renders the Earth uninhabitable. Musk has suggested that a million people may be calling Mars home by 2050 — and he’s hardly alone in his enthusiasm.
A Century Ago, a High School Teacher From a Small Tennessee Town Ignited a National Debate Over Human Evolution
The Scopes “monkey trial” garnered international attention, and the battle that was fought continues in some form in other states today A hundred years ago this summer, the small town of Dayton, Tennessee, was thrust into the international spotlight as one of the most famous legal confrontations of the 20th century got underway.
A Skeptical Look at Grand Designs for the Future
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Book Review: A Skeptical Look at Grand Designs for the Future
Elon Musk once joked: “I would like to die on Mars. Just not on impact.” Musk is, in fact, deadly serious about colonizing the Red Planet. Part of his motivation is the idea of having a “back up” planet in case some future catastrophe renders the Earth uninhabitable. Musk has suggested that a million people may be calling Mars home by 2050 — and he’s hardly alone in his enthusiasm.
" Toutes nos expériences conscientes trouvent leur origine dans cet impératif fondamental qui est de rester en vie "
Comment fonctionne l’esprit ? C’est la grande affaire d’Anil Seth, de l’université du Sussex, en Angleterre. Les neurones n’ont que peu de secrets pour lui, mais il sait que l’énigme de la conscience déborde le champ des neurosciences pour s’étendre à d’autres branches de la science, et même à la philosophie.
Researchers study the role of rock strength in landscape evolution
At first glance, landscapes like the Great Plains and the Rockies may seem unchanging, but over geological time scales, they're dynamic systems. Plate tectonics raise mountains, while erosion—driven by glaciers, rain and wind—wears them down. But there's an often-overlooked factor in this process: the rock itself.
Review: When the USSR and America Joined in the Search for ET
The summer of 1962 was a grim time for American-Soviet relations. The botched Bay of Pigs invasion of the previous year, in Soviet-backed Cuba, was still a fresh memory, and the Cuban Missile Crisis was just months away. Nonetheless, in June of that year a young astronomer named Carl Sagan decided to reach out to a colleague in the USSR, the astrophysicist Iosif Shklovsky.
Astronomers Suspect Colliding Supermassive Black Holes Left the Universe Awash in Gravitational Waves
A decade ago, physicists using twin detectors in Washington State and Louisiana detected gravitational waves—subtle ripples in space-time—for the first time. The landmark discovery, confirming Albert Einstein’s century-old prediction of such waves, was recognized with the 2017 Nobel Prize in Physics. Gravitational waves are created whenever massive objects undergo any kind of acceleration.
‘Language Puzzle’: Exploring the mystery of how humans learned to communicate
According to Guinness World Records, the world’s fastest talker is one Sean Shannon, capable of unleashing a staggering 665 English words per minute (that’s 11 words per second). But even those of us with average tongues seem to chatter incessantly.
The Ten Best Science Books of 2024
Smart News | From a deep dive on a fatal space shuttle disaster to a study of a dozen iconic trees, these are our favorite titles this year This year, millions of viewers looked to the sky during a momentous day in April to view a stunning total solar eclipse. During select nights throughout the year, they gazed at spectacular auroras. As record heat spread over our planet again this year, Atlantic hurricanes fueled by warm waters hit the United States hard.
Consciousness: More than nothing is going on in the mind of a bees and other animals
Dan Falk | October 30, 2024 In 2022, researchers at the Bee Sensory and Behavioral Ecology Lab at Queen Mary University of London observed bumblebees doing something remarkable: The diminutive, fuzzy creatures were engaging in activity that could only be described as play. Given small wooden balls, the bees pushed them around and rotated them. The behavior had no obvious connection to mating or survival, nor was it rewarded by the scientists. It was, apparently, just for fun.
After Decades of Searching, Are Physicists Closing In on Dark Matter?
The universe is made up of much more than meets the eye. While telescopes reveal countless galaxies, each containing billions of stars, physicists and astronomers believe that visible matter is just the tip of the iceberg, so to speak, and that some kind of unseen dark matter must be out there as well, accounting for some 85 percent of the mass of the universe.
Lucy at 50
Join ADVERTISEMENT Nautilus Members enjoy an ad-free experience. or Join now . Paleontology Donald Johanson reflects on his fossil discovery that shook the human family tree a half century ago. Sign up for the free Nautilus newsletter: Donald Johanson was 31 in 1974 when he came upon a set of bones belonging to an extinct hominin species at the Hadar fossil site in northeastern Ethiopia. Johanson, a newly minted Ph.D., was an associate professor of anthropology at Case Western University.
Book Review: The Mysterious Impact of Music on the Brain and Body
It’s not clear who first said that “writing about music is like dancing about architecture,” but they had a point: Music exerts a certain power over us, but it’s not the sort of power one can readily quantify or analyze. Music moves us, often very deeply — but how? If anyone is qualified to tackle this age-old question, it’s Daniel J.
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