💡 The Brilliant “Baloney Slicer” That Started the Digital Age

The latest from Nautilus, the best things we learned today, and more. [View in Browser]( | [Join Nautilus]( Did a friend forward this? Sign up here Hello there Nautilus readers, and thanks for popping in. Today we see how our memories are like paintings, and hear how the night sky speaks to us. Plus, some of the best things we learned today—Mars’ liquid water, human aging bursts, and more. Check out the quote of the day (on memory) and your free story (on a historic baloney slicer) below. Until next time! — Brian Gallagher The latest from Nautilus Your Memories Are Like Paintings Understanding that memories are interpretations can transform you. [Continue Reading→]( How the Night Sky Speaks to Us An acoustic experiment reveals that spooky forest sounds may come from above. [Continue Reading→]( Don’t limit your curiosity. Enjoy unlimited ad-free Nautilus stories every month for less than $5/month. [Join now]( A Night Under the Stars with Cassandra Jenkins and Nautilus On a sweltering Tuesday in July, scores of music fans (including four lucky Nautilus contest winners) packed into a cool, dark planetarium for an evening of music under the stars with indie rock artist Cassandra Jenkins. Jenkins crafted [a tailor-made cosmic show]( to accompany her latest album My Light, My Destroyer. For nearly 40 minutes the audience watched—necks craned toward the “sky”—as a series of cascading celestial events unfolded on the dome above, perfectly synchronized with her songs. You can read more about the event [here](. [Read more]( The best things we learned today - In the sky, 200 to 260 feet above the surface, oppositely charged ions interact, building energy to the point where it must discharge, like tiny lightning bolts that crackle and pop. [Read on Nautilus→]( - Mars is warm enough to host liquid water near the top of mid-crust, and apparently, there’s some there now. [Read on PNAS→]( - Because humans have such weird experiences that are totally unique, we can imagine things that would never come through some large language model trained on the internet. [Read on Nautilus→]( - Once you know how luminous a Cepheid—a pulsating star—is, you can compare that to how bright or dim it appears, to estimate how far away its galaxy is. [Read on Quanta→]( - Humans age dramatically in two bursts—at 44, then 60. [Read on The Guardian→]( “The very act of recalling a memory can lead … to distortions and misinformation, to the point where the memory becomes corrupted.” Neuroscientist Charan Ranganath tells Nautilus about the malleability of memory and what that means for our sense of self. [Read on Nautilus→]( Find Out Why Mushrooms are Punk Find out why mushrooms are punk in [Mushroom Punks](, a zine/foraging guide by artist and designer Bella Lalonde. Get [your copy]( for just $15. [Buy now]( Today’s unlocked free story HISTORY The Brilliant “Baloney Slicer” That Started the Digital Age How the hard disk drive married two very powerful concepts. BY VENKAT SRINIVASAN In the early 1950s, the U.S. Air Force Supply Depot in Ohio was looking for a faster way to store and fetch information from its sizable inventory. [Continue reading]( P.S. The Danish physicist Hans Christian Ørsted was born on this day in 1777. In 1820, he found that an electric current deflected his nearby magnetic compass needle. Hearing of this discovery, Michael Faraday, an English physicist, set up his own experiments and found that [magnetism and electric current had an interchangeable effect](. “He coiled two wires around a magnetic iron ring and ran current through the first coil, which caused a current to pass through the second coil, too,” wrote Venkat Srinivasan. “Faraday realized that the current through the first wire had created a magnetic field in the iron ring, and this field had in turn set off an electric current on the second wire”—the basis of magnetic recording. Thanks for reading! What did you think of today's note? Inspire a friend to [sign up for the Nautilus newsletter](. Copyright © 2024 NautilusNext, All rights reserved. You were subscribed to the newsletter from [nautil.us](. Our mailing address is: NautilusNext 3112 Windsor Rd, Ste A-391 Austin, TX, 78703 Don't want to hear from us anymore? [Unsubscribe](