💡 There’s No Such Thing as “Just a Song”

The latest from Nautilus, this week’s Facts So Romantic, and your question of the day. [View in browser](| [Join Nautilus]( Together with Did a friend forward this? [Subscribe here.]( Hello there Nautilus readers, and thanks for dropping in. Today we hear why there’s no such thing as “just a song,” rethink the randomness of big evolutionary change, and learn how actors remember their lines. Plus, in this week’s Facts So Romantic—record-setting dinosaur fossils, time’s speed when feeling manic, and more. Check out your question of the day (on reciting from memory) and free story (on a forgotten physics pioneer) below. Stay curious my friends. —Brian Gallagher The latest in Nautilus ARTS There’s No Such Thing as “Just a Song” What we can learn from the history of maritime folk music. BY KATY KELLEHER During the early, quiet, and lonely months of the COVID-19 pandemic, many strange things occurred, among them a renewed interest in a near-dead genre of music: sea shanties. [Continue reading→]( Get a Big Grill with a Tiny Carbon Footprint Charcoal grilling emits loads of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide. Propane burns cleaner, but the food doesn’t taste the same. Fortunately there’s a better option—[the Traeger Electric Wood Pellet Grill](. With the [Traeger Electric Wood Pellet Grill]( you get the same smoky BBQ flavor as charcoal with the convenience of propane and almost zero emissions. Plus, the built-in WiFIRE technology lets you monitor the grill from anywhere. Get the best of both worlds while doing your part to save our own with the [Traeger Electric Wood Pellet Grill](. [BUY ON AMAZON]( The latest from Nautilus [EVOLUTION]( A Crystal Ball for Evolution Long-term evolution may be more predictable than we assumed. BY KATHARINE GAMMON [Continue reading→]( [PSYCHOLOGY]( How Actors Remember Their Lines Emotional context helps memories stick. BY JOHN SEAMON [Continue reading→]( WE'RE CURIOUS TO KNOW... Is there anything you’ve proudly committed to memory that you could recite right now? Let us know! Reply to this newsletter with your response, briefly explaining your choice, and we’ll reveal the top answers. (This question was inspired by�€œ[How Actors Remember Their Lines](.”[)]( Top Answer to Our Previous Question(On an Impromptu Trip with Someone You Just Met) • After a little over a week of dating, as the sun was setting over Lake Wallenpaupack in Pennsylvania, my future wife asked if I would like to join her in a few months on a trip to Greece and Turkey. I said yes. At sunrise, as we sailed into Istanbul, I proposed. Next week will be our 30th anniversary. Together we have traveled the world. – Will C. Sign Up for the Imagine5 Newsletter Join more than [40,000 optimists]( today in creating a future we want to live in tomorrow. [Sign Up Here]( FACTS SO ROMANTIC The 5 Best Things We Learned Today A septuagenarian actor was able to recite all 10,565 lines of Milton’s epic poem, Paradise Lost. [Nautilus→]( Traits in animals that can evolve quickly over short time scales are often the very ones that matter when new species evolve. [Nautilus→]( People who suffer from mania are often characterized as inhabiting a world in which time seems to have sprinted ahead. [Nautilus→]( The record for the most valuable dinosaur fossils ever sold at auction is held by Stan, a T-rex skeleton that went for $31.8 million in 2020. [The Guardian→]( Humans in prehistory were afflicted with cancers that no longer exist. [The New York Times→]( QUOTE OF THE DAY “When was the last time you passed a worksite and heard the workmen singing?” [Stephen Sanfilippo talks to Nautilus about the significance of shanties.]( Your free story this Thursday! [ASTRONOMY]( The Man Who Discovered the Sun’s Puzzling Heat Is Being Forgotten The extraordinary physical intuition of Hannes Alfvén. BY VIRAT MARKANDEYA When you observe a solar eclipse—with great care, of course—what you see is a thin, red crescent outlining the blocked-out Sun and, extending beyond it, a stark white mane. [Continue reading for free→]( Sometimes You Just Click Culture is what connects us. No one knows that better than childhood friends Olu and WowGr8 of the experimental hip hop duo EarthGang. That’s why they were the perfect choice to read Claudia Geib’s [story]( “Clicking with Your Kin” about the special sounds sperm whales use to identify their clans. “Music is one of the characteristics that distinguishes different cultural groups amongst us humans, and helps us to identify ourselves — a trait that, as this research suggests, we seem to share with sperm whales,” Geib told us. “As such, it feels particularly appropriate to have a musical duo reading this story. Thanks to EarthGang for this fantastic reading. I'd love to see your collab with the whales themselves next!” You can now [watch]( or [listen]( to EarthGang read Geib’s story. [WATCH]( [LISTEN]( P.S. The Swedish electrical engineer Hannes Alfvén was born on this day in 1908. He convinced the world that the sun’s corona, its surrounding aura, was hotter than the sun’s surface. In the early 1940s, Alfvén “theorized that the sun’s magnetic field, interacting with charged particles, plays a crucial role in [the corona’s bewildering heat](, overcoming presumed thermodynamic limits—that heat cannot be transported from a cool to a hot body,” wrote Virat Markandeya. “While his contemporaries didn’t dare to draw such a conclusion, Alfvén boldly declared that the corona is ‘heated to an extremely high temperature.’” Today’s newsletter was written by Brian Gallagher Thanks for reading. [Tell us](mailto:brian.gallagher@nautil.us?subject=&body=) your thoughts on today’s note. 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