Rhia is queer, trans, and nonbinary. They are also otherkin, or an individual who identifies as nonhuman on a non-physical level, according to the Otherkin Wiki.

This is what happens when you turn the natural world into a profit-making machine. By and Jason W Moore The most telling symbol of the modern era isn’t the automobile or the smartphone. It’s the chicken nugget.

IF YOU’RE a typical westerner, you ate nearly 100 kilograms of meat last year. This was almost certainly the costliest part of your diet, especially in environmental terms. The clamour for people to eat less meat to save the planet is growing ever louder.

Though defining exactly what art is is a near-impossible art all its own, human involvement seems to be an essential tenet, whether it's in creation or conceptualization.

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Broadcast (2011) If you have ever wondered what would happen in your own home if you were taken away and everything inside was left to rot, the answer is revealed in this programme which explores the strange and surprising science of decay. For two months, a glass box containing a typical kitchen and garden was left to rot in full public view within Edinburgh Zoo. In this resulting documentary, Dr George McGavin and his team use time-lapse cameras and specialist photography to capture the extraordinary way in which moulds, microbes and insects are able to break down our everyday things and allow new life to emerge from old. Decay is something that many of us are repulsed by, but as the programme shows, it's a process that's vital in nature. And seen in close up, it has an unexpected and sometimes mesmerising beauty.

In the invisible, parallel world of Earth, they kill half the bacteria in the ocean every day, and invade a microbe host 10 trillion times a second around the world. There are 10 billion trillion, trillion viruses inhabiting Planet Earth, which is more stars than are in the Universe -- stacked end to end, they would reach out 100 million light years.

Over tens, hundreds and millions years, our ancestors have been picking up retroviruses (HIV is a retrovirus) that reproduce by taking their genetic material and inserting it into our own chromosomes. There are probably about 100,000 elements in the human genome that you can trace to a virus ancestor. They make up about 8 percent of our genome, and genes that encode proteins only make up 1.2 percent of our genome making us more virus than human.

Occasionally, a retrovirus will end up in a sperm cell or an egg and insert its genes there, which then may give rise to a new organism, a new animal, a new person where every cell in that body has got that virus.

The pine trees framing the entrance to the forest appear to be normal. Unremarkable. But the crackling dosimeter says otherwise. On this freezing February afternoon, about 2 miles from the concrete sarcophagus that now entombs the number four reactor at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, Gennadi Milinevsky, a physicist from a university in Kiev, walks along a path carpeted with pine needles and patches of recent snow. The size of a transistor radio, the dosimeter emits a sharp click when it detects a radioactive particle. Milinevsky waves the instrument: Its digital readout indicates levels of radiation 120 times higher than normal. As he walks, the staccato popping gets faster as the levels climb to 250 times higher than normal. “It’s not good,” he says. He ventures toward a wide clearing littered with the trunks of dead trees. Milinevsky suggests stopping the tour here. On the far side of the clearing, he knows, the dosimeter will begin to make a sound no one wants to hear: a terrifying snowstorm of screeching white noise, indicating highly toxic levels of gamma radiation some 1,000 times above normal.

Thanks to 3D printing, it will soon be possible to design and build household animals to order.

GeneDupe’s Universal Pet Printer is loaded with each of the 220 cell types (grown from stem cells in the company’s histology laboratory), and is programmed with a three-dimensional map of the creature it is to create. That is devised by the firm’s scientists, based on what the nanotomographic analysis has told them about the results of arranging cells in different ways in an animal’s body.

The cells themselves are stored in suspension, in glass reservoirs, and each reservoir is connected to a computer-controlled spray gun. The hydrogels (several sorts are needed) are stored separately. One, known as osteogel, is particularly important, as this solidifies to provide the animal’s initial skeleton. Once the new creature is up and running (both literally and metaphorically), the various hydrogels are gradually replaced by natural secretions. In the case of osteogel, that secretion is bone.

A stonishing animals show up everywhere these days. Cooperative apes, grief-stricken elephants, empathetic cats and dogs crowd our bookshop shelves. It’s all the rage to plumb the cognitive and emotional depths of the animal world, rejecting sceptics’ sneers of “anthropomorphism” to insist that we’re finally coming to see animals for who they really are: not so different from us.

Pushing against this tide of animal awe is a competing cultural trope, the relentless seeking of human superiority. It’s from this second camp that Michael C. Corballis, a professor emeritus of psychology from New Zealand, has written The Recursive Mind: The origins of human language, thought, and civilization. Mental time travel and theory of mind, Corballis believes, are two uniquely human ways of thinking that propelled our species to heights above all others, thanks to what is called recursion.

Being human offers homo sapiens variety, or some elasticity, in social life, though sociologists claim that people’s personalities disappear with no one else around. Imagining this evacuation, I see a person alone in a self-chosen shelter, motionless on a chair, like a houseplant with prehensile thumbs.

Is it Ethical to Make Animals as Smart as People?

Our ignorance is truly staggering. According to some estimates, 95 percent of organisms in the soil alone are unknown to science. Many of them labor unseen, in the dark, serving as the churning stomachs of our planet, digesting dead plants and animals and, in the process, enriching the earth we depend upon for food and fiber. Other organisms expel their gaseous waste — a precious resource known as oxygen —to create the atmosphere that supports and sweetens the earth with such glorious creatures as toucans and manta rays and blue morpho butterflies, not to mention writers and academics. Some bacteria are even thought to contribute to the formation of clouds.

In the last decade, human vanity has taken a major hit. Traits once thought to be uniquely, even definingly human have turned up in the repertoire of animal behaviors: tool use, for example, is widespread among non-human primates, at least if a stick counts as a tool. We share moral qualities, such as a capacity for altruism with dolphins, elephants and others; our ability to undertake cooperative ventures, such as hunting, can also be found among lions, chimpanzees and sharks. Chimps are also capable of “culture,” in the sense of socially transmitted skills and behaviors peculiar to a particular group or band. Creatures as unrelated as sea gulls and bonobos indulge in homosexuality and other nonreproductive sexual activities. There are even animal artists: male bowerbirds, who construct complex, obsessively decorated structures to attract females; dolphins who draw dolphin audiences to their elaborately blown sequences of bubbles. 

The origin of animals was one of the most astonishing and important transformations in the history of life. From single-celled ancestors, they evolved into a riot of complexity and diversity. An estimated seven million species of animals live on earth today, ranging from tubeworms at the bottom of the ocean to elephants lumbering across the African savanna. Their bodies can total trillions of cells, which can develop into muscles, bones and hundreds of other kinds of tissues and cell types. The dawn of the animal kingdom about 800 million years ago was also an ecological revolution. Animals devoured the microbial mats that had dominated the oceans for more than two billion years and created their own habitats, like coral reefs.

The origin of animals is also one of the more mysterious episodes in the history of life. Changing from a single-celled organism to a trillion-cell collective demands a huge genetic overhaul. 

Yesterday afternoon, Matthew Fuller gave a brief but fascinating overview of artworks that make a direct address to the perceptual world of non-human animal species. As you will see quite a few amazing works have been done in this field. Art for animals is art with animals intended as its key users or audience. Art for animals is not therefore art that uses animals as a substrate or a carrier, nor as an object of contemplation or use.

You can find online the text related to his presentation which was titled Pattern Recognition - Art for Animals so i'm just going to run through the examples he gave during the conference.

First one is Berthold Lubetkin's early modernist architecture for aquatic birds: the Penguin Pool at the London Zoo.

Hans Waanders's series of Perches are simple branches placed by the water in the hope to attract the attention of a kingfisher and modify its habitat in an obtrusive way. Sorry i couldn't find any illustration for this one.

Taxidermy (and the chemistry of the morgue) has been something close to a cult obsession with our contemporary gang. We get it, we get it, you often want to howl in the presence of some of the postmodern confections, now show me something you’ve really pondered, not just a high-school truism about the world drowning in the bloody slops of the abattoir. And back they come as if to say, no, that’s not it at all, actually; the reason we dip carcases into formaldehyde, why we (or our hirelings) are so busy stuffin’ ’n’ stitchin’, is because we’re really making a point about art itself; the unselfconsciousness with which all representation is a form of gussied-up taxidermy; the fixing of fugitive moments. Art may be the victory over decay but, guess what, the contemporary artist protests, it can’t be done. The end result of all that effort is merely a sub-species of deadness. So the contrary gesture is to foreground precisely the repugnant processes that the fake aesthetic of the perfect de

Who among us is invulnerable to the puppy in the pet store window? Not everyone is a dog person, of course; some people are cat people or horse people or parakeet people or albino ferret people. But human beings are a distinctly pet-loving bunch. In no other species do adults regularly and knowingly rear the young of other species and support them into old age; in our species it is commonplace. In almost every human culture, people own pets. In the United States, there are more households with pets than with children.

On the face of it, this doesn’t make sense: Pets take up resources that we would otherwise spend on ourselves or our own progeny. Some pets, it’s true, do work for their owners, or are eventually eaten by them, but many simply live with us, eating the food we give them, interrupting our sleep, dictating our schedules, occasionally soiling the carpet, and giving nothing in return but companionship and often desultory affection.

What explains this yen to have animals in o

Perhaps you have had a nightmare in which you fell through the bottom of your known universe into a vortex of mutated children, talking animals, mental illness, freakish art, and clamoring gibberish. There, you were subjected to the gaze of creatures of indeterminate nature and questionable intelligence. Your position as the subject of your own dream was called into question while voices outside your sight commented upon your tenuous identity. When you woke, you were relieved to find that it was only a dream-version of the book you were reading when you fell asleep. Maybe that book was Alice in Wonderland; maybe it was What is Posthumanism?

Now, it is not quite fair to compare Cary Wolfe’s sober, thoughtful scholarship with either a nightmare or a work of (children’s?) fantasy. It is a profound, thoroughly researched study with far-reaching consequences for public policy, bioethics, education, and the arts. However, it does present a rather odd dramatis personae, including a glow-in-t