The mouse didn't look like much. It had the same red beady eyes and white fur as any other laboratory mouse. Sure, its DNA had been tweaked to make it ideal for testing anti-cancer drugs, but that wasn’t so unusual either.

Parag Khanna is the author of Connectography (2016) and The Future is Asian (2019). Michael Ferrari is managing partner at Atlas Research Innovations and a senior fellow at the Wharton School.

In mid-January, a group of computer scientists and biologists from the University of Vermont, Tufts, and Harvard announced that they had created an entirely new life form — xenobots, the world’s first living robots.

A proposal to build two huge barriers — one that would connect Norway to Scotland, the other France to England — was described as a warning about the urgency of the climate crisis.LONDON — One dam would stretch some 300 miles from the coast of Scotland to Norway.

Some of the first people to be called “engineers” operated siege engines. A siege engine is a very old device used to tear down the walls of an enemy city.

Benjamin Bratton on Speculative Design, an alternative to mainstream Design that complicates the speculative models that underscore our global economy.

Last year, a man in an exoskeleton kicked off the Men’s World Cup. Juliano Pinto, a 29-year-old from Brazil, was outfitted by a team of scientists from the Walk Again Project with a complex framework of braces and metal armature that could all be controlled by his brain.

Scientists have already shown that termites build their mounds in a unique way involving "bio-cementation", a process where grains of soil are fused together into small balls with moisture, saliva and excretion.

Letting microchips make a few mistakes here and there could make them much faster and more energy-efficient.

Managing the probability of errors and limiting where they occur can ensure that the errors do not cause any problems. The result of a mathematical calculation, for example, need not always be calculated precisely—an accuracy of two or three decimal places is often enough. Dr Palem offers the analogy of a person about to cross a big room. Rather than wasting time and energy calculating the shortest path, it’s better just to start walking in roughly the right direction.

The seas are rising. Climate change has made it inevitable. I have a strange question... Assuming that world sea-level rises by 1 metre over the next hundred years - Would it be possible to cordon off a section of land, somewhere in the centre of a continent, and flood it to create an artificial ocean, thus reducing the consequences of the sea rise?

This Biblical scale engineering feat must take these issues into account:

1. The section of land would have to be a very large 'bowl', in the centre of a continent, that is already below sea level. Another section of land, leading from the ocean to this central 'bowl' section, would have to be carved out to create the biggest dam system mankind has ever witnessed. Does somewhere like this exist?

2. The number of humans currently living in this 'bowl' would have to be less than the number of humans who would be displaced by the 1 metre sea level rise. Otherwise this huge engineering feat would not be worth undertaking.

3. Other environme