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At a recent “hoarding panel” meeting in east London, Daniel Pearson, commander for Shadwell and Whitechapel fire stations, played attenders a recording of a 999 call in which a panicked resident reported a fire at their home.

image copyrightClaire Simonin‎ / Ar ViltansouA French coastal community has finally cracked the mystery behind the Garfield telephones that have plagued its picturesque beaches for decades.

Ranjan here, and today I'm talking Taboola and Outbrain. Most of my work in media has been on subscriptions and branded content, so I've never played in the depths of ad-tech darkness. But, I spent seven years trading currency derivatives and am well versed in the art of arbitrage.

In 2011, a loose group of “grumpy futurists” wrote up an extensive list of “Alternatives to the Singularity” in a collaborative Google Document. “The Singularity”, in popular culture and para-religious belief, refers to the point where machine intelligence leaves humans behind.

Tens of thousands of Londoners died of cholera from the 1830s to the 1860s. The causes were simple: mass quantities of human waste and industrial contaminants were pouring into the Thames, the central waterway of a city at the center of a rapidly industrializing world.

As the country’s population ages and shrinks, there’s increasing demand for services that clean out and dispose of the property of the dead.

In 1965, American sculptor Claes Oldenburg proposed an object of quite unforgettable brute simplicity for New York City. Oldenburg may be best known today for his cuddly "soft sculptures" and monumental pop-art reproductions of everyday objects, but this was neither cuddly nor pop.

The job of clearing out her father’s house after his death led Jo Cooke to discover more about his childhood in Poland and strange behaviour – a process that helped her change career My father’s death from pneumonia on 1 January 2012, aged 81, was almost a relief.

“Language is easy to capture but difficult to read”, in the words of the poet and media researcher John Cayley.1 Cayley wrote this sentence merely as a footnote to an essay on his “terms of reference”, yet it sums up the whole dilemma of so-called “big data” processing.

Human-engineered structures and gadgets from cities to cellphones now represent an enormous mass weight of nearly 30 trillion tonnes on the planet, or vastly more than the world’s forests or life in the oceans.

We can now quantify how much humans have changed the surface of the planet.

Giant collection of fishing nets, plastic containers and other discarded items called a ‘ticking time bomb’ as large items crumble into micro plastics 13.02 EDT Last modified on Tuesday 4 October 2016 13.

CHICAGO—It was Nordstrom’s anniversary sale, and Marnie couldn’t help herself. She ran to the shoe display, and, with a swooping bear hug, grabbed up an entire row of gemstone-hued Nikes. Marnie is a self-identified hoarder, and she was here as part of an intervention of sorts.

The dark web—the portion of the deep web only accessible through specific software—exists to serve the needs of hackers-for-hire, hitmen, internet drug kingpins, child pornographers, and their inevitable customers. That’s the public consensus. Then there’s the counter-narrative.

In early August 1997, Charles Moore found himself floating through the North Pacific in his Tasmanian-built catamaran.

It’s important to photograph the hermit crabs in their natural habitat.  I prefer to photograph them using a wide angle lens to achieve a unique perspective. Hermit crab in a glass bottle- Yomitan, Okinawa.

This talk was delivered as the plenary paper for The 11th Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Conference, Imperial College, London, 2nd August 2016. You can find the full content of the talk beneath the slides in the comments section, or click the gear icon below and select ‘Open speaker notes’ It is presented here under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA 4.0 licence – please use as you wish, but always reference and refer back to this post or the slide show.

“Any sufficiently advanced civilisation is indistinguishable from its garbage.” – Bruce Sterling

More than five years after the devastating tsunami and the 8.9-magnitude earthquake struck north-eastern Japan, causing the explosion of the nuclear power plant in Fukushima, the Japanese town remains abandoned. Since April 22, 2011, an area within 20km (12.

The Mariana Trench is the deepest spot in the ocean—and it’s home to some strange sights, sounds, and creatures. But there’s one thing down there that’s very familiar: a whole bunch of garbage.