Daniel Rourke /stream

Bookmark

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…

Bookmark

The crowd-sourced, wikinomic cloud is the new, new thing that all management consultants are now telling their clients to embrace. Yet the cloud is not a new thing at all. It…

Bookmark

Emulators for playing older games are immensely popular online, with regular arguments breaking out over which emulator is best for which game. Today we present another point of view from a…

Bookmark

 Although information spreads, virus-like, through replication, this replication, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, involves a dispersion that allows images or data to be seen in different places, in different contexts (what Benjamin…

Bookmark

Anders Behring Breivik, who has admitted responsibility for the death of seventy six innocents, is undoubtedly a madman. But madmen can be spurred on by anything in their environment they are…

Bookmark

Michel Serres: We are in the middle of an extraordinary human and environmental transformation, without really being aware of it, one that can only perhaps be compared with the Renaissance, the…

Bookmark

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…

Bookmark

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,…

Bookmark

A team of engineers has discovered how colonies of ants survive floods by forming themselves into life rafts. The work shows how many simple components can interact to create complex structures…

Bookmark

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the very archetype of a “closed society.” It ranks dead last—196th out of 196 countries—in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press index. Unlike the…

Bookmark

Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating…

Bookmark

(Michel Foucault, 1967) The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the ever-accumulating…

Bookmark

The upside-down values of the art world, popularly infamous, ridiculed, and resented, are by now the mark of the sphere itself, sufficient to establish the cynic’s principle that if you wish…

Bookmark

Our fascination with ants has led to engaging stories about them, from the Iliad’s Myrmidons to Antz’s Z, as well as a growing body of research by biologists. Though the ant…

Bookmark

Once the fungus invades its victim’s body, it’s already too late. The invader spreads through the host in a matter of days. The victim, unaware of what is happening, becomes driven…

Bookmark

The crowd-sourced, wikinomic cloud is the new, new thing that all management consultants are now telling their clients to embrace. Yet the cloud is not a new thing at all. It…

Bookmark

Emulators for playing older games are immensely popular online, with regular arguments breaking out over which emulator is best for which game. Today we present another point of view from a…

Bookmark

 Although information spreads, virus-like, through replication, this replication, as Walter Benjamin foresaw, involves a dispersion that allows images or data to be seen in different places, in different contexts (what Benjamin…

Bookmark

Dr. Munshi-South has joined the ranks of a small but growing number of field biologists who study urban evolution — not the rise and fall of skyscrapers and neighborhoods, but the…

Bookmark

Michel Serres: We are in the middle of an extraordinary human and environmental transformation, without really being aware of it, one that can only perhaps be compared with the Renaissance, the…

Bookmark

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,…

Bookmark

Biology used to be about plants, animals and insects, but five great revolutions have changed the way that scientists think about life: the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification of…

Bookmark

The Democratic People’s Republic of Korea is the very archetype of a “closed society.” It ranks dead last—196th out of 196 countries—in Freedom House’s Freedom of the Press index. Unlike the…

Bookmark

Kelly argues that all technologies, from the stone ax to the computer chip, should be seen as a collectivity—the technium, which is “the greater, global, massively interconnected system of technology vibrating…

Bookmark

Rain may seem a harmless nuisance to us humans, but for ants, it's a big deal. They can get trapped by just a single drop and risk drowning. Paradoxically, it's by…

Bookmark

Our fascination with ants has led to engaging stories about them, from the Iliad’s Myrmidons to Antz’s Z, as well as a growing body of research by biologists. Though the ant…

Bookmark

What do you think about when you think about ants? An aerial view perhaps, looking down at a line of ants moving along a trail. Go closer. If you stay with…