Daniel Rourke /stream

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Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week, we’re talking about transhumanism. Need a primer? Catch up here. Charles…

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Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week, we’re talking about transhumanism. Need a primer? Catch up here.

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New Media Artist and Educator Nick Briz has a perspective on copying, stealing and sharing on the web that all artists and creatives need to hear.

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According to urban legend, a landfill somewhere in the small city of Alamogordo, New Mexico, bulges with millions of copies of the worst game ever made—a game that many observers blamed…

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Later this year, a nuclear power reactor will open in the US for the first time in two decades. But this reactor, called Watts Bar Unit 2—one of two near Spring…

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German artist Ralf Baecker gives technology a life of its own. His new piece Irrational Computing, which debuts International Triennial of New Media Art, use semiconductor crystals (quartz sand) and connects…

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Chris Bishop fears concern over Terminator-style scenarios could deprive humanity of one of the most powerful technologies ever created The promise of artificial intelligence could be lost to humanity because people…

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Genomics entrepreneur Craig Venter has created a synthetic cell that contains the smallest genome of any known, independent organism.

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In the 21st century, we are inundated with news about human-induced climate change. But perhaps human-produced media are not the only source of information.

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Almost a decade ago I attended a conference called “1968” at a nondescript college in New Jersey. Mark Rudd, a student radical turned community college math instructor living out his retirement…

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A few weeks ago on this site I reviewed John Robb’s book Brave New War, discussing the potential of reconfiguring heritage preservation from a top-down, hierarchical model into a participatory, two-way,…

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The New York Times’ March 1, 2016 story “Swiping a Priceless Antiquity … With a Scanner and a 3-D Printer” by Charly Wilder tells how two German artists made a surreptitious, unauthorized…

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On the second floor of a nondescript warehouse owned by New York City's Sanitation Department in East Harlem is a treasure trove—filled with other people's trash. Most of the building is…

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Midway through the first of five recent matches between Lee Sedol, a top-ranked professional Go player, and AlphaGo, a computer program conceived by Google DeepMind, an odd thing happened: Lee’s jaw…

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SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — The move didn’t make sense to the humans packed into the sixth floor of Seoul’s Four Seasons hotel. But the Google machine saw it quite differently. The…

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The race for renewable energy has passed a turning point. The world is now adding more capacity for renewable power each year than coal, natural gas, and oil combined. And there's…

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In case you didn’t already feel like Google was a creepy stalker, its artificial intelligence tools are rapidly crossing over into uncanny. The latest one is PlaNet, a new deep-learning machine…

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“The black female’s body needs less to be rescued from the masculine “gaze” than to be sprung from a historic script surrounding her with signification while at the same time, and…

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Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week, we’re talking about transhumanism. Need a primer? Catch up here. Charles…

Bookmark

Each week, In Theory takes on a big idea in the news and explores it from a range of perspectives. This week, we’re talking about transhumanism. Need a primer? Catch up here.

Bookmark

In The Guardian, Amanda Holpuch writes about the new book The Fate of Gender: Nature, Nurture, and the Human Future by former science reporter Frank Browning.

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According to urban legend, a landfill somewhere in the small city of Alamogordo, New Mexico, bulges with millions of copies of the worst game ever made—a game that many observers blamed…

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Silicon Valley’s sunny outlook on technology and opportunity ignores systematic inequalities. Just over a century ago, an electric company in Minnesota took out a full-page newspaper advertisement and listed 1,000 uses…

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German artist Ralf Baecker gives technology a life of its own. His new piece Irrational Computing, which debuts International Triennial of New Media Art, use semiconductor crystals (quartz sand) and connects…

Bookmark

Chris Bishop fears concern over Terminator-style scenarios could deprive humanity of one of the most powerful technologies ever created The promise of artificial intelligence could be lost to humanity because people…

Bookmark

Genomics entrepreneur Craig Venter has created a synthetic cell that contains the smallest genome of any known, independent organism.

Bookmark

Almost a decade ago I attended a conference called “1968” at a nondescript college in New Jersey. Mark Rudd, a student radical turned community college math instructor living out his retirement…

Bookmark

The New York Times’ March 1, 2016 story “Swiping a Priceless Antiquity … With a Scanner and a 3-D Printer” by Charly Wilder tells how two German artists made a surreptitious, unauthorized…

Bookmark

On the second floor of a nondescript warehouse owned by New York City's Sanitation Department in East Harlem is a treasure trove—filled with other people's trash. Most of the building is…

Bookmark

Midway through the first of five recent matches between Lee Sedol, a top-ranked professional Go player, and AlphaGo, a computer program conceived by Google DeepMind, an odd thing happened: Lee’s jaw…

Bookmark

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — The move didn’t make sense to the humans packed into the sixth floor of Seoul’s Four Seasons hotel. But the Google machine saw it quite differently. The…

Bookmark

Are we entering a new planetary era? A working group of scientists met in Berlin last week to start answering this Earth-shifting question.

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In case you didn’t already feel like Google was a creepy stalker, its artificial intelligence tools are rapidly crossing over into uncanny. The latest one is PlaNet, a new deep-learning machine…

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There’s a fascinating Q&A in a recent issue of New Scientist with doctor and genetic researcher Karin Ljubic Fister. Fister studies “plant-based data storage,” which relies on a combination of artificially…