Daniel Rourke /stream

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Slime mold—a living network of tendrils found on rotting wood and other plant debris—is easily one of the strangest things alive. Neither plant, nor fungus, it’s a collection of individual cells…

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Jordan wanted to build an unpredictable trap. An 11-year-old in dark horn-­rimmed glasses, Jordan is a devotee of Minecraft, the computer game in which you make things out of virtual blocks,…

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In our culture, talking about the future is sometimes a polite way of saying things about the present that would otherwise be rude or risky. But have you ever wondered why…

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When Michael Haas, a former senior airman with the US air force, looks back on the missions he flew over Afghanistan and other conflict zones in a six-year career operating military…

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One person, a self-described “lone wolf,” admitted that dying alone was his greatest fear. Another urged readers to consider the things that give life heft and depth, the things that keep…

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The 10 Commandments. The 95 Theses. The 127 Hours and the 27 Dresses and the 10 Things I Hate About You. The mix tape. The menu. The card catalog. The grocery…

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Living things have puzzled and challenged us since the dawn of our species. Even in the light of our modern scientific understanding, they seem remarkable.

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Be careful about what you say in your living room if your new TV is on. News broke earlier this week that Samsung’s Web-connected SmartTV can listen to, record, and send…

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Narratives in the age of the smart object The cultural conversation about the Internet of things has tended toward a highly functionalist, utilitarian set of ideas: Connected objects can make smart…

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We have a strange, sad way of leaving things behind. Not just regular old things—spent notebooks, obsolete consumer electronics, whatever—but big things that happen to be old.

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LONDON — It was Game 8 of the World Chess Championship, and the four-time winner and defending champion, 42-year-old Viswanathan Anand of India, playing white, was a game down to the…

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Late one night last August, on the chalk downlands of southern England, Paul Kingsnorth stood in a field beside an old-growth forest, two yurts and a composting toilet. Kingsnorth is 41,…

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OVER THE NEXT DECADE video game engines will be used in film-making, with the two disciplines combining to eliminate the movie post-production process. That rather ambitious claim comes from Lucasfilm, the…

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Slime mold—a living network of tendrils found on rotting wood and other plant debris—is easily one of the strangest things alive. Neither plant, nor fungus, it’s a collection of individual cells…

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Jordan wanted to build an unpredictable trap. An 11-year-old in dark horn-­rimmed glasses, Jordan is a devotee of Minecraft, the computer game in which you make things out of virtual blocks,…

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What makes us different from all these things? What makes us different is the particulars of our history, which gives us our notions of purpose and goals.

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When Michael Haas, a former senior airman with the US air force, looks back on the missions he flew over Afghanistan and other conflict zones in a six-year career operating military…

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The second post in our forum on Nick and Alex Williams’ Inventing the Future, from Steven Shaviro. Steven is the DeRoy Professor of English at Wayne State University. He blogs at The…

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One person, a self-described “lone wolf,” admitted that dying alone was his greatest fear. Another urged readers to consider the things that give life heft and depth, the things that keep…

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The 10 Commandments. The 95 Theses. The 127 Hours and the 27 Dresses and the 10 Things I Hate About You. The mix tape. The menu. The card catalog. The grocery…

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The face at the end of this relief bringing squeeze says it all. 2. There’s just something soothing about watching these things get drained. imgur.com 3. Doesn’t this make you feel…

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“Les chose sont contre nous” ("Things are against us") is the wry slogan of Paul Jennings’ parodic philosophy resistentialism*. But Professor Jane Bennett of Johns Hopkins University doesn’t think so.

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Narratives in the age of the smart object The cultural conversation about the Internet of things has tended toward a highly functionalist, utilitarian set of ideas: Connected objects can make smart…

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n 1953, at the dawn of modern computing, Nils Aall Barricelli played God. Clutching a deck of playing cards in one hand and a stack of punched cards in the other,…

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LONDON — It was Game 8 of the World Chess Championship, and the four-time winner and defending champion, 42-year-old Viswanathan Anand of India, playing white, was a game down to the…

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OVER THE NEXT DECADE video game engines will be used in film-making, with the two disciplines combining to eliminate the movie post-production process. That rather ambitious claim comes from Lucasfilm, the…

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Synthetic biology grew from a very old human desire to engineer living systems and make them do useful things for us.