Daniel Rourke /stream

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Could future humans evolve to have venom glands? In new research, scientists close a long-open door by causally linking early salivary glands with what eventually became venom glands in many animals.

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It’s 7 AM, April 13th, 2025. Your smart clock rouses you from a dreamless sleep and you climb from bed as your house comes to life. The bathroom light turns itself…

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Search Google Images for ‘counterculture’ and it overwhelmingly returns black-and-white photos of young people all now over 60.

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There can’t be many visitors here who are unaware of Dougal Dixon and his 1981 book After Man (Dixon 1981), the work which effectively started the entire Speculative Zoology (or SpecZoo)…

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Humans are shaping the evolutionary future of life on Earth.

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Their eyes met across the rugged mountain landscape of prehistoric Romania. He was a Neanderthal, and stark naked apart from a fur cape. He had good posture and pale skin, perhaps…

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In this essay, Amber Huff and Nathan Oxley reflect on questions that have emerged through Natures, the STEPS Centre’s theme throughout 2020.

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In 1909, a poet named Filippo Marinetti was driving along in his brand new Fiat when he came across two cyclists in the road. Marinetti swerved to avoid hitting his fellow…

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You based the technology on parasitic hookworms. Where did that idea come from? We’ve been trying to deliver drugs through the gastrointestinal tract, and that is a formidable challenge because the…

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Wisdom is the ability to discern inner qualities and subtle relationships, then translate them into what others recognise as good judgment. If it comes to us at all, wisdom is the…

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Animal immune systems depend on white blood cells called macrophages that devour and engulf invaders.

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On the occasion of the opening of Designs for Different Futures at the Walker Art Center, we will be publishing a number of texts from the exhibition catalogue (Yale University Press,…

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Rhia is queer, trans, and nonbinary. They are also otherkin, or an individual who identifies as nonhuman on a non-physical level, according to the Otherkin Wiki.

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Since the pandemic began, the seemingly mundane protocols of Zoom have become a significant part of many people’s daily lives: finding the right link, setting up the peripherals, managing the glitches…

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Human extinction. The coordinated release of various strains of a human sterilization virus.

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Because there’s one thing I’m positive I know about Prince.

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In the 2010s, Hitler memes and “ironic” racism filled the internet. What if we had taken them seriously? Updated at 4:00 a.m. ET on Oct. 4, 2020.

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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.

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Thirty years ago, the philosopher Judith Butler*, now 64, published a book that revolutionised popular attitudes on gender. Gender Trouble, the work she is perhaps best known for, introduced ideas of gender as performance.

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It is only in the last couple of centuries that we have begun to grasp that our existence might one day cease to exist forever. Today's attempts to measure and mitigate…

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A small shark spots its prey—a meaty, seemingly defenseless octopus. The shark ambushes, and then, in one of the most astonishing sequences in the series Blue Planet II, the octopus escapes.…

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Who are you, and what are you doing here? You, there in the mirror, there in the lens of your phone: What do you see? In the eyes of us poor…

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Humanity’s transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most important developments in human and Earth history. Human societies, plant and animal populations, the makeup of the atmosphere,…

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Could future humans evolve to have venom glands? In new research, scientists close a long-open door by causally linking early salivary glands with what eventually became venom glands in many animals.

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It’s 7 AM, April 13th, 2025. Your smart clock rouses you from a dreamless sleep and you climb from bed as your house comes to life. The bathroom light turns itself…

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We’re Solarpunk because the only other options are denial or despair. —Adam Flynn1 By now, dystopia may have become a luxury genre. Indulging in miserable future scenarios is not something everyone…

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Search Google Images for ‘counterculture’ and it overwhelmingly returns black-and-white photos of young people all now over 60.

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Humans are shaping the evolutionary future of life on Earth.

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The first Neanderthal face to emerge from time’s sarcophagus was a woman’s. As the social and liberal revolutions of 1848 began convulsing Europe, quarry workers’ rough hands pulled her from the…

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In this essay, Amber Huff and Nathan Oxley reflect on questions that have emerged through Natures, the STEPS Centre’s theme throughout 2020.

Bookmark

In 1909, a poet named Filippo Marinetti was driving along in his brand new Fiat when he came across two cyclists in the road. Marinetti swerved to avoid hitting his fellow…

Bookmark

You based the technology on parasitic hookworms. Where did that idea come from? We’ve been trying to deliver drugs through the gastrointestinal tract, and that is a formidable challenge because the…

Bookmark

Wisdom is the ability to discern inner qualities and subtle relationships, then translate them into what others recognise as good judgment. If it comes to us at all, wisdom is the…

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The term terraforming refers to the transformation of the ecosystems of other planets or satellites to enable them to support Earth-like life.

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On the occasion of the opening of Designs for Different Futures at the Walker Art Center, we will be publishing a number of texts from the exhibition catalogue (Yale University Press,…

Bookmark

Since the pandemic began, the seemingly mundane protocols of Zoom have become a significant part of many people’s daily lives: finding the right link, setting up the peripherals, managing the glitches…

Bookmark

Computer-generated imagery is supposed to be one of the success stories of computer science. Starting in the 1970s, the algorithms for realistically depicting digital worlds were developed in a monumental joint…

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Because there’s one thing I’m positive I know about Prince.

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In the 2010s, Hitler memes and “ironic” racism filled the internet. What if we had taken them seriously? Updated at 4:00 a.m. ET on Oct. 4, 2020.

Bookmark

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.

Bookmark

Thirty years ago, the philosopher Judith Butler*, now 64, published a book that revolutionised popular attitudes on gender. Gender Trouble, the work she is perhaps best known for, introduced ideas of gender as performance.

Bookmark

“If you look at Google Earth, it’s springtime everywhere,” explains Gopal Shah, Google Earth’s product manager, in a YouTube interview. In a TED talk he boasts that Google Earth is “cloud-free,”…

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A small shark spots its prey—a meaty, seemingly defenseless octopus. The shark ambushes, and then, in one of the most astonishing sequences in the series Blue Planet II, the octopus escapes.…

Bookmark

Humanity’s transition from hunting and gathering to agriculture is one of the most important developments in human and Earth history. Human societies, plant and animal populations, the makeup of the atmosphere,…

Bookmark

“What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World,” a new book by the artist and design researcher Sara Hendren, opens with a challenge. A curator named Amanda has…