Daniel Rourke /stream

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The technology isn’t the moral game-changer that some make it out to be. There is considerable enthusiasm for technologies that allow people to simulate an engagement with a physical world.

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Evangelists of virtual reality believe it creates the ultimate empathy machine—this idea was wildly contested at the Weird Reality symposium this past October.

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Memes, as any alt-right Pepe sorcerer will tell you, are not just frivolous entertainment. They are magic, the stuff by which reality is made and manipulated.

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Alexandra Elbakyan is a highbrow pirate in hiding. The 27-year-old graduate student from Kazakhstan is operating a searchable online database of nearly 50 million stolen scholarly journal articles, shattering the $10…

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There are differences and sameness on some accounts within cyberfeminism versus afrofuturistfeminism, I’ll quickly list the basics.

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As a planetary astrobiologist, I am focused on the major transitions in planetary evolution and the evolving relationship between planets and life.

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Key Network Statistics *The assumptions underlying this estimate can be found here. Did you know? Ever since its inception Bitcoin’s trust-minimizing consensus has been enabled by its proof-of-work algorithm.

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BEIJING—A mysterious character named “Master” has swept through China, defeating many of the world’s top players in the ancient strategy game of Go. Master played with inhuman speed, barely pausing to…

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Joachim Neander was a 17th-century Calvinist theologian who often hiked through a valley outside Düsseldorf, Germany, writing hymns. Neander understood everything around him as a manifestation of the Lord’s will and…

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It’s hard to get people’s attention focused on the environment. Blame it on diminishing attention spans, overwhelming amounts of information, or simply the fact that people grow weary of hearing the…

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H.P. Lovecraft is universally acknowledged as one of the most important horror writers of the 20th century, and references to his Cthulhu Mythos abound in contemporary culture. But Lovecraft was also…

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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…

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There is no sign that 2017 will be much different from 2016. Under Israeli occupation for decades, Gaza will still be the biggest open prison on Earth.

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When we think of powerful goddesses, the names of Athena, Artemis, Isis, or Kali may come to mind. Much less known, however, particularly to the Western world, are the names of…

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Glitch art resonates with the increasingly complex love-hate relationship humans have with technology. Errors, and by extension the changes, that can occur within software source code and data can provide a fertile…

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Pop culture these days is awash in tales of AI run amok, from machines that act like humans to humans in love with machines. The reason seems clear enough: We're anxious…

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On November 7, 2016, the day before the US election, I compared the number of social media followers, website performance, and Google search statistics of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  I…

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

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Neil deGrasse Tyson was once asked about his thoughts on the cosmos. In a slow, gloomy voice, he intoned, “The universe is a deadly place. At every opportunity, it’s trying to…

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Time Magazine’s annual “Person of the Year” announcement is, year after year, grossly misunderstood.

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From Trump to climate change, this multiheaded crisis presages collapse. And there’s no hope of exiting the ‘other side’ if political alternatives are shut down Please don’t read this unless you…

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Humans invented it—and not that long ago. How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin? Many bookshelves are full of learned tomes by historians, economists, political philosophers…

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In February this year, iconoclastic Polish director Andrzej Żuławski, lost a battle with cancer at the age of 75.

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In 807 the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, sent Charlemagne a gift the like of which had never been seen in the Christian empire: a brass water clock. It chimed…

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The technology isn’t the moral game-changer that some make it out to be. There is considerable enthusiasm for technologies that allow people to simulate an engagement with a physical world.

Bookmark

Evangelists of virtual reality believe it creates the ultimate empathy machine—this idea was wildly contested at the Weird Reality symposium this past October.

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The mood in the room after an early Sundance screening of Adam Bhala Lough’s The New Radical was polite, but a little icy.

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Alexandra Elbakyan is a highbrow pirate in hiding. The 27-year-old graduate student from Kazakhstan is operating a searchable online database of nearly 50 million stolen scholarly journal articles, shattering the $10…

Bookmark

As a planetary astrobiologist, I am focused on the major transitions in planetary evolution and the evolving relationship between planets and life.

Bookmark

My libertarian friend Conor Friedersdorf has stared into the abyss, and has been jolted by what stared back. He writes about it in a must-read essay with the deceptively anodyne title…

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BEIJING—A mysterious character named “Master” has swept through China, defeating many of the world’s top players in the ancient strategy game of Go. Master played with inhuman speed, barely pausing to…

Bookmark

Joachim Neander was a 17th-century Calvinist theologian who often hiked through a valley outside Düsseldorf, Germany, writing hymns. Neander understood everything around him as a manifestation of the Lord’s will and…

Bookmark

It’s hard to get people’s attention focused on the environment. Blame it on diminishing attention spans, overwhelming amounts of information, or simply the fact that people grow weary of hearing the…

Bookmark

H.P. Lovecraft is universally acknowledged as one of the most important horror writers of the 20th century, and references to his Cthulhu Mythos abound in contemporary culture. But Lovecraft was also…

Bookmark

­­The conditions that obtained when life had not yet emerged from the oceans have not subsequently changed a great deal for the cells of the human body, bathed by the primordial…

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There is no sign that 2017 will be much different from 2016. Under Israeli occupation for decades, Gaza will still be the biggest open prison on Earth.

Bookmark

Glitch art resonates with the increasingly complex love-hate relationship humans have with technology. Errors, and by extension the changes, that can occur within software source code and data can provide a fertile…

Bookmark

Among the white nationalists on 4chan’s “politically incorrect,” or /pol/ board and on “alt-right” Twitter — or anywhere you might run into a picture of Pepe the Frog — there is…

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On November 7, 2016, the day before the US election, I compared the number of social media followers, website performance, and Google search statistics of Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.  I…

Bookmark

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

Bookmark

Neil deGrasse Tyson was once asked about his thoughts on the cosmos. In a slow, gloomy voice, he intoned, “The universe is a deadly place. At every opportunity, it’s trying to…

Bookmark

Time Magazine’s annual “Person of the Year” announcement is, year after year, grossly misunderstood.

Bookmark

One of the big trends we’ve seen over the last five years is automation. At the same time, we’re also seeing more intelligence built into tools we already have, like phones…

Bookmark

Humans invented it—and not that long ago. How and why did the modern world and its unprecedented prosperity begin? Many bookshelves are full of learned tomes by historians, economists, political philosophers…

Bookmark

In 807 the Abbasid caliph in Baghdad, Harun al-Rashid, sent Charlemagne a gift the like of which had never been seen in the Christian empire: a brass water clock. It chimed…

Bookmark

The first fossilised dinosaur brain has been found on a beach in East Sussex and could show that the extinct giants were more intelligent than first thought. The small brown pebble…