Daniel Rourke /stream

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The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I…

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I am honestly not sure whether fish have any concept of bees. I am equally unsure whether bees have any concept of fish. I am even more unsure whether bees and…

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We have entered a post-truth, post-authenticity era, in which dichotomies like true/false or real/fake no longer serve us very well, especially on social media platforms.

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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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All Mark Rittman wanted was a cup of tea. Little did he know he would have to spend 11 hours waiting for his new hi-tech kettle to boil the water. Rittman,…

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Jacques Toussaint Benoît believed that snails, once mated, had a lifelong telepathic bond. (Photo: Pierre Watson/shutterstock.com)

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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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Have you watched the last few moments of Saddam’s life? Or the necrophilic videos with Gaddafi’s behind? Al Zarqawi’s internet kill rooms? Magnotta’s cat suffocation videos? Ronal Poppo’s eaten face? I…

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Writing in the early 1990s, Susan Stewart observed that “with the advent of film, interpretation has been replaced by watching … Here we see the increasing historical tendency toward the self-sufficient…

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With an eight-track tape recorder and 100,000 times less memory than an iPod, Voyager 1 is celebrating its 35th birthday at the edge of the solar system. Traipsing through a giant,…

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In 1977, NASA sent 115 images – the so-called ‘Golden Record’ – into space on board the Voyager space probe. They also included greetings in 55 different languages and a number…

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In proposing the imitation game as a stand-in for another definition of thought or intelligence, Turing does more than deliver a clever logical flourish that helps him creatively answer a very…

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Artificial intelligence began with an ambitious research agenda: To endow machines with some of the traits we value most highly in ourselves—the faculty of reason, skill in solving problems, creativity, the…

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It's a testament to Turing's fascination with nearly everything that 76 years since his first major paper, there's still so much to write about his work. Expect this week to offer…

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In a time when likes, reblogs, and favorites determine what gets seen and what doesn’t, all cultural products, movies, music, writing, and visual art alike, exist in an economy of attention.…

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RICH AND SEEMINGLY BOUNDLESS as the creative arts seem to be, each is filtered through the narrow biological channels of human cognition. Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided about…

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Before we can understand an alien civilization, it might be useful to understand our own. To help in this task, anthropologist Kathryn Denning of York University in Toronto, Canada studies the…

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The humans use Arecibo to look for extraterrestrial intelligence. Their desire to make a connection is so strong that they’ve created an ear capable of hearing across the universe. But I…

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I am honestly not sure whether fish have any concept of bees. I am equally unsure whether bees have any concept of fish. I am even more unsure whether bees and…

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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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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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Jacques Toussaint Benoît believed that snails, once mated, had a lifelong telepathic bond. (Photo: Pierre Watson/shutterstock.com)

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Ever looked at a pork loin or beef liver and wondered, “Could I pump enough wireless data in there to stream HD video?” Probably not. But luckily for humanity, there are…

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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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Why look at animated GIFs now? They are one of the first forms of image native to computer networks making them charmingly passé, a characteristic that gives them contradictory longevity. Animated…

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In 1977, NASA sent 115 images – the so-called ‘Golden Record’ – into space on board the Voyager space probe. They also included greetings in 55 different languages and a number…

Bookmark

In proposing the imitation game as a stand-in for another definition of thought or intelligence, Turing does more than deliver a clever logical flourish that helps him creatively answer a very…

Bookmark

Artificial intelligence began with an ambitious research agenda: To endow machines with some of the traits we value most highly in ourselves—the faculty of reason, skill in solving problems, creativity, the…

Bookmark

It's a testament to Turing's fascination with nearly everything that 76 years since his first major paper, there's still so much to write about his work. Expect this week to offer…

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Ever wonder how Google manages to search the entire web and return results in half a second? Well, RobertvH from Munich did, and Mountain View’s head of web-spam, Matt Cutts, talks…

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RICH AND SEEMINGLY BOUNDLESS as the creative arts seem to be, each is filtered through the narrow biological channels of human cognition. Our sensory world, what we can learn unaided about…

Bookmark

Before we can understand an alien civilization, it might be useful to understand our own. To help in this task, anthropologist Kathryn Denning of York University in Toronto, Canada studies the…

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A data haven is "the information equivalent to a tax haven," a country that helps you evade other countries' rules on what you can and can't do with your bits. (Think…