Daniel Rourke /stream

Bookmark

Thank me for my free labor maintaining this list by making a donation to The Offing via Paypal, Crowdrise, or a monthly donation at Patreon.

Bookmark

Newly-released oil industry documents push back the start date of the world’s most successful disinformation campaign to the 1960s, if not earlier.

Bookmark

We have learned how to manipulate the code of life. Why this hasn’t received more attention is beyond me. Synthetic Biology is a multidisciplinary field that often defies definition. Yet despite its complexity, it is a remarkably easy…

Bookmark

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

Bookmark

Authors: R. Guevara Erra, D. M. Mateos, R. Wennberg, J.L. Perez Velazquez Abstract: It has been said that complexity lies between order and disorder. In the case of brain activity, and physiology in general, complexity issues are being…

Bookmark

“Human activity is leaving a pervasive and persistent signature on Earth.” So begins one of the more depressing scientific papers I’ve ever read.

Bookmark

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

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.

Bookmark

as the central speaker and facilitator. Aside from the Cyborg Manifesto, it constitutes one of Haraway’s most extended engagements with science fiction, and with a specific work of science fiction cinema in particular, as a central topic.

Bookmark

Plastics ... A Way to a Better More Carefree Life. Plastic, wrote Roland Barthes circa 1954, is “the first magical substance that consents to be prosaic.”2Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 98.

Bookmark

Evolution’s retirement plan has been 3.6 billion years in the making. With the appearance of the modern human being, we now have an organism that can take over from natural processes and engineer biology in entirely new ways.…

Bookmark

On September 14, I spent the day in the Chancellor Green Rotunda at the “Ferguson is the Future” Symposium, and I have spent every day since then trying to process the magnitude of what I learned there.

Bookmark

Is humanity’s impact on its environment so huge that the planet has entered a new geological era: the Anthropocene? The idea is gaining ground—and dividing scientists. Helen Gordon investigates

Bookmark

Explorers happened upon the bones after squeezing through a fissure high up in the rear wall of the Rising Star cave, 50km from Johannesburg, before descending down a long, narrow chute to the chamber floor 40 metres beneath…

Bookmark

A few years ago in a lab in Panama, Klaus Winter tried to conjure the future. A plant physiologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, he planted seedlings of 10 tropical tree species in small, geodesic greenhouses.

Bookmark

Let’s say someone successfully cloned human ancestors. Then what? Are they like chimps, to be put in a zoo or a nature reserve? Do they need carers? Should we enroll them in kindergarten? What do fossils tell us…

Bookmark

From rainforest revival and green technology to social changes, the age of humans is not necessarily a one-way ticket to eco-disaster, argue three new books Will more of the world's cities share Singapore's future vision of itself? (Image:…

Bookmark

What can lobbyists do when science contradicts their political messages? Some simply deny the science, as many conservatives do with climate change. Others pretend to embrace the science, while ignoring or purging the disagreeable content.

Bookmark

On the cultural ideology of Big Data.

Bookmark

An ontology of the present is a science-fictional operation, in which a cosmonaut lands on a planet full of sentient, intelligent, alien beings.

Bookmark

A collection of essays on the work of Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter attempts to move toward a future beyond white supremacist narratives of human universality.  The past year’s high profile murders have made clear that the media spectacle…

Bookmark

Thank me for my free labor maintaining this list by making a donation to The Offing via Paypal, Crowdrise, or a monthly donation at Patreon.

Bookmark

Newly-released oil industry documents push back the start date of the world’s most successful disinformation campaign to the 1960s, if not earlier.

Bookmark

Junot Díaz interviews science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany about what it means to be an aging sex radical and why he wrote the essay “Ash Wednesday.” Junot Díaz: Chip, “Ash Wednesday” is a wonderful essay.

Bookmark

We have learned how to manipulate the code of life. Why this hasn’t received more attention is beyond me. Synthetic Biology is a multidisciplinary field that often defies definition. Yet despite its complexity, it is a remarkably easy…

Bookmark

Authors: R. Guevara Erra, D. M. Mateos, R. Wennberg, J.L. Perez Velazquez Abstract: It has been said that complexity lies between order and disorder. In the case of brain activity, and physiology in general, complexity issues are being…

Bookmark

Just after World War II, when the atomic bombs fell and our thirst for coal and oil became a full-blown addiction, Earth entered the Anthropocene, a new geologic time when humanity’s environmental reach left a mark in sediments…

Bookmark

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

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.

Bookmark

Plastics ... A Way to a Better More Carefree Life. Plastic, wrote Roland Barthes circa 1954, is “the first magical substance that consents to be prosaic.”2Roland Barthes, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1972), 98.

Bookmark

On September 14, I spent the day in the Chancellor Green Rotunda at the “Ferguson is the Future” Symposium, and I have spent every day since then trying to process the magnitude of what I learned there.

Bookmark

Genomes are so regularly represented as strings of letters—As, Gs, Cs, and Ts—that it’s easy to forget that they aren’t just abstract collections of data. They exist in three dimensions. They are made of molecules. They are physical…

Bookmark

Explorers happened upon the bones after squeezing through a fissure high up in the rear wall of the Rising Star cave, 50km from Johannesburg, before descending down a long, narrow chute to the chamber floor 40 metres beneath…

Bookmark

A few years ago in a lab in Panama, Klaus Winter tried to conjure the future. A plant physiologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, he planted seedlings of 10 tropical tree species in small, geodesic greenhouses.

Bookmark

Let’s say someone successfully cloned human ancestors. Then what? Are they like chimps, to be put in a zoo or a nature reserve? Do they need carers? Should we enroll them in kindergarten? What do fossils tell us…

Bookmark

From rainforest revival and green technology to social changes, the age of humans is not necessarily a one-way ticket to eco-disaster, argue three new books Will more of the world's cities share Singapore's future vision of itself? (Image:…

Bookmark

An historic milestone in artificial intelligence set by Alan Turing - the father of modern computer science - has been achieved at an event organised by the University of Reading.

Bookmark

On the cultural ideology of Big Data.

Bookmark

A collection of essays on the work of Jamaican theorist Sylvia Wynter attempts to move toward a future beyond white supremacist narratives of human universality.  The past year’s high profile murders have made clear that the media spectacle…

Bookmark

The digital life is material and submerged, as much as it is immaterial and in the cloud. It is the navy and gold submarine cables set into the ocean bed. Digital life is the germanium and indium, the…