Daniel Rourke /stream

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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

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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…

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In 1968, Samuel Delany attended the third annual Nebula Awards, presented by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (SFWA).

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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…

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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…

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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.

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On the cultural ideology of Big Data.

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

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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…

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Antarctica, 1982. The first week of winter. Two Norwegians in a helicopter are chasing a sled dog, which flees through the snow to a United States science station, where the 12…

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As the film writer Anne Billson has pointed out most critics were wrong about John Carpenter’s The Thing when it was first released in 1982. In general they hated it and…

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In a paper published last year, I argued for a different way of understanding the emergence of hacker culture.

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Could cancer be our cells’ way of running in “safe mode,” like a damaged computer operating system trying to preserve itself, when faced with an external threat? That’s the conclusion reached…

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La Jolla geneticist J. Craig Venter has hired one of the world’s top computer scientists to help him try to prolong and improve people’s lives by deciphering hundreds of thousands of…

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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.

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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…

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The huge cultural authority science has acquired over the past century imposes large duties on every scientist. Scientists have acquired the power to impress and intimidate every time they open their…

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Ancient viruses inherited from Neanderthals have been found in modern human DNA. Scientists are investigating possible links between the “endogenous retroviruses”, which are hard-wired into DNA, and modern diseases such as…

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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…

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…

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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…

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…

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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…

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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…

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…

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.

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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…

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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…

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As the film writer Anne Billson has pointed out most critics were wrong about John Carpenter’s The Thing when it was first released in 1982. In general they hated it and…

Bookmark

Tales about the origins of our species always start off like this: A small band of hunter-gatherers roams the savannah, loving, warring, and struggling for survival under the African sun. They…

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Could cancer be our cells’ way of running in “safe mode,” like a damaged computer operating system trying to preserve itself, when faced with an external threat? That’s the conclusion reached…

Bookmark

La Jolla geneticist J. Craig Venter has hired one of the world’s top computer scientists to help him try to prolong and improve people’s lives by deciphering hundreds of thousands of…

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

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Human genome pioneer J. Craig Venter announced plans Tuesday to sequence the gene maps of 40,000 volunteers in a bid to crack the secrets of healthy human aging.

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The huge cultural authority science has acquired over the past century imposes large duties on every scientist. Scientists have acquired the power to impress and intimidate every time they open their…

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Ancient viruses inherited from Neanderthals have been found in modern human DNA. Scientists are investigating possible links between the “endogenous retroviruses”, which are hard-wired into DNA, and modern diseases such as…

Bookmark

The Latvian psychologist Konstanins Raudive spent the summer of 1965 trying to contact the dead. Every day, with careful precision, he would take a new reel of recording tape from its…