Al Jazeera’s Investigative Unit exposes Israeli war crimes in the Gaza Strip through the medium of photos and videos posted online by Israeli soldiers themselves during the year long conflict. The material reveals a range of illegal activities, from wanton destruction and looting to the demolition of entire neighbourhoods and murder.

Al Jazeera

In a new, yet-to-be-peer-reviewed study that was spotted by LiveScience, scientists conducted simulations to see just how long extraterrestrial civilizations could survive if they kept up similar rates of growing energy consumption to our own.

They found that the aliens kept dying off within just 1,000 years because their planets would always get too hot to remain habitable.

Futurism.com

Comics Artist John Cassaday, co-creator of Planetary and Astonishing X-Men, has died at the tragically young age of 52.

via Bleeding Cool

The basic infrastructure that controls plumbing, electricity and more is vital to your individual agency, says engineering professor Deb Chachra. She offers a crash course on how these systems connect to shape our lives — and suggests some key improvements for providing long-term, sustainable energy to everyone.

TED Talk

Can beauty defeat the war machine? Can we détente again? In this poetic, personal meditation, artist Nate Hofer's music, photography, and storytelling transcend "the new Cold War" to create hope and — for a few peaceful minutes — a place where old ideas can die beautifully.

TEDx Talks via YouTube

The leap in temperatures over the past 13 months has exceeded the global heating forecasts – is this just a blip or a systemic shift?

The Guardian

"This summer, one of my lectures was protested by far-right students. Their rhetoric brought to mind some of the darkest moments of 20th-century history – and overlapped with mainstream Israeli views to a shocking degree."

By Omer Bartov

The Long Read | The Guardian

“The hydraulic lift mechanism seems to be revolutionary for building stone structures and finds no parallel in our civilization,” they write in their paper, adding that its utility “is so significant that it seems beyond just building the Step Pyramid.” Combined with its water treatment capabilities, the architects’ planning would also “reflect their foresight in meeting various civil needs.”

Popular Science

LUNARSABER could serve as a central power, communications, and lighting hub of an Artemis base and part of a mesh network with other places of interest on the Lunar surface.

Phys.org

“Large-scale stellar-energy harvesting structures may especially be obsolete when considering technological advances,” adds Vincent Kofman, a co-author of the paper at NASA Goddard and American University, Washington, D.C. “Surely a society that can place enormous structures in space would be able to access nuclear fusion or other space-efficient methods of generating power.”

NASA

As wild species are increasingly threatened by habitat destruction, exploitation, invasive species takeovers, pollution, and relentless climate change, they want to capitalize on extremely frigid lunar environs to naturally cryopreserve animal cells — a difficult thing to artificially sustain on our world.

Mashable

Kansas City musician Nate Hofer took his pedal steel guitar 30 feet down into an inter-continental ballistic missile silo to record a hopeful reminder that nuclear war is not inevitable.

KCUR 89.3 | NPR

Many of the scientists envisage a “semi-dystopian” future, with famines, conflicts and mass migration, driven by heatwaves, wildfires, floods and storms of an intensity and frequency far beyond those that have already struck.

The Guardian

“I created a whole new world. Not too different than our world a few centuries ago, but with a lot more gods and monsters."

TheWrap

One day in the next couple of years, everyone in the world will lose a second of their time. Exactly when that will happen is being influenced by humans, according to a new study, as melting polar ice alters the Earth’s rotation and changes time itself.

CNN

Are growing rates of anxiety, depression, ADHD, PTSD, Alzheimer’s and motor neurone disease related to rising temperatures and other extreme environmental changes?

The Guardian

See NVIDIA’s journey from pioneering advanced autonomous vehicle hardware and simulation tools to accelerated perception and manipulation for autonomous mobile robots and industrial arms, culminating in the next wave of cutting-edge AI for humanoid robots.

NVIDIA via YouTube

Some 100 light-years from the Solar System dwells the most mathematically perfect planetary system we've ever seen. Such a perfect chain of orbital resonances is extremely rare, and it means that the system has remained relatively stable and undisturbed since it formed, around a billion years ago.

ScienceAlert

How one writer's trip to an annual tech conference left him with a sinking feeling about the future.

By Robert Evans

Dispatch from Dystopia | Rolling Stone

"I've always loved Barry Windsor-Smith's 1991 Weapon X arc. I took a lot of cues directly from his original art; namely, the way vibrant colors juxtapose the horror of Wolverine's experience, and how background technology is abstracted into geometric shapes."

alexgriendling.com

Astronomers have discovered a cosmic "ring" that's so enormous, it defies explanation with our best theories of the universe.

LiveScience.com

Astronomers accidentally discover 'dark' primordial galaxy with no visible stars.

Space.com

An essay by Bernardo Kastrup.

"The hypothesis I put forward is that, if the ‘nuts-and-bolts’ UAP phenomenon and the Non-Human Intelligence(s) behind it are real, they are unlikely to be extra-terrestrial."

bernardokastrup.com

The soldier of the future will be "flooded with pain-numbing stimulants," cybernetically enhanced, and, one official sort-of joked, must be eventually "terminated."

Vice

Photo art project by Julya Hajnoczky incorporating specimens of plants, animals, fungi and lichen. "Elegiac, dark, mourning, representing not contemporary specimens but rather, recontextualized, some last remaining pieces of a fragmented world, floating in the void."

How would a nuclear war between Russia and the U.S. affect you? Who would survive?

Watch and share our most realistic nuclear war simulation yet.

Future of Life Institute | via Twitter

"The new AI can write and talk! ("Large Language Models.") It can draw, do fake photos and even make video! (Text-to-image generators.) It even has AI folklore. Authentic little myths. Legendry."

Bruce Sterling | Newsweek

Natalie has taken one of pop culture’s most beloved characters, Barbie, used her signature pink colorway and smashed it together with some of sci-fi’s most iconic vehicles.

We reached out to Natalie and she was kind enough to give us a bit of info behind our newest obsession.

SUSIE, short for Smart Upper Stage for Innovative Exploration, was introduced to the world at the International Astronautical Congress held in Paris from September 18 to 22.

“We see them everywhere,” the research said. “We observe a significant number of objects whose nature is not clear.”

Vice

Prime Video has released the first trailer for The Peripheral, the long-gestating sci-fi drama from Lisa Joy and Jonathan Nolan’s Kilter Films. It’s based on the bestselling novel by William Gibson.

via Deadline

Tech billionaires are buying up luxurious bunkers and hiring military security to survive a societal collapse they helped create, but like everything they do, it has unintended consequences.

Douglas Rushkoff | The Observer

An interview with Mike Davis.

"Our ruling classes everywhere have no rational analysis or explanation for the immediate future. A small group of people have more concentrated power over the human future than ever before in human history, and they have no vision, no strategy, no plan."

Lois Beckett | The Guardian

Climate change minister Sherry Rehman said Sunday the unprecedented rain had created a “climate catastrophe” with floodwaters submerging homes, destroying farmland and displacing millions of people. “We’ve had to deploy the navy for the first time to operate in Indo-Pakistan, because much of it resembles a small ocean.”

CNN

Research shows the global heating to date will cause an absolute minimum sea-level rise of 27cm (10.6in) from Greenland alone as 110tn tonnes of ice melt. With continued carbon emissions, the melting of other ice caps and thermal expansion of the ocean, a multi-metre sea-level rise appears likely.

The Guardian

Whatever we may "owe the future," it isn't a bizarre and dangerous ideology fueled by eugenics and capitalism.

Émile P. Torres | Salon

A detailed account of the role of “future archeologists” at the Museum of the Future and how they brought to the present a culture from the future.

Fabien Girardin | Design Fictions - Near Future Laboratory

The risk of global societal collapse or human extinction has been “dangerously underexplored”, climate scientists have warned in an analysis.

They call such a catastrophe the “climate endgame”.

Climate Crisis | The Guardian

Dead spiders reincarnated as robotic grippers.

via IEEE Spectrum

After six globe-trotting decades spent probing “the phenomenon,” the French information scientist is sure of only one thing: The truth is really, really out there.

Wired

A comprehensive, nearly two and a half hour breakdown of what is wrong with NFTs and crypto, by Dan Olson.

via Folding Ideas

"A terrible storm is coming from the south, and Canada is woefully unprepared. Over the past year we’ve turned our attention inward, distracted by the challenges of COVID-19, reconciliation, and the accelerating effects of climate change. But now we must focus on the urgent problem of what to do about the likely unravelling of democracy in the United States."

Thomas Homer-Dixon | The Globe and Mail

Following the events of the Marshall Fire in Colorado, an interview with climate scientist Daniel Swain, by David Wallace-Wells.

nymag.com

A place to stay up to date on all things curious. Speculative biology, history, mythology, paleontology, archeology, and literature are the most common topics covered on the channel.

"In order to celebrate the release of Matrix Resurrections (and it's a bit of a Christmas present), I invite you to go back two decades… not in space, but to take a look behind the scenes of the art department of the Matrix trilogy.

Matrix has often been analyzed all over the place, but the point here is to understand how the future of the 'real' world was designed."

The Spaceshipper, via Patreon

An indestructible "black box" is set to be built upon a granite plain on the west coast of Tasmania, Australia, in early 2022. Its mission: Record "every step we take" toward climate catastrophe, providing a record for future civilizations to understand what caused our demise.

CNET

How the shared culture of Silicon Valley has shaped, and been shaped by, the places where tech has taken root.

Joanne McNeil | The Reboot

Writer Kim Stanley Robinson talks to Jacobin about Ministry of the Future and his other books, climate change, and why he thinks the Left should reclaim science as a tool of socialist progress.

A single speck of black carbon, inhaled, won’t stop the heart or poison the lungs, but over time, across populations, the effect is devastating.

David Wallace-Wells | London Review of Books

There’s a new plan to find extraterrestrial civilisations by the way they live. But if we can see them, can they see us?

Cory S. Powell | Aeon

A blog post examining the imaginary, human-shaped theropod invented during the early 1980s by paleontologist Dale Russell and artist and model-maker Ron Séguin.

John Conway | Tet Zoo

It is not a world in a headset but a fantasy of power.

Ian Bogost | The Atlantic

This post presents a selection of crank titles with cover art by SF artists.

via { feuilleton } A journal by artist and designer John Coulthart

Set in the near future, 'the Intersection' journeys from a violent present to a cooperative future. Telling stories of active hope from those who have fought to reimagine extractive technology, to serve community, support nature, and value planetary relationships.

It is commissioned by Eshanthi Ranasinghe, Julia Solano and Nicole Allred, Exploration & Future Sensing, Omidyar Network, and is conceived and produced by Superflux 2021.

via YouTube

Nanoracks, in collaboration with Voyager Space and Lockheed Martin [NYSE: LMT], has formed a team to develop the first-ever free flying commercial space station. The space station, known as Starlab, will be a continuously crewed commercial platform, dedicated to conducting critical research, fostering industrial activity, and ensuring continued U.S. presence and leadership in low-Earth orbit. Starlab is expected to achieve initial operational capability by 2027.

via PR Newswire

Unless greenhouse gas emissions drop significantly, warming by 2500 will make the Amazon barren, Iowa tropical and India too hot to live in.

The Conversation | Scientific American

In short, the Amazon is dying. Entire genetic libraries and symphonies of species – trees, birds, reptiles, insects and more, eons in the making, fine-tuned by natural selection – are being wiped out to make room for methane-belching cows.

The Guardian

WASHINGTON — Less food. More traffic accidents. Extreme weather hitting nuclear waste sites. Migrants rushing toward the United States, fleeing even worse calamity in their own countries.

Those scenarios, once the stuff of dystopian fiction, are now driving American policymaking. Under orders from President Biden, top officials at every government agency have spent months considering the top climate threats their agencies face, and how to cope with them.

The New York Times

The report, State of the World's Trees, found that at least 30% of the 60,000 known tree species face extinction.

Some 142 species have already vanished from the wild, while 442 are on the very edge of extinction, with fewer than 50 individual trees remaining.

BBC News

"We need to have a conception of infrastructural citizenship that includes a responsibility to look after each other, in perpetuity."

Deb Chachra | Comment

Technologically-savvy aliens could be powering their society using a hypothetical megastructure called a Dyson sphere to harvest energy from a black hole.

Because black holes smoosh a gargantuan mass into a tiny area of space, they are smaller than stars and therefore potentially easier to encircle. A species that chooses to "build a Dyson sphere around a black hole can save a lot of material," Hsiao said.

Space.com

Humanity stands on the brink of disaster. But with creative thinking and collective will, we may still have time to avert catastrophe.

The Weekend Essay | Financial Times

Climate scientists have said the severity of these events is simply “off scale”, compared with what atmospheric models forecast — even when global warming is fully taken into account.

“I think I would be speaking for many climate scientists to say that we are a bit shocked at what we are seeing,” said Chris Rapley, professor of climate science at University College London.

Financial Times

World faces ‘abrupt jump’ in pace of ice loss around 2060 unless emissions reduced to meet Paris agreement goals, study warns.

The Guardian

"A solid state volumetric OLED display. Video is now live on my YouTube channel. You’ll want to check it out."

—Sean Hodgins, via Twitter

#cyberpunk #diy

The disturbing series of events during the summer of 2019 resulted in an investigation that made its way to the highest echelons of the Navy.

The Warzone

Technical papers derived from the 1977 Summer Study
at NASA Ames Research Center, Moffett Field, California.

NASA SP-428

How did we — an advanced, high-tech civilization — find ourselves unable to efficiently produce and distribute a simple yet vital item during an international emergency? What does this mean for governments’ ability to protect their citizens? And how many lives were lost due to the failure of these systems to deliver essential supplies in a time of crisis?

Tim Maughan | OneZero

TIGER (Transforming Intelligent Ground Excursion Robot) is Hyundai's newest UMV designed to function as a mobile scientific platform. TIGER is fully autonomous and can even pair up with a UAV to be dropped into remote locations or charge batteries. Once on the ground, TIGER’s leg and wheel system allows for full 360-degree directional control and AWD.

If it encounters extreme terrain, it can use its walking ability to overcome obstacles and carry its supplies to their destination. Welcome to the future, where TIGER will redefine transportation and mobility.

via YouTube

Fifty Years of Mission Planning, 1950—2000

by David S. F. Portree

NASA SP-2001-4521

In praise of dials, toggles, buttons, and bulbs. A companion blog to the Control Panel group on Flickr.

A new trailer for the THE HIGH FRONTIER, an upcoming documentary film that shares the untold story of the life and influence of the late physicist and space colony pioneer Dr. Gerard K. O’Neill.

Thanks to The Black Vault, an online archive of declassified government documents, you can now dig through a massive trove of information the CIA has collected on UFOs over the years.

Earth's ability to absorb nearly a third of human-caused carbon emissions through plants could be halved within the next two decades at the current rate of warming, according to a new study in Science Advances. The team identified a critical temperature tipping point beyond which plants' ability to capture and store atmospheric carbon decreases as temperatures continue to rise.

Northern Arizona University | Phys.org

628 scans of vintage floppy disk sleeves.

Collected by Jason Scott

Removing carbon from the atmosphere is expensive—but so are a lot of other necessary things.

Kim Stanley Robinson | Bloomberg

Richard Corben, the iconic award-winning comic book artist best known for his work for Heavy Metal, has passed away at the age of 80.

CBR

The Arecibo Observatory’s suspended equipment platform fell hundreds of feet and crashed through the giant radio dish.

National Geographic

To be Indigenous to North America is to be part of a postapocalyptic community and experience.

Julian Brave NoiseCat | CJR

A mysterious monolith has been discovered in a remote part of Utah, after being spotted by state employees counting sheep from a helicopter.

The Guardian

“Losing this, especially after all that we’ve lost over the past half decade, makes me feel like we’re condemned to have our country just be ruins,” he says. “It becomes a signifier of a broader collapse. That’s just really tragic.”

Science News

The philosopher Toby Ord has given the name “the precipice” to our current phase of history. It will end, he suggests, with either a shared global effort to insure humanity’s continued survival or the extinction of our species.

The New Yorker

“We are on an absolutely catastrophic path,” said a COVID-19 doctor at America’s best-prepared hospital.

Ed Yong | The Atlantic

While the West remains gripped by the fear of a second-wave epidemic, increasingly clinging to lowkey designs, China’s fashionistas have moved in the opposite direction through techno glamour. In this post-pandemic reality, the two cultures couldn’t be further apart.

Jing Daily

Released October 30, 2020.

Exclusively on bandcamp for the moment, END CREDITS is the soundtrack to a movie that doesn't exist.

via GHOST COP

The GOP is starting to look a lot like an autocratic party, a large study into political identity has found.

CNN

Scientists have found evidence that frozen methane deposits in the Arctic Ocean – known as the “sleeping giants of the carbon cycle” – have started to be released over a large area of the continental slope off the East Siberian coast, the Guardian can reveal.

The Guardian

“The elements are there” for a radical transformation, says Mike Davis.

Mother Jones

Age Of Mecha™ is a 1/35 scale, highly detailed Sci-Fi action figure collectible toy line, set in the year 2150 and focused on powerful Mech walkers and their respective hero pilot action figures.

via Kickstarter

Ron Cobb, the underground cartoonist turned production designer who influenced the making of E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial and helped shape the worlds of Conan the Barbarian, Alien and Back to the Future, has died.

The Hollywood Reporter

Wildfires rage in the West. Hurricanes batter the East. Droughts and floods wreak damage throughout the nation. Life has become increasingly untenable in the hardest-hit areas, but if the people there move, where will everyone go?

ProPublica

Recent research shows that the most habitable climate in North America will shift northward and the incidence of large fires will increase across the country—this suggests that the climate crisis will profoundly interrupt the way we live and farm in the United States. See how the North American places where humans have lived for thousands of years will shift and what changes are in store for your county.

ProPublica

Phosphine gas (PH3), a chemical long thought to be a signature of life, has been found floating around in the clouds of Venus.

Live Science

NPR and PBS Frontline spent months digging into internal industry documents and interviewing top former officials. We found that the industry sold the public on an idea it knew wouldn't work — that the majority of plastic could be, and would be, recycled — all while making billions of dollars selling the world new plastic.

Fires are releasing record levels of carbon dioxide, partly because they are burning ancient peatlands that have been a carbon sink.

Nature

Leading up to the release of the collected trade release of the series, we spoke to Simon Roy, Daniel M Bensen and Artyom Trakhanov, writers and artist of the series First Knife. We go into the series’ life up to now, the potential for the universe and the current comics industry.

Stephen Clark | Geek Elite Media

Ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica whose melting rates are rapidly increasing have raised the global sea level by 1.8cm since the 1990s, and are matching the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's worst-case climate warming scenarios.

“The melting is overtaking the climate models we use to guide us, and we are in danger of being unprepared for the risks posed by sea level rise.”

University of Leeds | Phys.org

Rosatom, the Russian state energy company, posted a documentary about the 1961 Tsar Bomba nuclear weapons test, the most powerful on record. The documentary (itself obviously of the era) contains footage that was previously unreleased, according to commentators. The 50-megaton action starts about 22m in.

This new video purports to be a compilation of the freshly-declassified bits.

via Boing Boing

A rural electronics whiz broadcasts radio signals into space and monitors for signs of aliens, but makes a more important connection here on Earth.

A 2020 short documentary starring John Shepherd. Directed by Matthew Killip.

A single page website, for linking wherever you keep your web feed, to explain how it works for someone new to using RSS. The sections are:

• A short intro
• What is a feed? (a.k.a RSS.) - overview and benefits
• How do I get a newsreader app? - with suggested apps
• How do I use my new newsreader app to subscribe to a feed? - instructions!

Created by Matt Web

The National Science Foundation facility is closed while engineers review the damage and assess the extent of repairs that will be needed to bring the telescope back online.

Research | UCF Today

Wargaming shows that we may be headed for a severe constitutional crisis.

The bad news: in each scenario other than a Biden landslide, we ended up with a constitutional crisis that lasted until the inauguration, featuring violence in the streets and a severely disrupted administrative transition. The good news: we also learned a great deal about how to prevent the worst from transpiring. There were six major takeaways.

The American Interest

THERE ARE NO REAL HUMANS, EVERYTHING IS ARTIFICIAL.
GOVERNMENT AND SOCIETY ARE A CONSTRUCT OF A.I.
NOTHING IS PERMAMENT.
DISCONNECT IS A DEATH SENTENCE░

An anime short film by Maciej Kuciara

Two studs wide and angled at 45°, the ubiquitous “2x2 decorated slope” is a LEGO minifigure’s interface to the world.

These iconic, low-resolution designs are the perfect tool to learn the basics of physical interface design. Armed with 52 different bricks, let’s see what they can teach us about the design, layout and organisation of complex interfaces.

Tech | Designed by Cave

How did it come to this? A virus a thousand times smaller than a dust mote has humbled and humiliated the planet’s most powerful nation. America has failed to protect its people, leaving them with illness and financial ruin. It has lost its status as a global leader. It has careened between inaction and ineptitude. The breadth and magnitude of its errors are difficult, in the moment, to truly fathom.

Ed Yong | The Atlantic

These 68 videos show clear apparent instances of police officers escalating violence during protests. Most departments refused to share details about investigations and discipline or even officers’ names. Here’s what we learned about each case.

ProPublica

A pulpy magazine size (8"x10") book with over 180 Pages of Dark Fantasy/Sci-fi goodness brought to you by:

Zé Burnay • Matt Emmons • Marie Enger • Maxime Gérin • Goran Gligovic • Al Gofa • Leslie Hung • Tyler Landry • Vlad Legostaev • Sloane Leong • Matt Lesniewski • Trey M Patterson • Sophie Margolin • Simon Roy • Linnea Sterte • Artyom Trakhanov • Alexis Ziritt

Bortac agents are among “the most violent and racist in all law enforcement”. The quasi-military nature of the unit goes beyond their training, percolating into their state of mind. “They don’t exist within the realm of civilian law enforcement,” Budd said. “They view people they encounter in the military sense as enemy combatants, meaning they have virtually no rights.”

Trump has repeatedly pushed for more resources for the agency and for its staff union, and is now actively promoting the fulfillment of its dream of becoming a militarized presence on America’s streets. Under his presidency, the brutalized and violent politics of the border are being extended across the nation.

US News | The Guardian

Researchers reveal that given the right food in the right laboratory conditions, microbes collected from sediment as old as 100 million years can revive and multiply, even after laying dormant since large dinosaurs prowled the planet.

Phys.org

Massive unemployment has left more than 40% of renter households at risk of eviction, according to a new analysis by global advisory firm Stout Risius Ross.

“It’s like nothing we’ve ever seen,” said John Pollock, coordinator of the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel.

CNBC

Freaked out scientists and gleeful captains of fossil-fuel tankers are now sailing through climate history in the melting polar region.

Bloomberg Green

ProPublica and The New York Times Magazine, with support from the Pulitzer Center, have for the first time modeled how climate refugees might move across international borders. This is what we found.

by Abrahm Lustgarten

Peaceful protests were already happening for weeks when federal officers arrived on July 4. Our video shows how President Trump’s deployment ignited chaos.

Visual Investigations | The New York Times

A Q+A with the novelist Tim Maughan, whose disturbing future predictions have had an unfortunate habit of coming true.

One Zero

"I make tiny things! Handmade scratch build! This is my miniature insta!"

@miniatua

Hardspace: Shipbreaker is a sci-fi job simulator that gives you a laborer’s-eye view of a setting that we’re used to dominating from the god-like perspectives of rulers and admirals.

Games | Vice

Recent commissioned artwork by Russian comic artist Artyom Trakhanov.

2038: George Almore is working on a true human-equivalent AI. His latest prototype is almost ready. This sensitive phase is also the riskiest. Especially as he has a goal that must be hidden at all costs: being reunited with his dead wife.

Directed by: Gavin Rothery | Vertical Entertainment

Starring: Rhona Mitra, Theo James and Toby Jones

Alarming heat scorched Siberia on Saturday as the small town of Verkhoyansk (67.5°N latitude) reached 100.4 degrees Fahrenheit, 32 degrees above the normal high temperature. If verified, this is likely the hottest temperature ever recorded in Siberia and also the hottest temperature ever recorded north of the Arctic Circle, which begins at 66.5°N.

CBS News

I’m not going to regurgitate what’s already been said, because that just isn’t my style. If you know me at all, you know I prefer to instead fill noticeable vacuums, and there is indeed a vacuum I’m noticing in the dominant narratives that formulate the current Twitterstorm in regards to the subject at hand.

Ganzeer's thoughts on the Warren Ellis situation, via Ganzeer.Today

Scientists estimated how many alien societies in the Milky Way can send interstellar messages. But just because they can talk does not mean we will hear them.

Motherboard

NASA intends to return to the moon to stay. The infrastructure needed to make it possible is explained. Narrated by 'Star Wars' actress Kelly Marie Tran.

Credit: NASA / via VideoFromSpace YouTube

“If they had [breached the fence],” the president continued, “they would have been greeted with the most vicious dogs, and most ominous weapons, I have ever seen.”

The Guardian

Launched from a submarine, the Poseidon drone is shaped like a giant torpedo and nicknamed the “Doomsday Drone.” The weapon is designed to send a deadly tsunami wave into populated coastlines — it carries a nuclear warhead weighing up to two megatons and can autonomously cross the North Atlantic.

Asia Times

The Worm showcases over 300 images from NASA’s archives chosen with one simple criteria: each photograph must feature ‘the worm’.

Standards Manual

The Trump administration has discussed whether to conduct the first U.S. nuclear test explosion since 1992 in a move that would have far-reaching consequences for relations with other nuclear powers and reverse a decades-long moratorium on such actions.

The Washington Post

People desperately need to go back to work and save what they can of their lives. But Mike Davis argues that a rapid reopening of the economy would only result in unspeakable tragedy for millions.

Mike Davis | Jacobin

In some ways, space isn’t so much essential as it is inertial.

Ingrid Burrington | Engadget

Hey so here’s the paper Cyborgs and Space (1960) by Clynes and Kline in which the word cyborg was first introduced. It’s short. Here’s the first line:

"Space travel challenges mankind not only technologically but also spiritually, in that it invites man to take an active part in his own biological evolution."

Our geological era, the Anthropocene, in which human activity is the dominant agent of change in our ecosystems, is pretty fraught. That line makes me wonder…

Matt Webb | Interconnected

"So, the blog is formally ending this month, May MMXX.

My weblog is a collateral victim of Covid19, which has become a great worldwide excuse to stop whatever you were doing."

Bruce Sterling | Beyond the Beyond

For the final push we’re turning the Sci-Fi spotlight on the epic, Ultimate ’80s Sci-Fi Movie Mashup!

via HyperDrive YouTube Channel

It’s been five years since Mad Max: Fury Road came out in theaters, but if the director George Miller has his way, Furiosa will soon ride again. The film is a prequel centered on a young Furiosa, and Miller is searching for an actress in her 20s to take over the role.

Movies | The New York Times

We Are the Mutants is a weekly updated magazine focusing on the history and analysis of Cold War-era popular and outsider culture, with a strong emphasis on speculative (sci-fi, fantasy, horror), genre, pulp, cult, occult, subculture, and anti-establishment media.

The title of the magazine is taken from graffiti seen at the University of California at Berkeley in the late 1960s: “The bomb has already dropped, and we are the mutants.”

Self-publishing on the internet is a rewarding and powerful experience – you can very quickly produce work that is accessible to billions of people for very low cost.

This library will introduce you not just to code resources, but also to examples of alternative forms of screen-based interaction and the technologies they are based on.

by Jake Dow-Smith

The explorers who set one of the last meaningful records on earth.

The New Yorker

Kim Stanley Robinson will publish his next novel in October: The Ministry for the Future. As with many of his recent novels, like New York 2140, 2312, or Aurora, his focus is firmly on the state of the Earth, and the effect that climate change has on human civilization.

Tor.com

I dig this illustration Ganzeer shared in his latest newsletter, created for a reprinted version of a popular blog post he wrote a while back, about life with the coronavirus.

What felt impossible has become thinkable. The spring of 2020 is suggestive of how much, and how quickly, we can change as a civilization.

By Kim Stanley Robinson | The New Yorker

Through his extensive knowledge and keen curator’s eye, Scott Lindberg was a constant source of inspiration to the design community in the Seattle area and beyond. You may know him as the man behind New Documents (@dcmnts) — an incredible collection of 20th-century album art, book covers, and design artifacts. He was a genuinely kind person and will be missed by many.

Scott’s collection is among the best we’ve ever seen, and we’re honored to be its new home.

Letterform Archive

Znak: Ukrainian Trademarks 1960-1980 is research by U, N, A collective (Uliana Bychenkova, Nika Kudinova, Aliona Solomadina) on the history of Ukrainian graphic design, in particular, on the area of corporate identity during the period of Thaw, Stagnation, and Perestroyka.

This essay, by Rokas Sutkaitis, is from the book.

"Worked 3 months with Neill before studio pulled plug. Work still locked down, however, design development was discontinued on this. Sky Crane variant Cheyenne Drop-ship."

TyRuben Ellingson, via Twitter

The Type Foundry Directory is a curated index of type foundries by Matthew Smith of Morning Type.

The worm is back. And just in time to mark the return of human spaceflight on American rockets from American soil.

The retro, modern design of the agency’s logo will help capture the excitement of a new, modern era of human spaceflight on the side of the Falcon 9 launch vehicle that will ferry astronauts to the International Space Station as part of the Demo-2 flight, now scheduled for mid- to late May.

NASA Press Release

The U.S. may end up with the worst COVID-19 outbreak in the industrialized world. This is how it’s going to play out.

The Atlantic

The company's technology uses lasers to trigger a nuclear fusion reaction in hydrogen and boron — purportedly with no radioactive fuel required. The secret is a cutting-edge laser and, well, an element of luck.

Popular Mechanics

You can now download 900 hours of Andrew Weatherall DJ mixes thanks to the fine work of a cadre of superfans who have collected together studio mixes, live recordings and radio shows spanning 1988-2020.

Mixmag

Satellites are so crucial that attacking them could be seen as an act of war. The bad news is, it may have already happened.

MIT Technology Review

The use of off-the-shelf components means bad actors can easily look for vulnerabilities.

Scientific American

I’m sure many of you remember these cute robots released by Japanese toy giant TOMY during the mid-80s.

via @nightliquid_Retro

What is Browso?

It's everything you needed to know about your device in one handy package. It also has some neat little technical guides for those that want to dig a little deeper in their system setup. Plus games. What more could you want?

A side project by Seán Halpin.

The government can’t keep its story straight about its involvement with UFO research. After a yearlong investigation, we bust open the files, break through the noise, and reveal the definitive, staggering truth.

Popular Mechanics

The prescient sci-fi writer on why the future shock of tech mirrors the Industrial Revolution.

Financial Times

Just days after the Earth saw its warmest January on record, Antarctica has broken its warmest temperature ever recorded. A reading of 65 degrees was taken Thursday at Esperanza Base along Antarctica’s Trinity Peninsula, making it the ordinarily frigid continent’s highest measured temperature in history.

Washington Post

In the 70s and 80s the Magnetic Novelties Co was the lone supplier of promo magnets to all of North America. This is a sampling of their output.

Jordan Nogee

The company is building a massive centrifuge to accelerate rockets and send them screaming into space.

Wired

On January 20, something rather strange happened in orbit. A Russian satellite suddenly maneuvered itself so that it was closely shadowing a US spy satellite. The pair are now less than 186 miles (300 kilometers) apart — a short distance when it comes to space.

MIT Technology Review

The Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope has produced the highest resolution image of the sun's surface ever taken. The image shows a pattern of turbulent, “boiling” gas that covers the entire sun. The cell-like structures -- each about the size of Texas -- are the signature of violent motions that transport heat from the inside of the sun to its surface.

National Science Foundation

In response to this ongoing public health emergency, JHU developed an online dashboard to visualize and track the reported cases on a daily timescale; the complete set of data is downloadable as a google sheet. The case data visualized is collected from various sources, including WHO, U.S. CDC, ECDC China CDC (CCDC), NHC and DXY.

John Hopkins University

This ambient podcast was recently recommended by Warren Ellis.

Ambient Atomic Orbitals: A collection of mixes that include many different artists of the ambient / experimental genre. Unbroken seamless mixes including field recordings and other snippets.

Taken from the upcoming album 'Simulcast' out Feb 28 on Mom + Pop / Ninja Tune: https://tycho.lnk.to/simulcastYo

via Tycho YouTube

‘Terminal Slam’ is directed by Squarepusher's longtime collaborator, Daito Manabe. He is one of the directors and founders of Rhizomatiks, Japan's world-renowned artists, programmers and DJs who have collaborated with a variety of domestic and international artists.

New album ‘Be Up A Hello’ out 31 January

via Squarepusher YouTube

Osamu Sato is a talented polymath artist from Japan, known for his psychedelic video game scores and his pioneering work on computer graphics.

In 1993, he published the (now highly collectible) book, "Art of Computer Designing: A Black and White Approach," which opens with this amazing incantation: "The computer is a magic box. Many graphic images are hidden inside it."

Boing Boing

‘Honda. Great Journey.’ showcases how autonomous driving could take us around the world. Map Project Office and Mori Inc. were commissioned by Honda to create seven concept vehicles suitable for a journey that retraces mankind’s great migration from Africa across the globe to South America.

Honda | Map Project Office

Scientists have created a prototype "lunar oxygen plant" by testing a method for extracting oxygen from imitation Moon rocks that could be invaluable for lunar settlements. Not only does the process extract up to 96 percent of the oxygen in the imitation lunar soil, it also leaves behind metals that might be valuable to future crewed missions that venture to the moon, Mars, and beyond.

Astronomy

What does an evil interface look like? In the real world, few people believe they’re evil, so it’s problematic to look there for examples. But in sci-fi, we have The Empire. The First Order. Zorg! The Alliance! Norsefire! All evil, and all meant to be unambiguously so.

A short talk by Chris Noessel of Sci-Fi Interfaces

Scientists discovered a T-cell and its receptor that could find and kill a wide range of cancerous cells in the lab including lung, skin, blood, colon, breast, bone, prostate, ovarian, kidney and cervical cancer cells. Crucially, it left normal tissues untouched.

BBC News

A little-known start-up helps law enforcement match photos of unknown people to their online images — and “might lead to a dystopian future or something,” a backer says.

The New York Times

What ‘Blade Runner,’ cyberpunk, and Octavia Butler had to say about the age we’re entering now.

OneZero

Stardust that formed more than 5bn years ago, long before the birth of the Earth and the sun, has been discovered in a meteorite that crashed down in Australia, making it the oldest known solid material on the planet.

The Guardian

Tiny living robots have been created using cells taken from frog embryos. Each so-called xenobot is less than a millimeter across, but one can propel itself through water using two stumpy limbs, while another has a kind of pouch that it could use to carry a small load. Once it is set loose, a robot’s cells have enough energy to keep it wriggling and squirming for up to 10 days.

MIT Technology Review

Why is this The Last Blog?

Because it’s the last thing on Earth,
the only thing left.
It’s the last zine, paper airplane,
the last roll of toilet paper.
You are the last reader on earth, on the last computer,
listening to the last album ever made.
This is your last thought. Your last night on earth.
The Last Blog.

TikTok's algorithms make it a safe haven for those with an interest in the occult – and they're drawing more and more people into the practice.

Wired

Climate change is driving climate change.

The wildfires raging along Australia’s eastern coast have already pumped around 400 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, further fueling the climate change that’s already intensifying the nation’s fires.

MIT Technology Review

The writer who invented ‘cyberspace’ – and possibly the most influential living sci-fi author – on the challenges of keeping up with a reality even stranger than fiction.

The Guardian

A speculative biology project undertaken from 2009–2011, by Simon Roy and Memo Kosemen, that envisioned a world of bird-like intelligent dinosaurs. Originally intended for a book that didn't happen, the concepts have just been published in near entirety on Kosemen's site.

"International news coverage of these fires has pointed out that the Australian Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, has a poor record on climate change. What those articles don’t mention though (and this is something you’ll only know if you’ve lived through the last decade of climate politics in this country) is just how long and sustained that record is."

Angus Hervey | Medium

Experts say it could take decades for these ecosystems to regenerate, if they do at all. Even if the ecosystems succeed, it’s possible that this single fire season will have caused the extinction of entire animal species.

OneZero

"Broadcast witches seek the wastes looking for spell videos left by the old world. The origins of these tapes are unknown, but original video boxes say they were available as a bundle for 89.85. Many witches can only get these spell videos on ruined copied discs and floppy drives. Though shoddy these patchy videos are, they contain great amounts of power."

Illustration by Max Prentis

Video installation by R▲

Robert Scheer hosts guest Noam Chomsky, for a discussion of the human species' dystopian future (and present) and the disastrous success of America's imperial model.

Scheer Intelligence Podcast | KCRW

For more than fifteen years, The WELL has been proud to host writer Bruce Sterling’s annual discussion about where the world is and where it’s going. Join Sterling and other special guests for the freewheeling, fascinating discussion that is open to everyone, starting January 7, 2020.

“Alternate history, in my opinion, is a more demanding game,” says the author of Agency and other science fiction novels, “if only because conventional historical fiction, like history, is itself highly speculative.”

By the Book | The New York Times

Ingrid Burrington takes us on an idiosyncratic tour through the entanglement of infrastructures that govern our “logistics planet” — more or less. From pipelines to traffic lights, logistical operations are always vulnerable to technological malfunction and human error, or coordinated action.

Digital Friction Series | Urban Omnibus

Now that we are a few steps into this new year and new decade, our editors at Post-Punk.com have decided to look back at the past ten years with a list of top releases of the 2010s. We’ve also amassed everything into a handful of Spotify playlists to enjoy when you’re started to feel nostalgic for the Twenty-tens.

Post-Punk.com

With more than a month still to go in the fire season, the government announced a large-scale use of military assets, a deployment not seen since World War II.

The New York Times

Humanity has started many years ago the process of terraforming mars, we follow the thoughts and prayers of one of the " cleaners ", who work on this titanic project.

A collection of handmade circuit bend devices by Tanner Galvin.

Modern Props is a Hollywood institution, but after 42 years in the business, Zabrucky has decided to close shop. Buffeted by the exodus of production from Hollywood and the march of time, Zabrucky, the man who spent the past four decades fashioning the look of the future wants to focus on his own.

Stacy Perman | Los Angeles Times

SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY, or the application of engineering principles to the design of life, presents world-changing prospects.

Jonathan Shaw | Harvard Magazine

From a Tier 1 Zone Day Pass to see how the 1% lives to the final installment in the Marvel vs Star Wars saga—these are *the* gifts of 2030.

Tim Maughan | Motherboard

Many countries and groups already use small military drones that can drop grenades or fly into a target to detonate an explosive. The new drone, called Songar and made by Ankara-based electronics firm Asisguard, is the first drone to be equipped with a firearm and be ready for service.

David Hambling | New Scientist

Finnish artist living in Vancouver, Canada. Working in the animation industry on both TV shows and films, with a focus on concept art, painting and character design.

Midway through his career, the inventor of "cyberspace" turned his attention to a strange new world: the present.

Joshua Rothman | The New Yorker

With permission to be in Chernobyl’s Exclusion Zone before tours were available, she photographed the site using a regular camera, but also documented the area—and the legacy of the 1986 nuclear disaster there—in a different, more extraordinary way.

Winnie Lee | Atlas Obscura

When cartographers first started mapping the world’s oceans, sea monsters and mythical beasts inhabited the places where sailors had yet to explore. Today, we still don’t know much about what’s going on in some places, but autonomous sensor platforms are working to change this.

Michael J Coren | Quartz

"Over my 19-year career as a designer, I’ve amassed quite a nice collection of books on typography. Some have been more useful than others. In this article, I will share my thoughts on the books I’ve read, as well as gather together a list of books I’ve seen recommended elsewhere that I hope to read in the future."

Jeremiah Shoaf | Typewolf

A massive study of U.S. mortality shows a grim trend in life expectancy across racial lines.

Joel Achenbach | The Washington Post

Doctors have placed humans in suspended animation for the first time, as part of a trial in the US that aims to make it possible to fix traumatic injuries that would otherwise cause death.

Helen Thomson | New Scientist

A research group at Yamagata University discovered 142 new geoglyphs which represent living things and other objects, on the Nasca Pampa and surrounding area, while a test using AI successfully identified a new geoglyph they missed — paving the way for the use of AI in understanding Nazca lines and dramatically speeding up their discovery.

News | Yamagata University

The European Space Agency just released a recording of the frequencies generated as a solar storm collided with Earth’s magnetic field.

via American Geophysical Union

Colonization and exploitation define our major institutions, and are engrained in western society. They persist in science. And unless we make changes, they will persist in outer space as well.

Monica Vidaurri | Quartz

From Sagan to Tesla, scientists have long puzzled over how to talk to extraterrestrial intelligence

Daniel Oberhaus | The Guardian

A flying robot armed with a suite of microphones will roam through the space station and listen for any worrying clinks and clanks.

Neil V Patel | MIT Technology Review

Climate change will soon expose a crippling problem embedded in the nation’s infrastructure. In fire-ravaged California, it already has.

Alexis Madrigal | The Atlantic

Rising seas could affect three times more people by 2050 than previously thought, according to new research, threatening to all but erase some of the world’s great coastal cities.

Denise Lu and Christopher Flavelle | The New York Times

A U.S. Air Force X-37B spaceplane made a pre-dawn landing Oct. 27 at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, after spending 780 days in orbit, breaking its own record by 62 days.

Sandra Erwin | Space News

The county sheriff’s office estimated that 180,000 people had been ordered to flee the Kincade Fire, which has spread to 30,000 acres and was only 10 percent contained. Officials rapidly expanded the number of areas under mandatory evacuation orders in the early hours of the morning as gusts as high as 93 mph swept through the hills and valleys north of the San Francisco Bay area.

Derek Hawkins and Kayla Epstein | The Washington Post

Comics writer, novelist and screenwriter Warren Ellis picks the music that reflects the work he does, how he works, and what music means to him. With tracks from Delia Derbyshire, Billy Bragg and Neu!

Paperback Writers: Graphic Content | BBC 6

The report says a combination of global starvation, war, disease, drought, and a fragile power grid could have cascading, devastating effects. The senior US government officials who wrote the report are from several key agencies including the Army, Defense Intelligence Agency, and NASA.

Nafeez Ahmed | Motherboard

Seven months after a debacle in which the agency ran short on space suits for women, NASA is showing off a new, more flexible design.

Eric Niller | Wired

A new DARPA research program is developing brain-computer interfaces that could control “swarms of drones, operating at the speed of thought”. What if it succeeds?

Paul Tullis | MIT Technology Review

General Dynamics Ordnance and Tactical Systems has disclosed the development of Next Generation Squad Weapons (NGSW). The NGSW is planned for fielding 2021 or 2022. Versions of the weapon are intended to be equipped with sophisticated technologies such as ballistic calculation, intelligent targeting and tracking capabilities, wireless communication and advanced camera-based capabilities.

Press Release | via Defence Blog

Warren Ellis shares a bit of his active subscriptions list, for those who are looking for things to follow.

via WARREN ELLIS LTD

A man has been able to move all four of his paralysed limbs with a mind-controlled exoskeleton suit, French researchers report.

James Gallagher | BBC

Listen to the sounds of wind, quakes, and instruments on the red planet.

NASA/JPL | NASA News

Nearly all wristwatches once shared a distinctive form of lettering. It was confident, and timeless, and it’s almost completely vanished. Decimal examines this style, and explores the things that shaped it, to create a family of original typefaces that transcends its forms to celebrate its ideas.

News from H&Co

The revolutionary concept called Shapeshifter is part drone, part boat, part all-terrain vehicle, and part submarine.

NASA 360 takes a look at the NASA Innovative Advanced Concept (NIAC) known as Shapeshifter. Researched by a team of engineers at NASA JPL the Shapeshifter concept is a flying amphibious robot that could one day be used to explore the treacherous terrains of distant worlds.

Once a novelty, drones have become standard military equipment around the world. In The Drone Databook, a new study released today, the Center for the Study of the Drone at Bard College presents an encyclopedic catalogue of military drone inventories, units, bases and test sites, training academies, research and development programs, operational experiences, and exports, showing that at least 95 countries now maintain active military drone programs, a 58 percent increase over a decade ago, and that there are likely at least 21,000 military drones in operation around the globe.

When designing Epcot Center, the talented minds at WED Enterprises — now known as Walt Disney Imagineering — made sure that every visual element made guests feel as if they were truly stepping into a community of tomorrow.

Michael Crawford | D23

'Pulsar Guardian' will let governmental and commercial customers run wargames simulating conflict in space.

Sarah Scoles | Motherboard

Climate change is poised to alter the face of global conflict.

Emily Atkin | The New Republic

Scientists taught rats to play hide-and-seek in order to study natural animal behavior—but it was also fun, for both the researchers and the animals.

Ed Yong | The Atlantic

Robocap is born, a font informed by Robocop’s visions of dystopian futures.

Angela Riechers | AIGA Eye on Design

Astronomers have detected evidence of water on a potentially habitable planet outside our solar system for the first time.

Neil V Patel | MIT Technology Review

Polyethylene terephthalate (PET) bottles are commonly used for soft drinks and mineral water, but can also be used in other household or personal care products. Data from Euromonitor International, shows that more than 480 billion of these bottles were sold last year alone. That’s almost 1 million every minute, as shown in the animation at the top of this page. The illustrations below show what that pile of plastic would look like if it was collected over a longer period of time.

Simon Scarr and Marco Hernandez | Reuters

Taking cues from the systems that run our cities and our passion for excess, illustrator himHallows creates meticulous repeat designs of industrial objects.

Rebecca Fulleylove | Creative Review

Space is empty, cold, hostile and ruthless. We, on Earth, are more fragile and spoiled than celebrities' children. Not even close to be adapted to its environment.

If we are to abandon Earth and survive, we must act quickly. But will it ever be possible for us to reach other stars and solar systems? It seems improbable. The fact that we may be doomed to extinction in our cradle deserves a black metal album.

—Thanatonaut

Robotics engineers at MIT have built a threadlike robot worm that can be magnetically steered to deftly navigate the extremely narrow and winding arterial pathways of the human brain.

Andrew Liszewski | Gizmodo

A five minute short documentary on the illustrious career of production designer and illustrator Tom Southwell through the lens of his passion for educating.

Directed by Johan Erik Lallerstedt

Tens of thousands of fires have been scorching Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, proliferating at the fastest rate since the country’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) started recording such data in 2013. Brazil has weathered 74,155 fires thus far this year, an 80 percent increase compared to the same period in 2018. Nearly 36,000 of them began in the last month, with satellite images indicating that more than 9,500 were ignited in the last week alone.

Aaron Mak | Slate

Available now for pre-order.

Parks, our second title with photographer Brian Kelley, is a collection of over 300 United States national park maps, ephemera, and brochures spanning over 100 years.

Standards Manual

This week, Muller spoke to SYFY WIRE about the task of reimagining the X-Men, the thought process behind House of X and Powers of X and how design, down to creating new typefaces, plays into comic books. On Muller's Tumblr, he wrote of the collaboration "This is what comics can look like when you put two guys who like design systems in the same room."

Dana Forsythe | SyFy Wire

"There’s this old sci-fi movie called 'Quatermass and the Pit.' In the movie, someone says to Professor Quatermass, 'Do you ever find your early career catching up with you?' And he says, 'I never had a career, only work.' I feel like that’s where I’m at now. I never had a career, only work. I’m just going to keep working." –Nicolas Cage

By David Marchese | The New York Times Magazine

The 1985 tv commercial for Tomy's Omnibot 2000.

via Computer Love Records

Here are seven ways of understanding the IPCC’s newest climate warning.

"Climate change requires us to alter the biogeochemical organism that we call the global economy on the fly, in our lifetimes. Such a task should command most of the time and attention of every economist, agriculturalist, investor, executive, and politician — anyone who fancies themselves a leader in the physical workings of the economy, or whatever we call it. It is our shame, and theirs, that they don’t."

Robinson Meyer | The Atlantic

The world’s land and water resources are being exploited at “unprecedented rates,” a new United Nations report warns, which combined with climate change is putting dire pressure on the ability of humanity to feed itself.

The report, prepared by more than 100 experts from 52 countries and released in summary form in Geneva on Thursday, found that the window to address the threat is closing rapidly.

Christopher Flavelle | The New York Times

Editing the epigenome, which turns our genes on and off, could be the “elixir of life”.

Erika Hayasaki | MIT Technology Review

The unmanned spaceplane is shrouded in mystery.

Kyle Mizokami | Popular Mechanics

In a controversial first, a team of researchers have been creating embryos that are part human and part monkey. The idea behind the research is to fashion animals that possess organs, like a kidney or liver, made up entirely of human cells. Such "human-animal chimeras" could be used as sources of organs for transplantation.

MIT Technology Review

Meet the classified artificial brain being developed by US intelligence programs. It’s intended to become an omnivorous analysis tool that can predict the future.

Sarah Scoles | The Verge

20 Minutes Into The Future is a critical look at how technology is shaping our lives today and what actions we can take for a better tomorrow. It is written by Daniel Harvey, a digital product designer currently based in London. But he lived in NYC for 20 years so expect him to say “fuck” an awful lot.

Big tech firms are trying to read people’s thoughts, and no one’s ready for the consequences.

Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review

Some people say “the climate has changed before,” as though that should be reassuring. It’s not.

Kate Marvel | Scientific American

Losing the remaining Arctic sea ice and its ability to reflect incoming solar energy back to space would be equivalent to adding one trillion tons of CO2 to the atmosphere, on top of the 2.4 trillion tons emitted since the Industrial Age, according to current and former researchers from Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California San Diego.

The amount of additional heat introduced into the Earth system because of Arctic melt is equivalent to an increase in CO₂ concentration from 400 to 456.7 parts per million.

Scripps News

Thompson’s Arthur C Clarke winning novel Rosewater, NK Jemisin, Nnedi Okorafor ... the most exciting sci-fi is coming from writers of colour.

Adam Roberts | The Guardian

Dear Tarot-o-bot, mother of tech updates and design trends, what do you foresee for our future?

by Illo.tv

Deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon has surged above three football fields a minute, according to the latest government data, pushing the world’s biggest rainforest closer to a tipping point beyond which it cannot recover.

Jonathan Watts | The Guardian

"The climate math is brutally clear: While the world can't be healed within the next few years, it may be fatally wounded by negligence until 2020."

Matt McGrath | BBC News

Growing numbers of whales, sea lions, and seals are being found stranded or dead, alarming oceanic experts.

Abigail Summerville | The Wall Street Journal

Minipax is a typeface inspired by the novel 1984, from George Orwell. It has been vaguely influenced by the skeleton of the font used in my edition of the book (printed in 84 !). But more importantly, it’s been designed to fit with the atmosphere of the Orwellian dystopia.

Designed by Raphaël Ronot

President Trump has set his sights on the Moon. Elon Musk's are on Mars. But some of the edgier talk urges an even bolder national aim — a human mission to Titan, Saturn's largest moon.

Steve LeVine | Axios

The US is on a path to an unrecognizably hot future. Here’s what that looks like and how to change course.

Kristy Dahl, Senior Climate Scientist | Union of Concerned Scientists

The surprisingly whimsical art of the space patch

Emily Ludolph | AIGA Eye on Design

Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch, one of the most legendary creative partnerships in modern comic book history, reunite for THE BATMAN’S GRAVE, a twelve-issue monthly DC maxi-series about life, death and the questions most are too afraid to ask.

via WARREN ELLIS LTD

The EPA has dropped restrictions on the use of a powerful pesticide known to be particularly lethal to honeybees for some 190 million acres of US cropland. The action came just days after the US Department of Agriculture revealed it had stopped tracking rapidly vanishing honeybee colonies.

Mary Papenfuss | HuffPost

Scientists have captured the first ever image of a phenomenon which Albert Einstein once described as "spooky action at a distance".

BBC News

This map is based on data from the National UFO Reporting Center. It includes over 90,000 reports of UFO sightings dating as far back as 1905. Each circle on the map corresponds to a reported UFO, with the size representing the number of UFO reports received. For any UFO reported by at least two people, details of all sightings are available by clicking on the circle.

Created by Max Galka

Starshot wants to build the world’s most powerful laser and aim it at the closest star. What could go wrong?

Kate Greene | MIT Technology Review

Spaceplanes, giant rockets, tethers and catapults.

Konstantin Kakaes | MIT Technology Review

A small group of venture capitalists and technologists believe that humans can capture and reverse-engineer UFOs — and that trying to do so might be a good investment.

MJ Banias | Motherboard

Dedicated to celebrating the awesome, the everyday and the imaginary.

A gender-neutral, modern kids brand — inspired by kiddos, for kiddos.

NYC Synth duo Ghost Cop are back with another fantastic video from their debut LP released last November, One Weird Trick.

via POST-PUNK.COM

"Goodbye friends, see you on the other side."

via DRONEGOD$ YouTube

*from the pages of Infinite Detail

They form 50 miles up, in a region of the atmosphere called the mesosphere. All of our weather-producing clouds live far lower — generally less than 50,000 feet — in the troposphere.

Sightings have been pouring in from the western half of the nation.

Matthew Cappucci | The Washington Post

Even if thousands of logos were created in the USSR only a very small part of them managed to survive until our days. Designed by professionals of various specialties, these fine graphic creations quickly became forgotten because of the turbulent fall of the Soviet Union. This monograph aims to rediscover the unrighteously forgotten logos and to introduce them into the global design context.

via Soviet Logos

NASA is opening the International Space Station for commercial business so U.S. industry innovation and ingenuity can accelerate a thriving commercial economy in low-Earth orbit.

Press Release | NASA

Meet the space-weather forecaster leading the charge to help us understand solar flares and geomagnetic storms before it’s too late.

Erin Winick | MIT Technology Review

Human activity has transformed the Earth – but scientists are divided about whether this is really a turning point in geological history.

Nicola Davison | The Guardian

SpaceX realizes that getting to Mars will require a lot of help. NASA and the academic community have begun to step up and help one of the most ambitious undertakings of our times.

Ben Pearson | Ars Technica

What if the space race had never ended? Watch an official first look at For All Mankind, an Apple Original drama series coming this Fall to Apple TV+.

via Apple TV YouTube

A harrowing scenario analysis of how human civilization might collapse in coming decades due to climate change has been endorsed by a former Australian defense chief and senior royal navy commander.

Nafeez Ahmed | Vice

This summer, NASA astronauts will join an international diving crew in a special underwater laboratory under the Atlantic to prepare astronauts for the harsh environment of space as well as the lunar and Martian surfaces.

Victor Tangermann | Futurism

Mill+ Director Ilya Abulkhanov opened Offf Barcelona 2019 with the debut of his sci-fi short film ‘ARXIV’. ARXIV (pronounced ‘archive’) is an immersive sci-fi family drama is set in two time frames: the deep future, that is left with no future, and the near future, that will bring about the eventual dystopian collapse of society. Protagonist Lew Aron survives both time frames and is set to discover a potential outlet to confront his innermost desire, or what’s left of it.

via OFFF Festival Vimeo

Welcome to the day after Judgment Day. Producer James Cameron returns with director Tim Miller for Terminator: Dark Fate. In theatres 11.1.19.

via Paramount Pictures YouTube

Warren Ellis to write a six-issue WILDCATS series for DC as part of the Wildstorm pop-up imprint, with artist team Ramon Villalobos and Tamra Bonvillain.

via Warren Ellis Ltd.

Watch a clip and the official trailer for "Aniara", as well as check out alternate posters for the film. The movie debuts in select theaters May 17.

Elizabeth Howell | Space.com

In the first of BBC Culture’s new series on fiction that predicted the future, Hephzibah Anderson looks at the work of John Brunner, whose vision of 2010 was eerily accurate.

Hephzibah Anderson | BBC

A thousand years ago, Native Americans in South America used multiple psychotropic plants—possibly simultaneously—to induce hallucinations and altered consciousness, according to an international team of anthropologists.

via Phys.org

This club is a way to connect young people who love our home planet, who believe in the power of human ingenuity and the abundance of space, and who are unshakably optimistic about the future. We welcome students, educators, and fans of the future to join a worldwide community of dreamers sponsored by Blue Origin, builders of reusable rockets and roads to space.

Blue Moon is a flexible lander delivering a wide variety of small, medium and large payloads to the lunar surface. Its capability to provide precise and soft landings will enable a sustained human presence on the Moon.

via Blue Origin YouTube

The Mad Scientist Laboratory blog is a marketplace of ideas about the future of our society, work, and conflict.

Mad Scientist is a U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC) initiative.

Nature is declining globally at rates unprecedented in human history — and the rate of species extinctions is accelerating, with grave impacts on people around the world now likely, warns a landmark new report from the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services.

Press Release | IPBES

Apple claims that AirPods are building a “wireless future.” Many people think they're a symbol of disposable wealth. The truth is bleaker.

Caroline Haskens | Motherboard

Last week, the Petersen Automotive Museum of Los Angeles opened a massive new exhibit: Hollywood Dream Machines: Vehicles of Science Fiction and Fantasy, which includes more than 50 vehicles from throughout science fiction movie history, along with other props and memorabilia.

Andrew Liptak | The Verge

The long view of humanity — a series that aims to stand back from the news cycle and widen the lens of our current place in time.

BBC Future

"That was then. This is now."

The Center for PostNatural History is dedicated to the advancement of knowledge relating to the complex interplay between culture, nature, and biotechnology. Our mission is to acquire, interpret, and provide access to a collection of living, preserved, and documented organisms of postnatural origin.

“It’s not the phone or Facebook that are doing the magic. It’s the words that we’re saying, the rituals that we’re doing and it’s enough to look each other in the eye for the ritual to work.”

The power of the Internet has allowed Romania’s busy witch community to gradually migrate their ancient practices onto the Web.

Emily Wither | Reuters

Russian media reported that the 184 m-long submarine is designed to operate six Poseidon weapons and it is also believed to have an underwater dock beneath its hull to allow the launch of mini-submarines and multimission UUVs.

Tim Ripley | Jane's Defence Weekly

"My Family Exhibition" started in 2005 as an exhibition event where designers and artists create labels for game cartridges. The exhibition started with 23 volunteers who are related to METEOR, which is also an exhibition hall.

3D Bioprinting Solutions, a Russian bio-technical research laboratory, has announced plans to collaborate with scientists from the U.S. and Israel to deliver muscular tissue biomaterials to the International Space Station (ISS) in September as part of a microgravity 3D bioprinting experiment.

Anas Essop | 3D Printing Industry

For science, profit, and pride, China, the U.S., and private companies are hunting for resources on the lunar surface.

Rivka Galchen | The New Yorker

The software, called PlanetNet, mapped out a monster 2008 Saturn storm system in detail using data gathered by NASA's Cassini spacecraft, which studied the ringed planet up close from 2004 through 2017.

Mike Wall | Space.com

Set in London around 2050, 'Mitigation of Shock' is a pragmatic experiment practicing hope for a future disrupted by climate change.

Full documentation of the project + accompanying film.

Superflux

Inferi is a font family drew with a monk’s pen. Possessed by the evil beings whom dwell within, it is a tool made to speak the words which will end the world.

Two styles, Roman & Italic, 26 fonts available.

Blaze Type Foundry

Musician Zac Bentz outlines his process, sharing outtakes and the final sound for Warren Ellis' new animated television production ident.

The Intercept launches “A Message From the Future With Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” a seven-minute film narrated by the congresswoman and illustrated by Molly Crabapple.

Naomi Klein | The Intercept

"We are introducing a brand-new, lifelike material concept powered by its very own artificial metabolism. We are not making something that’s alive, but we are creating materials that are much more lifelike than have ever been seen before."

Tristan Greene | TNW

The designer behind Acronym—the cutting-edge fashion coveted by legions of fans like John Mayer and sci-fi wizards like William Gibson—is making clothes for the end of the world.

Chris Gayomali and Nikita Teryoshin | GQ

“The fact that an apparently stable, cold-based glacier suddenly went from moving 20 meters per year to 20 meters per day was extremely unusual, perhaps unprecedented,” said Willis. “The numbers here are simply nuts. Before this happened, as far as I knew, cold-based glaciers simply didn’t do that...couldn’t do that.”

NASA Earth Observatory

From prehistoric cave paintings to buried nuclear waste, underground spaces record how humans have lived. To explore Underland means voyaging into the deep past – and raises urgent questions about our planet’s future.

Robert Macfarlane | The Guardian

A four-part series authored by journalist and artist James Bridle examining how technology is changing visual culture.

BBC

The Astrobee project is preparing to launch a pair of free-flying cube robots that will operate inside the International Space Station (ISS) alongside astronauts. Astrobee’s primary objective is to provide a zero-g research facility for guest scientists. The Astrobees will replace the SPHERES robots that have been on the ISS since 2006.

Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum

The Russian Advanced Research Foundation is developing a cyclocopter drone, which flies using an “egg-beater wing” propulsion system.

David Hambling | Popular Mechanics

"After Scarcity is a sci-fi essay film that tracks Soviet cyberneticians (1950s – 1980s) in their attempt to build a fully-automated planned economy. If history at its best is a blueprint for science-fiction, revisiting contingent histories of economic technology might enable an access to the future." —Bahar Noorizdah, Artist

via DIS

Stratolaunch Systems Corporation successfully completed the first flight of the world’s largest all-composite aircraft. The aircraft is a mobile launch platform that will enable airline-style access to space that is convenient, affordable and routine. The reinforced center wing can support multiple launch vehicles, weighing up to a total of 500,000 pounds.

Press Release | Stratolaunch

A Russian company called StartRocket says it’s going to launch a cluster of cubesats into space that will act as an “orbital billboard,” projecting enormous advertisements into the night sky like artificial constellations.

Jon Christian | Futurism

As they see it, global warming stands to make corporate security as high-stakes in the 21st century as it was in the 19th.

Noah Gallagher Shannon | The New York Times

Smart spacesuits and solar surfing may sound like the stuff of science fiction, but they are just two of the technology concepts NASA has selected for further research as part of the NASA Innovative Advanced Concepts (NIAC) program. The program will fund 18 studies to determine the feasibility of early-stage technologies that could go on to change what’s possible in space.

Press Release | NASA

Two landed almost simultaneously back on Cape Canaveral (you can watch the video here). The third central booster, which had gone higher into orbit, landed on a ship platform in the Atlantic Ocean.

The Download | MIT Technology Review

A study found eight modified monkeys did better on a memory test, and their brains also took longer to develop—as those of human children do.

Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review

An international collaboration presents paradigm-shifting observations of the gargantuan black hole at the heart of distant galaxy Messier 87.

Event Horizon Telescope (EHT)

Three short films speculating surveillance futures and the effects of deeply embedded and connected surveillant systems on our everyday lives, produced as part of a international multiphase project on Big Data Surveillance.

Surveillance Studies Centre

As the Navy advances plans for a 10-ship "ghost fleet," leaders are assessing how much decision-making power to give large unmanned vessels that can operate without any humans aboard.

Gina Harkins | Military.com

The DARPA Subterranean Challenge will task teams of robots with autonomous exploration deep beneath the surface of the Earth.

Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum

The era of hypersonic, long distance weapons is almost upon us.

The Economist

Last week, NASA awarded the New York-based design studio SEArch+ and robotics company Apis Cor top prize in phase three of the 3D-Printed Habitat Challenge for their conceptual tower.

Dianna Budds | Curbed

Is it possible to take down the internet by physically attacking its infrastructure?

Tim Maughan | Motherboard

The plan, dubbed Project Kuiper, will send satellites up into orbit at three different altitudes. There will be 784 satellites at 367 miles (591 kilometers), 1,296 satellites at 379 miles, and 1,156 satellites at 391 miles, according to a filing with the ITU, which oversees global telecom satellite operations. Combined, these satellites will provide internet access to more than 95% of the global population, according to Amazon.

The Download | MIT Technology Review

Scientists have measured how many adult corals survived along the length of the world’s largest reef system and how many new corals they produced in 2018 in the aftermath of severe heat stress and coral mortality. The results, published in Nature, show not only a dramatic reduction in new coral recruitment compared with historic levels, but also a change in the types of coral species produced.

Lisa Cox | The Guardian

South Korea will become the first country to commercially launch fifth-generation (5G) services on Friday as it rolls out the latest wireless technology with Samsung Electronics’ new 5G-enabled smartphone Galaxy S10. The technology can offer 20-times faster data speeds than 4G long-term evolution (LTE) networks.

Ju-min Park | Reuters

NASA identified 400 pieces of orbital debris from the test, including about 60 trackable pieces at least 10 centimeters in size. Two dozen pieces were identified above the highest point of the International Space Station’s orbit.

Kai Schultz | The New York Times

In the summer of 1975, NASA brought together a team of physicists, engineers, and space scientists—along with architects, urban planners, and artists—to design large-scale space habitats for millions of people.

Space Settlements examines these plans for life in space as serious architectural and spatial proposals.

Canada is, on average, experiencing warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world, with Northern Canada heating up at almost three times the global average, according to a new government report.

CBC News

In ‘Donna Haraway: Story Telling for Earthly Survival’, the feminist theorist discusses ‘living well and giving heart’

Hestia Peppe | Frieze

Just over a decade after it first opened, the world's "doomsday vault" of seeds is imperiled by climate change as the polar region where it's located warms faster than any other area on the planet.

Eoin Higgins | Common Dreams

“We can trace our origins back to that event,” DePalma said. “To actually be there at this site, to see it, to be connected to that day, is a special thing. This is the last day of the Cretaceous. When you go one layer up—the very next day—that’s the Paleocene, that’s the age of mammals, that’s our age.”

Douglas Preston | The New Yorker

Handle is a mobile manipulation robot designed for logistics. Handle autonomously performs mixed SKU pallet building and depalletizing after initialization and localizing against the pallets.

via Boston Dynamics YouTube

GITAI announced a joint research agreement with JAXA (the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency) to see what it takes for robots to be useful in orbit, with the goal of substantially reducing the amount of money spent sending food and air up to humans on the International Space Station.

Evan Ackerman | IEEE Spectrum

Never before in recorded history has a single disease burned down so much of the tree of life. New estimates show that the doomsday fungus called Bd has caused the decline of over 500 species and the extinction of at least 90.

Ed Yong | The Atlantic

“I felt like as soon as you’ve given it a name, it’s dead.” A longform interview with one of the most divisive figures in graphic design.

Meg Miller | AIGA Eye on Design

Loosely connected disc-shaped “particles” can push and pull one another, moving en masse to transport objects.

Rob Matheson | MIT News Office

The recently revived blog of designer Javier Garcia, described by him as follows:

"No Barcode is a blog about the modern past, it’s a collection of found illustration and design that I want to share so it doesn’t just exist in a drawer."

Marvin Visions is a modern and consistent reinterpretation of Marvin, a typeface originally designed by Michael Chave in 1969 and published by Face Photosetting.

It has been revived and expanded by Mathieu Triay for the identity of Visions, a new science fiction magazine.

A digitized collection of the press kits that were prepared by public relations staff at the major contractors for NASA's Apollo 11 mission.

This Pi Day (Thursday, March 14), scientists, astronauts, artists, engineers and designers gathered to discuss our future in space as we near the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 lunar landing. The event, called "Beyond the Cradle 2019: Envisioning a New Space Age," hosted speakers ranging from former NASA astronaut Leland Melvin to Marc Okrand, a linguist who invented the Klingon language, and even glass artist John Simpson.

Chelsea Gohd | Space.com

A new survey on Europeans’ attitudes towards technology found that a quarter of people would prefer it if policy decisions were made by artificial intelligence instead of politicians.

Jackie Bischof | Quartz

The SETI Institute and Astrobotic Technology, Inc. are announcing the successful mapping in 3D of the interior of an ice-rich lava tube in Iceland using a LiDAR-equipped drone.

“We went to Iceland to study a lava tube with massive amounts of ice inside it to understand better both the potential hazards and opportunities presented by the many lava caves we hope to explore on the Moon and Mars. One promising way to explore them is with drones.”

Press Release | SETI Institute

The air is getting more dangerous to breathe all over the world — and a suite of companies are hoping to capitalize with a new fashion item.

Rose Eveleth | Vox

The "Aurora" supercomputer would be the first US computer to reach "exascale" performance, where a computer can do more than a quintillion calculations per second. Officials from the Department of Energy claim the $500 million machine will be roughly seven times faster than the current most powerful system.

via The Download | MIT Technology Review

"People think that data is in the
 cloud, but it’s not. It’s in the ocean."

Adam Satariano | The New York Times

Created by a group of linguists, technologists, and sound designers, Q hopes to “end gender bias” and encourage “more inclusivity in voice technology.”

Cara Curtis | TNW

"Using what he called a 'halo drive' — named for the ring of light it would create around a black hole — Kipping found that even spaceships with the mass of Jupiter could achieve relativistic speeds. 'A civilization could exploit black holes as galactic waypoints,' he wrote in a study accepted by the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and detailed online Feb. 28 in the arXiv preprint server."

Charles Q. Choi | Space.com

A collection of science fiction stories, art, and essays exploring human futures powered by solar energy, with an upbeat, solarpunk twist.

From the Center for Science and the Imagination, at Arizona State University

"For better or worse, this notion of dolphins as a prototypical extraterrestrial intelligence would shape the trajectory of interstellar communication for the next half century."

Daniel Oberhaus | Super Cluster

Russia built an underwater nuclear torpedo with a massive warhead designed to cause tsunamis and devastate entire continents. Russia said it will arm one of its most mysterious subs with up to six of these devices by 2020. The sub has also been linked to clandestine efforts to destroy vital undersea cables.

Alex Lockie | Business Insider

JAXA and Toyota have reached agreement to further cooperate on and accelerate their ongoing joint study of a manned, pressurized rover that employs fuel cell electric vehicle technologies, for human exploration activities on the lunar surface. The pressurized rover would accommodate two people, and have a total lunar-surface cruising range of more than 10,000 km.

via Toyota

Physicists have long suspected that quantum mechanics allows two observers to experience different, conflicting realities. Now they’ve performed the first experiment that proves it.

via The Download | MIT Technology Review

This latest cartoon by Tom Gauld, for New Scientist, is pretty great.

Astronomers claim in a new paper that star motions should make it easy for civilizations to spread across the galaxy, but still we might find ourselves alone.

Rebecca Boye | Quanta

"After wilfully ignoring the intelligences of others for so long, the centrality of human intelligence is on the point of being knocked violently aside by our own inventions. A new Copernican trauma looms, wherein we find ourselves standing upon a ruined planet, not smart enough to save ourselves, and no longer by any stretch of the imagination the smartest ones around."

James Bridle | Life Rewired

In his book “The Uninhabitable Earth”, David Wallace-Wells depicts a catastrophic future far worse than we ever imagined... and far sooner than we thought. It is undoubtedly a brutal truth to face, as you will hear in this episode, but if there’s any hope to avert the worst case scenarios, we have to start now.

Chris Hayes, with David Wallace-Wells | Why Is This Happening

Covering an area of 53,330 square meters, the base can accommodate 60 people in its capsules and hundreds in the base's tents. Construction started in June 2018 at a cost of about 150 million yuan ($22.3 million).

Liu Caiyu | Global Times

The new space vehicle, carrying only cargo and a human dummy, launched Saturday from NASA's Kennedy Space Center in Florida. On Sunday, the ISS crew watched as Crew Dragon became the first American commercial space vehicle designed to carry humans to dock at the station, according to NASA.

Francesca Paris | NPR

Help launch a bold new book about the end of predatory delay and the beginning of rapid climate action.

Kickstarter Campaign by Planetary Futurist Alex Steffen

‘Trigger Warning’ is a fast paced journey through a city of memes.

An urban hinterland of embodied ideas and warring ideologies. Switching between various first-person perspectives, the film embodies the current culture clashes bubbling away beneath the surface of the city.

via Superflux Vimeo

Their goal is to create a drone submersible so small and so light that they'll one day be able to shoot it into space to explore other oceans. Orpheus is the first step in that direction.

Hilary Brueck | Business Insider

A team led by the University of Central Florida (UCF) has unveiled a spacecraft that will use water to explore asteroids. Instead of ending the mission when it runs out of propellant, the craft will pull water from the celestial body it’s visiting. The technology could give a new lease of life to asteroid mining.

Erin Winick | MIT Technology Review

MIT'S new mini cheetah robot is the first four-legged robot to do a backflip. At only 20 pounds the limber quadruped can bend and swing its legs wide, enabling it to walk either right side up or upside down. The robot can also trot over uneven terrain about twice as fast as an average person's walking speed.

via MIT YouTube

The tests, published in Cell, found the infrared effect lasted in the mice for 10 weeks, causing no long-term damage (though some had cloudy corneas for up to two weeks.)

via The Download | MIT Technology Review

Tucked into the recent spending bill that was passed by Congress is a line item for $100 million for NASA to develop nuclear thermal rocket engines, according to a recent article in Space News.

Mark R. Whittington | The Hill

In the Mariana Trench, the lowest point in any ocean, every tiny animal tested had plastic pollution hiding in its gut.

Ed Yong | The Atlantic

A state-of-the-art supercomputer simulation indicates that a feedback loop between global warming and cloud loss can push Earth’s climate past a disastrous tipping point in as little as a century.

Natalie Wolchover | Quanta Magazine

A recent discovery based on observations by the ESA/NASA Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, SOHO, shows that the gaseous layer that wraps around Earth reaches up to 630 000 km away, or 50 times the diameter of our planet.

“The Moon flies through Earth’s atmosphere,” says Igor Baliukin of Russia’s Space Research Institute, lead author of the paper presenting the results.

ESA | Space Science

New research suggests that a controversial gene-editing experiment to make children resistant to HIV may also have enhanced their ability to learn and form memories.

Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review

Amazon, Google, and Microsoft have all struck lucrative arrangements—collectively worth billions of dollars—to provide automation, cloud, and AI services to some of the world’s biggest oil companies, and they are actively pursuing more.

Brian Merchant | Gizmodo

After Opportunity, now what? An unpowered inflatable craft using thermal updrafts to stay aloft could cost-effectively map less-documented parts of the planet’s surface to help plan lander missions.

via MIT Technology Review

"Still the best Teaser for a film ever. No contest."

via @Timobros

With next-generation telescopes, tiny space probes, and more, scientists aim to search for life beyond our solar system—and make contact.

Writing by Jamie Shreeve, Photographs by Spencer Lowell, Art by Dana Berry | National Geographic

"A few years ago, when it suddenly occurred to us that the internet was a place we could never leave, I began to keep a diary of what it felt like to be there in the days of its snowy white disintegration, which felt also like the disintegration of my own mind." —Patricia Lockwood

via London Review of Books

Imaginary architectures drawn by Stefan Davidovici, Architect, Milan.

More than 40% of insect species are declining and a third are endangered, the analysis found. The rate of extinction is eight times faster than that of mammals, birds and reptiles.

Damian Carrington | The Guardian

Researchers believe they have identified the prime driver for a startling rise in the number of people who think the Earth is flat: Google’s video-sharing site, YouTube.

Ian Sample | The Guardian

The University of South Florida held its inaugural Brain-Drone Race, in which participants competed using drones controlled by their mental electrical signals.

via Center for the Study of the Drone

They believe the coming leaps in science and technology will help us realize the Mormon promise of achieving perfect, immortal bodies and becoming Gods.

Erin Clare Brown | Medium

A podcast from Changeist created to dive into trends, dynamics and emerging scenarios that we think are interesting, underplayed, and under-examined in contemporary discussions about futures.

"I’ve been testing out various publishing systems and formats for the last few months, to settle on what I want to do and how I want to act for, say, the next three to five years. I think this is it. So I’m signing and dating the first page of the notebook."

Warren Ellis | warrenellis.ltd

Font files contain a wealth of information about a typeface. Whether you’re a designer or a developer, learning more about how fonts work can open new doors in how you work and what you create.

Weston Thayer | westonthayer.com

Russian authorities and major internet providers are planning to disconnect the country from the internet as part of a planned experiment, Russian news agency RosBiznesKonsalting (RBK) reported last week.

Catalin Cimpanu | ZDNet

The Army’s Training and Doctrine Command, headquartered at Fort Eustis, envision future wars in a variety of ways. Now they’re asking for your help, and all you have to do is impress a few of their mad scientists.

Hugh Lessig | Daily Press

Some scientists are pushing for NASA to make looking for alien technology an official goal.

Lisa Grossman | Science News

The melting of this glacier could lead to as much as 10 feet of sea level rise over the next century or so. If we’re unlucky, much of that could happen the lifetimes of people alive today, flooding every coastal city on Earth and potentially grinding civilization to a halt.

Eric Holthaus | Grist

A directory of PDFs of Computers and Automation, the first computer magazine. This publication initiated the first Computer Art Contest in 1963 which features early pioneers in computer and plotter art.

via Duane King

Colonisation of the Americas at the end of the 15th Century killed so many people, it disturbed Earth's climate.

Jonathan Amos | BBC News

Your gateway to the future of space technology, delivered each Wednesday.

via MIT Technology Review

The European Space Agency plans to start mining for water and oxygen on the moon by 2025. The agency announced Monday it has signed a 1-year contract with European aerospace company ArianeGroup to explore mining regolith, also known as lunar soil or moon dust.

Lauren Kent | CNN

Efforts to grow human hearts in the lab are showing promise, but are hampered by the need for the organs to grow around a "scaffolding" to make sure they don't collapse during the process. Space tech company Techshot believes zero gravity could be the answer.

Emma Woollacott | BBC News

Through old stories of “Gerry” as many called him, and the social impact he made on the world, this documentary pays tribute to the unsung hero of today’s space race, while hoping to inspire all ages and walks of life to reignite our planet’s space venturing spirit.

Documents released by the Department of Defense reveal some of what its infamous Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program was working on.

Sarah Emerson | Motherboard

Video depicting an experimental modular spacecraft for long-distance space travel. Created under the supervision of Dr. Angelo Vermeulen, a former NASA collaborator and current researcher at TU Delft.

by Joris Putteneers

2nd run of pro-dubbed cassettes — a group of 50 were discovered in a secret compartment of a fuselage in a museum just outside of Vladivostok. Aging or preservation has turned the artwork a lovely shade of green. Magnetic tape has remained intact on all copies.

by The National Pool (U.S.S.R. ambient composers alliance create these sounds)

“We’re actually a lot closer than we should be; I can say that with confidence,” says Rob Jackson, an Earth scientist at Stanford and the chair of the Global Carbon Project, which leads the research tracking worldwide emissions levels.

Robinson Meyer | The Atlantic

A Japanese company is about to launch a satellite that's the first step toward creating the world's first artificial meteor shower. The satellite is hitching a ride on the Japanese space agency’s Epsilon Rocket, due to launch at 9.50am Japan time on Thursday.

via The Download | MIT Technology Review

Designed by Vitaly Kuzmin and released by Paratype in 2018, PT Root UI is a modern uniwidth sans serif whose individual character widths are constant across all weights. It consists of four styles of normal proportions, from Light to Bold, intended for screen reading, interfaces, websites, as well as wayfinding systems.

Long ago, a broadcast network was established across the galaxy. Each of the 78 stations played a unique identification signal across the network once a day as a sort of “hello.” As the universe inevitably expanded, these stations fell into disrepair. Many maintained their integrity for quite a while, while others quickly became corrupted and haunted. A small number, left to their own devices, came alive only to find something missing, never knowing what had been lost…

by Zac Bentz (ASCAP), Xero Music

A satirical anthology set in the not-too-distant future metropolis of Weird. In this dystopian setting, the middle class has completely vanished dividing Weird City into two sections: Above the Line (The Haves), and Below the Line (The Have Nots). Presiding over the denizens of the city is the strange and mysterious Dr. Negari, who weaves all of the stories together.

In a paper just published in Nature Machine Intelligence, CSIRO's Active Integrated Matter Future Science Platform (AIM FSP) says robots could soon be taking their engineering cues from evolution, creating truly startling and effective designs.

via Tech Xplore

Visual artist Kordae Henry's seismic ritual performance draws on the likes of Sun Ra and Khalil Joseph to imagine an Afrofuturist utopia.

via Nowness

Stuff in Space is a realtime 3D map of objects in Earth orbit, visualized using WebGL. The website updates daily with orbit data from Space-Track.org and uses the excellent satellite.js Javascript library to calculate satellite positions.

Using scientific methods to improve the legibility of typefaces and pictograms.

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Design

"If we can find technosignatures — evidence of some technology that modifies its environment in ways that are detectable – then we will be permitted to infer the existence, at least at some time, of intelligent technologists."

via Phys.org

The washing away of claims to human mastery over the world, the terminal diagnoses of western civilization, and the human and nonhuman transgression of earthly tipping points signal our entrance into the Anthropocene’s back loop.

Stephanie Wakefield | Affidavit

A look back at The Day After and the role played by ordinary citizens in a small Midwestern city shows how the risk of nuclear war took center stage in 1983, and what it would take for that to happen again in 2018.

Dawn Stover | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

In a not-too-distant Christmas, Amazon's child-friendly surveillance elves will motivate your kid to be nice not naughty with the promise of nonstop streaming content and elfcoins.

Tim Maughan | Terraform

There is no Planet B. We have to keep this planet healthy, because it's our one and only home, our extended body. Margaret Thatcher infamously said that "there is no alternative" to corporate capitalism. But there is absolutely no alternative to maintaining life on Earth.

Kim Stanley Robinson | Sierra

Throughout history, random numbers have been used in gambling, divination, and democracy. They are also essential to modern computation, used in everything from cryptography to scientific research. However, true random numbers cannot be calculated by machines alone. Rather, they must be sampled from the world itself.

Robotic installation art by James Bridle.

New technologies are making war even more horrific.

Darran Anderson | The Atlantic

Let’s put aside these murky plans to orbit the moon in a can for no good reason. Let’s build a base on the moon where not only Americans can take small steps in the peaceful pursuit of knowledge, but also where the world can take giant leaps toward opening of a new frontier.

Robert Zubrin and Homer Hickam | The Washington Post

Collectively, the relics of the Anthropocene, also known as “technofossils”, will telegraph a story to the distant future.

Maddie Stone | Earther

Exhibiting and promoting the best of the Generative Art movement from across the globe.

Curated by James Pricer and Julia Morton

Austin, TX

In 2017, PwC published "Using science fiction to explore business innovation," a guide for corporations that wanted to work with sf writers to think about the future of their businesses.

Cory Doctorow | Boing Boing

Oakland based artist Charles Aweida is manipulating the physical through his robotic language to create fine art.

Kathryn Zerbe | Bob Cut

New research shows that the Permian mass extinction in the oceans was caused by global warming that left animals unable to breathe. As temperatures rose and the metabolism of marine animals sped up, the warmer waters could not hold enough oxygen for them to survive.

University of Washington | via Phys.org

An Amazon robot tore open a can of bear repellant at the company's New Jersey warehouse on Wednesday, hospitalizing 24 workers.

Saqib Shah | Engadget

Welcome to the bright side of Motherboard’s two-part poll about the future.

Becky Ferreira | Motherboard

Climate change, extremism, and artificial intelligence were among the top fears, and young people, technology, and equality were among the top hopes.

Becky Ferreira | Motherboard

Greenhouse gas emissions worldwide are growing at an accelerating pace this year, researchers said Wednesday, putting the world on track to face some of the most severe consequences of global warming sooner than expected.

Kendra Pierre-Louis | The New York Times

A photo series from the Mars analog in southern Oman staged by the Austrian Space Forum (OeWF). For the three-week mission this past February, a team of six analog astronauts and nine support crew traveled to the desert of the country's Dhofar region.

Photography by Florian Voggeneder

Kelsey Lannin | Wired

Dark Horse has made an official Mignolaverse timeline to be released next year for the inaugural Hellboy Day.

Chris Arrant | Newsarama

The Warren Ellis Forum wasn't just an online tool for comic creators to banter and barb; it was a breeding ground for the voices that would define the medium in the years to come. In this oral history from Joshua Rivera, a host of the forum's most activist participants discuss how one man and his website catalyzed a new era of sequential art.

Joshua Rivera | Image Comics

Toyota says 5G will pave the way for robots in real-world scenarios, like environmental disasters and health care.

via Mashable

Elowan is a cybernetic lifeform, a plant in direct dialogue with a machine. Using its own internal electrical signals, the plant is interfaced with a robotic extension that drives it toward light.

MIT Media Lab

Different visions of the future are springing up around the globe. Tom Cassauwers explores what these movements reveal about the places in which they appear – including China, Russia and Africa – and how imagining alternative realities can be subversive.

Tom Cassauwers | BBC Culture

"At the end of the day I’m really just trying to tell a story that is entertaining. It’s just that what is entertaining these days is some dark [stuff]. I was not expecting [“The Stone Sky”] to do as well as it did, partly because we are in the darkest timeline."

An interview with N.K. Jemisin.

Everdeen Mason | The Washington Post

The world’s most powerful particle accelerator has gone quiet. Particles took their last spin around the Large Hadron Collider on December 3 before scientists shut the machine down for two years of upgrades.

Emily Conover | Science News

NASA's OSIRIS-REx spacecraft completed its 1.2 billion-mile journey to arrive at the asteroid Bennu Monday. The spacecraft executed a maneuver that transitioned it from flying toward Bennu to operating around the asteroid.

NASA | via Science Daily

Fuel is heavy. And when you launch a satellite into space, the amount of fuel you give it determines how long it can stay operational. That is, unless you can refuel at a space gas station.

via The Download | MIT Technology Review

NASA announced Thursday that it has partnered with nine companies to enable the delivery of small scientific payloads to the lunar surface.

Eric Berger | Ars Technica

HBO's 'The Truth About Killer Robots' examines the legal, economic, psychological, and moral implications of our inevitable, AI-run dystopia.

An interview with filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin.

Seth Ferranti | Vice

Microsoft has won a $480 million deal to supply more than 100,000 augmented-reality HoloLens headsets to the US Army, Bloomberg reports.

via The Download | MIT Technology Review

Global efforts to tackle climate change are way off track says the UN, as it details the first rise in CO2 emissions in four years.

Matt McGrath | BBC News

A road trip through the geological ruins of our planet's worst mass extinction.

"…we have an analog in Earth’s history. And it’s fucking scary."

Peter Brannan | The Atlantic

There are myriad of ways that the world as we know it could come crashing down, from nuclear war to rampant climate change. But somehow, if we’re to be remembered, our information must outlast these cataclysms.

Robin George Andrews | Earther

NASA's InSight has sent signals to Earth indicating that its solar panels are open and collecting sunlight on the Martian surface.

JPL | InSight Mission News

Volume II: Impacts, Risks, and Adaptation in the United States

The National Climate Assessment (NCA) assesses the science of climate change and variability and its impacts across the United States, now and throughout this century.

After Syrian insurgent groups attacked Russian forces in Syria, the Defense Ministry began laying plans for wide-scale response.

Patrick Tucker | Defense One

A daring effort is under way to create the first children whose DNA has been tailored using gene editing.

Antonio Regalado | MIT Technology Review

China is planning to build a deep sea base for unmanned submarine science and defence operations in the South China Sea, a centre that might become the first artificial intelligence colony on Earth.

Stephen Chen | South China Morning Post

London-based designer Yesenia Thibault-Picazo has created three household objects for the anthropocene era, using materials she believes will be used by craftsmen hundreds of years in the future.

Gunseli Yalcinkaya | De Zeen

The turbineless design uses electroaerodynamic propulsion to fly and could herald the arrival of quieter, lower-emission aircraft.

Erin Winick | MIT Technology Review

In the wake of the deadly anti-Semitic attack at the Tree of Life synagogue in Pittsburgh, FRONTLINE and ProPublica present a new investigation into white supremacist groups in America – in particular, a neo-Nazi group, Atomwaffen Division, that has actively recruited inside the U.S. military.

The most devastating fire in California history began in the Sierra foothills in the morning hours of Nov. 8, prompting a hectic evacuation that has left at least 52,000 people in hotels, relatives’ homes, parking lots and makeshift shelters…

Frances Stead Sellers, Scott Wilson and Tim Craig | The Washington Post

In our first-ever entirely nonfiction issue of McSweeney’s, The End of Trust (McSweeney’s Issue 54) features more than thirty writers and artists investigating surveillance in the digital age.

Available from The McSweeney’s Store

‘Mini brains’ grown in a dish have spontaneously produced human-like brain waves for the first time — and the electrical patterns look similar to those seen in premature babies. The advancement could help scientists to study early brain development.

Sara Reardon | Nature

We’ve taken giant leaps and left our mark in the heavens. Now we’re building the next chapter, returning to the Moon to stay, and preparing to go beyond. We are NASA – and after 60 years, we’re just getting started.

NASA | via YouTube

RoboDoc is a brand new feature length documentary from the makers of @uk_leviathan and @frightnightdoc Directed by @Griff_est88

via Twitter @RoboCop_Doc

"The delta is a good place for evidence of life to be deposited and then preserved for the billions of years that have elapsed since this lake was present." —Ken Farley, Mars 2020 project scientist at NASA's JPL

Kerry Sheridan | Phys.org

Organisers said thousands gathered in central London to demand the government take greater action on climate change.

BBC News

"Since people have been asking I thought I'd recap my #dystopia talk at @theuxcrunch from Thursday. The examples used are not what if scenarios. These all happened. #triggerwarning's apply. If you can make it thru to the end I have suggestions for how we can claw back some hope."

Daniel Harvey | via Twitter

Steve Braunias resumes his occasional series about preparing for Doomsday with a report on a strange trip to Sydney to interview a New Zealander who claims to be selling million-dollar bunkers and shelters.

Steve Braunias | NZ Herald

…he went from being one of America’s most prescient futurists to one of its ugliest reactionaries.

Scott Bradfield | Los AngelesTimes

…our problem is not confined to post-industrial-era CO₂ emissions (global warming, in any case, probably began with forest clearance for early agriculture), but insists that the Holocene was a freakish gift to humanity that we have exploited and taken for granted. We are now assisting at its funeral.

Peter Forbes | Aeon

With wildfires, heat waves, and rising sea levels, large tracts of the earth are at risk of becoming uninhabitable. But the fossil-fuel industry continues its assault on the facts.

Bill McKibben | The New Yorker

The wildfires that have laid waste to vast parts of California are presenting residents with a new danger: air so thick with smoke it ranks among the dirtiest in the world.

Julie Turkewitz and Matt Richtel | The New York Times

Ranking of countries’ goals shows even EU on course for more than double safe level of warming.

Jonathan Watts | The Guardian

The US is racing to devise the next generation of weapons. Will China beat them to it?

Katrina Manson | Financial Times

Feast your peepers on these artistic interpretations of a colonized cosmos.

Evan Nicole Brown | Atlas Obscura

We're just five years away from harnessing almost unlimited power from "miniature suns", some start-ups say: nuclear fusion reactors that could provide abundant, cheap and clean energy.

Emma Woollacott | BBC News

Richard Browning built the world's fastest personal jet suit. WIRED spoke with him to find out about the design process and engineering of a radical new form of transportation.

Via Wired | The Scene

On Monday, Zemeckis talked about the two projects: Bios, the upcoming feature film; and Project Blue Book, a television series that premieres in January on History.

Geoff Boucher | Deadline Hollywood

Using an AI design process, engineers at software company Autodesk and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory came up with a new interplanetary lander concept that could explore distant moons like Europa and Enceladus.

Loren Grush | The Verge

This website is a solar-powered, self-hosted version of Low-tech Magazine. It has been designed to radically reduce the energy use associated with accessing our content.

The page is at the whims of the weather—a sunny day allows the website to run at full capacity; rainy days can drain the battery to the point where the page won’t load at all.

Liz Stinson | AIGA Eye on Design

The Indian Space Research Organisation (Isro) on Wednesday successfully placed another communication satellite in orbit, while also achieving a crucial success of GSLV-MkIII rocket which is slated to launch two big missions—Chandrayaan-2 and the human space mission—in the next four years.

Chethan Kumar, U Tejonmayam | The Times of India

“These gravity images are revolutionizing our ability to study the least understood continent on Earth—Antarctica.”

Becky Ferreira | Motherboard

Neuromorphic computing just got a big boost with a million-core supercomputer that took over a decade to build.

Daniel Oberhaus | Motherboard

The Pentagon’s missile defense policy, if it is released, and February budget request could indicate whether the administration intends to advance an effort to put interceptors in space beyond the study stage.

Paul Sonne | The Washington Post

It's an obscure Cold War-era technological relic that's still in use—and becoming increasingly relevant.

Tyler Rogoway | The Drive

A monthlong visit to observatories in Chile, Hawaii and Los Angeles revealed spellbinding visions of the heavens.

The second of a two-part series on science tourism.

Peter Kujawinski | The New York Times

New from Field Notes: The 41st design in our series of Quarterly Editions has a sleek, mysterious look, fitting for an edition all about secret codes and ciphers.

"There is the idea that we should despair and evacuate this planet and go somewhere else. That's a dangerous delusion."

An interview with esteemed British astronomer Sir Martin Rees.

Dennis Chow | Mach

…at every point in the panorama of disaster underway there is a semblance of war — the scenes, the scents, the sounds, the emotions, and even the language of firefighting, of “aerial assaults” and “boots on the ground.”

Tim Arango | The New York Times

My son was born last week, right before two historic wildfires hit California—his new home state—and burned whole cities to the ground.

Brain Merchant | Motherboard

In this issue, leading experts explore how quickly changing technologies that could pose existential threats to humanity increasingly intersect with one another and, as they do, pose new types of global dangers.

Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | November 2018 Special Issue

Over 15 years, Spilhaus worked with three different artists to make scientific knowledge fun and accessible. Each Sunday comic strip illustrated a recent advance in science or engineering, discussing its implications for how people might live, work or play in the future.

Roger Turner | Picturing Meteorology: Images of Science and History

It had cars on rails, 100% recycling and a nuclear power station in the centre, all covered by a massive dome. So what went wrong with Athelstan Spilhaus’s vision of the future?

Steve Rose | The Guardian

The company’s Electron rocket launched at 4:50 pm local time from the company’s New Zealand launch site on Nov 11, carrying six satellites.

Andy Pasztor | The Wall Street Journal

Unbeknown to the colliding mountains and swinging apes of the Miocene, the 420,000 square miles that make up the Libyan desert would soon be caramelized into shards of foggy green glass. This rare and precious material, known as Libyan Desert Glass, was found in King Tutankhamun’s burial tomb millions of years later.

Evan Nicole Brown | Atlas Obscura

A trio of rapidly expanding wildfires are burning in California, marking the latest in a string of harrowing climate-related disasters in America.

Eric Holthaus | Grist

We dusted off some of our favorite vintage promo clips Dr. Sagan recorded for The Planetary Society to inspire a generation of members to join us in advancing space science and exploration.

The Planetary Society | via Twitter

Building a sustainable human presence on other worlds should be open to all. Comparing the journey to violent conquest doesn't help.

An interview with astronomer Lucianne Walkowicz.

Nadia Drake | National Geographic

"ONE WEIRD TRICK is out today! This album is us trying to make sense of the end of the world. Not a polemic, but a process. What it feels like to be haunted by an increasingly uncertain tomorrow, chasing future echoes down the hall. These are the songs you dance to as the clock ticks closer to midnight." —Ghost Cop

After years of feeding the mystery machine, Richard D. James is offering us more pieces of himself.

Andrew Nosnitsky | Crack Magazine

The state-run press agency in China, Xinhua, will now deliver news using "AI anchors" made of digital composites that use synthesized voices to "read" the news.

Via Mashable

This research project examines seven trends shaping the context for the practice of design.

Via AIGA

What to expect when you’re expecting aliens.

Loren Grush | The Verge

Existing laser technology could be fashioned into Earth’s “porch light” to attract alien astronomers, study finds.

Jennifer Chu | MIT News Office

The SMX-31 could be the first of a new generation of submarines.

Via Popular Mechanics

Earth’s rural areas are being transformed by climate change and technology.

By Darran Anderson, for The Atlantic

NYC’s Ghost Cop have just released their latest single “ACCELERATE,” backed with a futuristically stunning video. The track is the first preview of the duo’s long-awaited debut album, ONE WEIRD TRICK, due out November 9th.

Via Post-Punk.com

The Designers Republic is the design group that changed design. But there’s never been a book that tells its story. Until now.

A Kickstarter campaign by Unit Editions.

Netflix has ordered a 10-episode third season of Castlevania, its dark medieval fantasy based on the classic Konami video game.

Via Deadline Hollywood

The continued growth of power-hungry Bitcoin could lock in catastrophic climate change, according to a new study.

By Eric Holthaus, for Grist

The concept of “ritual music” continues to the present day, with many artists—particularly in the realms of dark ambient and drone—seeking new ways to combine their haunting sonics with spiritual energy.

Via Bandcamp Daily

The star's discoverer, 19th century English astronomer John Russell Hind, reported that it appeared in a telescope "... like a drop of blood on a black field."

NASA APOD 2018 October 31

Instant Archetypes is a toolkit to explore the never-ending narratives and multiple perspectives of our new normal: the world of tech-saturated late capitalism.

A Kickstarter campaign conceived by Jon Ardern, Anab Jain and Paul Graham Raven; designed and produced by Superflux; illustrated by Amelie Barnathan

The telescope has now gone silent, its fuel tank empty.

Via Phys.org

Through robots, animation, illusions, and pools, Geoffroy De Crécy captures the simplicity and beauty of empty places, isolation, and automation like no one else.

Via Gestalten Journal

Retired professor Glenn A. Albrecht has coined new words to describe the full range of positive and negative emotions we have toward the environment.

By Deidre Olson, for Motherboard

World happiness levels are at their lowest level in over a decade, with the number of people who say they feel stressed and worried rising, according to a survey published in September.

By Umberto Bacchi, for World Economic Forum

On Sunday, far-right evangelical Jair Bolsonaro was elected president of Brazil. The era of being surprised at this kind of politics is over. Now we have to live with what we've done.

By Ryan Broderick, for BuzzFeed News

Researchers are ramping up plans for living on the Moon.

By Elizabeth Gibney, for Nature

As the Antarctic Peninsula heats up, the rules of life there are being ripped apart. Alarmed scientists aren’t sure what all the change means for the future.

By Craig Welch, for National Geographic

"Science fiction might be the genre best suited to Chinese society today; the breakneck pace of change becomes a constant, and to live in the present is to anticipate what is to come."

By Amanda DeMarco, for The Paris Review

James Gunn, the last surviving author of the genre’s Golden Age, believes it can help, anyway. A longtime resident of Lawrence, Kansas, Gunn started writing short stories in 1948…

By Mark Alpert, for Scientific American

Kickstarter campaign to publish the newly discovered, expanded version of the classic sci-fi story "Who Goes There?" (THE THING) by John W. Campbell, Jr.

The Australian National University has launched its new innovation institute, InSpace, which will bring together technology, science and law research to advance Australia's space industry.

Strata – Rock – Dust – Stars, which showcases ground-breaking moving image, new media and interactive artwork, is inspired by William Smith’s geological map of 1815, which was key in the development of Geology as a science and transformed the way in which we understand the world. Featuring artists: Isaac Julien, Agnes Meyer Brandis, Semiconductor, Phil Coy, Liz Orton, David Jacques, Ryoichi Kurokawa

China is planning to launch its own 'artificial moon' by 2020 to replace streetlamps and lower electricity costs in urban areas, state media reported Friday.

Reported by Phys.org

The Trump administration wants to shift to a capitalist free-for-all in orbit. But the readiness of commercial space outposts to take NASA’s place is far from certain.

By Kenneth Chang, for The New York Times

The IAAA is the world’s only guild of artists dedicated to creating images of space. We paint, draw, sculpt, blow glass, and move pixels to show galaxies, stars, planets, moons, anywhere that the imagination can go, but a camera cannot (yet!).

This article explores four California-based eco-utopias: The Earth Abides (George Stewart, 1949), Ecotopia (Ernest Callenbach, 1975), Pacific Edge (Kim Stanley Robinson, 1990), and Snow Crash (Neal Stephenson, 1992), in an attempt to revive eco-utopian visions and learn from them.

By Ronnie D. Lipschutz, for Elementa: Science of the Anthropocene

Like its biological model, the flic-flac spider, the BionicWheelBot can both walk and roll. Together with its discoverer, Professor Ingo Rechenberg, the Festo bionics team has used these unique movement patterns and turned them into a technical masterpiece for the Hannover Messe 2018.

By Festo HQ, via YouTube

Andrew McGranahan has cornered the growing market for witchy-sci-fi-collage art.

By Margaret Andersen, for AIGA Eye on Design

The "L5" is the world's first functional multi-bore single barrel rifle, and utilizes FDM's caseless ammunition.

FDM Promotional Video, via YouTube

Note: I think I first learned of caseless ammunition reading a William Gibson novel — Virtual Light maybe? — so this caught my attention for that reason.

They live thousands of feet below the Earth’s surface. They eat hydrogen and exhale methane. And they may shape our world more profoundly than we can imagine.

By Douglas Fox, for The Atlantic

Repeatedly reproduced and reimagined since the 80s, the tropes of cyberpunk must evolve or die.

By Paul Walker-Emig, for The Guardian

Where the social, political, and technological meet in the music.

By Florence Okoye, for How We Get to Next

From Afrofuturism to the New Weird, nine sci-fi subgenres for understanding what’s to come.

By Jay Owens, for How We Get to Next

OUT speaks with the singer-songwriter Kim Boekbinder about her newest video and how her queer identity, specifically being bisexual and gender nonconforming, influences her music.

By Zachary Zane, for Out

Humanity’s ongoing annihilation of wildlife is cutting down the tree of life, including the branch we are sitting on, according to a stark new analysis.

By Damian Carrington, for The Guardian

Hot on the heels of Atlas doing parkour, we now have Boston Dynamics' SpotMini dancing its way into our nightmares.

By Boston Dynamics, via YouTube

"I don’t want to go all Dark Mountain here, but if you haven’t noticed by now that we’re all in trouble, then I’m not waiting for you any more."

By Warren Ellis, via MORNING, COMPUTER

By Zora Mai Quỳnh, for Terraform

"In one of the most powerful stories I've ever read to be set to the backdrop of climate change, Zora Mai Quỳnh draws on her own experiences as a refugee fleeing her home country of Vietnam to bring our fast-warming future into sharp, crushing relief." —Brian Merchant, Editor of Terraform

"Sometimes, when I write scary essays, I encourage you not to read them. This one’s different. It’s going to be brutal, scary, jarring, and alarming. But if you want my thoughts on the future, then read away."

By Umair Haque, for Eudaimonia & Co.

Insects around the world are in a crisis, according to a small but growing number of long-term studies showing dramatic declines in invertebrate populations. A new report suggests that the problem is more widespread than scientists realized.

By Ben Guarino, for The Washington Post

:echōlot is an ambient audio-reactive light installation, in which imagery compliments the music, providing the viewer with graphic echo feedback.

Created by R▲

At Blue Origin, Amazon's space-obsessed founder is building rockets, and he hopes to someday blast humanity into an extraterrestrial future.

By Steven Levy, for Wired

Exoplanets imagined daily by designer Patricia Klein.

Photographer Edward Burtynsky is recording humanity's impact on the Earth, one epic-scale photo at a time.

By Nicola Davison, for Wired UK

In a bar in the small town of Peabody, Kan., in the middle of the night, astronaut Nick Hague’s family huddled around television screens. Family members breathlessly awaited the result of the rocket launch, the culmination of a childhood dream for Hague, a 43-year-old Hoxie native and U.S. Air Force colonel.

By Matt Riedl, for The Wichita Eagle

Human cognitive ability is being damaged not just by CO2 and lead, but the way social media feeds us information, making us shockingly ill-equipped to clean up the air we breathe.

By James Bridle, for The Guardian

The symbol represents extinction. The circle signifies the planet, while the hourglass inside serves as a warning that time is rapidly running out for many species.

Hot Spots: Radioactivity and the Landscape at UB Art Galleries in Buffalo examines the nuclear past and future of the United States.

By Allison Meier, for Hyperallergic

Urmila Mahadev spent eight years in graduate school solving one of the most basic questions in quantum computation: How do you know whether a quantum computer has done anything quantum at all?

By Erica Klarreich, for Quanta Magazine

An IPCC special report on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty.

A landmark United Nations report paints a far more dire picture of the immediate consequences of climate change than previously thought.

By Coral Davenport, for The New York Times

A study of form language in logo design.

A new web comic created by Warren Ellis and Colleen Doran.

FELICITY ROCKALL was the world’s greatest criminal investigator. She retired at the age of 35 after spending ten years working for international criminal courts. A young agent from the White House’s Intelligence Support Activity, AMY ASH, is reluctantly sent to get her. There’s been a murder, one apparently insoluble, and Rockall’s skills are required one more time.

The discovery of rock carvings believed to be tens of thousands of years old in India's western state of Maharashtra has greatly excited archaeologists who believe they hold clues to a previously unknown civilisation, BBC Marathi's Mayuresh Konnur reports.

Bruce Sterling lecture on the topics of science fiction, the future, and where architecture may be in 30 years.

Deep in the Arctic Circle, the USSR was drilling deeper into the Earth than anyone before. One artist has combined archaeology and invention to bring its spirit back in sound.

By Peter Kirn, for CDM

Newly found documents from the 1980s show that fossil fuel companies privately predicted the global damage that would be caused by their products.

By Benjamin Franta, for The Guardian

Mars P.D. will have to deal with new blood-spatter patterns, different body decay rates, and space-suit sabotage—and they won’t be able to fire guns indoors.

By Geofff Manaugh, for The Atlantic

Erratic? Don’t you know that Trump is the instrument of God? He may not be capable of having a sophisticated agenda or even coherent positions on particular issues, but evangelicals, ultra-zionists, the coal industry and military lobbyists certainly do and they are firmly implanted within the administration.

By Mike Davis, for Rebel

They’re no longer in use, having been decommissioned for decades, but they’re a nationwide network of relics of fear—a fear that seems never to have left.

By Kate Ravilious, for Atlas Obscura

1960 film sponsored by Western Electric (AT&T’s equipment manufacturing division), the builder of the USAF’s White Alice Communications System in Alaska. Land of White Alice introduces the people and geography of the new state as well as the Western Electric radio-relay system, which links far-flung military sites, alert stations, and missile-warning facilities.

By Knickerbocker Productions

Volume Zero has announced winners of the Marsception competition, a challenge to envision a habitat for the first colonizers of Mars. Participants were prompted to consider research conducted within the facility as well as architecture to define a future civilization on Mars.

By Hope Daley, for Archinect News

TED-Ed commissioned animation for their lesson about what it might look like if/when we colonize the moon.

By Allen Laseter, on Vimeo

The wealthy are plotting to leave us behind.

By Douglas Rushkoff, for Future Human

A comprehensive library of esoteric symbols, lovingly crafted for design enthusiasts. 750 glyphs for $10.

Designed by Avana Vana

"It was as if someone my size had caught fire and walked through me."

By Matthew Gault, for Motherboard

Isolated graphics, type and illustration. Mostly from government, NGO and private studies and reports.

Curated by Jake Luck, on Instagram

Canada Modern is a physical and digital archive of Canadian graphic design, with modernism central to its glowing heart.

In its ruggedness and lack of concern to look comfortable or easy, Brutalism can be seen as a reaction by a younger generation to the lightness, optimism, and frivolity of today's web design.

The Western concept of '"humanity" is limited, and I think it’s time to seriously question whether we have the right to exploit the environment, animals, tools, or robots simply because we’re human and they are not.

By Joi Ito, for Wired Ideas

"our future is in ruins"

One way to improve democracy is for more people to appreciate its complex technological underpinnings.

By Debbie Chachra, for The Atlantic