“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