Science
Getting In Touch With Your Body
Going Beyond Numbers, Diets, and Standards
Mainstream US society is obsessed with thinness and perfection. In magazines, newspapers, and television, models are regularly photoshopped down to size …
Get With the Program
Coding: the new global language?
What’s in a name? Most schools in the United States only offer computer science courses as electives, if at all. This …
And How Does That Make You Feel?
On AI and Mental Health Care
The word “therapy” might evoke some archaic characters and images: the patient lying on a leather couch, the older male therapist …
The Lab
A Story of Compression
The glass wool flies towards the vacuum in the back of the fume hood in futility—a constant regular nuisance caused by …
How's My Driving?
I remember the feeling of driving a car for the first time. The freedom I felt, most likely ingrained in me …
Is it the Canvas or the Painter?
Poetry's Machine Age
This anatomy Of extraordinary names Where did it come from? The poem is not what you think. This haiku was crafted …
Ascent
Watching Scientific Interests Grow Over Time
Yellow petals surprise the curious amidst the sea of Kentucky Blue. My family doesn’t quite understand why I stare out of …
When The Foam Settles
Essentialism in Tech
On March 11, 2011, a 71-year-old fisherman named Morihisa Kanouya stood on a small hill in Ukedo, Japan. In the distance, …
The Perfect Bubble
The Polynomial Guide to the Universe
Everyday, I cut through the alleyway off Angell and Thayer street. There’s a dumpster, there. On a good day, whatever’s left …
Forgotten Worlds
Neglect and Fragility at the Ends of the Earth
Drifting Seaward Somewhere out in the middle of the Pacific Ocean is a giant floating garbage patch. But garbage continent might …
You've Got Learning
Education Turns to Technology
Every day at 8:45 AM, Village Green Virtual’s 210 students walk through the lobby and scan their IDs on the wall …
The Edible Complex
Paths to the Ultimate Mushroom
Under the brush, a golden-red cap glints. Trembling, I push back the undergrowth and gasp. I then gingerly pull out the …
Beyond Our Fingers
The Hidden Beauty of Recursive Computing
When I was four, I snuck into my mother’s bedroom and flicked the switch by her makeup desk. Big filaments blazed …
Barely Legal
The Volatile Chemistry of Synthetic Drugs
When the video starts, the woman is already on the ground. She is lying on her stomach next to the open …
Runt in Orbit
Pluto and Humanity Do the Long Distance Thing
The interplanetary space probe New Horizons arrived this July in the Pluto system, marking both a new milestone for astronomy and …
ASCII ME Another
How to Text Better
On October 6, 1960, the American Standards Association (ASA) inaugurated the mysterious “X3” committee; a group tasked with determining the standard …
ASCII Me Another
In Pursuit of Perfect Punctuation
On October 6, 1960, a committee from the American Standards Association (fittingly and mysteriously called the “X3” committee) drew up the …
Stuffed to the Gills
An amateur dissection of taxidermy
Prepare the form In Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, the protagonist pulls up to an empty motel and has an unsettling dinner with its …
EARTH LINKS
Technology, Agriculture, and the Computational Metaphor
We conceive of the Internet mostly through metaphors. Early imaginings of a globally distributed network of information likened the nascent web’s …
The Thirst Ahead
One day in late February, the taps that carry water to São Paolo’s 20 million residents suddenly went dry. The effects …
Memoir of a Young Hacker
When I was 13, I wrote a piece of malicious software and put it on my mother’s computer. It took the …
To Be Ourselves
“I founded 4chan eleven and a half years ago at the age of 15, and after more than a decade and …
Bacteria[s] R Us
Last week, a new study delivered confirmation of something that many of us had suspected for decades: the New York City …
The New Obvious Choice
Every June, 1500 interns arrive in Mountain View, California to begin their highly coveted summer internships at Google. They represent approximately …
Tastes Like Chicken
Sizing Up Alternative Meats
Although we live in a culture replete with red paint on fur coats, images of warehouses crammed with livestock, and non-stop …
Notes on Connection
Technology—and more relevantly, those who make/use it—very much wants to work within a language of disruption. Tech has always defined breaks …
Genetic Poetics
Christian Bök gets experimental
“The word is now a virus” —William S. Burroughs Something deeply radical is pulsating under poet Christian Bök’s seemingly normal exterior, …
Iron and Fields
A journey to the inside of the earth
The earth can seem impenetrable, unexplainable, whether you are flipping through the pages of an earth science textbook or staring up …
Cyborgs in the Club
Arca and the digital boundary
On November 1, Venezuelan electronic musician Arca released his debut album Xen, named for Arca’s alter ego, a genderless—though feminine—figure whom …
Bigger Than You Can Imagine
Paranoia and privacy law
Big Data. Admittedly, it’s a great phrase, encapsulating every bigger-better progress narrative in a tight trisyllabic punch. As a term, it …
Intimate Strangers
Growing up on Internet forums
This is the most famous post in the history of Internet forums. On July 14 2004, a user registered as “lonely” …
Accidental Greatness
How some of the world’s most famous discoveries started with mistakes
In 1879, chemist Constantin Fahlberg came home from a long day of experimenting with coal tar. Upon sitting down to eat, …
Meditations on Fusion
"Music is like a drug; whoever acquires the habit can no longer devote himself to important activities. We must eliminate music …
Towards a Greener Future
The environmental impact of cannabis cultivation
A pair of sultry eyes sunken into a frighteningly unblemished face appeared on the screen. Beneath a wisp of smoke ascending …
Pushing Back Silence
“Imagine a world where we never again hear the symphonic startup of a Windows 95 machine. And when the entire world …
A History of Violence
The Australian shark cull and the plight of apex predators “As long as Homo sapiens has been sapient... alpha predators have …
Ghosts in the Machine
The sounds of the digital archive
How can a body connect with the Internet? Think of how each sense wouldconceive of the Internet. It’s harder than you …