MachineMachine /stream

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From 1961 to 1973, a loosely organized group of artists and scientists coalesced around the radical idea that the emerging technology of the computer could be used to make a…

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These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that…

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What aliens could learn from the stuff we’ve left in space Even in space, where none of us live, some of what we’ve left is space junk: stuff orbiting the…

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Friday's report by the Academy of Medical Sciences on the increasingly fuzzy boundaries between the human and the animal is the latest in a long series of policy reflections on…

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The increasingly sophisticated blending of different species to create chimaeras is pushing biology into a new ethical dimension. Last year, scientists used new stem-cell technologies to create a mouse with…

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Son of a barge man, Michel Serres joined the Ecole Navale in 1949 and the Ecole Normale supérieure in 1952 where he obtained the aggregation of philosophy in 1955. From…

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It’s human nature, I suppose, to want to survive, to resist succumbing to the same fate all living things do. It’s the reason we write books, create art, have children—we’re…

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Interview with Nick Bostrom Our long track record of survival–humans have been around for about 100,000 years–gives us some assurance that the natural risks have been rather small. If they…

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"If there has been no spiritual change of kind / Within our species since Cro-Magnon Man . . ." The poet Louis MacNeice was voicing a commonplace that was accepted…

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The debate over artistic research, particularly its appeal to scientificity, often rests on defining one’s terms. Thus, an examination of some of the keywords deployed might be instructive, especially when…

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Humanity's profound impact on this planet is hard to deny, but is it big enough to merit its own geological epoch? This is the question facing geoscientists gathered in London…

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Biology used to be about plants, animals and insects, but five great revolutions have changed the way that scientists think about life: the invention of the microscope, the systematic classification…

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The shift that has happened in 40 years which mainly has to do with climate change. Forty years ago, I could say in the Whole Earth Catalog, "we are as…

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In 2000, Roy Cullimore, a microbial ecologist and Charles Pellegrino, scientist and author of Ghosts of the Titanic discovered that the Titanic --which sank in the Atlantic Ocean 97 years…

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Science and art often seem to develop in separate silos, but many thinkers are inspired by both. Novelist Cormac McCarthy, filmmaker Werner Herzog and physicist Lawrence Krauss discuss science as…

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In science fiction, ghosts in machines always appear as malfunctions, glitches, interruptions in the normal flow of things. Something unexpected appears seemingly out of nothing and from nowhere. Through a…

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If you try to describe the living processes of the cell in a rather more living language than is typically found in the literature of molecular biology — if you…

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A remarkable feature of the commentary on today's economic troubles is that, despite constant reference to the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as to the many downturns since…

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Archaeologists and other scientists report in Friday’s issue of the journal Science that excavations show hunter-gatherers were living at the Buttermilk Creek site and making projectile points, blades, choppers and…

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The origin of animals was one of the most astonishing and important transformations in the history of life. From single-celled ancestors, they evolved into a riot of complexity and diversity.…

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Is studying the brain a good way to understand the mind? Does psychology stand to brain anatomy as physiology stands to body anatomy? In the case of the body, physiological…

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it must have been when i was a boy at school that the phonograph was invented. at any rate it was at that time a chief object of public wonder;…