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~Space

What Two Satellites Practice Before the Astronauts Arrive

CAPSTONE 02 sends two spacecraft to lunar orbit in 2027 to learn a skill astronauts will need: finding each other across empty space and closing the gap. The station that orbit was built for is shelved. The navigation work outlived it, and infrastructure, given enough time, always becomes culture.

~Culture

Bill Oddie Needed a Place That Changed Every Morning

Bill Oddie died on July 25, aged 85. Kate Humble said the natural world let him quieten his mind. The research behind that runs thinner than the idea it supports, though his two careers sketch a specification for the kind of place a working mind needs, and for how easily it can be taken away.

~AI

When Thinking Aloud Becomes Testimony

Prosecutors now pull ChatGPT histories into open court, treating private conversations with machines as testimony. What photography's slow, century-long path to legal trust reveals about the newest witness in the room, and the price of a recordable mind.

~AI

We Built Twins to End the Blown Call. They Redefined Judgment

FIFA scanned every player at the 2026 World Cup into a body-accurate avatar that can settle an offside call in under a second. The technology works. The harder question is what happens to human judgment when a duplicate starts making the call, on the pitch and in the studio alike.

~Technology

Why Artists Are Running Their Own Data Centers

In Linz, a cultural association runs servers the way printmakers run presses. A new browser attack called FROST, which reads your activity through SSD timing, shows why that matters: when artists configure the stack themselves, privacy becomes a design question they can answer.

~Technology

Gardening Malware: When Code Becomes Canvas

When code travels without permission, artists have been asking what it could carry instead — and one strange new program answers with pixel vegetables.

~Technology

The Listening Body: Why Sound Design Is a Human Problem

We stopped listening because listening became punishing. The listening body, the idea that we hear with bone, skin, and posture, not just our ears, points toward a different way to build technology. One that knows when to be quiet.

~Technology

The Sun as Composer: How Solar Flares Became Music

Explore how the unpredictability of solar flare rates discovered by volunteers may offer new insights into musical composition, mirroring the patterns of natural fluctuations.

~Technology

Preservation Through Fire: Unveiling Ecosystems' Role in Digital Archiving

As wildfires reshape landscapes like Florida's Big Cypress National Preserve, CIFRA's digital art archives offer a lens on how destruction fosters new modes of creation.

~AI

AI Prescription Refills: The Ethical Dilemma of Autonomy in Medicine

Utah has launched a first-in-the-nation pilot allowing an AI system to renew existing prescriptions, often without requiring a physician to sign off, though safeguards include escalation pathways and human review. As of January 2026, Utah residents can use Doctronic to request renewals for about 190–200 eligible,

The Rise of Virtual Sanctuaries: Meta's Hyperscape for VR Socialization

The boundaries between physical and digital presence continue to blur. Meta's Hyperscape, initially launched as a photorealistic capture and viewing tool, has evolved into a platform for social interaction. The recent addition of multiplayer capabilities represents a significant expansion of its original solo-experience design, now enabling users

Echoes of the Past: AI Predicts the Unseen Harm of Data Rot

The last tyrannosaurs walked through lush Cretaceous forests, unaware that cosmic dice had already been thrown. Millions of years later, we're building artificial minds on foundations that may be quietly crumbling beneath us. The parallel isn't perfect—no asteroid threatens our data centers—but the pattern