A quarter of the American population is now engaged in “guard labor”—defending property, supervising work, or otherwise keeping their fellow Americans in line. Economically, most of this disciplinary apparatus is […]
James Lovelock at 100: the Gaia saga continues
Tim Radford reassesses the independent scientist’s groundbreaking body of writing. Novacene: The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence James Lovelock Allen Lane (2019) [He developed] a sustained and developing argument, in the face of […]
Should Evolution Treat Our Microbes as Part of Us?
Re-thinking the theory of Evolution How does evolution select the fittest “individuals” when they are ecosystems made up of hosts and their microbiomes? Biologists debate the need to revise theories. […]
Lake Lazarus: the strange rebirth of a Californian ecosystem
Amy Maxmen lauds a study of the bold project to rescue Owens Lake – Adaptation and Survival California’s Owens Lake, once one of the largest inland bodies […]
The Book No One Read
Why Stanislaw Lem’s futurism deserves attention. To Lem (and, to their credit, a sizeable number of modern thinkers), the Singularity is less an opportunity than a question mark, a multidimensional […]