Taryn Riley, “Brood,” mixed media on paper, 14 x 11 inches.
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New research conducted on a NASA-discovered bacterium shows the microbe is capable of entering an extreme dormant state, essentially “playing dead” to survive in some of the cleanest environments on Earth.
The finding could potentially reshape how scientists think about microbial survival on spacecraft and the challenges of preventing contamination during missions to space. Preventing contamination matters because it helps keep space missions safe, while ensuring that any signs of life spotted elsewhere in the solar system can be trusted.
“It shows that some microbes can enter ultra-low metabolic states that let them survive extremely austere environments, including clean rooms that naturally select for the hardiest organisms,” said Nils Averesch, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the University of Florida’s Department of Microbiology and Cell Science and a member of the Astraeus Space Institute. “The fact that this bacterium can intentionally suspend its metabolism makes survival on spacecraft surfaces or during deep-space cruise more plausible than previously assumed.”
“I don’t think writers are sacred, but words are. They deserve respect. If you get the right ones in the right order, you can nudge the world a little or make a poem which children will speak for you when you’re dead.” — Tom Stoppard.
A spectre is haunting the best contemporary literary writing, the spectre of necromodernism…
Writing à propos of Louis Armand’s recent opus magnum, A Tomb in H-Section (2025), critic Ramiro Sanchiz called it “a necromodernist tour de force which animates every remain of (un)dead XXth century literature,” thus invoking the spectre of necromodernism, a modernism long-buried but still somehow living on, its undead corpse back again for yet another zombie standoff.
Necromodernism!
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OpenAI is seemingly allowing the company behind a teddy bear that engaged in wildly inappropriate conversations to use its AI models again.
In response to researchers at a safety group finding that the toymaker’s AI-powered teddy bear “Kumma” gave dangerous responses for children, OpenAI said in mid-November it had suspended FoloToy’s access to its large language models. The teddy bear was running the ChatGPT maker’s older GPT-4o as its default option when it gave some of its most egregious replies, which included in-depth explanations of sexual fetishes.
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When the combination of inside temperature, outside temperature, number of plays, distance travelled, the moon & the mood is right the car will eat the tape, as it should; it is foretold.
So true, and why I will not entertain this “tape cassette revival” bullshit. Been there done that lost too much.
The internet encourages a form of assemblage, where users collect images, memes, and bits of information under particular themes. In the Tumblr era, this practice was referred to as a user’s “aesthetic”; more recently, on TikTok, this indexing is marked by the suffix “-core” (as in cottagecore). This impulse finds its outlet on every social media platform, from Instagram’s “saved” tab to platforms dedicated to such collections, like Are.na or Pinterest. To see someone else’s curated hoard is a very personal kind of poetry. It’s also a kind of folk art: There are recognizable forms, a movement for a certain kind of reference. And yet, these aesthetic assemblages aren’t often critically examined. Few, if any, are questioning the message embedded in a mood board. What is its history, context, medium, or intent?
If you’re heading into a haunted site with a historical story attached, ask three simple questions:
Which parts of this tale are documented history, and which are tour-script lore?
What here might be stagecraft, mood, or expectation at work?
Am I treating someone’s tragedy with dignity while I investigate?
If your answers stay honest, your methods will too. It doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy ghost stories – but this is a way to enjoy them responsibly, while honouring the dead.
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Technology is always changing, quickly becoming dated or even obsolete as new updates are released. Remember LaserDiscs? What about 8-tracks? For Japanese musical trio Open Reel Ensemble, analog contraptions meet digital combinations to make unique and experimental sounds. Using reel-to-reel recorders from the 1970s and 1980s as musical instruments, the stage and studio setup is just as interesting as the recordings.
Delving into a nostalgic technology, the group describes their hybrid contraptions and techniques as “magnetic folklore instruments. They tap into a sense of nostalgia for reel-to-reel, also known as magnetic tapes. They’ve described their genre as “Magnetikpunk.”
China and Japan are also building “maglev” (magnetic levitation) train lines, the article points out — though it also includes this quote from rail expert and author Christian Wolmar. “Hyperloop is unworkable. The infrastructure it needs would be amazingly expensive to build and it can’t deliver the capacity to compete with high-speed railways or airlines. “It doesn’t integrate with existing transport modes, the infrastructure required to reach city centers would cause intolerable noise and disruption. And there are doubts over energy costs, capacity and passenger safety if something goes wrong at such high speeds…. “[T]he economics of it just don’t work.”
Scientists have captured an exceptionally rare, high-resolution view of an active region that produced two powerful X-class solar flares—an achievement rarely possible from Earth. Using the GREGOR solar telescope in Tenerife, researchers recorded the explosive activity of the sun’s most energetic sunspot group of 2025, revealing twisted magnetic structures and the early stages of flare ignition with unprecedented detail. The flares triggered fast coronal mass ejections that lit up Earth’s skies with vivid auroras in the nights that followed.
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Shusei Nagaoka / Androla in Labyrinth | 1984 |
Scientists in Switzerland have created a robot the size of a grain of sand that is controlled by magnets and can deliver drugs to a precise location in the human body, a breakthrough aimed at reducing the severe side effects that stop many medicines from advancing in clinical trials…
Fucking finally. I remember talking about this at the Architectural Association probably fifteen years ago.
Work has begun on a looped Christian landmark named the Eternal Wall of Answered Prayer, which was designed by UK studio Snug Architects to rise over 50 metres in Warwickshire.
I wasn’t sure what made this Christian art, as it’s obviously a Mobius loop:
Set to be built near Coleshill, the monument will be made up of 188 differently shaped precast concrete elements clad in one million white bricks.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1538138464089-0’); });Each brick on the looping wall will represent the story of an answered prayer, which visitors will be able to read via a mobile app.
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To begin at the beginning: It is a spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters’-and-rabbits’ wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea.
UNDER MILK WOOD, Dylan Thomas
The Crow Canyon Petroglyphs, the American Southwest’s most extensive collection of Navajo rock art from the 16th through 18th centuries. Some represent corn, the most sacred plant in their creation story. According to myth, white corn emerged along with First Woman (Áłtsé asdzą́ą́ ) and yellow corn with First Man (Altsé hastiin)
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We live in changing times. While we once flippantly threw villains to the lions, now we seek to fire them into the Sun.
It sounds easy enough. The Sun is unbelievably massive, with gravity sufficient to keep the planets in their orbits over billions of years. How hard can it be?
Well, it may be harder than you think.
Fire away
The obvious way to fire someone into the Sun is the direct approach, as shown in South Park Season 1. Point a rocket at the Sun and fire. But can that work?
For a start, the rocket has to reach a speed greater than 11 kilometres per second, so it doesn’t get stuck orbiting Earth. Fine – we can send off our rocket at 20km per second for good measure. What happens next?
The results are, to be honest, disappointing. It isn’t even close: we miss the Sun by almost 100 million km.
But why? It’s because we have launched from Earth, which is travelling around the Sun at 30km per second.
In late October, the James Webb Space Telescope’s Near-InfraRed Camera (NIRCam) captured this dramatic and beautiful phase occurring in what’s known as the Red Spider Nebula, or NGC 6537.
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Eric Wesley. I love this.
Earlier this month, China was forced to delay the November 5 return of three astronauts from its Tiangong space station after concerns that their ride home — a Shenzhou-20 spacecraft parked at the orbital outpost since April — had sustained damage from an impact.
And as it turns out, their suspicions were correct. In a statement to state-run news outlet Xinhua, the China Manned Space Agency revealed that crews had found “tiny cracks” in the “return capsule’s viewport window, which are most probably caused by external impact from space debris.”
As a result, the “Shenzhou-20 spacecraft does not meet the requirements for the astronauts’ safe return and will remain in orbit to continue relevant experiments.”
Two sculptural metal speakers made from a disused rocket fuel tank to reference the debris “floating in outer space” have been unveiled at this year’s Designart Tokyo.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1506076990687-0’); });The large cylindrical speakers were made by spatial design company Nomura‘s research and development arm, Noon by material record, and &Space Project, which reuses discarded materials from space development.
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While companies like Elon Musk’s Neuralink are hard at work on brain-computer interfaces that require surgery to cut open the skull and insert a complex array of wires into a person’s head, a team of researchers at MIT have been researching a wireless electronic brain implant that they say could provide a non-invasive alternative that makes the technology far easier to access.
They describe the system, called Circulatronics, as more of a treatment platform than a one-off brain chip. Working with researchers from Wellesley College and Harvard University, the MIT team recently released a paper on the new technology, which they describe as an autonomous bioelectronic implant.
Sportswear brand Nike has unveiled its Mind 001 and Mind 002 trainers, designed in collaboration with neuroscientists to improve the connection between mind and body.
googletag.cmd.push(function() { googletag.display(‘div-gpt-ad-1506076990687-0’); });Described as the company’s “first neuroscience-based footwear”, the shoes were created using data collected from brain scans at Nike’s recently established Mind Science Department.
“These are the first shoes designed from the brain down, not the ground up,” Nike chief science officer Matthew Nurse told Dezeen.
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