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Welcome to the World of the Plastic Beach
[Image: The new plastic geology, photographed by Patricia Corcoran, via Science]. Incredibly, a “new type of rock cobbled together from plastic, volcanic rock, beach sand, seashells, and corals has...
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Architecture-by-Bee and Other Animal Printheads
[Image: By John Becker]. For thousands of years, animal bodies have been used as living 3D printers—or sentient printheads, we might say—but the range of possible material outputs is set to change...
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Through the Cracks Between Stars
[Image: Trevor Paglen, “PAN (Unknown; USA-207),” from The Other Night Sky]. I had the pleasure last winter of attending a lecture by Trevor Paglen in Amsterdam, where he spoke about a project of his...
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Landscapes of Inevitable Catastrophe
[Image: Illustration by David McConochie, courtesy of The Art Market, via The Guardian]. Last month, The Economist reported on the widespread presence of radioactive tailings piles—waste rock left over...
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The Drowned World
[Image: From Terra Forming: Engineering the Sublime by Adam Lowe and Jerry Brotton]. Artists Adam Lowe and Jerry Brotton’s project Terra Forming: Engineering the Sublime simultaneously explores the...
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Computational Romanticism and the Dream Life of Driverless Cars
[Image by ScanLAB Projects for The New York Times Magazine]. Understanding how driverless cars see the world also means understanding how they mis-see things: the duplications, glitches, and scanning...
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Dead Ringer
[Image: Mars’s moon, Phobos; courtesy NASA /JPL/University of Arizona]. Oh, to live another 40 million years… “One day,” Nature reports, “Mars may have rings like Saturn does”: The martian moon Phobos,...
View ArticleAgrirobotics
The USDA has announced a grant-giving program “for robots to roam farmlands,” Modern Farmer reports. It’s called the “National Robotics Initiative,” and it’s “getting $3 million to give in grants to...
View ArticleBurial Grounds
Blogger Andrew Ray of Some Landscapes recently re-read The Wind in the Willows to his son, stumbling on “an intriguing passage that I’d forgotten all about, concerning Badger’s large underground home.”...
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Landscapes of Data Infection
[Image: An otherwise unrelated seed x-ray from the Bulkley Valley Research Centre]. There’s a fascinating Q&A in a recent issue of New Scientist with doctor and genetic researcher Karin Ljubic...
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An exceptional, extreme, and largely unexplored place
The always interesting Center for Land Use Interpretation is seeking proposals from artists, writers, designers, architects, and more to “explore the land and waterscape of the north arm of the Great...
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The Disease Reservoirs of the Future
[Image: Flooding in Brooklyn during Hurricane Sandy; Instagram by BLDGBLOG]. Before heading out the other night to see a panel on pandemic diseases moderated by Sonia Shah—author of the interesting new...
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L.A. Recalculated
[Image: From L.A. Recalculated by Smout Allen and BLDGBLOG]. London-based architects Smout Allen and I have a project in the new issue of MAS Context, work originally commissioned for the 2015 Chicago...
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“Today’s world has no equivalent”
[Image: Tromsø, Norway; photo by BLDGBLOG]. Ted Nield’s book Supercontinent: Ten Billion Years in the Life of Our Planet—previously discussed back in 2012—is an exercise in what has long been referred...
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Sunken Cities
[Image: Raising a house to help survive future floods; photo by Eliot Dudik, courtesy The New York Times]. The climate change-induced flooding of coastal cities along the U.S. eastern seaboard has...
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Atlas of the Underworld
[Image: Via Science]. A “complete x-ray of Earth’s interior is coming into focus,” Science reported last week. Using computerized tomography, or CT scanning—the same technology used to visualize the...
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From Bullets, Seeds
[Image: From the “Flower Shell” project by Studio Total]. The Department of Defense is looking to develop “biodegradable training ammunition loaded with specialized seeds to grow environmentally...
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The Coming Amnesia
[Image: Galaxy M101; full image credits]. In a talk delivered in Amsterdam a few years ago, science fiction writer Alastair Reynolds outlined an unnerving future scenario for the universe, something he...
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Terrain Jam
[Image: “arid wilderness areas” from @witheringsystem]. I’ve long been a fan of generative landscapes—topographies created according to some sort of underlying algorithmic code—and I’m thus always...
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Hard Drives, Not Telescopes
[Image: Via @CrookedCosmos]. More or less following on from the previous post, @CrookedCosmos is a Twitter bot programed by Zach Whalen, based on an idea by Adam Ferriss, that digitally manipulates...
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