Sarah Owen

In a first-of-its-kind certification program titled “Business in the Metaverse Economy,” the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania will offer business professionals a six-week crash course on topics like VR technologies and blockchain-based worlds like The Sandbox and Decentraland.

“The digital architecture of social media privileges the expression of emotions. It privileges the audiovisual over the written, the controversial over the moderate. All of this makes us more emotional.”

English soccer club Manchester City will keep track of its fans’ biometrics using connected scarf embedded with a biosensor to “get a better understanding of the emotion at the heart of the world’s beautiful game.”

What defines new relational stages today, given they’re always mixed together with old ones on platforms eager to keep you engaged? How do you mark a new “era” when you’re keeping tabs on the day-to-day lives of hundreds of people who will never tangibly occupy your day-to-day life again?

University of Cambridge researchers successfully used algae to power a computer chip for six months. The blue-green algae perform photosynthesis and generate a small electrical current that “interacts with an aluminum electrode and is used to power a microprocessor,” according to an official release.

“In actual fact, [BeReal] is trapping us in an endless, 24-hour cycle – one in which every user knows that everyone else is carefully curating their casualness”

Patricia de Vries, a research professor at Gerrit Rietveld Academie who has written about algorithmic anxiety, told me, “Just as the fear of heights is not about heights, algorithmic anxiety is not simply about algorithms.”