Sublime

An inspiration engine for ideas

AllPeopleCollectionsArticlesAudioBooksFilesHighlightsImagesLinksNotesTextTweetsVideosSocial

As Barad spoke, I experienced something extraordinary. For a few brief moments, as her words hung in the air above us in the darkened auditorium, I understood quantum physics. And when she stopped speaking, that understanding was gone. It was a product of intra-action too. I was left with the sense that while I would never really understand quantum

James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

But in scientific language our terminology is used to define the boundaries of our knowing. What lies beyond our grasp remains unnamed.

Robin Wall Kimmerer • Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants

The Trump administration could learn a thing or two from Rob Swanda, a 26-year-old PhD student at Cornell, whose social media talents have earned him overnight science communication stardom. ⠀ When Swanda first created his viral video explaining the mRNA technology used in two coronavirus vaccines, he had a smaller... See more

motherjonesmag instagram.com

Her public reputation, like Demeter’s daughter, crawls back up from the underworld.

Richard Powers • The Overstory: A Novel

A group of roughly 140 scientists (as well as lawyers and physicians) met at The Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA in February 1975 to draft voluntary guidelines for research on recombinant DNA. The meeting set stringent standards to ensure research on recombinant DNA could proceed without endangering public health

Asterisk Magazine Issue 01 Inaugural Issue

Gogolook

Audrey Tang • ⿻ 數位 Plurality: The Future of Collaborative Technology and Democracy

Kat Arney sets out to understand how our genes work and, as her book title suggests, this is not going to be an easy task. She takes us on a journey, quite literally, as she flits across the world to meet a variety of geneticists, from those at the heart of the major genetic discoveries of the last century to those at the cutting edge of genetics... See more

James Hamlin • Herding Hemingway’s Cats: Understanding How Our Genes Work

Are Blockchains Decentralized? Unintended Centralities in Distributed Ledgers

The report investigates the true decentralization of blockchains, highlighting various forms of centralization, vulnerabilities in consensus protocols, and the implications for security and immutability in networks like Bitcoin and Ethereum.

blog.trailofbits.com

At present only a fraction of synthesized DNA is screened for potentially dangerous elements, but a global effort like the SecureDNA program to plug every synthesizer—benchtop at home or large and remote—into a centralized, secure, and encrypted system that can scan for pathogenic sequences is a great start. If people are printing potentially