Simon Ings's Blog, page 45

How two dead power stations fuel the art of catastrophe

Karen Kramer: The eye that articulates belongs on land

The Fukushima power plant offered us “a false promise of dominion” apparently – a formulation I’m sure to recall next time I turn on a kettle for a cuppa – before Nature Wrought Her Terrible Judgement.

for New Scientist

How the forces inside cells actually behave

Thomas Deerinck, NCMIR/SPL

If you stood at arm’s length from someone and each of you had 1 per cent more electrons than protons, the force pushing the two of you apart would be enough to lift a “weight” equal to that of the entire Earth.

for New Scientist

Staring into the heart of an artificial tree

The sculpture is both a salute to the gallery’s reopening after a two-year renovation, and an evocation of how, even when we try to tread lightly over Earth, we can’t resist a spot of weird tinkering.

for New Scientist

Putting the wheel in its place

Mary Evans / Grenville Collins

What made the rickshaw so different from a wagon or an ox-cart and, in the eyes of many Westerners, so cruel, was the idea of it being pulled by a man instead of a farm animal. Pushing wheelchairs and baby carriages posed no problem, but pulling turned a man into a beast.

for New Scientist

 

 

 

The meaning of aliens

“If such advanced beings meant us harm, they would have harmed us by now. She’s much more worried that we would harm peaceable aliens by making mistakes”

Interviewing filmmaker Michael Madsen about his new documentary The Visit.

Gardening in space: Sow the cosmological seeds and scatter

The novelist Norman Mailer considered the US space program “the deepest of nihilistic acts – because we don’t know why we did it”. The Russians always knew. They wanted to plant gardens.

for New Scientist

Recalling the Paris climate talks

Climate change is no longer a purely scientific problem: it is a political and social truth we must handle as best we can. And we aren’t handling it. We can’t handle it. We haven’t got a clue.

For New Scientist, 11 December 2015

A comic novel about the death of God

“… were it not for a persistent feeling of somehow being mocked.”

for The Guardian.

Wonder in an age of collapse

We still have to live here, however absurd the world becomes…

for New Scientist.

Minchin is storming the barriers of unreason again

Be careful who you invite to your dinner party…

for New Scientist.