General | Platypus

Can a Data Center Sweat?

 Miriam Fahimi  August 7, 2026

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Small drops form on my forehead. Slowly, they make their way down along my temples. The weather app on my phone shows a red alert. For days, I have been caught in the so-called heat wave that swept across Europe in June of this year. Unfortunately, what slowly drips from the edge of my chin is neither refreshing rain nor cool water – it’s my own sweat. Yet, I am not the only one struggling under the weight of the heat. The servers and chips inside the data centers are suffering, too. (read more...)

Fragile Followings: Leaving and Returning to the Ecological Field

 Mayline Strouk  August 5, 2026

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Elliðaey Island, in the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago off the coast of Iceland, hosts one of the world’s largest populations of Leach’s storm-petrels (Hydrobates leucorhous), a small seabird species. Nearly 90% of the individuals breeding in Iceland nest there, yet knowledge about this species, listed as globally vulnerable on The International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Red List since 2016, remains largely limited (Hurling, 2021). (read more...)

Charting the (Dis)course of Nature Restoration: The EU Nature Restoration Law in the Public Sphere in Czechia

 Abhigya  July 20, 2026

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The EU Nature Restoration Legislation was finally adopted in 2024, after going through the rounds of the EU parliament since 2022. The passing of the law marks a key moment in the EU’s pursuit of the European Green Deal, adopted in 2019. The European Green Deal is the EU’s growth strategy aimed at putting EU on the path to a green transition, with the ultimate goal of reaching climate neutrality by 2050. The ambitious Nature Restoration Legislation is expected to provide legal instruments to facilitate the restoration of declining ecosystems across the European Union. It supports some of the key goals of the biodiversity pillar of the Green Deal (the EU Biodiversity Strategy 2030), akin to how the European Climate Law (Regulation (EU) 2021/1119) sets legally binding climate neutrality targets for the member states. Some of the measures outlined in the regulation include supporting sustainable agriculture, greening cities and towns, protecting pollinators, and restoring wetlands and rivers. (read more...)

Digital Porosity and Value in Suspension: Informal Economies and Video Games

 Iván Flores  July 16, 2026

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When a video game development company creates a skin, a character, or a bundle of digital items, it is not merely producing aesthetics or playable experiences—it is also building an entire economic system: it defines a virtual currency, sets an exchange rate, and organizes a circuit of value. Riot Games, the creator of League of Legends (LoL), does not sell items directly; instead, it offers Riot Points (RP) as an intermediary currency. This move—currency and rate—drives the formal economy. (read more...)

The Monsters We Buried: Plastics, Swamp Men, and the Unquiet Ground of Deonar

 Adwaita Banerjee  July 14, 2026

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It is a winter day. Workers at the dump are busy emptying trucks, sweating profusely as the sun beats down on all of us. The smell of the freshly arrived waste grows worse in the heat. I have come to the dumping ground to meet Shivam, a municipal officer deputed there to supervise the workers. (read more...)

Searching for Microbes with No Name: The Labour of Sampling and the Making of Scientific Value

 Victor Secco  July 7, 2026

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It was an early crisp morning in late April 2023, I climbed into the back seat of the Hilux with the other field scientists, heading to the day’s sampling site on the north coast of Belgium. We sat in silence in the car, part of the early-morning mood and a sign of how tired and overworked we felt most days for the last month. Outside the car’s window urban and green fields landscapes alternate on our way. As we reached closer to our destination the song “A horse with no name” by George Martin started playing on the radio. Slowly the lead-scientist in the field started humming the song and then singing along quietly, as we all followed her humming, the mood inside the car completely changed. We were ready for another long day out in the elements—thorny bushes, light rain, cold wind—collecting soil, sand, water and air in search of microbes with no name. (read more...)

Collaborating with Precarity: Anthropology on Crip Time

 Seon Shim  July 2, 2026

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Anthropology is widely recognized as a fragmented, precarious discipline: short-term contracts, insecure funding, and the pressure to publish on institutional time threaten our ability to do sustained, accountable work with communities. At the same time, anthropology is called upon to imagine more inclusive, equitable worlds in a polarized global order, a tension that raises a pressing question: how can we pursue meaningful collaboration, equity, and inclusion from within such a precarious, short-term, and unequal academic landscape? (read more...)

Between Cure and Care: Governing Bodies in Türkiye’s Hybrid Medical Landscape

 Şafak Kılıçtepe, Emine Onculer Yayalar  June 24, 2026

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What do you call a practice that is neither traditional nor modern, neither fully inside medicine nor fully outside it? In Türkiye, the answer arrived in the form of an acronym: GETAT (Geleneksel ve Tamamlayıcı Tıp) or Traditional and Complementary Medicine. Officially regulated since 2014, it now encompasses everything from acupuncture and cupping to phytotherapy and leech therapy, all performed legally only by licensed physicians in certified facilities. On paper, it sounds like a tidy administrative solution. In the field, it turned out to be anything but. We began to understand this early, in a clinic in Ankara, when one of the physicians who had helped draft the original regulations leaned back in his chair and said: “GETAT is the best name.” The term, he explained, had not emerged locally, but was shaped through years of visits to countries known for their traditional medicine systems: China, India, Thailand, Germany. “We looked at how they classify it,” he continued. “What counts as traditional? What counts as complementary, holistic or integrative? You cannot just translate these things. You have to adapt them.” The controversy over the label itself signaled historical and sociological divisions around medical knowledge and expertise. (read more...)