Search Results for: scale

Microbiome Monitoring: Smart Toilets, Precision Medicine, and the Post-Genomic Bowel

Megan MacGregor August 11, 2026
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Imagine that every time you poop, your hygiene routine involves depositing your used toilet paper into a toilet-side receptacle. As you wash your hands, the device mixes, processes, and extracts microbial DNA from your stool. It sequences the microbial DNA for a real-time readout of your microbiome (the microbial genomes from within your gut, or at least the ones that made it to your stool), automatically sending the information to a large-scale microbiome database that integrates it into its data, algorithms, and analytic programs. The program connects to an app on your phone, telling you that based on your personal version of a healthy microbiome, today your microbiome is looking a little low in the bacterial species Akkermansia municiphila and high in some risky metabolites (the molecular outputs of some of your gut microbes). It recommends that you eat extra polyphenol- and fiber-rich foods today, and asks if you want a recipe for a berry- and seed-laden oatmeal for breakfast. The vision I describe here is a technoscientific imaginary: a shared vision of a future, mediated by science and technology (Marcus 1995). Technoscientific imaginaries are always embedded in historic and cultural contexts and narratives, which shape what future visions we find possible, desirable, and relevant. In this post, I examine how this technoscientific imaginary draws on narratives about promise and precision medicine inherited from genomics, as well as newer ones based in new understandings of the human microbiome and its powerful associations with many aspects of human health. (read more...)

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Fragilités du Suivi. Partir et Revenir sur le Terrain de L’écologie

Mayline Strouk August 5, 2026
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L’île d’Elliðaey, dans l’archipel de Vestmannaeyjar au large de l’Islande, abrite l’une des plus importantes populations d’océanites cul-blanc (Hydrobates leucorhous), un petit oiseau marin, au monde. Il s’y trouve près de 90 % des individus nichant en Islande, et pourtant, les connaissances sur cette espèce, classée sur la liste rouge des espèces vulnérables depuis 2016, restent largement sporadiques (Hurling, 2021). (read more...)

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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...)

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Stuck Among the Trees

Sumin Myung July 22, 2026
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This article is a part of a series about stuckness in science and technology. Read the introduction to the series here. On a sunny day in November 2021, I was taking a walk with two forest scientists, Junho and Minho (pseudonyms). Junho was then working as a junior researcher at a premier research institution in South Korea, whereas Minho was a Ph.D. candidate at a university lab. During my fieldwork with forest scientists from 2017 to 2023, I frequently encountered growing expectations that new field technologies—drones, high-resolution satellite sensors, or LiDAR (Light Detection and Ranging) devices—would replace some of the traditional fieldwork components that depended on diameter tapes, calipers, hypsometers, or increment coring. For many younger scientists, these field techniques were considered notoriously time-consuming, toilsome, and costly. While many of my interlocutors called such expectations a “hype,” Junho and Minho, as technophiles both in their early 30s, were excited about the introduction of such technologies to their fields. (read more...)

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Porosidad Digital y Valor en Suspensión: Economías Informales y Videojuegos

Iván Flores July 16, 2026
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Cuando una empresa desarrolladora de videojuegos crea una skin, un personaje o un paquete de objetos digitales, no solo está produciendo estéticas o experiencias lúdicas, también está construyendo un sistema económico completo: define una moneda virtual, fija una tasa de cambio y organiza un circuito de valor. Riot Games, creadora de League of Legends (LoL), no vende directamente los objetos: ofrece Riot Points (RP) como moneda de intermediación. Este movimiento —moneda y tasa— es el motor de una economía formal. (read more...)

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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...)

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Becoming-with Mushrooms: Multispecies Collective Autoethnography for Reworlding Educational Environments

Jennifer Foley, Dani Dilkes, Mandy Penney June 19, 2026
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“Mycelium is ecological connective tissue, the living seam by which much of the world is stitched together.” — Sheldrake, 2020 “Multispecies relationality tuned to the temporal and semiotic registers makes evident a lively world in which being is always becoming, becoming is always becoming-with.” — van Dooren, 2016 Higher education in Canada is currently in a state of fragmentation, isolation, and disconnection, due in large part to shifting institutional motivations and ideologies, emerging technologies, political upheaval, and ecological estrangement. (read more...)

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Viral Afterlives: Toponymy of Zoonotic Ruptures in West Malaysia

Nga Shi Yeu, Nga Shi Yeu June 12, 2026
本文亦提供繁體中文版。
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In early 2026, as reports of the Nipah virus outbreak in West Bengal surfaced, the Taiwan Centers for Disease Control responded with a swift escalation of prevention measures, designating the pathogen as a Category V notifiable infectious disease. In an island nation where the pig-farming industry remains a cornerstone of both the economy and cultural diet, this classification represents the highest tier of state concern, mobilizing an apparatus of epidemiological surveillance and media speculation. Yet, as these institutional gears turned, the discourse spilt over into the digital sphere. Online, the virus animated civic narratives inflected by biosecurity anxiety and the fraught moral politics of naming. (read more...)

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