Search Results for: scale

The Porosity of Promise: Metal Organic Frameworks (MOFs) and the New Science of Technofixation

Aaron Gregory May 29, 2025
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Amidst the proliferation of material technologies developed to solve the problems of planetary climate change and carbon emissions, the technoscientific community increasingly champions a new molecular hero: metal organic frameworks (MOFs). Metal organic frameworks are an emergent generation of material technologies lauded for their capacity to capture and sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) within their porous structures. They are among the most widely researched materials within the fields of climate science, materials science, and various (sub)disciplines of chemistry, heralded for potential applications that include yet exceed carbon capture and sequestration. Their synthesis anticipates infinite configurations of matter and materiality at the molecular scale, with an equally infinite array of applications. This article examines the promise and porosity of MOFs created to capture CO2 and an expanding array of technoscientific actors and interests. (read more...)

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L’Écosystème Multiple: Naviguer le Destin Transatlantique de la Biosphère 1 ½

Elie Danziger May 8, 2025
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C’est la fin du mois de mars 2022 et, comme toujours, le temps est radieux à Tucson, en Arizona. Mais une grande réunion rassemble un groupe binational à l’intérieur d’un bâtiment climatisé du campus. Pour la première fois depuis le début de la pandémie de Covid-19, des scientifiques français du Centre national de la recherche scientifique (CNRS) ont pu venir rencontrer leurs homologues de l’Université d’Arizona (UA), pour célébrer le lancement d’un partenariat entre les deux institutions, qui a débuté officiellement en 2021. Grâce à ce partenariat, les deux parties souhaitent favoriser des recherches collaboratives et complémentaires, notamment sur le thème de l’environnement. L’un des points forts de cette collaboration est la perspective de projets conjoints faisant usage d’un laboratoire appelé « Biosphère 2 ». (read more...)

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Toward a Linked Data Approach to Shifting Identities and NULL Values in Data Sets

Andrew Wiebe April 17, 2025
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The tension between binary thinking and the fluidity of identity has long been featured in discussions of definition in computational practice within galleries, libraries, archives, and museums. Nowhere is this more evident than in how data systems attempt to categorize — or fail to categorize — 2SLGBTQIA+ subjects. Metadata schemas, survey tools, and classification structures often rely on rigid dichotomies, such as male/female, known/unknown, or 1/0. (read more...)

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Witnessing the Porous World

Misria Shaik Ali April 1, 2025
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Pores compose materials around us such as gypsum, clay, lead, concrete, whose strength and durability are paradoxically analyzed in their capacity to resist porosity, or contain. Anthropogenic engagements with pores hold this ambivalence–resisting to perceive pore as a passage into the world and reducing them to their instrumental capacity to hold and contain. (read more...)

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Major Internet Outages are Getting Bigger and Occurring More Often: A Reflection on the CrowdStrike IT Outage

A.R.E. Taylor February 18, 2025
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At 09:30 a.m. BST on 19 July 2024, IT systems around the world suddenly ground to a halt. Without their computer systems, pharmacies, doctors’ surgeries, airports, train providers, and banks, among other critical services, were unable to operate. Websites and entertainment platforms went offline. Supermarket deliveries were cancelled. Retailers’ payment systems were unable to process transactions. Emergency services were disrupted. TV Channels were unable to air. (read more...)

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Disruptions in Grace: Embracing Mutation and Disability in Nature through Art

Emery Vanderburgh February 6, 2025
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Gripping tightly onto a walking stick, I slowly and precariously make my way through the forest. Careful not to catch my prosthetic foot on the exposed roots, I’m scanning the ground when I see a disfigured branch, gnarled, with burls and nodules on it. These masses—called “galls”—are a common growth mutation that can be caused by various factors: bacteria, insects, and rapid changes in weather. I grew up on a fruit tree farm, so I’ve seen this before, but a different familiarity, like a kinship, spurred me to take the branch home. I soon became obsessed with the idea of “tree tumors” and the aesthetics of mutation in nature as a beautiful and intriguing expression of disease and disability. They evoked memories of the way seeing my medical scans eased the abject fear of my cancer – even though the scans felt alien and depersonalized from me, they offered a concrete visual anchor that demystified my diagnosis. (read more...)

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Thinking with Epistemic Things: Quality and its Consequences in Agri-Commodities Markets

Amrita Kurian January 28, 2025
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This is a thought experiment on the consequences of technical rationality, the dominant epistemology of practice that tells us that “professional activity consists in instrumental problem solving made rigorous by the application of scientific theory and technique” (Schön 2017, 22). My aim is not to demonize technical rationality at the outset. Instead, I attempt to lay out the stakes of such a project when scaled beyond the confines of the spaces where experts conceive them. What happens when an “epistemic thing”—an unstable, experimental object of scientific research—is taken out of the controlled confines of the lab or the pages collated from a scientific symposium and introduced into the real world (Rheinberger 1997)? To borrow Anna Tsing’s phrasing, what happens when you increase the scale of an experiment without altering its frame for the differences encountered in the real world (Tsing 2015, 38; 2019, 506)? (read more...)

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Swimming Against the Current: Navigating Distrust in Open Science

Valerie Berseth December 17, 2024
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This post is part of a series on the SEEKCommons project; read the Introduction to the series to learn more. On a cool autumn day in Vancouver, I took my car, a warm coffee tumbler in hand, and drove into the woods to witness the return of salmon to their spawning grounds. I followed highways and dirt roads to the Adams River, where dense forest meets fast-moving water. I was there for the Salute to the Sockeye—a festival that gathers people from all walks of life every four years, when sockeye salmon are returning in the largest numbers of their four-year life cycle. Every year, salmon return after spending two to three years in the ocean navigating past rocks, hungry bears, eagles, fishing hooks, and even waterfalls. They push forward bit by bit, against the odds, to reach the precise place they were born where they spawn and die. Scientists don’t fully understand how salmon navigate this long, upstream journey, but we know they rely on subtle cues from the earth’s magnetic fields and the river’s chemistry to guide them home. (read more...)

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