Space in Member States Find out more about space activities in our 22 Member States, and understand how ESA works together with their national agencies, institutions and organisations. Germany Austria

Leonora Carrington, And Then We Saw the Daughter of the Minotaur . 1953. I had an early flight, so I went to bed long before I was tired. But it doesn’t matter—I never sleep when I know an alarm will

I’ve just spent a few minutes with Stephen Anderson ‘s reflections on the Mighty Mind community experiment on Circle (which, as a platform… kinda sucks).…

Tessa Coates’ reflection looks different from her in both mirrors. A woman says that “the fabric of reality crumbled” after she looked at an iPhone photo of herself trying on a wedding dress and notic

No high-profile journalist has been more assertive about Palestinian rights than Mehdi Hasan, and MNSBC punished him on Thursday by taking away the TV shows he hosted on the network and on NBC’s strea

Whose fault was social media? This review by Tarpley Hitt of Taylor Lorenz’s Extremely Online helped me focus my thinking about what I was trying to articulate the other day about “the end of social m

Like many others, I typically listen to my local public radio station while I’m driving, my attention drifting in and out as I gaze out of the windshield. But my ears pricked up on a recent morning on

Explore S ocial media is exhausting. The sheer volume of information about humanity contained in just a few minutes of scrolling is almost too much to contemplate: Wrenching accounts of global violenc

everything happens so much (upper west side, october, blue hour) Hi Everyone, I realize it’s been a while since you’ve had an update from this newsletter. In August, I said I was taking a one-month br

First off, what I've been up to lately... I realized that if folks are subscribed to my newsletter, they might actually be interested in what's going on with me personally? (Maybe?) So a quick update.

Doctor Who is back! Last Saturday, we got the first new episode in absolute yoinks, and there’s tons more to come. Returning showrunner Russell T. Davies has said that one of his goals is to make more

Explore 1 The Fundamental Division of the Nervous System Is Not What I and Many Others Thought For me, book writing is a process of discovery. I find out how much I don’t know about a topic that I tho

I believe that sports are meant to be watched socially, ideally in a public setting—this can be a somewhat expensive habit, but also a way to limit the excessive time they might otherwise consume. Whe

Hello, I’m Kyle Chayka, a staff writer for The New Yorker , a guy on Twitter (for now), and author of the forthcoming book Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture . This is my personal newslette

A few weeks ago, without fanfare (because who cares), I was lying on my couch watching the end credits of The Social Dilemma , which I’d somehow never sat down and watched, and just kind of sighed and

(Cyber)Punk is Dead by Molly Noise “ The future is already here – it’s just not evenly distributed .” William Gibson, The Economist, December 4, 2003 The above is untrue. Search online and you’ll cert

I won’t pretend to know what the hell is happening at OpenAI . The story is changing by the hour. It’s chaos though. And that’s a good thing. For the past few years, OpenAI has told a near-perfect sto

The U.S. Census Bureau may soon change the way one of its nationwide surveys asks about disability. But alarm bells are ringing for many researchers and…

The underwater microphone first picked up the distinctive ping around 4:00 a.m. In the water off Hawai‘i, there it was: the unknown whale’s signature call. Jennifer McCullough, a biologist with the US

Explore 1 Naturalists Still Use Methods Common in the 1700s Naturalists have long had to look in odd places to broaden the scope of human knowledge. In the 1700s, they would frequent fish markets to f

In our supposed age of distractibility, there is a tendency to valorize the ability to focus on a single thing as a feat of strength and endurance, a way to assert one’s “executive function” in the fa

Photograph by Alecio Ferrari / Connected Archives 10.10.2023 Words by Bridget Reed Morawski Many of us spend the majority of our time indoors despite the impact of confined spaces on our wellbeing. Fo

Another quote, I've been thinking about, that I believe is a paraphrase because I can't quite find the origins: “Jailers love escapism. What they hate is escape.” Michael Moorcock, apparently, via Chi

It’s safe to say that no one ever gives a second thought about URLs. Or a first thought, for that matter. We click on link after link, and never think to look at the browser’s URL bar. We just assume

If there is one statistic that best captures the transformation of the American economy over the past half century, it may be this: Of Americans born in 1940, 92 percent went on to earn more than thei

These pockets "might be more hospitable" than Mercury's harsh surface. Icy Hot The planet Mercury seems like a place inhospitable to life, with surface temperatures reaching a blistering 800 degrees F

An explosion in space nicknamed the Tasmanian devil has confused astronomers by flashing at peak brightness more than a dozen times, months after the initial event. The observation, while posing new q

For nearly a quarter century, the International Space Station (ISS) has continuously hosted astronauts and science experiments as an enduring and beloved bastion of humanity in low-Earth orbit. Yet de

physiology In the Gut’s ‘Second Brain,’ Key Agents of Health Emerge November 21, 2023 Sitting alongside the neurons in your enteric nervous system are underappreciated glial cells, which play key role

The way my spouse likes to tell it, our cat Calvin was just about a year old when he revealed his love for fetch. One evening, my spouse offhandedly flung a yarn puff across the apartment and was gobs

Enlarge / Zork running on an Amiga at the Computerspielemuseum in Berlin, Germany. Marcin Wichary (CC by 2.0 Deed) The source code for many of Infocom's foundational text-parsing adventure games, incl

Doctor Who showrunner Russell T Davies has revealed why the TARDIS has received an updated design for its new era. Before Ncuti Gatwa assumes the mantle of the titular Time Lord of the BBC's long-runn

Throughout his life, I watched my father, a Black man born in 1930s Alabama, address his elders as “Sir” and “Ma’am.” He raised my siblings and me to do the same with phrases like “Yes, sir” and “Than

“R econstruction,” by Frederick Douglass, appeared in the December 1866 issue of this magazine . It was the most important article that The Atlantic published in the immediate postwar era. It was also

A golden age of connectivity is ending. “I deleted my Facebook years ago, spend at least three to six months off Twitter every year, and Bluesky invites are just sitting in my inbox,” a friend tells m

The first person I met with long COVID was Kenton Kaplan, a student I was mentoring at Georgetown University. Without much warning, he had called me in January 2022 to drop out of our departmental hon

O ne afternoon in early 1994 a couple of astronomers sitting in an air-conditioned computer room at an observatory headquarters in the coastal town of La Serena, Chile, got to talking. Nicholas Suntze

Enlarge / Drawing of a trade expedition to Punt during the reign of Queen Hatshepsut. Note the presence of baboons on board the lower ship. Nastasic One of the most enduring mysteries within archaeolo

Physics The enduring mystery of dark matter has led some physicists to propose that it was forged in a distinct moment of cosmic creation, potentially transforming our view of the early universe 8 Nov