Rorotoko: scholars, artists and thinkers on their own work, in their own words

Plants are intelligent beings that sense, remember, and communicate.

The scientists at the heart of the film have reached a wide public with the idea that plants cooperate and recognize kin. That reach has drawn fierce pushback from peers, from calls to defund the research to attacks that drove one of them from the field.

Understory

Intertidal oyster reefs live for millennia and prevent shoreline erosion but not climate change.

Reefs have no growth rings. A pair of shell valves still joined at the hinge is how researchers date a reef's foundation, and the oldest living ones turn out to be nearly two thousand years old.

Sea level-induced oyster reef accretion causes minimal net carbon burial change

Listening works with the opposing forces of attention and receptivity.

Listening understood as a relation that technology mediates, and what social media does to it: scrolling, amplifying, confirming. The practice began with a lockdown New Year's challenge in January 2021 and led to deep listening sessions, singing bowls, sound recordings and long conversations.

Listening

The most sophisticated robots are often the ones that do more with less.

On a reservoir, a small robotic sailboat has to read a shifting wind before it can reach its mark. Instead of carrying a dedicated wind sensor, it lets the sail itself report where the wind is coming from.

ALBATROSS: A Bioinspired, Aerially Deployable, Autonomous Sailing Sensor Platform

The phenomenon of people dressing up as Frida, the lookalikes, is absolutely extraordinary.

Hairless xolo dogs wandering a garden at dusk, women in line dressed as Frida, the largest gathering of lookalikes ever recorded. In the costume, a declaration: I am here, and this is who I am.

Frida: The Girl Just Doesn't Go Away

Redemption will not come from truth, but from hope.

What happens when the ideologies that promised a better future lose their hold, and liberalism declares that history has arrived? A passage from the book reads conspiracy theories as the destructive half of an old apocalyptic story, stripped of hope. What it proposes instead is not more truth but the confidence that history is made.

Conspiracy: The History of a Political Obsession

Draining the Fens and colonizing the Chesapeake were not separate endeavors.

Draining the English Fens and settling Virginia are usually told as separate stories. They were run by the same families, with the same legal move: call a lived landscape waste, then enclose it.

Taming Waters, Transforming Worlds: Law, Land, and Belonging in Seventeenth-Century England & Virginia

If our eyes would be 1m in diameter, we would not need to do this.

Insects sway from side to side to judge distance. A robot that does the same, and folds what it sees into one giant virtual lens, can blur away the leaves in front of it.

How Robot Dogs See the Unseeable: Improving Visual Interpretability via Peering for Exploratory Robots