Culture

Digital filmmaker Fran�ois Vautier installed an ant colony in his scanner and scanned it every week for five years. The movie he made of the results is fairly astonishing. It's high-tech ruin porn at insect scale.

So, this video's got it all: off-the-grid filesharing, subcontinental slum-techno-chic, secret police in steampunk plague helmets, and a plot that remixes District 9 and Children of Men.

Artist and technologist Aram Bartholl is mortaring USB drives into brick walls and curbstones throughout New York City and inviting people to use them to share files. His "Dead Drops" project offers a glimpse of a utopian, DIY darknet in RL.

Some "products dive even deeper," says Joshua Glenn, "down to the cellular level�where a shampoo's ionic, nanorobotic, or I-don't-know-whatic technology causes the cells within a single strand of hair to oscillate through rejuvenating vibrational motions."

In 'What Technology Wants', author and Wired founder Kevin Kelly elaborates a theory of technology that emancipates tools from the bondage of human hands. In the weeks to come, I'll be blogging my reading of Kelly's challenging and provocative work.

images have been important in the story of science and technology for a very long time�especially since the advent of movable type and the printing press in the West. I�m asking for help in compiling the Wonderful Gallery of Scientific Imagery. What images have had the greatest impact on the course of scientific knowledge and technological innovation?

You think your mornings are hard? Try waking up after be trapped under a glacier for five thousand years.

Isabella Products, a maker of wireless digital picture frames, has teamed up with publishing giant Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to bring a children's e-reader to market next summer. Called the Fable, the device will be marketed as a networked color tablet for kids, and will feature a 7-inch color touchscreen and a wireless networking over a secure, managed connection.

We're fascinated by all kinds of technology. Apple's remix of letterpress and desktop publishing may be more mainstream than steampunk, but it reminds us what a tremendous technology the press in all its manifestations can be. Follow the jump for a short film profiling Manhattan printer Robert Warner, master of printing technology from the turn of the last century.

In the excitement around the new MacBook Airs, another Apple product rollout has received less attention: the addition of a letterpress-printing option in iPhoto. But Apple's foray into craft printing should come as no surprise; Steve Jobs has always been an aficionado of classic typography.