Can Design Save Science?

Bella Spencer explores the potential of speculative design to engage society and democratise the debate around science. You watch a genetically modified mosquito buzz outside your window on a sweltering day in December. It’s a sentence that could be plucked from a science fiction novel; a speculative future. The advances [...]

The Naked Eye In the Night Sky

PLASMA 6 article By Jarred Donkersley Everybody loves the night sky. Rumors of eclipses, meteor showers, comets, and planetary alignments fill our imaginations with romantic notions of cosmic fate and a deep, almost spiritual connection between ourselves and the creation of the universe. And it should. Astronomy is our oldest [...]

Time Machines and TV Screens

PLASMA 6 article by Ramon Hurtado   The End.       I want to tell you a story.   Once upon a time, There was a time traveler. This time traveler lived in the year 2020. One day, the time traveler traveled back to the year 2000. When the [...]

SPACE PLANTS

POSTER OF THE YEAR 2020 Wow, the SPACE PLANTS poster is this years winner! thanks a lot @digital_archive ORDER NOW These plants stand out from the crowd with their ability to adjust more easily to their harsh environment. SPACE PLANTS are grown on space stations, in so called space gardens. [...]

Looking for Hubble

A day at Mount Wilson Observatory PLASMA 6 article On the 8th of March 2020, the Global International Women’s Day we met Jessica Rodriguez, STEM program coordinator at Mount Wilson Observatory and strong advocate for diversity and equality in STEM. Jess’s everyday job involves bringing students from across LA to [...]

SP(R)ACE

PLASMA 6 article (excerpt) …As the timer for the race to the Moon kept ticking, another major event was unfolding during this period of the 20th century. The civil rights movement had picked up momentum and had started to stir the inequitable, racist status quo of the time. Martin Luther [...]

STAR BEATS

TEASER full article in PLASMA 6 Jim Fuller is a professor of theoretical astrophysics as CalTech. Jim studies the physics of ‘vibrating fluid spheres’ and is currently applying this knowledge to studying plasma movements in stars. Internal gravity waves in stars cause constant vibrations, which can be detected through brightness [...]

Desert X 21

UPCOMING  Coachella Valley, CA / March 12 – May 16 A stunning glass replica of a fan palm set in an equally stunning landscape. The Ghost Palm, as seen above was the highlight of PLASMA’s first Desert X trip in 2019. A deeply inspiring exhibition of art that is not [...]

May the Other Live in Me

PLASMA 6 article by Bella Spencer Interview with Daria Parkhomenko, Laboratoria Moscow. In 1990, a 5 year old girl visited her father’s laboratory in Russia and stared in amazement at the machinery that loomed over her. Unbeknownst to her, this moment would spark a life-long interest in the beauty and [...]

PLASMA 6 _ LIFE IS AS YOU ARE

ANOTHER UNIVERSE RIGHT HERE / Earth issue PLASMA 6 At PLASMA we always wonder: if extraterrestrials ever paid us a visit, what would we want to show them? We’d like to make a good impression, right? PLASMA 6 turns its gaze towards the pale blue dot. This issue’s Earth-centric focus [...]

The Dragon’s entrails

PLASMA 6 article On 7th March 2020, the CRS20 Dragon cargo capsule was launched for the last time, propelled by the Falcon 9 on its way to the International Space Station. JP, a Fluid Systems Prop Technician at SpaceX, was part of this mission. The PLASMA team met JP during [...]

Desert X AlUla

Desert X AlUla is the first site-responsive exhibition of its kind in Saudi Arabia. PLASMA 6 article An exploration of desert culture, the exhibition is a cross-cultural dialogue between artists from Saudi Arabia and its surrounding region and artists from previous iterations of Desert X in California, taking its cues [...]

another universe right here

TEASER full article in PLASMA 6  “The World Ocean is as close as you can get to outer space without leaving Earth. It’s an entirely different universe, nothing like the life we have on land. And while people dream about alien life forms from other planets, there is another universe [...]

INVISIBLE PSEUDO-LIVES PART 2

A VIRAL RETROSPECTIVE PART 2 Were these mysterious infectious agents exclusive to plants? No! Around the same time that TMV was being investigated, Friedrich Loeffler and Paul Frosch (two of Koch’s former students) were working hard to get at the root cause of Foot-and-mouth disease (FMD), an illness that affects [...]