Ariel Waldman is standing all alone on a planet that looks a lot like Mars. At her feet are rock shards and barren soil. Overhead are jagged mountains streaked with dusty ice. The sky is a hazy white; the sun appears very far away. And then, Waldman smiles, explaining that she’s in Antarctica’s dry valleys, a vast stretch of deep-brown earth between frozen mountains and ancient glaciers. Maybe she’s not coming to you live from another planet, but in her new docuseries , she may convince you that Earth is more alien than you realised.

Now available on PBS, Waldman’s 6-episode series is a journey into the microscopic jungle that lurks in our planet’s crust. Embedded with a soil-science team on Earth’s southernmost continent, Waldman brought her own microscopes, a macro probe lens that captures depth of field when shooting minute landscapes, a drone, and several complicated camera mounts to film the world’s most unsung wildlife in situ. She also filmed herself as she worked, creating a fascinating record of what it’s like to study an ecosystem that is undergoing a rapid, and sometimes violent, transformation due to climate change.

From the seemingly lifeless valleys of Antarctica to the bubbling wetlands of the North American prairies, she introduces us to animals including nematodes, rotifers and tardigrades, tiny creatures who shape and nourish our ecosystems while remaining invisible to the naked eye. Most impressive of all, she filmed her journey to Antarctica entirely on her own.

Sitting in her cozy office in San Francisco, surrounded by microscopes and cabinets full of photographic equipment, Waldman told me that a big part of her motivation is to chronicle environments in Antarctica and the prairies before they disappear. “If you want to do a nature documentary in [the dry valleys] of Antarctica, you need microscopes to see the animals that exist there,” she told me. The same goes for the prairies, where the vast majority of biomass lurks deep in the soggy ground.

As the official curator of the , Waldman also wants to normalise the idea that we should look at the dirt through microscopes as often as we peer through telescopes at the sky. That’s another reason she loves the microcosmos. “When we’re thinking about finding life on other planets or moons, our best guess is that we would find something microscopic.” In Life Unearthed, she films tardigrades (also known as water bears) under the microscope, wiggling their puffy legs and booping into plant cells. These cute little guys can survive in the extreme cold of Antarctica and the sweltering prairies – and even the vacuum of space. They hint at the kinds of characters we might find beyond the safe envelope of our atmosphere.

I first met Waldman when she was working with NASA and running , an organisation that connects citizen scientists with space-exploration projects. She introduced me to CubeSat, a group of people into orbit. Later, she created , a global event I attended where scientists and enthusiasts can collaborate on everything from data gathering to software development. Since then, we’ve become friends, and I’ve followed her unique career that blends science, art and community organising.

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I visited her the day before she left for Antarctica, when her biggest worry was how she would get as much equipment as possible into her suitcases. Unlike the scientists she works with, Waldman’s deep academic background is in graphic design. She doesn’t merely want to research the planet, she wants to show it to people, to encourage them to get a cheap microscope and “just throw things under it”. When people can see life in all its diversity, she believes, we become more confident about advocating for its conservation.

Influenced by the famous 1977 Eames short film , Waldman thinks that scale is a key way to understand our place in the universe. That’s why she needs drones for aerial views, as well as her beloved microscopes – and, when she’s chasing prairie crayfish in their underground burrows, she even uses a camera on a long wire that’s designed for snaking into clogged pipes. “Humans are both very small in the universe and very large in the universe, depending on your perspective,” she mused. So much of life is “virtually invisible to us without technology”.

Waldman hopes that Life Unearthed inspires more people to pick up a microscope and check out all the invisible wildlife beneath their feet. To understand the true wonder of nature, we need to see it first.

The robot army that saves the world won’t be anything like what you imagine. Nope, they aren’t little humanoids who can do synchronised martial arts like the ones who dazzled audiences during . And they won’t help you find a can of Coke with embarrassing slowness like from Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. Instead, they will be microscopic, and mostly made of algae, bacteria and other single-celled organisms. Engineers call them biohybrid microrobots.

If you’ve read about people swallowing pills full of tiny robots to deliver medicine – or you watched the classic 80s flick Innerspace – you’ve already experienced the dream of a microrobot future. For many years, medical researchers have imagined using little machines to get medicine into the hard-to-reach parts of our bodies such as the minuscule capillaries in our lungs. Even better, these machines could actually drive around in our organs, perhaps to seek and destroy cancer cells one by one. The problem is that we can’t actually build motorised devices small enough to do it.

That’s where biomedical engineer Joseph Wang’s work comes in. Like many in the growing field of microrobotics, Wang has dramatically expanded the definition of what most of us think of as “robots”. Any mechanism that can be controlled and move around semi-autonomously is a robot, much like the squishy, pneumatically powered turtle bot I described in a previous column. And some robots contain living tissues – or entire living creatures.

There are many things technology simply can’t do as well as biology – and one of them is motor around inside minuscule environments. Tiny synthetic engines tend to dissolve after a few minutes, Wang says, but “algae just swims and swims”. That’s why he and his colleagues power their robots with the green microalga Chlamydomonas reinhardtii.

At the University of California, San Diego, Wang’s lab worked closely with chemical engineer Liangfang Zhang’s research group to create . They began with C. reinhardtii, which can swim with its powerful flagellum, or tail. It also happens to love blue light, so it is relatively simple to guide this single-celled critter by shining a blue light on its target region. Wang and Zhang can even get massive swarms of the algae into formation: by shining the blue light through a screen with a shape cut out of it, they herded thousands of algae cells into forming a circle, square and even more complex designs.

To disperse the swarm, the researchers used a red light. In a video demonstration, they show a swarm under the microscope moulding itself into the shape of the African continent and then scattering again. Essentially, Wang and Zhang created a microrobot army, “programmed” to move in particular ways by blue and red lights.

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To turn this swarm into a microscopic medical team, they expose the algae to nanoparticles that stick to their outer membranes via electrostatic force. The result is half-algae, half-synthetic, all bot. Researchers can guide the fully loaded microbot swarm towards a wound using blue light. One day, doctors might use the masking technique to create custom-shaped algae bandages with many kinds of therapeutic payloads.

Other parts of the body call for a different kind of algae motor. For stomach exploration, Wang says, he and his team had to use where it had become used to acidic environments. That’s right – toxic mining sites produced algae that might one day swim to the rescue with drugs to treat your stomach cancer.

Light is just one way to program the bots. Scientists can also – organisms that navigate via Earth’s magnetic field – then guide them around inside an animal’s body using electromagnets. Regardless of whether the payload rides on algae or bacteria, it’s referred to as “active” medicine. Traditional drugs are called “passive” because they can’t be programmed to target specific regions or cell types. The hope with much of this research is that more medicine can become active, leading to more effective therapies, fewer side effects and less invasive treatments.

Medicine isn’t the only possible application for biohybrid microrobot swarms, either. Wang’s lab is also in rivers and oceans. Instead of loading the bots up with medicine, researchers cover them in chemicals that can neutralise or absorb toxins. The algae wriggle around in the water, often for days, collecting toxins opportunistically until everything is cleaned up. Meanwhile, some research groups are testing fully synthetic in the ocean.

The fantasy of a robot army doesn’t have to mean humanoid soldiers conquering enemies. Another future is always possible. Tiny algae-cyborg swarms could one day live inside your body – briefly – or travel in packs through the environment, decontaminating the messes that humanity made.

When we cobble ourselves together out of what we think other people want, we hide from something crucial

We are approaching the Gregorian New Year, and it’s a great time to ponder what’s coming next. Are we about to use CRISPR to grow wings? Will we all be uploading our brains to the Amazon cloud? Should we wrap the sun in a Dyson sphere? If, like me, you are a nerd who loves science and engineering, sci-fi is the place you turn to imagine the answers. The problem is that most people are getting the wrong messages from these visions of tomorrow.

As a science journalist who also writes science fiction, I am giving you an end-of-year present: a quick guide to not misreading sci-fi stories. Pay attention, because all our civilisations depend on it.

There are two main ways that people misread sci-fi. Let’s start with the simpler one, known as the Torment Nexus Problem. It appears most often in tech conferences and business plans, and gets its name from an iconic social media post by the satirist Alex Blechman. In 2021, he :

“Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a cautionary tale

Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus from classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus”.

You get the idea. The Torment Nexus Problem crops up when people read, watch or play a sci-fi story and focus on its futuristic tech without paying attention to the actual point of the story.

As a result, you get billionaire Peter Thiel co-founding a company that in data and surveillance called Palantir, named after the fantasy tech of the “seeing stones” in The Lord of the Rings that drive their users to evil and madness. Palantir’s products have been used by the Israel Defense Forces to strike targets in Gaza. Earlier this year, the firm signed a contract with the US government to build a system for tracking the movements of certain migrants. J. R. R. Tolkien would not be amused.

There are less disturbing examples as well. When Mark Zuckerberg decided to pivot Facebook to virtual reality, he renamed it Meta, after the metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash. But this fictional metaverse isn’t something you would want to emulate, if you paid attention when reading the story. It’s a hostile corporate space that unleashes a mind virus that causes people’s brains to “crash” like computers.

Zuckerberg and Thiel overlooked the fact that a palantir and the metaverse destroy people's minds

You might be sensing a theme here. Thiel and Zuckerberg wanted to make fictional tech real and appear to have overlooked the fact that a palantir and the metaverse destroy people’s minds. That’s a profound misreading of sci-fi.

The second major way people misread science fiction could be called the Blueprint Problem. Essentially, it’s the mistaken idea that sci-fi provides an exact model for what is coming next and if we replicate what happens in sci-fi, we will arrive in a glorious future.

The Blueprint Problem inspired a lot of early space programmes in the 1950s, which prioritised putting humans into space rather than exploring it remotely with robotic spacecraft. Generations of people had watched Flash Gordon and read Edgar Rice Burroughs, and had been promised that people would fly spaceships to colonise alien worlds. Today, we have robots discovering incredible things on Mars and space probes grabbing chunks of asteroids for analysis. But the media are still more likely to make a fuss over riding in Jeff Bezos’s rocket than to celebrate when the autonomous Voyager spacecrafts shock that marks the edge of our solar system.

Most of the hype around AI products can also be blamed on the Blueprint Problem. We were promised AI servants and savants in so much sci-fi over the past century that robocops and holographic doctors have come to feel inevitable. But they aren’t.

Science fiction isn’t a map, a recipe book or a prescription. Instead, it is a world view, a way of approaching problems with the underlying assumption that things don’t have to be the way they are. This conviction inspired the book , a sci-fi anthology about social change that I co-edited with Karen Lord and Malka Older. We collected stories and essays intended to dislodge people’s preconceptions about where human civilisations are headed. In our book, the future isn’t predestined; it’s a process, and people are actively shaping it.

The more you appreciate this process, the weirder the present-day world starts to seem. Why do we build machines to fold tissues into boxes? Why do we believe in invisible lines called borders? Why do we assume there are only two immutable genders? Asking those kinds of questions is the real point of science fiction. They are the gateways to new worlds.

If you want to build a better future, you cannot merely replicate something you read. You must imagine it yourself.

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Automatic Noodle. They are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is

What I’m reading
404 Media, an incredible online publication for investigative journalism about tech.

What I’m watching
Heated Rivalry, a gay ice hockey romance series that is extremely Canadian.

What I’m working on
Planning the European tour for sci-fi anthology We Will Rise Again.

In 1907, US historian Henry Adams first started circulating a memoir that would go on to be a smash hit in 1919: The Education of Henry Adams. Given Adams’s illustrious family – both his grandfather and great-grandfather were presidents – you might expect it to be a self-congratulatory tale of the wonders of US education.

Instead, it galvanised audiences with the bold claim that everything Adams had been taught in 19th-century schools was useless. Immersed in religious studies and the classics, he was ill-equipped for a world of mass electrification and automobiles. If education was supposed to prepare him for the future, he argued, it had failed.

Nearly 120 years later, Adams’s critique is once again relevant, especially in the US. New technologies are upending the traditional ways that students learn. The problem isn’t just the rise of AI models, though. It is also ideological. The US government is depriving universities of billions in federal funding while it demands more control over curriculums and admissions. The future of education is in chaos, but it isn’t dying; it is changing to meet the moment.

I was thinking about Adams as I sat down to take my first college course in over two decades. “Race, Media and International Affairs” is taught by journalist and international studies professor . In 2024, Attiah covered politics at The Washington Post and taught international affairs at Columbia University in New York. But earlier this year, her courses. A few months later, Attiah over social media posts regarding racism and right-wing activist Charlie Kirk. The newspaper declined to comment on Attiah’s dismissal at that time.

But, in Attiah’s words: “This is not the time for media literacy or historical knowledge to be held hostage by institutions bending the knee to authoritarianism and fear.” So she converted her Columbia class into what she called ““, which she would livestream to anyone who paid a tuition fee. enrolled within 48 hours, and the wait list was huge. Now, she is teaching two courses this fall, including mine.

In many ways, Attiah’s class feels like a throwback to the courses I took in college over 25 years ago. Sitting at a desk, Attiah lectures on topics such as how colonial newspapers in the 1600s described wars with Indigenous nations in the colonies, and why the media failed to cover Japan’s Racial Equality Proposal for the Treaty of Versailles in 1919. Weaving together the history of US media and international race relations, Attiah has taught me a lot that I never knew, despite working my whole adult life as a journalist and occasional media studies professor. I feel like I am back in college, in the best possible sense.

I fear for academic institutions, but not for the future of education. The quest for knowledge can never be stopped

Attiah’s no-nonsense approach stands in stark contrast to other professors who have taken their work online. , a long-running series of lectures delivered by philosopher Abigail Thorn on YouTube, teaches modern philosophy with effects, costumes and witty scripting. But Thorn’s aim is the same as Attiah’s: she wants to make education as publicly accessible as possible, and to question authority without academic constraints.

Attiah and Thorn are following in the footsteps of the scholar and activist Stuart Hall. After teaching cultural studies at the University of Birmingham, UK, in the 1960s and 70s, he wanted to break out of his ivory tower and teach the British public about racism in the media. So he co-wrote and co-hosted a documentary for the BBC in 1979 called , about racial bias in news reports and TV shows about Black immigrants.

When the public can’t gain access to higher education, Hall suggested, then higher education should come to the public. And that is exactly what educators are doing now. Some are teaching for free, relying on crowdfunding; others, like Attiah, are using a subscription model. Either way, they are finding ways to educate.

But what about students who don’t want to stare at a screen for hours? There is a new movement afoot to reach these learners too. Hacker and maker spaces – community centres for learning about science and engineering – are springing up all over the world. Members can take classes in everything from electronics to 3D printing and welding.

As Adams argued, education should prepare us for what is coming next. And what is coming, I believe, is a world where academic freedom exists only outside academia. I fear for the future of academic institutions, but not for the future of education. As long as we support our renegade professors and hacker space tutors, the quest for knowledge will never be stopped.

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Annalee’s week

What I’m reading
The Keeper of Magical Things by Julie Leong, a cosy fantasy about archivist mages.

What I’m watching
Frankenhooker, the greatest adaptation of Frankenstein ever made.

What I’m working on
Doing homework for Karen Attiah’s class!

Annalee Newitz is a science journalist and author. Their latest book is Automatic Noodle. They are the co-host of the Hugo-winning podcast Our Opinions Are Correct. You can follow them @annaleen and their website is

A government might start using its digital ID in much more invasive ways than originally promised

Annalee’s week