This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Kate Zogaj can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/smart-wallets-and-the-shifting-boundaries-of-trust-in-decentralized-finance/. About the post: This article explores how smart wallets not only reflect changing technological norms but also reveal deeper social and political dynamics. Drawing on themes of delegated trust, infrastructure politics, and usability, it asks what kinds of financial agency are being enabled—or foreclosed—as DeFi (Decentralized Finance) tools move from niche platforms to mainstream adoption.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Elexis Williams Gray can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/submarine-cyborgs-at-sea-with-haraway-and-jue/. About the post: The history of human relations with the Earth’s oceans and seas is an old one, set back into deep time. As long as humans have been living by the shores of this planet, we have found ourselves drawn to marine worlds and species, to the fluid enchantments of water, waves, salt, spray, submersion. However, it is only in recent decades that scholars have begun to consider that the ocean itself has a history. Drawing on the insights of scholars who have traced transformations in human-ocean relations over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, this piece opens a small window into my research examining the figuration of the midcentury scientific diver, considering representations of hybridity and cyborg embodiment witnessed in the “manfish” of Jacques Cousteau’s diving memoir The Silent World (1953), and a few relevant articulations (and critiques) of the submarine cyborg.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Vivette García-Deister can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/sts-academic-publishing-as-a-work-of-service-and-hope-a-conversation-with-vivette-garcia-deister/. About the post: I believe that my job as an editor is to encourage conversations and foster a dialogue between different epistemic traditions. To achieve this, I pay attention to the topics that are being discussed (...) There is a challenge in making explicit the relevance of the knowledge produced in Latin America at a global level. We aim to make authors’ work visible at very different stages of their careers, from graduate students to established researchers. We guide authors to make their inter-translations as generative as possible (by this I mean, English versions of their texts that do not lose their local specificities). We also organize a peer review system that includes reviewers from the Global North and South. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Julián Medina-Zárate and Nicolas Lara-Rodriguez can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/peasant-reserve-zones-as-techno-socio-environmental-assemblages/. About the post: Peasant Reserve Zones (Zonas de Reserva Campesina, or ZRCs in Spanish) constitute a legal framework established to organize territories historically inhabited by peasant communities in Colombia. Designed as part of agrarian reform efforts, these zones are intended to promote environmental conservation and socioeconomic sustainability in rural areas. The ZRCs provide peasant organizations with a set of tools to structure their social, economic, political, and environmental governance. However, their effectiveness in achieving social and environmental objectives remains a subject of ongoing research across disciplines such as ecology, sociology, and economics. Existing studies yield inconclusive results, instead highlighting the complexity of the dynamics surrounding this institutional mechanism.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Tiên-Dung Hà can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/homecoming-tasting-death-in-a-vietnamese-forensic-laboratory/. About the post: This sacred obligation to the dead allows the Vietnamese forensic scientists and technicians to think beyond the dichotomies of martyr/non-martyr, or North/South Vietnamese. A high-level scientist at CDI once confided in me that there are many commingled remains between North and South Vietnamese or between Vietnamese and American soldiers, especially due to bodies getting tangled up in bombs and explosions. To this high-level scientist, these past political differences did not matter. They expressed to me their desire to identify everyone, meaning remains of not just the martyrs, but also the Southern Vietnamese soldiers and American soldiers. To my scientist interlocutors, every mother who has lost her children in the war deserves to know where their remains lie.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Katie Ulrich can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/06/the-sugar-library/. About the post: The making of the online sugar library has unfolded amid growing discussions around Open Science, increasing concerns about AI training on stolen materials accessed online, and in the context of anthropology’s fraught history obtaining and distributing others’ knowledge without their permission. Which is to say, it was never a given how and why to share the sugar library as an accessible online repository.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Aaron Gregory can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/05/the-porosity-of-promise-metal-organic-frameworks-mofs-and-the-new-science-of-technofixation/. About the post: Amidst the proliferation of material technologies developed to solve the problems of planetary climate change and carbon emissions, the technoscientific community increasingly champions a new molecular hero: metal organic frameworks (MOFs). Metal organic frameworks are an emergent generation of material technologies lauded for their capacity to capture and sequester carbon dioxide (CO2) within their porous structures. They are among the most widely researched materials within the fields of climate science, materials science, and various (sub)disciplines of chemistry, heralded for potential applications that include yet exceed carbon capture and sequestration. Their synthesis anticipates infinite configurations of matter and materiality at the molecular scale, with an equally infinite array of applications. This article examines the promise and porosity of MOFs created to capture CO2.

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Arielle Milkman can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/05/what-if-weve-been-thinking-about-wildfire-smoke-the-wrong-way/. About the post: Wildfire smoke toxicity is linked with multisystemic adverse health effects. Scientists are increasingly studying wildfire health impacts beyond respiratory and cardiovascular effects, including fertility issues and dementia. But what if we’ve been getting wildfire smoke wrong when we interpret it exclusively as a matter of exposure and a public health concern?

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Elie Danziger can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/05/the-ecosystem-multiple-navigating-the-transatlantic-fate-of-biosphere-1-%c2%bd/. About the post: Experimental "ecosystems" emerge from the relation between facilities. The DSE case shows how ecosystems are defined relationally, not only through interoperability (as with LEO), but also through ever-analogical definitions: the "ecosystem" idea is located at the meeting point of fully-interdependent instantiations by various experimental facilities across continents. (This episode is available in additional languages on Platypus, The CASTAC Blog.)

This bonus content is a reading from Platypus, the CASTAC Blog. The full post by Aaron Neiman can be read at https://blog.castac.org/2025/05/its-like-youre-welcome-love-science-on-doing-critical-anthropology-when-the-enterprise-is-under-attack/. About the post: Should we refrain from kicking science when it is down? Ought the level of our critique be calibrated by how vulnerable the scientific enterprise is in a given moment? Would we dare release a book called Against Health (Metzl & Kirkland 2010) in 2025, when being against health seems to explicitly be the order of the day? And how do we speak honestly about how much worse things have gotten without rehabilitating the tepid liberalism which got us here in the first place?