Introducing the Spring/Summer 2026 Expeditions

Expeditions is an experimental fund organized around one slippery quality: interestingness. We are pursuing the core argument of Kenneth Stanley and Joel Lehman’s Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned: the most consequential discoveries are rarely reached by marching toward a predetermined objective. We back independent researchers, amateur inventors, and others chasing ideas that feel as though they should exist, even when their purpose isn’t yet legible.

Since soft-launching last year, a few things have evolved:

• We have a new website for the fund: expeditions.earth.

• We now back teams, in addition to individuals.

• Every Expedition commits to a publishable artifact as part of our acceptance criteria. This could be a report, an essay, a public good, or anything else that feels right.

This season, we ask: what does it take to be a sovereign, cooperative human inside complex systems? How do we ground ourselves in our bodies and experience, and reach for tools both fringe and rigorous?

The six Expeditions below inquire from completely different directions. We’re pleased to introduce them.

Material Farming — Filipe Natalio

Keywords: materials science, plant biology, sustainability, biomanufacturing, agriculture

Everyone learns that plants need sunlight. Material Farming bets that’s just one mode of their being. Plants once fed on sugars and other nutrients for millions of years, when Earth was hospitable to photosynthesis. If they still remember how to metabolize sugars, then, in theory, we could promote certain properties in plants by feeding them purposefully tailored diets.

If it works, we could grow food where sunlight is scarce and grow materials with properties baked in — like cotton that’s already blue and needs no dye — without resorting to toxic chemicals or genetic engineering.

The Space Between — Cameron Boehmer

Keywords: rouleaux, blood coagulation, microclots, structured water, Long COVID, grounding, infrared light, EMF, independent research, microscopy

When red blood cells stick together, they don’t flow into our narrowest capillaries, and our tissues suffer oxygen and nutrient deprivation. The Space Between is an independent investigation into blood coagulation and the subtle ways modern living disrupts the flow on which every cell depends. Led by a self-funded researcher and former software engineer, this expedition explores how cheap, everyday interventions — grounding and earthing, sauna, infrared light, and reducing EMF exposure — might prevent blood cell clumping. It is a deliberate attempt to investigate fringe territory with discipline rather than dismissal, treating unfashionable questions with the rigor they deserve.

The implications reach further than they first appear: Long COVID, estimated to affect 300–400 million people worldwide, the harmful effects of air travel on the body, sleep quality, inflammation, and vitality in general. The work will be published as a study in two versions — one scientific, one written for a lay audience — so that the findings are useful to anyone, not only to specialists.

Live Longer World — Aastha Simes

Keywords: longevity, public health, evidence synthesis, accessibility, preventive care

Everyone wants to be healthier; almost no one has time to parse through the snake-oil in longevity. Live Longer World does that work for you, metabolizing vast amounts of health research and filtering what’s real from what’s a hoax.

The reframe is what makes it powerful: instead of pharmaceuticals and risky interventions, Aastha starts with your environment: light, air, water, EMF, toxins. The result is a set of interventions that are practical, accessible, and testable, shared with genuine respect for readers’ time and attention.

Health is a fundamental leverage point: when people feel better, they show up better everywhere else. The protocols discussed help us live closer to how we evolved without giving up the comforts of the modern world. Aastha also interviews scientists at the frontiers of longevity and biology. The Live Longer World podcast runs in the spirit of open inquiry and is unafraid to challenge conventional health knowledge.

Conditions of We — Stephen Le

Keywords: trust, coordination, game theory, Elinor Ostrom, cooperation, anthropology, mediation, field research

Finding collaborators has never been easier, yet most initiatives still fall apart — not for lack of talent, but for lack of trust. Conditions of We investigates exactly when trust emerges, holds, and breaks down.

Stephen treats trust as something built, with specific and often expensive parts: not a vague feeling but a set of conditions you can name, design for, and repair. If it works, the payoff is large. As capital concentrates in fewer hands, the ability to coordinate may be the biggest wedge left for everyone else, and better tools for trust could unlock cooperation at every scale, from two people to whole institutions.

Homunculus — Jad Rabhi & Loriann Razafimandimby

Keywords: organic intelligence, synthetic biological intelligence, bio-interfaces, predictive processing, neuroscience, cybernetics, living systems

Artificial intelligence is cool, but there’s something even better: communicating with organic intelligence directly. Homunculus is an expedition into interfaces with living systems — the messy, adaptive intelligence that biology has been refining for billions of years. Rather than simulating intelligence in silicon, this work asks how we might listen to and converse with the intelligence already present in living tissue.

Niche Design — Itay Dreyfus

Keywords: design research, cultural anthropology, publishing, pseudoanonymity, identity, zines, long tail

Some products are quietly perfect and never go mainstream — and never want to. Niche Design is a zine about that long tail: the passion-driven corners of design the market overlooks.

For 2026, Itay turns to pseudoanonymity as a vehicle for culture-making. For the first time, “anon” accounts are being treated as legitimate voices, marking a shift from identity as something fixed to something you create and deploy — a future glimpsed today in obscure forums.

The artifact is the second volume of Niche Design: a self-funded study of design culture, now extended into pseudoanonymity as an evolving form of authorship.

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Expeditions is run by Karol Majewski, Program Director for Expeditions under The Analogue Group.

If you’d like to be a patron of interesting work, please reach out to us at expeditions@analoguegroup.org.