Technetium Dreams
All that glitters is not gold: The most valuable things in the world!
Raising a Titan: The story of titanium!
‘Twas Art that moved the beast. And rockets.
The Alchemists
How oil built the world
Beyond Balloons: The hidden helium crisis
How do we get helium? And what do we use it for?
Who cares if he's evil?
It's what you do, not how you do it…
The Graphene Age
Making the miracle from Manchester
How Carbon Fibre Conquered The World
Just weave and add resin!
The 4 Music Habits That Instantly Give Someone the Ick
If you have any of these four music habits, there's a chance you're causing instant secondhand embarrassment; here's how to address that.
Check out this chat
Here's a chat someone thought you'd want to see.
Corruption: When norms upstage the law
People with good motives may engage in bribery and worse depending on what society expects of them. A political scientist explains.
The secrets of cooperation
Most people care what others think of them. In many situations, that can be leveraged for the common good.
Sony, TSMC Form CMOS Image Sensor JV
Sony will design the image sensors. The venture will use TSMC’s process
Introducing Muse Glimmer: An Open Agentic Model That Runs on Your Device
Muse Glimmer is a 30-billion-parameter open agentic model from Meta Superintelligence Labs, optimized for always-on local workflows on consumer hardware.
Google for Developers Blog - News about Web, Mobile, AI and Cloud
As AI shifts software engineering from writing to reviewing, discover how Go's strict compiler and unified toolchain ensure reliable AI-generated code.
AI Is Solving CTF Challenges in Minutes — What This Means for Cybersecurity Training
Something happened at [BSidesSF](https://bsidessf.org/) 2026 that nobody saw coming. The top ten teams in the Capture The Flag competition didn't just use AI to...
Brain medicines
Compression is prediction | ngrok blog
Compression and LLMs are trying to solve the exact same problem: predicting what comes next. Learn the fundamentals of compression and how better prediction leads to better shrinkage.
How to Tail and Filter Logs in Real Time on Linux
Follow Linux logs in real time with tail -F, filter live output with grep, pause with less +F, and stream systemd service logs with journalctl -f.
5 CSS Properties You Should Know for Better Text Designs
Includes background-clip for masking backgrounds, vertical-align for aligning elements, box-decoration-mode for consistent edge styling, letter-spacing for spacing control, and text-combine-upright for vertical text layouts.
The sucker’s dilemma
In a world filled with scams, being wary makes perfect sense. But health, trust and decision-making can suffer when the fear of getting conned goes too far.
Oil Refining, explained — Post factum
The Geopolitics of Black Sludge Processing
A Firefighter Family, 25 Years After 9/11
Kevin Dowdell, a lieutenant in an elite FDNY rescue unit, taught his sons to take action. When he disappeared on 9/11, they went to Ground Zero to search for him.
5 Japanese Pens & Notebooks So Beautifully Made You’ll Never Want to Type Again - Yanko Design
There is a specific quality to well-made Japanese stationery that is difficult to name and easy to recognize. It is not about price or brand recognition. It is the sense that the object was designed by someone who used a pen every single day and got quietly frustrated with…
A Goat-Headed Robot With a Chainsaw Is Actually a Great Idea - Yanko Design
The first time I saw Threehalves, I did a double take. Seven feet tall, four-legged, with a horned goat head and glowing eyes, it looks less like a piece of modern engineering and more like something conjured from ancient mythology. It's the kind of design that makes you laugh…
West Virginia's Highest Lake Is A Mountain Beauty For Camping, Fishing, And Stargazing
Explore West Virginia's highest lake, where trout fishing, camping, mountain scenery, and dark night skies make for a memorable outdoor escape.
Describe a Lever in Words and a Diagram
Section 2 of Chapter 5: Why the diagram succeeds when a sentence may fail, and how different modalities work in cognition?
Humans’ sense of smell is still evolving
A genetic study shows how smell capabilities were maintained in a hunter-gatherer population
226 Ansel Adams Photographs of Great American National Parks Are Now Online
Like many American stories, the story of the National Parks begins with pillage, death, deep cultural misunderstanding, and venture capitalism. According to Ken Burns’ film series The National Parks:
Being in a crowd doesn’t make you part of a mindless mob | Psyche Ideas
It’s often assumed people lose their minds in a crowd. Research on riots, festivals and sports tells a more uplifting story
7 Packaging Designs That Dissolve, Compost, or Actually Feed You – Plastic’s Replacement Is Here - Yanko Design
Plastic has long been the default choice for packaging because of its durability, flexibility, and low cost. Today, however, designers are proving that high-performance packaging does not have to come at the expense of the environment. Advances in renewable materials, circular…
Seaweed packaging films, molded pulp, mono-material packaging, compostable foams, and dissolvable packaging
Seaweed
DiffusionGemma Explained
by Timothy Gao
Are Memories Transferable — or Edible? | Quanta Magazine
In the 1960s, worm-training experiments and their strange implications captivated the nation. Columnist Claire L. Evans follows the neuroscientists who attempted to recapture the magic.
In the 1960s, an eccentric behavioral psychologist named James McConnell convinced the scientific establishment that planarian worms, like Pavlov’s dogs, could be classically conditioned — and that memories of this training could be transferred from worm to worm through cannibalism. These bizarre…
every company needs a cassandra
an ai agent for the socially expensive work of organizational dissent
The Tenth Man Rule: How to Take Devil’s Advocacy to a New Level
A reflection on the Tenth Man Rule, a form of institutionalised devil's advocacy. How can we benefit from a professional pain in the neck?
What Makes Customers Stop? The Psychology Behind High-Performing Coffee Spaces in Retail - Retail Focus Magazine - Retail Design
Coffee has become one of the most effective tools retailers have for encouraging customers to stay longer and engage more deeply with a space
Variational Autoencoders (VAEs) Explained: From Theory to ELBO and the Reparameterization Trick | Towards Data Science
A clear, math-first walkthrough of how VAEs learn to generate new data
Dogs can tell if you're scared or sad - Ars Technica
fMRI scans show happiness, fear, anger, and sadness have distinct brain activity patterns in doggy brains.
I found the American dream… in China
Decline and renaissance in El Segundo
How we pushed CDC into Postgres — and turned replication into clockwork
Discover Snowflake Postgres Mirroring. Learn how push-based change data capture delivers transactional replication to your data lake with zero lag.
What we get wrong about dopamine
Sometimes dubbed the 'pleasure chemical', dopamine is often wildly misunderstood. Nikolay Kukushkin delves into what the much-discussed neurotransmitter really does to our brains.
MAGIC - semiconductor aging malware
Overthinking: Amplifying reasoning weights makes models reveal their secrets — LessWrong
If you take the weight difference between a reasoning model and its non-reasoning instruct counterpart, and then apply more of that difference to the…
Writing by Hand is Good for your Brain - Here's how to do it
Because I am known to write using a fountain pen on paper, a number of people have pointed me to this post and its underlying research. I won’t rehash what is said in those sources, but the gist of it is that when you write things down by hand you’re recruiting more of your…
Technology and the Rise of Great Powers
A novel theory of how technological revolutions affect the rise and fall of great powers
Sunday School: Starlink and Link-Budget 101! There are many people who think that SpaceX can do d2d indoors but "Ye cannae change the law…
Sunday School: Starlink and Link-Budget 101! There are many people who think that SpaceX can do d2d indoors but "Ye cannae change the law of physics". RF is RF, from a satellite 550km away, or a Cell site 1km away. Your phone needs a signal above around -110dBm for a poor…
The Underground Chefs of South L.A.
Inside the kitchens of home cooks who are dreaming up everything from “urban tacos” to gumbo pot pie.
Taxi drivers rarely die of Alzheimer’s – how complex mental maps and spatial reasoning protect your brain
Working with and living in spatially complex environments may help delay cognitive decline, though more research is needed.
Music’s Most Mysterious Profession
What conductors actually do
What Happened to Talenti?
Over the past 20 years, Talenti has changed from a small, independent brand to a piece of a corporate conglomerate. Has that affected its quality?
What is a product? - One more thing
While AI makes it easy to create prototypes, these are often not fully functional products. A real product requires users, a market, and solves real problems.