Technology, Politics, Mind. Since 2014.
Est. 2014
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Silicon Canals on YouTube

The hidden machinery of money and power — the secret owners, staggering fortunes, and frauds behind the companies and institutions you think you know. Every film is built on court records, regulator filings, and original investigative reporting.

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Technology

Innovation ecosystems and the people building them. European startup news, global ecosystem coverage, and the engineering inside the companies shaping the technology economy.

  1. SoftBank is putting $200 million into the excavator-automation startup Gravis Robotics, whose headline productivity figure was stated two different ways on announcement day, with no published method behind either version
  2. In January 2026, the largest human–AI creativity comparison yet tested language models against 100,000 people. GPT‑4 beat the average person at generating unexpected associations — but even the most creative half of humanity outperformed every model tested, with the top 10% far ahead.
  3. One of the most counterintuitive findings from the first wave of AI productivity research is that the biggest gains often go to the people who were weakest to begin with — one study found productivity jumped 34% for novice workers while experienced employees barely improved, suggesting AI may compress skill advantages that once took years to build.
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Politics

The political and policy forces shaping technology. Capital, regulation, geopolitics, surveillance, antitrust, and the politics of innovation.

  1. Across 37,073 European Research Council applications, the same proposal scored higher with reviewers who shared the applicant's citizenship and country of work — and that match moved the score about seven times as much as a shared gender did
  2. Migration generates more heat than light, but the evidence is clearer than the shouting suggests: migrants found most of America's billion-dollar companies, pay in more tax than they cost, and quietly prop up the finances of ageing societies
  3. The problem with being anti-woke is less about the concerns it raises, some of them serious, than about the label: a stance defined against a word that now stretches to mean almost anything inherits that word's vagueness, and the same charge lands on being woke
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Mind

The human behaviour behind the work. Decision-making, attention, identity, performance, and the everyday observations that explain how people live and work.

  1. People who grew up with minimal affection often describe the same pattern in middle age: a delayed grief for something they didn't know they were missing until they finally encountered it in someone else's family
  2. The famous limit of 150 friends a human brain can supposedly hold turns out to rest on a calculation whose own confidence interval runs from 2 to 520 — too wide to support any specific number, let alone the one everyone quotes
  3. Psychology says people who find it almost impossible to sleep when something is unresolved — a conversation left hanging, a decision unmade — may not simply be anxious by nature; the brain tends to keep unfinished experiences mentally active, replaying them when the distractions of the day disappear
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What’s building in

Cities

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Europe

London

On May 24, 1844, Samuel Morse sat in the US Capitol and tapped out 'What hath God wrought' to his assistant Alfred Vail 60 kilometres away in Baltimore, a phrase chosen not by Morse but by Annie Ellsworth, the young daughter of a friend, who picked it out of the Book of Numbers and then traced every letter of it on the tape in ink herself
  1. How did a treaty agreed in 1987 and eventually ratified by every nation shrink a hole in the atmosphere the size of North America back toward 1980 levels?
  2. In 1939, a self-taught excavator named Basil Brown was digging a mound on Edith Pretty's estate in Suffolk when his trowel traced the outline of a 27-metre Anglo-Saxon ship whose timber had long since rotted, leaving only iron rivets holding the shape of a vessel in the sand

North America

New York

We tend to picture gold as an Earth metal pulled from mines, but every atom of it, in every wedding ring and central bank vault, was forged in the collision of two neutron stars before the Sun existed and rained onto the young Earth as stellar shrapnel
  1. Singapore's millionaire density hit 1 in 6 households — and the mental health data is telling a very different story about what that wealth is buying
  2. Nearly every plant on your plate is quietly chemically defended against being eaten — and a growing line of research suggests that faint, low-dose sting may be one of the underrated reasons a vegetable-heavy diet keeps you healthy

Asia

Singapore

A 2026 study revealed how sperm whales stay suspended during their eerie vertical naps: they blow bubbles to stop their buoyant bodies from rising into the waves
  1. In 1944, an IBM machine called the Harvard Mark I clattered through a calculation for the Manhattan Project at three additions per second, fed by paper tape and operated by a young Navy lieutenant named Grace Hopper who took the graveyard shift more often than anyone and slept beside it on a cot, waking the moment the relays went quiet because a silent machine meant something had gone wrong
  2. Nobody talks about the layer underneath physical AI, and the man whose code runs on 6 billion devices just raised $5M to own it before the robot fleets arrive

Latin America

São Paulo

In 1816, a 35-year-old French physician named René Laennec rolled a sheet of paper into a tube and pressed it against a young woman's chest because he was too embarrassed to put his ear there, and the sound of her heartbeat through the cylinder became the first stethoscope
  1. A single bolt of lightning that crossed Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in April 2020 stretched 768 kilometres end to end, once the longest single flash ever recorded and roughly the distance from New York City to Columbus
  2. On September 9, 1947, Grace Hopper's team at Harvard pulled a dead moth out of the Mark II computer's relay, taped it into the logbook with the note 'first actual case of bug being found,' and preserved the page that gave software its oldest metaphor

Middle East

Tel Aviv

US hits Iranian nuclear site as Hormuz shipping stalls and troop deaths mount
  1. Roughly 80% of the cheese in the US and other major markets is now made with an enzyme produced by genetically modified microbes, not from calf stomachs — and most shoppers have no idea
  2. Iran wiped Stryker's devices, ShinyHunters defaced Canvas during finals, and DOGE allegedly uploaded every American's SSN to an unsecured server — and the connective tissue between these stories isn't what most analysts think

Deep dive on

Europe

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Editorial columns

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Technology

Canal Letter

Cambridge Aerospace was just valued at $3.4 billion, less than two years after it was founded — and the two numbers that would let anyone test that valuation, the price of one Skyhammer and the size of its UK contract, have never been published as figures

Investors marked the British interceptor maker up 2.6 times in four months. The Ministry of Defence has described the deal three times, once as an intention and twice as a signed contract, without ever attaching a figure to it, and the company has never said what one costs, only that it costs tens of thousands of dollars.
  1. Fresh disclosures revealed separate containment failures at two of the biggest AI labs in the same week, and the timing overlaps closely with a kill-switch bill that had just entered Congress
  2. Nadella pitches swappable AI models as Microsoft scales MAI models and Maia chips
  3. Wall Street is treating Nvidia GPUs like aircraft collateral — and a $35B syndication is quietly testing whether the credit markets agree
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Politics

Cabinet

The company behind Singha beer removed one of its heirs from every executive role days after an abuse allegation went public — a reckoning Asian family dynasties usually avoid

When Boonrawd Brewery cut ties with Sunit Scott, it did in public what family conglomerates in the region almost always handle in private. The speed and visibility of that decision is its own story.
  1. South Korea approved single-stock leveraged ETFs, then banned new ones two months later — inside the margin unwind that pushed forced selling to seven times last year's pace
  2. The EU’s AI Act starts requiring chatbot and deepfake labels on August 2 — while its tougher rules on hiring, biometrics and migration are pushed back to December 2027
  3. The EU says Instagram and Facebook’s addictive design likely breaks its rules — and it wants autoplay and infinite scroll off by default
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Mind

Field Notes

Researchers rewrote study abstracts to strip out the causal wording, and about half the readers still described the findings as one thing causing another — with the wording left in and a note attached saying the design could not establish cause, 64 percent described it that way

A new analysis codes 46.3 percent of 194,631 cross-sectional papers as using causal language about their own results in the title or abstract. The experiment that follows is the part that lands: readers kept supplying the causal reading themselves, whatever the abstract in front of them said.
  1. Why looking away during a skin prick may carry a physical cost — in one pre-registered experiment the welt at its peak averaged 3.5 mm when people kept their attention on their own arm and 5.0 mm when they watched video clips
  2. Adults who apologise for crying aren't over-emotional, they were taught early that tears were an inconvenience someone else had to manage, and the apology is the tax they still pay for feeling anything visible
  3. The habit of rehearsing a short text message five times before sending it
All in Field Notes →

Funding

The Term Sheet

The claim that people's welfare matters more than profit tangles two very different ideas: an empirical one, that treating staff well and making money usually go together, which the evidence supports, and a moral one, about which should win when they genuinely conflict

When profits and worker welfare clash, the real debate begins—the first one about facts, the second about values.
  1. An Espoo robotics startup just raised €6.4 million to put “physical AI” into infrastructure factories — robotic 3D printers that monitor their own production, paired with a new concrete mix being developed to become carbon-negative rather than carbon-heavy.
  2. For decades, automation fears focused on factory workers while knowledge workers looked comparatively safe. AI's trajectory has begun to flip that assumption: software developers, financial analysts and junior lawyers are already seeing parts of their work compressed or automated, while robots capable of broadly replacing human factory workers remain years behind.
  3. Google's ATLAS study analyzed nearly 15 million AI interactions across more than 150 countries and found that, for the non-routine cognitive work where AI is used most heavily, fewer than 10% of conversations attempted to automate a task end-to-end. For now, the real-world picture looks much more like humans working with AI than AI simply replacing them.
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AI & Deep Tech

Machine Room

Psychology says the trait we most admire as "confidence" in leaders overlaps disturbingly often with narcissism, which helps explain why the wrong people so often rise to the top.

The charisma we mistake for leadership capability may be indistinguishable from the grandiosity that derails organizations from within.
  1. The Coldcard holders drained on 30 July had multiple safes, a safety deposit box and a device that never touched the internet, which is four defences against the same threat and none against the one that emptied them, a shape engineers call common cause failure
  2. The bootlace worm found washed up on Scottish beaches can stretch to more than 55 metres when uncoiled, making it longer than a blue whale, and its mucus contains a peptide that paralysed crabs and killed or permanently paralysed juvenile cockroaches in laboratory tests
  3. When ByteDance moved to end its fortnightly six-day rota in 2021, a large share of its own staff objected rather than celebrated, because as much as a fifth of their pay was classed as overtime
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Free field brief

The Empire File

How money, ownership, and power actually move behind the companies you think you know. Built for people who watch our documentaries. Sundays you also get The Undercurrent.

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