Editorial Team

Silicon Canals Editorial Team

Editorial Team

The Silicon Canals Editorial Team produces content across our three editorial pillars: technology and business, power and investigations, and human systems. We chronicle the systems that shape our lives, from the global infrastructure of technology to the internal infrastructure of the human mind. Articles reflect our team's collective editorial process, sourcing, drafting, fact-checking, editing, and review, rather than a single journalist's writing. Silicon Canals takes editorial responsibility for content under this byline. For more on how we work, see our editorial policy.

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Curiosities

Axolotls can regrow entire limbs, parts of their heart, sections of their spinal cord, and even portions of their brain, and they do it without forming scar tissue, which is why labs from Vienna to Boston keep colonies of them alive specifically to figure out what humans lost

Axolotls regrow limbs, heart tissue, spinal cord and brain without forming scars. From Vienna's Hand2 discovery to a 2026 PNAS paper on the SP8 gene, here's why labs worldwide keep the Mexican salamander alive.

Jun 24, 2026

Technology

Qualcomm is about to spend $4B on a startup that makes no chips — because Nvidia’s real moat was never the silicon, and Cristiano Amon finally figured out the shortcut

Qualcomm is in advanced talks to buy Modular Inc.

Jun 24, 2026

News

A Georgia Tech team scanned more than 100 people at rest and found that those who reported more frequent mind-wandering in daily life tended to score higher on fluid intelligence and creativity tests — suggesting that, in some people, a wandering mind may reflect an efficient brain with spare cognitive capacity, rather than simple distraction.

A Georgia Tech resting-state brain imaging study complicates the usual workplace story about mind-wandering, creativity, and visible focus.

Jun 24, 2026

News

McKinsey surveyed C-suite executives and found they believed only 4% of their staff used AI for at least 30% of daily work; the real figure, from the employees themselves, was 13% — meaning AI has already spread three times further than leadership knows

A McKinsey survey gap suggests workplace AI may be spreading through everyday employee habits faster than leadership dashboards can see.

Jun 24, 2026

Mind

A Johns Hopkins study tracked the point at which a behaviour turns from a choice into a habit — and found it does not fade in gradually, it switches over all at once

The standard account of how habits form goes something like this: repetition gradually reduces the cognitive effort a behaviour requires.

Jun 24, 2026

News

IKEA is owned by a Dutch foundation with no shareholders and no owner, an arrangement that protects the company from any takeover, keeps its tax bill low, and for years left it running the world’s wealthiest charity and one of its least generous

Ask who owns IKEA and the honest answer is that almost nobody does, by design.

Jun 23, 2026

Technology

On an August evening in 1991, a Finnish student named Linus Torvalds posted a message to a Usenet newsgroup apologising that his hobby operating system was ‘just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu’ — and the kernel he was building now runs roughly 90 percent of the world’s cloud servers and every Android phone

On 25 August 1991, a 21-year-old Finnish student posted a Usenet message apologising that his hobby operating system would "never be big and professional." The kernel he attached now runs roughly 90 percent of the world's cloud servers and every Android phone on Earth.

Jun 23, 2026

Mind

The most reliable sign that someone is genuinely confident, rather than performing it, is that they can afford to be interested in you, because they’re not using the conversation to manage how they appear in it

People look for a tell.

Jun 23, 2026

Mind

Elon Musk’s original 2001 plan for Mars wasn’t a colony — it was a tiny greenhouse called Mars Oasis, meant to grow plants and reignite public interest in space

Before SpaceX existed, Elon Musk flew to Moscow in 2001 to buy a refurbished Russian ICBM for a mission called Mars Oasis — a small robotic greenhouse meant to grow the first plants on another planet and shame the public back into caring about space. The greenhouse never flew, but the theory of change behind it became SpaceX.

Jun 23, 2026

Business

QatarEnergy is rushing empty LNG carriers back through Hormuz for the first time in months — and a Ras Laffan explosion on the eve of the restart is complicating the story the market wants to tell

Qatar is sending empty LNG carriers back through the Strait of Hormuz, and the fact that this counts as news tells you everything about how much the global gas market has been holding its breath for the past three weeks.

Jun 23, 2026

Curiosities

In 1901, sponge divers sheltering from a storm off the Greek island of Antikythera surfaced with a corroded bronze lump that sat in an Athens museum for decades before anyone realised it was a 2,000-year-old geared computer that could predict eclipses and track the Olympic Games

The Antikythera mechanism spent 2,000 years on the seabed and another 50 in a museum drawer before X-rays revealed it was a hand-cranked bronze computer that predicted eclipses, modelled the Moon's elliptical orbit, and tracked the schedule of the ancient Olympic Games.

Jun 23, 2026

Mind

Older adults who start giving away money before they die aren’t being reckless, they’re choosing to witness the help they’d otherwise never see

When an older person starts giving money away in earnest, funding a grandchild's deposit, signing large cheques to a cause, the reaction around them is often unease.

Jun 23, 2026