Technology, Politics, Mind. Since 2014.
Est. 2014
Silicon Canals Editorial Team
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

In 1974, a Chinese farmer named Yang Zhifa was digging a well in a dry field outside Xi’an when his shovel struck a clay head, and the well he never finished opened the first pit of a buried army of more than 8,000 terracotta soldiers

On 29 March 1974, six farmers digging a well in a drought-stricken Chinese village hit a clay head four metres down. They had punctured the roof of a 2,200-year-old pit holding more than 8,000 terracotta soldiers guarding the tomb of China's first emperor.

Jul 1, 2026
Technology

In 1969, the Apollo Guidance Computer kept flashing a 1202 alarm during the lunar descent, and Margaret Hamilton’s priority-scheduling code saved the landing because it had been written to shed low-priority tasks the moment the processor overloaded, exactly as a stuck rendezvous radar was now flooding it

When the Apollo Guidance Computer began flashing 1202 alarms during Apollo 11's lunar descent, Margaret Hamilton's priority-scheduling code shed the low-priority tasks a stuck rendezvous radar was flooding it with — and saved the landing.

Jul 1, 2026
Mind

People who keep one chair in the house that nobody else is allowed to sit in aren’t being territorial, they’re protecting the one square metre of the world where nothing is currently being asked of them

The chair that nobody else sits in is rarely about ownership. It's about engineering one location in the house where the nervous system is allowed to stand down — and why that single square metre often does more psychological work than any conversation about boundaries ever could.

Jul 1, 2026
News

A new study modeling six of history’s deadliest heatwaves found that conditions had already crossed the threshold for human survival, and every single one of those events stayed below the wet bulb temperature long treated as the line between danger and death

A new study in Nature Communications modelled six of the deadliest heatwaves on record and found something the field has been slow to acknowledge: every single one of them killed thousands of people while staying below the wet-bulb temperature long treated as the threshold between danger and death.

Jul 1, 2026
Curiosities

The Pompeii worm lives on the chimneys of deep-sea hydrothermal vents with its tail bathed in 80°C water and its head in 22°C water, the steepest thermal gradient any animal on Earth tolerates, and it survives by farming a fleece of bacteria on its back that may be insulating it from the heat

Alvinella pompejana lives on hydrothermal vent chimneys with its tail near 80°C and head at 22°C — the steepest thermal gradient tolerated by any known animal — and wears a fleece of chemosynthetic bacteria that may insulate it from the heat.

Jun 30, 2026
Curiosities

In 1994, a park ranger abseiling into a sandstone gorge 150 kilometres from Sydney found a stand of trees with bark like bubbling chocolate that turned out to be Wollemi pines, a species the fossil record had declared extinct for 90 million years and whose location the New South Wales government still refuses to publish

In 1994, NSW park ranger David Noble abseiled into a sandstone canyon and found Wollemi pines, a conifer the fossil record had listed as extinct for 90 million years. Three decades on, the location is still a state secret.

Jun 30, 2026