Technology, Politics, Mind. Since 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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Mind

Older adults who downsize their possessions late in life aren’t preparing for the end, they’re performing one of the oldest acts of love a person can perform, which is making sure the people they leave behind don’t have to sort through a lifetime alone

Late-life downsizing is often misread as surrender or morbid preparation. Looked at honestly, it's something else entirely: a deliberate, generous act by an older adult who remembers what it was like to sort through their own parents' house and is determined to spare their children the same burden.

Technology

In late 1971, Ray Tomlinson sat at two side-by-side PDP-10s in a Cambridge office and sent a message from one to the other across ARPANET, picking the @ symbol off his Model 33 Teletype because it was the only punctuation that couldn’t appear in a user’s name

Ray Tomlinson was sitting in a beige office at Bolt Beranek and Newman in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in front of two refrigerator-sized mainframes pushed close enough together that he could swivel between their teletypes.

Curiosities

Bowhead whales can live more than 200 years and their cells appear to repair DNA damage so efficiently that researchers studying them have found tumors that simply stop growing partway through, leaving the animal to swim the Arctic for another century unaffected

Bowhead whales can live more than 200 years, and a 2025 Nature paper from the University of Rochester shows their cells repair DNA breaks two to three times better than human cells — thanks to a cold-activated protein called CIRBP that may explain why tumors in these Arctic giants sometimes simply stop growing.