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 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
Curiosities

In 1946, a captured Nazi V-2 rocket lifted off from White Sands carrying a 35mm DeVry motion picture camera bolted into its nose, and at 65 miles up it shot the first photographs ever taken of Earth from space — the film canister survived the crash because engineers had wrapped it in steel and buried it in the desert sand

On October 24, 1946, a captured V-2 rocket fired from White Sands carried a 35mm camera to 65 miles up and brought back the first photographs of Earth from space — the film survived because engineers had wrapped it in steel and trusted the desert sand to catch it.

Jun 30, 2026
Mind

People who keep the same handful of mugs in rotation while a cupboard full of nicer ones stays untouched aren’t being sentimental, they’re protecting the small daily proof that some objects in their life chose them back

The mugs in daily rotation aren't kept out of sentimentality but as a small daily record that some objects have quietly earned their place. The psychology of habit, attachment, and the difference between objects we cling to and objects that have proven they fit.

Jun 30, 2026
Technology

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

In 1816, a French physician at the Necker Hospital in Paris reached for a sheet of paper because he was too embarrassed to press his ear to a young woman's chest. The rolled cylinder he held against her ribs became the stethoscope — and the vocabulary of modern cardiology.

Jun 30, 2026