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

Sara Blakely spent seven years selling fax machines door-to-door for an office-supply company — being turned away and having her business card ripped up at least once a week — before starting Spanx with $5,000 of her own savings in 2000, writing her own patent, keeping the company entirely self-funded for 21 years, and eventually selling a majority stake to Blackstone in 2021 at a valuation of about $1.2 billion

Sara Blakely built a billion-dollar company on $5,000 of her own money and never took a cent from outside investors.

Jul 15, 2026

Mind

People who keep their phone face down during a conversation aren’t simply being polite—they’re making a visible decision that the person present outranks everyone who might appear on the screen

There is a small movement people make at the beginning of a serious conversation.

Jul 15, 2026

Curiosities

Astronauts can return to Earth up to 5 cm taller — then gravity compresses their spines again as weakened back muscles take on a load they have spent months without

Astronauts return from long missions up to 5 centimetres taller as their spinal discs swell in the absence of gravity. Within 48 hours of landing, the spine begins compressing again — and the injury risk that follows can last for years.

Jul 15, 2026

Curiosities

Cuttlefish have W-shaped pupils and can see polarised light, yet tests find them colour-blind — and scientists still debate how they match the colours around them

Cuttlefish have monochromatic vision but produce some of the most accurate colour camouflage in nature. New computer-vision studies of their chromatophores are finally showing how.

Jul 15, 2026

Curiosities

After nearly a year on the International Space Station, Scott Kelly found the hard part was never leaving Earth — it was coming back, when the smell of rain felt almost too much to bear and even sitting at his own dinner table no longer felt quite real

After 340 days on the ISS, astronaut Scott Kelly returned to Earth to find his own home felt staged, his skin broke out from soft furniture, and the smell of rain on his patio hit him like a physical event — a reentry the launch had never prepared him for.

Jul 15, 2026

Mind

The ‘spotlight effect’ was measured at Cornell in 2000, where students wearing an embarrassing T-shirt guessed twice as many people had noticed it than actually had — we consistently overestimate how closely others watch us

In 1996, Cornell psychologist Thomas Gilovich sent students into a room wearing a Barry Manilow T-shirt and measured a gap that would reshape how psychologists think about self-consciousness: wearers guessed 46 per cent of observers noticed the shirt. The real number was 23 per cent.

Jul 15, 2026

Business

Singapore had no natural resources, no fresh water and no land to spare when it was expelled from Malaysia in 1965, and within a single lifetime it became one of the richest nations on Earth

Singapore became an independent country on 9 August 1965 after a brief and bitter union with Malaysia.

Jul 15, 2026

Mind

Adults who prefer physical books aren’t necessarily romanticizing the past—they’re protecting a form of attention in which the device cannot interrupt the experience it was chosen to provide

A physical book makes a narrow promise.

Jul 15, 2026

Mind

Psychology says people who keep a paper calendar beside their phone aren’t resisting technology—they trust the version of time they can see all at once more than the version that disappears behind a screen

There is a particular kind of desk that looks as if it belongs to two eras at once.

Jul 15, 2026

Mind

A TED talk watched tens of millions of times promised that standing like a superhero for two minutes would lift your testosterone and your nerve — yet larger studies found no such hormone effect, and the study’s own lead author walked it back

Stand like a superhero for two minutes before a job interview, and your body chemistry shifts to make you braver.

Jul 15, 2026

Mind

If you still write things down on paper instead of your phone, psychology says you display these 8 unique traits

There is an oddly revealing moment in modern life: someone needs to remember something, reaches past the phone already in their hand, and looks for a pen.

Jul 15, 2026

Mind

Marcus Aurelius warned that the desire to be remembered was pointless because both the famous and those remembering them would disappear, a thought written by one of the most powerful men alive

Marcus Aurelius wrote one of his clearest warnings about ambition in the fourth book of the notes now called Meditations.

Jul 15, 2026