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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Curiosities

On Earth your inner ear works every second of your life so quietly you never feel it — but in orbit there is no gravity left for it to measure, so it simply falls silent and the brain rebuilds around the loss

The vestibular system in each inner ear works a thousand times a second for a human lifetime without ever asking to be noticed. In orbit it goes silent, and the brain performs one of the fastest rewirings in adult neurology — a rewiring that reverses, painfully, the moment the capsule lands.

Mind

In a 1978 study of major lottery winners, researchers found that within about a year the winners rated their daily pleasures — a good meal, a morning coffee — measurably lower than people who had never won a cent

Philip Brickman's 1978 Northwestern study tracked 22 Illinois lottery winners and found that within a year, they rated ordinary pleasures — coffee, conversation, a good meal — lower than people who had never won. The finding launched the concept of the hedonic treadmill.

Curiosities

A single lightning bolt heats the air around it to roughly 30,000 degrees Celsius, about five times hotter than the surface of the Sun, and the thunder you hear is that channel of air exploding outward faster than the speed of sound

A lightning bolt heats the narrow channel of air it travels through to roughly 30,000°C — about five times hotter than the surface of the Sun. Thunder is that channel exploding outward faster than the speed of sound, then decaying into the rumble you hear seconds later.

AI

The companies building AI — OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Anthropic — co-signed a letter on Monday warning that their own technology could trigger an economic transformation larger than the Industrial Revolution, unfolding so fast that existing institutions have no realistic path to keep up without immediate action

On Monday, 13 July, a coalition of economists, AI researchers and technology executives issued an unusually compressed warning about the economic consequences of increasingly capable artificial intelligence.

Technology

In 1911, a geologist walking through a dry valley in Antarctica found a frozen waterfall stained the colour of rust, and it took a hundred years and a robotic probe to confirm that Blood Falls is fed by a briny lake sealed under a glacier for roughly 1.5 million years, still leaking iron into the light

In 1911, a geologist named Thomas Griffith Taylor was walking through a frozen valley on the eastern edge of Antarctica when he came across a stain in the ice that looked like it belonged in a slaughterhouse.