Curiosities - Silicon Canals

In 1946, a secretary named Betty Snyder and five other women were handed the wiring diagrams for ENIAC and told to program it with no manuals and no instructions, and the ballistic trajectory calculation they got running became the first working software ever demonstrated on a general-purpose electronic computer

In 1946, six women at the Moore School of Engineering were handed the wiring diagrams for ENIAC and told to program it without manuals. The ballistic trajectory they got running became the first working software ever demonstrated on a general-purpose electronic computer — and their names were left off the press release.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jul 9, 2026

Curiosities

In 1859, a solar storm now called the Carrington Event pushed auroras as far south as Cuba and induced currents so strong in North American telegraph lines that operators disconnected their batteries and kept sending messages using only the electricity coming out of the sky

On September 1, 1859, a solar flare witnessed by Richard Carrington triggered a geomagnetic storm so powerful it lit up the tropics with auroras and let North American telegraph operators send messages using only current induced by the sky.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jul 9, 2026

Curiosities

Bristlecone pines growing in the White Mountains of California germinated before the Great Pyramid was built, and the oldest one alive today, nicknamed Methuselah, has been quietly adding rings for 4,855 years in soil so poor almost nothing else survives beside it

A single Great Basin bristlecone pine growing in the White Mountains of eastern California has been alive for 4,855 years.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jul 8, 2026

Curiosities

In 1959, the Soviet Luna 3 probe swung around the far side of the Moon carrying a camera loaded with film salvaged from downed American spy balloons that developed its own film onboard, scanned the negatives with a photocell, and radioed 17 grainy frames back to Earth — the first images humans had ever seen of a hemisphere no one on the planet had ever laid eyes on

How a 1959 Soviet probe, loaded with captured American spy film, photographed the far side of the Moon, developed the negatives onboard, and radioed 17 grainy frames back to Earth — filling in the last blank hemisphere on the human map.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jul 7, 2026

Curiosities

Hugh Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster, was worth nearly £10 billion before turning 40 — and he still owns roughly 300 acres of Mayfair and Belgravia that the family has refused to sell for three centuries

Hugh Grosvenor became the 7th Duke of Westminster at 25 with a £9.9 billion fortune built on 300 acres of Mayfair and Belgravia — land his family has leased, but never sold, since 1677.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jul 6, 2026

Curiosities

The Grosvenor family started building Grosvenor Square in the 1720s but leased the houses instead of selling — 99 years at a time — so London's priciest homes quietly return to the family that owns the ground beneath them

How the Grosvenor family used a 300-year-old leasehold trick to keep the ground beneath London's most expensive addresses — and got the houses back, one 99-year lease at a time.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jul 6, 2026

Curiosities

The Atacama Desert in Chile has regions where no rainfall has ever been recorded in human history, yet a fog called camanchaca rolls in from the Pacific and feeds lichen colonies that exist nowhere else on Earth

In the hyperarid core of Chile's Atacama Desert, weather stations have gone decades without recording a single drop of rain — yet a Pacific fog called the camanchaca sustains lichen communities found nowhere else on Earth.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jul 6, 2026

Curiosities

Turkiye is hosting its first NATO summit in 22 years, and the gap itself explains more about the Alliance's balance of power than anything in the communiqué

What is missing from the run-up to Ankara this week is any pretence that NATO still knows what it is.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jul 6, 2026

Mind

The truth about 10,000 steps a day: the number wasn't science, it was the brand name of a pedometer a Japanese company launched around the 1964 Tokyo Olympics — and later research finds real health benefits from as few as 4,000 steps

The daily step goal on hundreds of millions of wrists and phones did not come out of a laboratory.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jul 5, 2026

Curiosities

Pando is a single quaking aspen in Utah that has cloned itself into roughly 47,000 genetically identical trunks across 106 acres, making it one organism weighing nearly 6,000 tonnes and likely dating back thousands of years, to around the end of the last ice age

In a corner of Utah's Fishlake National Forest, 47,000 white-barked aspen trunks share a single root system and a single genome — making Pando the heaviest known living organism on Earth, possibly older than the last ice age, and quietly being eaten out of existence by mule deer.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jul 1, 2026

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.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · 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.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jul 1, 2026