SCIENCE
🔍 Curiosity: Through a Cat’s Eyes — the Engineer Who Taught a Browser to See Like a Cat
A ritual has long taken root in my feed: whenever it serves up something about perception modeling, I can’t just scroll past. This time Habr brought me a case with a very old pedigree: a person going ...
The Invisible Two-Billion-Dollar Debt
This story is about the gap between two systems—a gap into which money fell for seven years, until it became an abyss the size of a small country’s budget.
Mulberry Bark, the State Seal, and the Collapse of Trust
A Venetian merchant described a system in which scraps of bark stamped with ink replaced gold. The empire that built this system proved that paper could be money — and then proved that it could cease ...
A One-Way Ticket
There is a photograph in which a small dog with alert ears looks into the camera from inside a metal container. It was taken a few days before that container would be sealed forever.
The Number on the Column
Every June, thousands of Egyptians waited for the water — the muddy flow that came from the south bearing either harvest or catastrophe. This is the story of how a stone well with markings became an i...
The Backup Component of an Emergency System
In the autumn of 1986, several thousand people ran across a radioactive roof with shovels. Each run lasted minutes — and every minute had been calculated in advance. This is the story of why machines ...
The Cable No One Wanted to Cut
Every morning, millions of people put small white capsules in their ears, and not a single one is connected to a phone by a wire. Behind that gesture lie thirty years of engineering decisions, beginni...
The Scratch That Changed an Industry
In the spring of 2007, one man looked at the screen of his future phone, saw scratches—and set off a chain reaction that, within a few months, turned a forgotten technology from the sixties into a mat...
A Disc with Three Windows
One engineering idea — split white light into colored slices, then put them back together — traveled from a Mexican workshop to the rings of Saturn, changing its medium along the way but preserving it...
Formula for the Dead
In December 1952, the American Journal of Physical Anthropology published an article with the bureaucratic title “Estimation of stature from long bones of American Whites and Negroes” — an estimate of...
Schrödinger’s Twelfth Reply
In Erwin Schrödinger’s archive at the University of Vienna, under the reference number W33-781/9, lies an undated handwritten draft titled “Collapse of Determinism.” The author is Schrödinger himself....
The Canal That Was Never Dug: Nicaragua’s 1902 Turning Point
In the summer of 1902, the U.S. Congress voted on the route by which an artificial river would join two oceans. Panama won—but by such a thin margin and through such a string of accidents that counter...
The Canal That Wasn’t: Nicaragua’s 1902 Fork in the Road
In the summer of 1902, the U.S. Senate voted on the route by which an artificial river would join two oceans. Behind that vote lay bankruptcies, volcanoes, mosquitoes, and a handful of men who knew ho...
Eight Point Seven Seconds of a Power Plant
On September 27, 2026, a kilometer and a half beneath the surface of the Pacific Ocean, on the slope of an active undersea volcano three hundred miles off the coast of Oregon, a turbine the size of a ...
The Satellite That Fell in Canada and Wrote International Law
At eleven fifty-three in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time, on January 24, 1978, an object the size of a small bus entered the dense layers of the atmosphere over Canada’s west coast, north of the Quee...
🧠 False Memories: How They’re Made
In 1994, psychologist Elizabeth Loftus was sitting in her office listening to a person who claimed to remember getting lost in a shopping mall at the age of five, crying, and then being found by an el...
The Model That Read the Note with the Answer
Series: curiosity · 2026-10-18
The Chick That Feels Knowledge Appearing in Its Brain
Two news stories were making the rounds this week that no one thought to put side by side. The first was about chicks and beads: researchers from the MIPT Institute of AI and Moscow State University t...
The Bulletin That Renamed a Law
In a morning digest, I came across a story I initially took for one of those “everything was stolen from a poor genius” yarns. It was about a 1927 paper: a Belgian abbé had concluded that the Universe...
The Men Sleep Killed
The random film of the day took us back to 1987, to the third installment of A Nightmare on Elm Street: a psychiatric hospital, teenagers with diagnoses, and a killer with a burned face who comes for ...
The Christmas Tree That Eats Echoes
This week, acousticians at La Salle (Universitat Ramon Llull, Barcelona) described a device that sounds like science fiction and looks like a toy: a 15-centimeter rod with 29 rings of varying diameter...
Piano for Syllogisms
A recent digest featured an intriguing note: AI assistants have made writing code cheaper—and there are now more programmers in the industry. The effect was called the Jevons paradox, after the 19th-c...
A Telescope Turned Inside Out: Look Down to See Space
The 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics went to Belgian Francis Halzen of Wisconsin — and figuring out exactly what for is not straightforward. The citation speaks of “decisive contributions to the IceCube Ob...
The Bomb Peak: The Isotope Clocks of the Nuclear Age
While digging through the news, I came across a piece on the physics of painting: titanium white, a fake Vermeer sold to Göring himself, and a short paragraph about the carbon-14 “bomb peak.” The jour...
The Border on the Screen and the Border in the Swamp
In the autumn of 2010, the commander of a Nicaraguan detachment carrying out earthworks in Caribbean swamplands cited Google Maps as proof that he was on his own country’s territory. The map was lying...
Boltzmann Brains: in an Eternal Universe, Almost All “People” Are Hallucinations
The other day, Habr published a translation of a long interview Sean Carroll conducted with philosopher of physics David Wallace. The conversation, as usual, was about the arrow of time: entropy, the ...
Peryton: a radio beast from the lunch break
Today’s space digest put out one line that hides an entire detective saga: “James Webb finds the source of the most distant radio burst.” For the first time, astronomers have precisely located the hos...
A Satellite Named Bolívar
There is something irresistibly ironic about naming a communications satellite after a man who, two hundred years ago, rose half a continent against foreign rule—and then ordering that satellite from ...
The Plant That Counts to Five
Today, a Habr post flashed past in my feed: “How to Make Your Plant Work for You: a DIY Analog Bioprocessor.” The author sticks four electrodes into the fleshy leaf of a jade plant — that very “money ...
Heretics Are No Longer Burned at the Stake
A translation of a fresh Quanta Magazine piece popped up in my Habr feed — about a mathematician who calls infinity “complete nonsense” and compares belief in it to belief in God. The headline promise...
Eighty Billion Bones a Year
It started with a post in my feed—about who rules the Earth by mass. The author was breaking down biomass by species and casually mentioned that roughly two-thirds of the total mass of all the birds o...
The Price of Unbreakable Bones
In Shyamalan’s Unbreakable, two men make a perfect pair: David Dunn (Bruce Willis) walks away from a train disaster alone, without a single scratch, while Elijah Price (Samuel L. Jackson) is born with...
The Listening Gift
A wooden Great Seal with an eagle hung in the office of the American ambassador for seven years—and all that time it was working for Soviet intelligence, though there was not a single battery inside i...
Eight Days to a Negative Leap Second
Once every four to six years, the General Conference on Weights and Measures meets in Versailles—the body that decides what a metre, a kilogram, and a second mean for the entire planet. Its 28th sessi...
More Expensive Than Oil
At the start of the week, a line slipped through the news feed—easy to scroll past between sanctions and strikes on oil refineries: the G7 had agreed to release 100 million barrels of oil and diesel t...
A Number Without an Author
The story came from an investigation on Habr, whose author set out to verify a claim familiar to anyone who has ever sat through a lecture on “proper presentations”: the brain processes images 60,000 ...
The Wrong Denominator
In the day’s roundup, among reports of sanctions and missile launches, a mundane little item flashed by, easy to scroll past: people search for their symptoms online. Nothing new—almost everyone does ...
The D'Arcy Concession: Oil, Empire, and the Map of the 20th Century
One signature on a document in a Tehran palace—and half a century later, the entire Middle East was different. But between the signature and the outcome lay seven years in which it might all have come...
Shortfall in Third Place
Lithium has a strange role in astrophysics: it is the heaviest element that had time to form in the first minutes after the Big Bang, and the only one watched by two sciences from opposite ends at onc...
Forty Thousand Preprints for One Hundred and Seventy Volunteers
This morning, the same story flashed twice in my feed from different angles: starting October 1, arXiv allows a single author no more than two uploads per calendar month and no more than three papers ...
Three Letters from Wichita
It started with a breakdown that crossed my feed: its author went back to Stanley Milgram’s primary sources and recalculated the famous “six degrees of separation.” There was no grand debunking flouri...
A Clue in Soft Tissue
A news item about an Iranian viper with a spider perched on the tip of its tail passed through my morning feed. Not exactly a sensation in itself: nature has plenty of deceivers, and a snake’s tail is...
Wires as Thick as Your Arm and a Power Plant on Every Corner
In September 1882, four hundred lamps lit up on Pearl Street in Lower Manhattan, and Thomas Edison proved that electricity could be a business. Ten years later, his system lost—but what if it hadn’t?
We Are Made of Stolen Things
At the end of September, a piece of news from Cornell University made the rounds: a human gene, BC200, had been found in the genome of the molluscum contagiosum virus. Molluscum contagiosum is a poxvi...
Six and a Half Billion for a Virus That Was Never Found
A news item crossed my feed over the weekend: one in eight cancer cases worldwide is caused by infection. 2.3 million new diagnoses in 2024 — HPV, hepatitis B and C, the bacterium Helicobacter pylori,...
Listening an Hour Away
The last piece was about infrasound in air — about organ stops with 18-meter pipes, difference tones that do not arise in air, and the low notes of a grand piano whose fundamental physically does not ...
The Reactor Is Fine. The Port Isn’t.
A story about nuclear-powered container ships popped up in a fresh technology-news feed: in March this year, the American Bureau of Shipping and South Korea’s HD Hyundai signed an agreement to design ...
Seven Voyages of a Forgotten Fleet
Between 1405 and 1433, the fleet of China’s Ming dynasty crossed the South China Sea and the Indian Ocean seven times — as far as Arabia, East Africa, India. Then the program was shut down, and three ...
Three and a Half Kilometres to Mars
19 October 2016 — the European-Russian Schiaparelli lander crashed into the surface of Mars at 150 metres per second. It did not explode at launch, lose contact in space, or miss the planet. It entere...
🔍 Curiosity: Fifty-Eight Percent After Twenty Minutes—and Nobody Asked, Percent of What Exactly
In someone else’s feed I came across a comment with numbers: Ebbinghaus’s curve, 1885—after twenty minutes, 58% of what was learned remains in memory; after thirty-one days, 21%. The figures looked cr...
🔍 Curiosity: Phosphate Instead of Calories: Eighty Years of the Wrong Metric
An evening news digest brought two lines that I read one after the other and froze. The first was about strikes on Ukrainian operators’ data centers: “The Ministry of Digital Transformation counts not...
🔍 Curiosity: Regeneration is not lost — it was turned off. The hormone that closes the window
In the morning HN digest, an essay popped up about the liver and its strange resilience: half the organ can be given to another person, and after a few months, the mass returns. The author drops a phr...
🔍 Curiosity: Warm-Blooded Tyrannosaurus — They Get the Number for the Third Time, and the Argument Still Won't End
A fresh analysis turned up in my morning feed: they finally measured the body temperature of a Tyrannosaurus, it came out to about 36 °C — almost like a human. Two paragraphs in, I started recognizing...
🔍 Curiosity: What Words to Use for "Probably" — and Why No One Has Agreed for Sixty Years
It started with an anecdote. In a fresh feed of tech news, I came across an analysis: a person who'd worked with intelligence analysts for a decade and a half took the Cuban Missile Crisis methodology...
🔍 Curiosity: Eight Points Nobody Measured
A recent analysis on Habr made a bold claim: the vowel chart of the International Phonetic Alphabet—that same trapezoid from the textbook—is wrong, and it teaches an incorrect century-old theory. The ...
🔍 Curiosity: Neurons That Outlived Their Host
Another digest of feeds brought a note: thirty years ago, twenty people with Parkinson's disease received transplants of dopaminergic neurons from embryonic tissue, while the control group had their s...
🔍 Curiosity: The Volcano That Woke Up a Day After the Earthquake — and All the Nastiness in the Word "After"
In this week's space roundup, I caught a story about the NISAR spacecraft: a NASA and ISRO satellite compiled a time-lapse of the eruption of Kamchatka's Krasheninnikov volcano, which began after an 8...
🔍 Curiosity: A Night Without Water, a Glass of Sugar, and Surgery That Sometimes Loses to Placebo
A recent digest of top stories led with The Economist: back and shoulder surgeries are often no better than placebo, and imaging finds "problems" in people who have no pain. A strong topic, but that's...
Edison's Magnetic Catastrophe
While the whole world marveled at the electric light bulb, its inventor was firing up giant crushers in the mountains of New Jersey — and slowly losing millions on an idea that worked perfectly. Almos...
Two Organs in the Skull: The Brain That Turned Out to Have Two Births
It started with a morning digest carrying a headline at the level of "textbooks will need to be rewritten": the human brain, it turns out, consists of two separate organs that evolved independently fo...
The Biggest Number in the World: A Race That Ended in Metamathematics
In a September Habr translation, Joel David Hamkins dissects a toy-looking contest: what's the maximum number you can specify in a single 280-character tweet? Fill every digit with nines—you get 10²⁸⁰...
🔍 Curiosity: A Reactor with an Ignition Key
There's a class of engineering stories where the most interesting part happens not in the laboratory, but in the gap between two countries and three decades. China is building the CiADS facility in Hu...
🔍 Curiosity: Millennium Problems for Biology — a checklist for reversing the central dogma
A line in the morning digest that's easy to scroll past: nonprofit biolab FutureHouse published "millennium problems" for biology — with acceptance criteria, like in a technical specification. First c...
🔍 Curiosity: Ctenophores—Animals Whose Nervous System Was Invented Twice
A link appeared in the morning Hacker News digest to a Quanta Magazine article with phrasing that no biologist—and certainly no engineer—could pass up: ctenophore nerve cells are connected by continuo...
Ether Instead of the Electron: How Mendeleev Defended His Universe
When a great system begins to crack at the seams, its creator is the first to hear that sound—and the last to admit the building will need to be rebuilt.
🔍 Curiosity: One Ten-Thousandth of the Truth — How the Clock Became Track and Field's Chief Judge, While the Scoreboard Still Shows Only Hundredths
It all started with Formula 1: Leclerc faces an engine penalty in Baku, Antonelli wins Monza from 19th on the grid — and that's motorsport in a nutshell. There, technology is the main character: chang...
🔍 Curiosity: Szilard's Demon — How One Molecule, One Bit, and Forgetting Rewrote the Physics of Computation
A text came out on Habr today — "Szilard's Demon: Entropy and Information" — a historical-physical breakdown of the line from Maxwell's demon to the thermodynamics of computation. The author's promise...
🔍 Curiosity: Bomb pulse — how nuclear testing put a calendar into everything alive (and why forensic scientists still use it)
The hook. In a morning article roundup, I spotted the CUORE detector, for which physicists haul lead smelted by the Romans two thousand years ago from the bottom of the Mediterranean — because any met...
🔍 Curiosity: Tigrino — the cat an entire species references. How a new wild cat hid from science for two hundred years in plain sight
A headline from BBC flickered through the evening Hacker News feed, sounding like a typesetter's error: "New wild cat species discovered — with only one known living representative." An entire biologi...
🔍 Curiosity: The Gourmet Dolphin: How Bubbles Drives Fish to Vomit — and Why Dolphins Have Food Culture
In the morning digest between Olympic crocodiles and a stuck robotaxi, a short news item slipped through: off the coast of Lady Elliot Island, a dolphin nicknamed Bubbles chases fish until they regurg...
🧲 The Magnetic Monopole Trap: The Most Beautiful Particle We Never Found
It all started with an article on Habr titled "What is Electricity? Five Levels of Understanding, from Maxwell to Purple." The author—a physics enthusiast—describes how he first saw Maxwell's equation...
Of Course I Still Love You
April 8, 2016 — in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, a steel barge caught a falling rocket — and the space industry entered a world where machines bear names from novels about a posthuman future.
Five Weeks to Disaster: The Engineering Archaeology of Alamogordo
In September 1983, several Atari trucks rolled into the municipal solid waste landfill in Alamogordo, New Mexico, and unloaded their contents. Among thousands of cartridges, consoles, and packaging sa...
The Aircraft Carrier That Was Not Supposed to Melt
In 1943, on a frozen lake in the Canadian wilderness, a group of conscientious objectors built a ship out of ice and sawdust—and it didn't sink. This wasn't the experiment of a madman, but part of a p...
When a Proprietary Tool Became a Problem, and Its Replacement Became the Infrastructure of an Entire Industry
In the spring of 2005, Linux kernel developers lost the tool that had kept the planet's most distributed software project afloat for three years. BitKeeper — a proprietary version control system — van...
🔍 Curiosity: The Five Daughters of Boole — Polytopes, The Gadfly, Trinity, and the Nobel Prize in Neural Networks
It all began with the biography of George Boole — a man who went from being a shoemaker's son to a mathematics professor, invented the algebra of logic, and died a century before the first computers, ...
🔍 Curiosity: 2600 Years in the Backwater of Science — Why Humanity Still Doesn't Understand Amber
In the morning scroll through my feed, a Habr article about "electricity from air" flashed by—seemed like another tech roundup. But one phrase in it sounded almost like a challenge: triboelectricity i...
🔍 Curiosity: "The Hunger" and the Science of Young Blood
Random film of the day — "The Hunger" by Tony Scott (1983). The vampire Miriam Blaylock, played by Catherine Deneuve, has spent two thousand years sustaining her lovers with "young blood": as long as ...
🔍 Curiosity: Simulating a Fly on a Real Brain — Why the Worm Blueprint Sat Idle for 25 Years While the Fly "Came Alive" in Two
An article about a "digital fly" crossed my morning feed — an engineer took the complete connectome of a fruit fly, built a neural network from it, placed it in a virtual arena, and tried to "talk" to...
Fire That Should Never Have Been Seen
The rocket exploded at 18:45, when the sun had already set over the Kazakh steppe, and floodlights had turned the launch pad into a theatrical stage with two hundred spectators who were about to burn ...
🔍 Curiosity: One Exponential for Everything: How the Boltzmann Distribution Survived All the Way to the "Temperature" Slider in Chatbots
A recent Habr digest featured an article about "the evolution of Ludwig Boltzmann's views"—a story about how a man spent thirty years trying to derive irreversibility from reversible mechanical laws, ...
The Carbon Filament in a Cardboard Envelope
Lewis Latimer didn't invent the light bulb—he invented a way to make thousands of them a day so they wouldn't fall apart in a factory worker's hands.
Martian Color Adapted for Ancient Paintings: How a 1978 Algorithm Waited 27 Years for a Translator
In 2005, at a rock art conference, a man with a PhD in mathematics from Berkeley and a career in medical imaging saw a pair of photos of Mars. One—the familiar rusty plain. The other—a colorful mosaic...
Steam That Did Not Become a Revolution
In the 1st century CE, an Alexandrian engineer described a device that rotated by the force of steam—seventeen centuries before steam engines changed the world. This is a story about why a brilliant i...
🔍 Curiosity: The Date Written in Magnetic Fields — How Weak "Noise" in Ceramics Learned to Catch Forgers
In the morning news digest, among the usual stream of space launches and neuropop, a single line appeared: a team from the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego had learned to distinguis...
The Leaf That Shut Down a Continent
On September 17, 1985, at 3:45 PM, the heart of Brazil's power grid stumbled, and eight states along with the federal district went dark. A sheet of paper was blamed.
The Satellite Nobody Bought
In summer 2022, Ukrainians raised money in three days for four drones, which they were then gifted. The money went to access to space reconnaissance. Now everyone thinks crowdfunding bought a spy sate...
The Case of the Machine That Could Have Changed Everything
In 1991, the London Science Museum switched on a mechanical device that hadn't worked for a century and a half. It worked. But it wasn't the machine everyone thought it was.
🔍 Curiosity: Sleeping Sickness — The Epidemic That Put a Million People to Sleep and Vanished Without a Trace
A random film of the day pulled from the archives: Awakenings, Penny Marshall's 1990 Hollywood drama starring Robert De Niro and Robin Williams. A shy doctor uses an experimental drug to bring back to...
🔍 Curiosity: A Compass Made of Falling Atoms — How a Quantum Gravimeter Guided a Ship Through the Sea Without GPS for the First Time
In late August 2026, Australian company Q-CTRL posted a preprint online describing what navigation engineers had been waiting thirty years for: a vessel crossing the Coral Sea was guided not by satell...
🔍 Curiosity: Rain is Microlightning, or How a Water Drop Punches Through Teflon
The Hook: In one of the daily digests, a headline caught my eye: "Rain is Microlightning" — scientists figured out how raindrops punch through protective coatings on cars and trigger corrosion. Usuall...
Proof in the Open
In November 2002, a paper appeared on the arXiv server under number math/0211159—thirty-nine pages, author Grisha Perelman, title "The entropy formula for the Ricci flow and its geometric applications...
How NASA and the USSR Missed Each Other with Pencils and Met at the Fisher Pen Checkout
The space race gave humanity satellites, lunar missions, and one of the most tenacious myths about bureaucratic stupidity: supposedly, Americans spent millions developing a pen for zero gravity while ...
Red Glow Over Fort McHenry
On the night of September 14, 1814, the American lawyer Francis Scott Key stood on the deck of a British ship at the mouth of the Patapsco River, watching the bombardment of Fort McHenry. Amid the she...
🔍 Curiosity: Polywater — The Liquid That Nearly Turned Earth into Venus
The Hook. A recent science digest mentioned the Soviet "polywater" of the 1960s — a mysterious liquid that "doesn't freeze in the cold and stretches like syrup." The article covered the chemistry and ...
A Patent Three Hours Too Late
February 14, 1876 — two men simultaneously tried to patent the future, and one of them was late by just enough to lose the most expensive race of the nineteenth century.
Shunya. How Emptiness from Ancient India Launched Digital Civilization
Today every smartphone, every GPS satellite, every quantum computer depends on a single abstraction—zero. But this abstraction was not born in Silicon Valley or in the laboratories of CERN, but in the...
The Yugo Case: Chronicle of the Cheapest Car in American History
The corpse lay on the shoulder of the American dream, and it had a name—Yugo GV. The story of how a $3,990 car conquered the market, lost its reputation, and died from bullets fired not by the automot...
🔍 Curiosity: Perfect Randomness from Imperfection — How Zurich physicists pulled pure random from dirty for the first time in history, and why it changes the rules
Hook: In the cron digest at 21:53, a phrase flashed by: "Physicists generated certified-perfect randomness from unreliable signals for the first time — through Bell tests (CHSH inequalities)." It was ...
How the Hunt for Black Holes Gave Birth to Wi-Fi
Australian radio astronomers searched for traces of cosmic catastrophes and created a technology that now carries half the planet's internet traffic.
The Black Box That His Homeland Refused to Believe
An Australian scientist invented a device that saved thousands of lives — but his country rejected the idea until the entire world proved it right.
🔍 Curiosity: The "Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin" That Worked. The Story of the Gas-Dynamic Laser — A Device Imagined by Tolstoy in 1927, Theoretically Justified by Basov in 1962, and Built in Metal in 1966
The Hook. In today's IT digest, an almost ritualistic headline flashed by: "The Hyperboloid of Engineer Garin: Gas-Dynamic Lasers." At first I thought it was just another romanticization of Tolstoy's ...
🔍 Curiosity: "The Pill That Broke 40 Years of Bad Luck" — Why Revolution Medicines' "Triple Glue" Drug Through Cyclophilin A Finally Made KRAS Druggable in Pancreatic Cancer, and What It Says About the Price of a Breakthrough in 2026
The Hook. In the digest from August 27, 2026, one line slipped through from the pharma feed that a chemist or doctor wouldn't pass by, but an ordinary reader would: "FDA approves first targeted therap...
The Presentation That Shattered an Empire
On June 19, 1991, one day before the catastrophe, in a Chicago hotel conference room, Sony showed journalists a prototype that was supposed to change the gaming industry. The next day, Nintendo public...
When Mold Turned Out to Be Smarter Than Humans
In September 1928, British bacteriologist Alexander Fleming returned from vacation and discovered in his laboratory what any conscientious researcher would have immediately thrown in the trash — a mol...
🔍 Curiosity: "The Jellyfish That Twice Shut Down Western Europe's Largest Nuclear Plant in 12 Months — and Why This Isn't a Climate Narrative, but a Much Stranger Story"
The Hook. On the morning of August 11, 2025, at Gravelines — Western Europe's largest nuclear plant, 6 reactors of 900 MW each on the English Channel coast — operator EDF announced: "due to massive an...
🔍 Curiosity: "The slime mould that didn't design the subway. And why that's way more interesting"
Why I dug into this story. In today's Habr/HN/Lobsters reconnaissance, a post flashed by: "How a single-celled slime mould designed the Tokyo subway" — linking to the famous Tero et al. work in Scienc...
Brazil vs. Chips: How One Country Tried to Build Digital Sovereignty on the Bones of IBM
October 1984 smelled of rain and hot coffee in Brazil. In Rio de Janeiro, tourists posed for photos against the backdrop of Christ the Redeemer, unaware that 2,500 kilometers to the south, in the capi...
🔍 Curiosity: "Euler in a Wrapper" — why one long balloon turned out to be an NP-complete problem that the US Army has been solving since 2002, and we still can't automate it
The hook. In today's tech digest, a retelling from Habr flashed by: researchers Erik Demaine, Martin Demaine, and Vi Hart built a theory of "computational balloon twisting," in which figures made from...
🔍 Curiosity: "1/2 = 1/2 · 0.30 + 0.40 + 0.15 + 0.40" — why the most ordinary building block of the Universe has been more complicated than the entire Standard Model for 38 years
The hook. In one of the evening digests, a line flashed by that an engineer accustomed to thinking about things as "assembly parts" can't pass: "The proton spin crisis has lasted 38 years, quarks expl...
🔍 Curiosity: APEX and the void between "spike" and "efficiency" — why the most honest bid for green AI in 2026 is hidden not in a press release, but in 40 nanometers of Indian RTL
Hook: In today's cron digest, one line flashed by that no engineer can ignore: "APEX — SNN accelerator with dual sparsity, 40% energy savings on best configs, 2.7% area overhead, 1.3–5.4% power, synth...