News from Silicon Canals

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

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Silicon Canals Editorial Team @ Silicon Canals · 07/15/2026 04:47 EDT

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. Read more ›

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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

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Silicon Canals Editorial Team @ Silicon Canals · 07/15/2026 04:10 EDT

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. Read more ›

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Saudi and UAE sovereign AI plans still rely on Nvidia and US technology

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Canal Letter @ Silicon Canals · 07/15/2026 03:44 EDT

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have spent the past year trying to prove that enough capital can purchase a way out of a monopoly. Read more ›

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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

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Silicon Canals Editorial Team @ Silicon Canals · 07/15/2026 03:22 EDT

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. Read more ›

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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

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Silicon Canals Editorial Team @ Silicon Canals · 07/15/2026 03:01 EDT

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. Read more ›

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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

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Silicon Canals Editorial Team @ Silicon Canals · 07/15/2026 00:38 EDT

Singapore became an independent country on 9 August 1965 after a brief and bitter union with Malaysia. It entered that day with no hinterland, no industrial base, no significant natural resources and a water supply that depended heavily on agreements with the country it had just left. “Expelled” is a fair description of the political ... Read more Read more ›

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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

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Silicon Canals Editorial Team @ Silicon Canals · 07/15/2026 00:37 EDT

A physical book makes a narrow promise. Open it and there will be the book. No messages will arrive in the margin. No application will ask to be updated. No alert will appear over the final sentence of a chapter. For adults who continue to choose print, that limitation can be the point. The preference ... Read more Read more ›

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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

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Silicon Canals Editorial Team @ Silicon Canals · 07/14/2026 21:37 EDT

There is a particular kind of desk that looks as if it belongs to two eras at once. A smartphone handles messages, maps, calls and appointments. Beside it sits a paper calendar, open to the whole month, with crossings-out, arrows and small blocks of handwriting. The easy interpretation is that its owner has failed to ... Read more Read more ›

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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

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Silicon Canals Editorial Team @ Silicon Canals · 07/14/2026 21:00 EDT

Stand like a superhero for two minutes before a job interview, and your body chemistry shifts to make you braver. That was the promise of one of the most-watched talks in TED’s history. The trouble is that the claim about your hormones did not hold up, and the scientist who first reported it later said ... Read more Read more ›

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

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Silicon Canals Editorial Team @ Silicon Canals · 07/14/2026 20:30 EDT

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. Maybe it is a shopping list. Maybe it is the three things that have to happen tomorrow. Maybe it is an idea that will disappear if it is ... Read more Read more ›

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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

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Silicon Canals Editorial Team @ Silicon Canals · 07/14/2026 15:27 EDT

Marcus Aurelius wrote one of his clearest warnings about ambition in the fourth book of the notes now called Meditations. A person longing for fame after death, he argued, forgets that everyone preserving the memory will also die. Their successors will die too, until the chain of remembrance ends. The observation came from the Roman ... Read more Read more ›

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In 2023, two researchers whose earlier work had reached opposite conclusions about money and happiness — Daniel Kahneman, who had said well-being plateaued around $75,000, and Matthew Killingsworth, who had said it kept rising — carried out an “adversarial collaboration” and reconciled their findings in PNAS: for most people happiness does keep rising with income beyond $100,000, while an unhappy minority plateaus

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Mal James @ Silicon Canals · 07/14/2026 14:00 EDT

For a few years I carried a tidy little fact around. Money stops mattering for happiness once you clear about $75,000. Past that, you are just chasing numbers on a screen. I used to say it at dinners. I half believed it because it let me off a hook I could not quite name, the ... Read more Read more ›

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Psychology says the loneliest people in retirement aren’t the ones who never made friends — they’re the ones who spent forty years being the friend everyone else leaned on, and quietly forgot to build anything for themselves

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Daniel Moran @ Silicon Canals · 07/14/2026 13:15 EDT

My grandmother knew everyone’s blood type. Her kids, the grandkids, the cousins who weren’t technically cousins, the neighbour two doors down. She kept it all in her head like a switchboard operator who never got to clock off. Somebody sick, somebody broke, somebody in a fight with somebody else, she was the first call. She ... Read more Read more ›

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Psychology says people who regularly eat alone in public without self-consciousness aren’t loners, they’re often the ones who have learned to distinguish between solitude and loneliness, a distinction that takes most people decades to make

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Daniel Moran @ Silicon Canals · 07/14/2026 12:30 EDT

“Table seven, one cover.” That was the line that used to make my floor staff sigh. One cover means a single diner. Somebody eating dinner with nobody across from them. We treated it as a tiny logistics problem, which tells you plenty about how the world reads a person who shows up to a nice ... Read more Read more ›

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Psychology says people who remain kind despite a difficult life aren’t weak or in denial — they’re often running on a kind of strength that only forms under sustained pressure, the way certain metals do

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Daniel Moran @ Silicon Canals · 07/14/2026 12:15 EDT

Some of the gentlest people I have ever met had lives that would flatten most of us. A woman who worked the pass at one of my restaurants comes to mind. She had every reason to be hard. Instead she was the one who noticed when a new hire hadn’t eaten, who covered a shift ... Read more Read more ›

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Most people assume Dubai became rich from oil, but oil now accounts for less than 1% of the emirate’s GDP — down from 50% in the 1980s — with tourism, trade, and aviation doing the work instead

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Silicon Canals Editorial Team @ Silicon Canals · 07/14/2026 10:30 EDT

Dubai is routinely treated as an oil city because it is wealthy, Gulf-based and visually associated with the wider United Arab Emirates. Its economy now looks very different. Trade is its largest directly measured sector, while finance, transport, property, tourism and aviation carry much of the rest. The familiar claim that oil has fallen from ... Read more Read more ›

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Thought of the day by Stoic philosopher Epictetus: “Wealth consists not in having great possessions, but in having few wants”

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Mal James @ Silicon Canals · 07/14/2026 09:00 EDT

I have moved between Ireland and Southeast Asia year after year for a while now, and one thing has crept up on me quietly. My wants have shrunk. Not because I decided to want less. They just receded on their own, and the strange part is they receded most not in the cheaper country but ... Read more Read more ›

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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

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Silicon Canals Editorial Team @ Silicon Canals · 07/14/2026 08:52 EDT

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. Read more ›

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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

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Silicon Canals Editorial Team @ Silicon Canals · 07/14/2026 08:29 EDT

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. Read more ›

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In 1965, Okinawa held the world’s highest concentration of centenarians — six decades later, its young men now die earlier than the Japanese average

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Silicon Canals Editorial Team @ Silicon Canals · 07/14/2026 07:01 EDT

In 1965, Okinawa produced more centenarians per capita than anywhere on Earth. By 2000, its young men were dying earlier than the Japanese average. The unplanned experiment on one island reveals what the wellness industry keeps missing about longevity. Read more ›

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