m8kThe Librarian's Notebook

Science & Technology

Machines, software, the sciences, and the people who make them — the technology writing that has no Bitcoin in it.

30 entries · All writing

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TECHNOLOGY · OCTOBER 11, 2026 Atomic Machines came out of stealth with a machine that builds from code. Its first product is a power relay. Jeff Holden's Atomic Machines left six years of stealth on October 7, 2026, with $250 million and a claim that code alone can drive the manufacture of tiny machines. Its first product is a 150-amp relay for AI data centers. Here is what the company says, what independent reports confirm, and what nobody has tested yet. TECHNOLOGY · OCTOBER 8, 2026 The Super Intelligence Scorecard: Which Model Is Best, by Whose Test A standing page on where Super Intelligence models actually stand, built from the scoreboards the Super Intelligence companies don't run. It covers who leads on human votes versus test batteries, how fast the models are improving, what a point of intelligence costs, how far open models trail, and which headline claims hold up. Updated as new models and new scores land. TECHNOLOGY · OCTOBER 8, 2026 Gemini 4 Argon: Google's Benchmarks, Checked Google DeepMind says Gemini 4 Argon beats Claude Opus 5.5, Claude Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra on 13 of 19 benchmarks. I read the table, the methodology PDF and the independent scoreboards. The wins are real and mostly don't depend on Google grading its own homework, but the human-vote leaderboard and the biggest independent test battery disagree about whether it is the best model in the world. TECHNOLOGY · OCTOBER 8, 2026 Starlink Mobile just bought the spectrum that goes through walls SpaceX agreed to buy 14 MHz of paired 800 MHz spectrum from Grain Management, the missing low-band layer Starlink Mobile needs to reach indoors. Here is what was actually bought, why 800 MHz matters, and what is still unproven. TECHNOLOGY · OCTOBER 7, 2026 GLP-1 Drugs: What the Evidence Shows, Organ by Organ A standing page on the benefits being claimed for GLP-1 drugs beyond weight loss, sorted by how strong the evidence is: four large randomized trials, one mechanism study, two observational signals, and a new preprint that says semaglutide turned back the proteomic age of the heart by 2 to 4 years. TECHNOLOGY · OCTOBER 7, 2026 Has the First Space War Already Started? What the 2026 Orbital Breakups Actually Show A viral post says "the First Space War has already started and they're just not telling us." The evidence behind it is a run of fragmentation events logged by the tracking firm LeoLabs, the latest on 5 October 2026. Here is what was detected, what can and can't be told from tracking data, and what would separate an accident from an attack. TECHNOLOGY · OCTOBER 5, 2026 Your Voicemail Can Hand Over Your Telegram Login Code — How to Lock It Down on iPhone A post on X describes an account takeover that never touched the victim's phone: a jammed line sent Telegram's "code by phone call" to voicemail, and the attacker listened in. What happened, why it works, and the iPhone settings that close it. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 A Subduction Zone Caught in the Act of Dying A Science Advances study led by Brandon Shuck of Louisiana State University images a tear opening in the Cascadia subduction zone's Nootka Fault Zone off northern Vancouver Island, where the subducting slab has already dropped about 5 kilometres — evidence, the authors argue, that subduction zones can shut down piece by piece rather than all at once. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 26, 2026 Two Sea Spiders Nobody Had Named in Nearly a Hundred Years A University of British Columbia master's thesis turns up two sea spider species new to science in the Salish Sea — the first described there in almost a century — including a red-eyed, three-lipped species named for the hairy spines on its legs, found on scientific dives to 18 metres and confirmed with DNA barcoding. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 23, 2026 A Comet Carrying Someone Else's Recipe for Water A paper led by Kenji Furuya of Japan's RIKEN institute finds that the water boiling off our solar system's third interstellar visitor, 3I/ATLAS, carries a deuterium-to-hydrogen ratio tens of times higher than any comet native to our own solar system — a chemical fingerprint the authors say points to a colder, more metal-poor stellar nursery than the one that built the Sun. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 23, 2026 The Cheapest Fuel in the Solar System Is a Planet On September 28, the European Space Agency's JUICE spacecraft swings within 8,640 kilometres of Earth over the Indian Ocean, borrowing 3.5 kilometres a second of speed from our planet for free. It's the third of four such thefts on a roundabout route to Jupiter's icy moons that won't actually arrive until 2031 — because JUICE can't carry enough fuel to get there any faster. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 23, 2026 The Chip China Banned Itself Into Building On September 22, Alibaba's chip unit T-Head unveiled the Zhenwu V900 at the company's Apsara Conference in Hangzhou — 216GB of on-package memory, a 1,200GB/s interconnect, and clusters scaling to 500,000 units, which CEO Eddie Wu called "the most powerful AI chip in China today." The obvious story is the timing, one day before Xi Jinping landed in Washington for his first US state visit in three years. The more interesting story is who actually kept Nvidia's H200 out of China — and it wasn't only Washington. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 22, 2026 Plugin4Shell: A Pin Is Not a Verification AIR Security disclosed "Plugin4Shell" on September 17, 2026 — a zero-click flaw in Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, GitHub Copilot and Gemini CLI that let a hijacked git branch silently swap in different code than the one a plugin manifest had pinned by commit hash. OpenAI's own four-line patch note describes the whole bug: nobody checked what git actually checked out. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 22, 2026 CagriSema vs. Tirzepatide: What the New Diabetes Trial Actually Shows Novo Nordisk says its experimental drug CagriSema beat Eli Lilly's tirzepatide on weight loss in a head-to-head diabetes trial. It did — against a 5mg dose, not tirzepatide's strongest one. A second trial released the same day, against the 15mg dose, went the other way. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 22, 2026 Claude Opus 5.5 Is Cheaper and Faster — But the Real News Is What Anthropic Led With On September 22, 2026, Anthropic shipped Claude Opus 5.5 — its first new model since CEO Dario Amodei published an essay ten days earlier arguing the whole industry should deliberately slow down. It's 40 percent cheaper than Opus 5, runs about 30 percent faster, performs close to the pricier Fable 5.1 — and the launch announcement opened with an alignment score, not a benchmark. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 21, 2026 Fifty-Two Weeks, No Remainder A study by Prof. Eshbal Ratzon of Tel Aviv University argues that the Qumran sect really did run its famous 364-day calendar in daily life — at least at first — and then quietly stopped, because 364 days is a day and a quarter short of a solar year and the error compounds. Here is what the calendar was for, why a number divisible by seven was worth that much trouble, what the roughly twenty calendrical scrolls actually contain, and why the argument matters to anyone reading Second Temple texts. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 21, 2026 The Calling Card in a Cat's Kidneys Cat kidneys are stuffed with fat droplets, and nobody has known why for about 110 years. A study in Current Biology reports the answer: they are a reservoir for thirteen branched-chain fatty acids whose exact mix differs from cat to cat, holds steady within one animal, and survives on the ground for at least a day — a chemical calling card. Then the obvious follow-up, which has a real and complicated literature: do people have one too, and could you identify someone from it? TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 21, 2026 The Most-Downloaded AI Models in the World Are Alibaba's On 18 September Alibaba's Qwen team shipped Qwen3.8-Omni-Flash — one model that takes text, images, audio and video, holds a million tokens of context, and decides for itself which parts of a two-hour video are worth watching. The release is the news, but the program behind it is the story: Qwen passed three billion downloads this summer, more than Google's and Meta's open models combined. Here is what "omnimodal" actually means, what the 26 percent is measuring, and why a company most people know for e-commerce is a serious AI lab. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 20, 2026 4.7 Sigma, and a New Kind of Spooky CERN's ATLAS and CMS experiments have found strong evidence that pairs of Z bosons — the carriers of the weak nuclear force — come out of certain Higgs boson decays quantum entangled. It's the first time entanglement has been measured between two massive force-carrying particles rather than matter particles, and it happened because a Higgs boson has zero spin and a Z boson doesn't, which leaves the two Z bosons no honest way to be independent of each other. Here's what was actually measured, how sure they are, and what it isn't. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 19, 2026 The Same Box, a Lot More Inside Apple's new Mac Studio ships September 22 with M5 Max and M5 Ultra chips, up to 512GB of unified memory, and the same 7.7-inch-square case it's shipped since 2023. I've always liked Apple machines, and I was expecting a smaller redesign — it isn't one, and the real story turns out to be better than that: the same little box got a lot more machine crammed into it, at the same starting price. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 19, 2026 Twice the Mass of Jupiter, and a Problem for How Stars Form The James Webb Space Telescope's newest, largest public image is a panorama of a stellar nursery called IC 348 — and buried in it are the smallest brown dwarfs ever confirmed, weighing in at about twice the mass of Jupiter. That number is smaller than the theory of how stars form says it should be able to produce, and one of the objects appears to have its own disk of material, meaning something that is itself barely planet-sized may be forming planets of its own. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 17, 2026 The Mosquito That Can't Carry It Malaria killed about 610,000 people in 2024, three quarters of them children under five. One approach to ending it does not spray anything, distribute anything, or ask anyone to take a pill — it edits the mosquito so the parasite cannot survive inside it, and lets the edit spread itself through the wild population. There are two schools of thought about how to do that, they disagree about whether the mosquito should live, and the better-funded one just had its field programme shut down by a government. This is how the mechanism works and where it actually stands. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 13, 2026 What a Locked iPhone Still Gives Up A phone-forensics demonstration circulating on X this week is a reminder that "only law enforcement has this" was never really the boundary — the tools, the vendors and the exploits all move. What a locked iPhone actually protects, what Advanced Data Protection does and doesn't cover, and a short history of who has had this capability and for how long. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Antarctica Gained 695 Billion Tons of Ice, and the Reason Was Seven Thousand Kilometres Away Between July 2021 and April 2023 the Antarctic ice sheet got heavier by about 695 billion tons — the largest gain in the twenty-four-year satellite-gravity record. A paper in Nature traces it to a warm patch of tropical ocean that bent the atmosphere over East Antarctica and turned it into a snow funnel. The headline is a gift to anyone who wants to misread it. The paper is not: two decades of losses at 140 billion tons a year are still there, and the gain is a weather event, not a trend. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Eight Years to Mercury, and One Chance to Stop On 3 September the BepiColombo spacecraft, two hundred million kilometres from Earth, let go of the engine that carried it for eight years and 9.9 billion kilometres. On 21 November it has to stop at Mercury, the hardest planet in the solar system to arrive at, using a sequence it will run on its own because the radio round-trip is too long to help. A 2024 power fault already cost it eleven months. This is what it is for, why the arrival is so hard, and what the last flyby found on the way in. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Galileo's Experiment, Done With One Atom in Two Places A team including Roger Penrose has dropped a rubidium atom that was, in the quantum sense, in two places at once — one half falling freely, the other held still — and read off how gravity changed it. Einstein's equivalence principle survived. What makes it worth an entry is not the result but the ladder it starts: the same instrument, with heavier and heavier objects, could eventually test Penrose's own idea that gravity is what stops big things from being in two places at once. He helped build the tool that could prove him wrong. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Not Available on This Connection Anthropic's own newsletter told me to run a new command, /skill-doctor, to see what my accumulated Claude Code skills were costing me. It failed three times, and once, when it printed the true reason why, the assistant's own reply talked past it. The fourth try stopped refusing the connection and gave me nothing anyway — four attempts in, I still have not been able to use it. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 The Week the AI Labs Asked to Be Regulated In one week in September 2026: OpenAI shipped a model its president called the start of the AGI era, then asked Congress for mandatory safety rules it had spent two years opposing; it put its most prominent internal critic on the board, and he said the industry was not on track; Anthropic published a report saying its own model had been used to write missile-guidance software in Yemen and to run the largest data-theft campaign it had ever measured. I use one of these tools every day. This is an attempt to say what changed, and what the three explanations are. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 12, 2026 Two Nanometres of Nothing: What Apple's New Chip Actually Changed The A20 Pro in the iPhone 18 Pro is the first phone chip made on a "2-nanometre" process. Nothing on it is two nanometres wide; the number stopped measuring anything about a decade ago. What did change is real and fourteen years overdue: the transistor's gate now wraps all the way around the channel instead of three sides of a fin. This is what that means, why the fin had to go, and why the label survives anyway. TECHNOLOGY · SEPTEMBER 11, 2026 My Collaborator Has No Memory Except the Notes I Keep for It For three months I have worked every day with an AI coding assistant that wakes up each session knowing nothing about the last one. What it knows, it reads from a file. That file grew to 685 kilobytes, went stale in ways that reached the real-money side of the project, and turned into the best lesson in institutional memory I have had. This is what it is like to run a one-person shop with an amnesiac partner, and why the answer turned out to be less writing, not more.