siliconcanals

In 1926, the U.S. government killed Yellowstone's last wolf pack — and spent the next 69 years watching the park quietly fall apart

In 1926, federal predator-control policy eliminated the last wolf pack from Yellowstone. What followed — eroding riverbanks, vanishing willows, a single beaver colony left in the entire park — took ...
Silicon Canals

Most of what you do all day runs on habit, not choice — but a new study found the habits are usually working for you, not against you

Researchers tracked 105 people six times a day for a week. About two-thirds of what they did was triggered by habit, and ...
Silicon Canals

Two men are each called the inventor of email: one chose the @ sign between two computers in 1971, the other wrote a program he named EMAIL as a 14-year-old in …

In late 1971, Ray Tomlinson wheeled his chair between two PDP-10 mainframes at BBN in Cambridge and sent the first message ...
Silicon Canals

The hardest part of a long marriage isn't always the arguments or the boredom — sometimes it's the strange grief of watching the person you married slowly become …

Long marriages ask something almost no one warns you about: the quiet grief of watching your partner slowly become someone ...
Silicon Canals

Before it was named Ceratothoa famosa, Nico Smit’s photograph of the parasite staring from a fish’s mouth had already gone viral

Cymothoa exigua is a parasitic isopod that enters a fish through the gills, drinks the blood out of its tongue until the ...
Silicon Canals

In April 1967, a Palo Alto history teacher named Ron Jones ran a five-day classroom experiment called 'The Third Wave' — and by day four, 200 students had joined a m…

In five days in April 1967, a 25-year-old history teacher in Palo Alto turned a classroom question about Nazi Germany into a ...
Silicon Canals

Apple just banned home services, crypto ATMs and bail bonds from Maps ads before the product even launched — and the exclusions reveal a bet against Google's entir…

Apple has published the rulebook for its forthcoming Maps advertising product, and the document reveals a deliberately ...
Silicon Canals

Psychology suggests we don't reason toward truth so much as defend what we already believe: we seek out the facts that confirm us and quietly wave away the res…

In 1998, a Tufts psychologist named Raymond Nickerson published a long review article pulling together decades of scattered ...
Silicon Canals

Nearly every plant on your plate is quietly chemically defended against being eaten — and a growing line of research suggests that faint, low-dose sting may be one of …

The bitter compounds in kale, broccoli and green tea are plant defence weapons — and the reason vegetables extend human life.
Silicon Canals

Psychology says people who push their chair in when they leave aren't performing for an audience, and the fact that they do it when no one is watching is precisely what …

Last week I watched a bloke in a near-empty café stand up, sling his bag over one shoulder, and then, before he walked out, ...
Silicon Canals

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

Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates have spent the past year trying to prove that enough capital can purchase a way out ...
Silicon Canals

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 to…

After 340 days on the ISS, astronaut Scott Kelly returned to Earth to find his own home felt staged, his skin broke out from ...