Technology & Invention
12 pieces · 5.3 hours of reading
Artificial Intelligence: Where It Came From and Where It Stands
Seventy years of bold promises, two hard winters and one very sudden spring, and an honest look at where things stand in late 2026.
Deep dive28 min02How Large Language Models Actually Work
One small trick, guessing the next word, repeated trillions of times. What that really means, and what nobody yet understands.
Deep diveInteractive21 min03Blockchain, Explained: Bitcoin, Ethereum, and What a Shared Ledger Is Actually Good For
How strangers learned to keep one honest record without a bank, what it costs, and where the idea earns its keep.
Deep diveInteractive25 min04The Internet: From ARPANET to the Network in Your Pocket
How a handful of researchers built a network that nobody owns, and how it ended up carrying three-quarters of humanity.
Deep dive27 min05Flying Machines
For most of history, human flight was a legend and a broken leg. Then, in little more than a century, it became one of the safest ways to cross a continent. How that happened, how a wing really works, and where aviation stands at the end of 2026.
Deep diveInteractive29 min06Rockets and Spaceflight: From Fireworks to Reusable Boosters
A rocket is the only machine that can push itself through empty space, and the maths of how it does that makes getting to orbit brutally hard. Here is how humans learned to do it anyway, what it cost, and what changed when rockets started landing.
Deep dive27 min07Cars: From the Benz Patent-Motorwagen to Electric and Self-Driving
In 140 years the car went from a three-wheeled curiosity that frightened horses to the machine that shaped our cities, our wars over oil and our air. Here is where it came from, how it works, what it cost, and where it stands at the end of 2026.
Deep dive27 min08Batteries
A battery is a controlled chemical reaction that you can carry in your pocket and switch on and off. Here is how it works, who worked it out, why the one in your phone wears out, why car batteries got about ten times cheaper, and what digging up the ingredients costs.
Deep diveInteractive25 min09Nuclear Energy: The Promise, the Accidents, and the Comeback
Born inside a bomb programme, sold as the power of the future, nearly killed by three accidents, and now being courted by the companies that run the world's data centres.
Deep dive29 min10How Screens Work
From a German physicist's tube for watching electric currents to the folding glass in your pocket: how screens make light and colour, why some of them flicker and some never do, and what the evidence really says about screens and sleep.
Deep diveInteractive26 min11Processors: How a CPU Thinks
Everything your phone does comes down to billions of tiny switches flipping on and off, obeying a short list of very simple instructions. Here is how we got from a lump of germanium in 1947 to that, how it actually works, and who makes it now.
Deep diveInteractive29 min12GPUs: From Video Games to the Engine of AI
A chip designed to colour in millions of pixels for video games turned out to be exactly what artificial intelligence needed. This is how that accident happened, how the chip works, and why in 2026 it sits at the centre of a trillion-dollar industry and a geopolitical fight.
Deep dive26 min