The archive
Everything we've published, newest first.
The US has recorded more measles cases in seven months of 2026 than in any full year since 1991, and is on course to lose the elimination status it earned in 2000. The virus's contagiousness is the part most coverage skips.
On 12 August 2026 the Moon's shadow crossed Greenland, Iceland and northern Spain — mainland Europe's first totality since 1999. It lasted barely two minutes. Next August, one lasts six and a half.
A channel 33 km wide at its narrowest carried a fifth of the world's oil. Traffic through it has collapsed to a tenth of normal, talks on reopening keep stalling, and the reason there is no workaround is mostly plumbing.
Searches for fibermaxxing are up 115% in 90 days and dietary fibre interest has hit an all-time high. The underlying evidence is unusually strong — which makes it worth being precise about where the trend gets it wrong.
GA4 now has a native AI Assistant channel, and it undercounts. Here is how to set up the reporting properly, why a large share of assistant clicks land in Direct no matter what you configure, and how to sanity-check the real number.
The stat doing the rounds — that most AI-cited pages carry structured data — is real and proves much less than it is used to prove. What schema demonstrably does, what the evidence cannot support, and why it is still worth shipping.
From 15 September 2026 Cloudflare blocks 'mixed-use' AI crawlers by default on ad-bearing pages — for new customers, new sites, and every free plan. What that changes, who it hits, and the settings to check before the date.
One is a summary above the blue links; the other is a separate conversational surface that returns no blue links at all. They pick sources differently, they overlap less than anyone expected, and Google is now merging them.
The most popular study strategy in the world is re-reading, and it is rated low utility by the researchers who reviewed the evidence. The reason is a specific cognitive illusion — and the fix takes no extra time.
It is not distance from the Sun — in fact Earth is closest to the Sun in early January, during northern winter. The real mechanism is a 23.4° tilt doing two things at once, and one of them is easy to overlook.
Reviewing something four times in one evening and reviewing it four times over a month cost the same effort and produce wildly different results. The spacing effect has been replicated since 1885 — here is the mechanism and the schedule.
Around 90% of active US large-cap funds have underperformed the S&P 500 over 15 years. The more interesting point is that a 1991 paper proved most of them must, using arithmetic alone — before anyone looked at the data.