Silicon Canals

There’s a reason “I’ll start Monday” keeps working — researchers found people are measurably more likely to hit the gym, start a diet, or set a new goal right after a ...

A 2014 study tracked years of diet searches, hundreds of thousands of gym visits, and tens of thousands of goal commitments and kept finding the same pattern: the urge to chase a goal spikes right ...
Silicon Canals

People who were always described as "easy to talk to" often reach their fifties realizing that being a good listener quietly excused everyone around them from ever learning to ...

For most of my life, "you're so easy to talk to" felt like the highest compliment a person could hand me. I was the friend who remembered the details, who ...
Silicon Canals

Europe’s new tech-sovereignty plan doesn’t ban U.S. cloud giants — it sets four levels of “sovereignty” for sensitive government data, and an American law makes the ...

On June 3 the European Commission proposed the Cloud and AI Development Act, which grades cloud providers on four sovereignty levels for public-sector data. The rules stop short of a ban, but the ...
Silicon Canals

We tend to think our actions follow from our beliefs — but cognitive dissonance means we often rewrite our beliefs to justify what we've already done, not the reverse

More than a decade ago, I left a finance job, moved to Vietnam, and eventually started writing for a living. For a long time ...
Silicon Canals

People who reach their seventies genuinely content usually didn't get there by forgiving everyone; they got there by quietly releasing the need for certain people t…

We tend to assume that the calm you see in some older people is the reward for a lifetime of forgiveness. The picture is ...
Silicon Canals

Psychology says people who grew up working class aren't less capable than their higher-class peers in job interviews — they're simply less overconfident, and overco…

Job interviews are supposed to measure competence. In practice, they often measure a performance that sits beside competence: ...
Silicon Canals

The generation that grew up with one shared phone in the hallway learned something their children never had to: how to be bored in front of other people without reaching for an ...

Picture a narrow hallway in a small apartment. A single phone is bolted to the wall, and a teenager twists the cord around her finger while her whole family ...
Silicon Canals

TSMC says it manufactured 12,682 different products for 534 customers in 2025 — meaning the chips inside your phone, car, and bank all trace back to one company …

TSMC's 2025 annual report disclosed it manufactured 12,682 unique chip designs for 534 customers — meaning Apple, Nvidia, ...
Silicon Canals

Palm oil hides on supermarket labels under more than 200 different names — from sodium lauryl sulfate to glycerol stearate — and most shoppers have no idea they'r…

Palm oil sits in roughly half of all packaged supermarket products, but it almost never appears on the label as "palm". The ...