The Librarian's Notebook

Science & Technology

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

6 entries · All writing

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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 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.