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Mind

People who fall asleep with the television on aren't lazy or undisciplined — many learned in childhood that voices in another room meant the house was safe, and the nervous system still reads the equation the same way decades later

Falling asleep to the television isn't laziness — it's a self-soothing strategy with deep roots. But new research on broadband background noise suggests the cost is showing up in the parts of sleep you can't feel directly.

By Silicon Canals Editorial Team · Jun 25, 2026
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Technology

Innovation ecosystems and the people building them. European startup news, global ecosystem coverage, and the engineering inside the companies shaping the technology economy.

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In 1977, Jerry Ehman was paging through computer printouts from Ohio State's Big Ear telescope when he saw a 72-second signal so strong and so cleanly from the direction of Sagittarius that he circled the column in red ballpoint and wrote a single word in the margin: Wow!

On August 15, 1977, Ohio State's Big Ear radio telescope recorded a 72-second narrow-band signal from Sagittarius that was 30 times louder than background noise — sitting almost exactly on the hydrogen line where SETI researchers had been listening since 1959. Jerry Ehman circled it in red ballpoint days later. It has never been heard again.
  1. The Netherlands just sent its trade minister to lobby US Congress directly — and the reason exposes who actually pays when Washington tightens the chip war
  2. MoEngage buys Aampe to bet enterprise marketing's future belongs to per-customer AI agents, not segments
  3. In 1957, a stray dog named Laika was strapped into Sputnik 2 and launched into orbit about a week after being plucked off the streets of Moscow, and Soviet engineers admitted decades later that she died of overheating within hours because the thermal control system failed and there had never been a plan to bring her home
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Politics

The political and policy forces shaping technology. Capital, regulation, geopolitics, surveillance, antitrust, and the politics of innovation.

  1. Wirecard's Singapore whistleblower was a junior lawyer named Pav Gill — and his mother's intervention saved the evidence Munich tried to bury
  2. Trump rebukes Netanyahu at G7 and floats Syria role against Hezbollah
  3. Elon Musk's $288M political spend in 2024 was the largest individual donation in American electoral history
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Mind

The human behaviour behind the work. Decision-making, attention, identity, performance, and the everyday observations that explain how people live and work.

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We tend to think romantic love fades into something quieter with age, but when researchers scanned the brains of people in their 50s and 60s who said they were still madly in love after decades of marriage, they found that the same reward circuits seen in new lovers were still active — suggesting that for some couples, passion doesn’t disappear; it simply loses its anxious edge.

Acevedo, Aron, Fisher, and Brown's fMRI study suggests that, for some long-term couples, romantic reward can persist alongside attachment and lower obsession.
  1. Psychology says people who seem to mellow noticeably in their 50s and 60s aren’t necessarily losing their edge — they may be showing a measurable pattern of personality maturation. In a 50-year study tracking Americans from age 16 to 66, researchers found that people tended, on average, to become more agreeable, more conscientious, and more emotionally stable over time.
  2. People with a richer vocabulary for their inner life have measurably lower rates of depression — not because they feel less, but because they feel more precisely
  3. Psychology suggests that people who feel drawn to the ocean aren’t just being sentimental: research on “blue spaces” finds that time near water is linked with lower stress, better mood, and a restorative state of effortless attention — the kind of calm, lightly absorbed focus that can feel almost meditative.
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Europe

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In 1901, sponge divers sheltering from a storm off the Greek island of Antikythera surfaced with a corroded bronze lump that sat in an Athens museum for decades before anyone realised it was a 2,000-year-old geared computer that could predict eclipses and track the Olympic Games
  1. In 1844, Samuel Morse tapped out 'What hath God wrought' from the US Capitol to a Baltimore railroad depot, and the four-word message took 38 miles of copper wire and a verse his friend's daughter had chosen from the Book of Numbers
  2. Goldman Sachs paid $3.9 billion to settle with Malaysia over 1MDB — the bond fees that triggered it were just $600 million

North America

New York
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In 1944, an IBM machine called the Harvard Mark I clattered through a calculation for the Manhattan Project at three additions per second, fed by paper tape and operated by a young Navy lieutenant named Grace Hopper who took the graveyard shift more often than anyone and slept beside it on a cot, waking the moment the relays went quiet because a silent machine meant something had gone wrong
  1. A single bolt of lightning that crossed Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi in April 2020 stretched 768 kilometres end to end, once the longest single flash ever recorded and roughly the distance from New York City to Columbus
  2. Cambodia stripped Chen Zhi of citizenship in January 2026 and handed the 'Neak Oknha' royal advisor to Beijing — not Brooklyn

Asia

Singapore
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Nobody talks about the layer underneath physical AI, and the man whose code runs on 6 billion devices just raised $5M to own it before the robot fleets arrive
  1. The US Justice Department seized 127,271 bitcoin worth $15B — the largest forfeiture in American history traces back to a 2020 mining hack nobody reported
  2. Adyen processes payments for Uber, Spotify, eBay, and Microsoft from an Amsterdam canal house where the engineering team still eats lunch at a single long table, and the company went public worth €7 billion with fewer staff than a midsize hotel

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Regulation

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Curiosities

Axolotls can regrow entire limbs, parts of their heart, sections of their spinal cord, and even portions of their brain, and they do it without forming scar tissue, which is why labs from Vienna to Boston keep colonies of them alive specifically to figure out what humans lost

Axolotls regrow limbs, heart tissue, spinal cord and brain without forming scars. From Vienna's Hand2 discovery to a 2026 PNAS paper on the SP8 gene, here's why labs worldwide keep the Mexican salamander alive.

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Technology

Canal Letter

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Mach Industries raised $300M at a $1.8B valuation — and its new in-house rocket-motor arm targets a U.S. supply bottleneck

A three-year-old unmanned-systems maker just raised $300 million. Two weeks earlier it bought a propulsion company, a move aimed at one of the defense industry's most stubborn shortages.
  1. One of the five brothers who kept Ubisoft independent for 40 years just died in a plane crash, and the real question is whether the family voting bloc can survive its first generational test
  2. A Nobel laureate just walked out of Google DeepMind for Anthropic, and the part nobody is discussing is what Alphabet had reassigned him to do before he left
  3. BlackRock and Wellington just backed a 1977 Japanese taxi operator's robotaxi pivot — and the demographic math behind the deal explains why Waymo needs Go more than Go needs Waymo
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Politics

Cabinet

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Stockholm's Fika Jobs just raised $4M to kill the resume with AI video interviews — and the part nobody is pricing in is what happens when employers see your face before your skills

Stockholm-based Fika Jobs has raised a $4 million pre-seed round to build what it describes as a video-first hiring platform, where candidates are interviewed by an AI agent rather than screened through resumes, as reported by TechCrunch . The round was led by Luminar Ventures, with participation from Alliance VC and King co-founders Sebastian Knutsson and Riccardo Zacconi, the duo behind Candy Crush.
  1. Tech layoffs are running 44% ahead of last year while the same companies post record profits and mint new billionaires — and the structural setup is stranger than 2008 because there's no crash to blame
  2. The UK's Online Safety Act gives Ofcom the power to fine platforms 10% of their global revenue, which for Meta alone would be over $16 billion, and the enforcement unit responsible for issuing those fines has fewer than 50 staff
  3. Norway's sovereign wealth fund owns roughly 1.5% of every listed company on Earth, and the team deciding how it votes at 9,000 annual shareholder meetings is smaller than the compliance department of a single mid-sized European bank
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Mind

Field Notes

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Most people don't realise the hardest part of ageing isn't losing abilities, it's outliving everyone who knew the younger version of you

A woman in her late eighties once said it like this, almost as an aside: "There's no one left who remembers me as a girl." She had outlived two husbands, a sister, the neighbours from the street she grew up on.
  1. We picture the dark web as the internet's underworld, but it was built by Navy researchers who understood a quiet truth — that anonymity only protects anyone if it protects everyone, including the people we'd rather it didn't
  2. A Johns Hopkins study tracked the point at which a behaviour turns from a choice into a habit — and found it does not fade in gradually, it switches over all at once
  3. The most reliable sign that someone is genuinely confident, rather than performing it, is that they can afford to be interested in you, because they're not using the conversation to manage how they appear in it
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