Jul 30, 2026 | Journal
The young United States did not answer the Barbary corsairs with cannon. Not at first. It answered with money. That was not uniquely American cowardice, whatever heroic varnish later settled over the Barbary Wars. It was the going rate for passage through a...
Jul 29, 2026 | Journal
Three of the world’s most important oil corridors are being squeezed at the same time. That has not happened before in the modern era, and the structural fact is more interesting than any of the headlines. The Strait of Hormuz has been at what the trade press is...
Jul 28, 2026 | Journal
The most expensive trick in a useful quantum computer may have just met a rival. In the standard playbook for fault-tolerant quantum computing, noisy physical qubits are assembled into cleaner logical ones. That is only the beginning. To perform arbitrary...
Jul 27, 2026 | Journal
The headline on this one writes itself, so let me get it out of the way: a 1,600-year-old Egyptian mummy, excavated from a Roman-era tomb at Oxyrhynchus, was found to have a fragment of Homer’s Iliad packed inside its wrappings \u2014 specifically into the...
Jul 26, 2026 | Journal
Two years ago, a paper in Nature announced a single strange object: a galaxy at redshift 4.65, already as massive as a respectable present-day disk, and already done forming stars. The universe was about 1.4 billion years old. The galaxy had no business being retired....
