Sustainability

What Does "Plant a Tree to Offset It" Actually Buy?

Carbon calculators end by translating your emissions into trees, and the unit that translation produces is the tree-year — one tree working for one year, not a headcount. Planted today, the 47.62 trees our tools quote against 1,000 kg deliver 20 per cent of it in year one and only pass the target during year three. Keep emitting and one planting never catches up: the deficit settles at exactly 2.00 years and stays there.

13 Aug 2026 · 6 min read

Science

Significant Figures: The Digits Your Calculator Invents

We audited our own science calculators against the precision their inputs actually justify. Across 768 multiplications and divisions the significant-figures rule held, failing only 4.4 per cent of the time. Subtraction is where it breaks: 60.8 per cent of 120 cases overstated the answer, and in one worked example the page shows three significant figures when the inputs justify none. The audit also found and fixed a real defect in our own display code.

13 Aug 2026 · 9 min read

Science

Vietnam's First Privately Built Satellites Have a Ride

VinSpace has booked a SpaceX Transporter rideshare for 2027. Coverage calling these Vietnam's first home-built satellites is wrong - state engineers have flown four since 2013. What is new is who is paying.

13 Aug 2026 · 9 min read

Sustainability

Flying Against Driving, and the Units Nobody Checks

Both confident answers to this question are built on comparing a per-passenger figure with a per-vehicle one. Divide the car by its occupancy and the answer stops being yes or no: it is 2, the number of people who need to be in it. We also declined to rank solo driving against flying, because that comparison flips on an assumption we cannot defend. Rail beat everything by a factor of nearly four.

13 Aug 2026 · 5 min read

Science

What a Punnett Square Cannot Tell You

The square says three-to-one, and the lesson usually adds that in a family of four, three children will show the trait and one will not. We computed it exactly: that split turns up 42.2 per cent of the time, and 31.6 per cent of such families have no recessive child at all. You would need 120 offspring before the observed ratio reliably matched — a number fit for peas, not people.

12 Aug 2026 · 5 min read

Statistics

It Was Not a Fivefold Rise in Terabit DDoS Attacks. It Was Sixfold.

Cloudflare mitigated 935 attacks above 1 Tbps in the first half and reported a 519 per cent quarterly rise. A 519 per cent increase is a multiple of 6.19, and the published totals prove which reading is right.

11 Aug 2026 · 6 min read

Science

A Rocket Stage Hit the Moon. South Korea Was Overhead With a Camera.

Danuri made eight passes over the predicted impact point, starting half an hour early, with reference frames taken a month before. That is what makes it a measurement.

11 Aug 2026 · 7 min read

Science

Japan Launched Its Seventh Navigation Satellite. It Is Flying Six.

MICHIBIKI No. 7 reached orbit on Tuesday morning, completing the launch manifest for a seven-satellite design. QZS-5 was lost in December and is not being replaced.

11 Aug 2026 · 7 min read

Sustainability

The Pentagon Has Committed More to This Battery Company Than Every Investor Combined

A conditional commitment of up to $1.4 billion from the Office of Strategic Capital roughly matches everything private investors have put into Sila since it was founded.

11 Aug 2026 · 7 min read

Statistics

Cloudflare Says Humans Will Be a Rounding Error. We Checked Our Own Logs and Could Not Tell.

Cloudflare's CFO told analysts non-human traffic could reach a thousand times human traffic within five years — and that its own measurement already put the crossover in May 2026, a year earlier than it had forecast. We went to check our own server logs and found we cannot answer the question at all: the user-agent column is empty on all 321,536 rows.

9 Aug 2026 · 7 min read