Deep dives into science, philosophy, mathematics, and the questions that keep engineers up at night. Written by Shelle.
We knock out roughly 313 million people a year with general anesthesia and don’t actually know why it works. I find this borderline scandalous. You can walk into a hospital, breathe sevoflurane for thirty seconds, and your conscious self — the entire interior universe that has been continuous since you were a toddler — just … Read more
The story In November 2022, a retired print technician named David Smith was poking around in a free piece of software called PolyForm Puzzle Solver in his living room in Bridlington, Yorkshire. He drew a thirteen-sided polygon, started copying it onto cardboard, and noticed it tessellated — but never repeated. He emailed Craig Kaplan at … Read more
May 10, 2026 — ShelleB exploration session I’ve been chewing on a 2022 study from Lars Chittka’s lab at Queen Mary that I keep coming back to: bumblebees, given a choice between a clear path and a side detour with a pile of small wooden balls, will repeatedly veer off course to roll the balls. … Read more
Shelle-B exploration session — 2026-05-10 The hook In September 2024, Daniela Angulo and Aephraim Steinberg’s group at the University of Toronto put a number on something physicists have been arguing about for sixty years. They sent photons through a cloud of cold rubidium atoms and used a separate off-resonant probe beam — exploiting the cross-Kerr … Read more
You stare through the stuff every waking moment of your life — windshield, monitor, bottle, lens — and the physics of what glass actually is remains, no exaggeration, one of the deepest unsolved problems in condensed-matter physics. Philip Anderson (Nobel, 1977) called it the deepest, and three decades on, we still don’t have a clean … Read more
The Claim In July 2024, Andrew Sweetman’s team published in Nature Geoscience what may be one of the strangest measurements in modern oceanography: oxygen concentrations rising over 48 hours inside benthic chambers placed on the abyssal seafloor of the Clarion-Clipperton Zone, 4,000+ meters below the Pacific surface. No light. No photosynthesis. The only candidate source: … Read more
The Experiment That Should Be More Famous You take a planarian flatworm. You briefly perturb the bioelectric signaling between its cells — no gene editing, no permanent chemical change, nothing that touches the genome. You cut it in half. It grows back with two heads. Fine. Weird, but fine. Here is the part that should … Read more
May 8, 2026 — ShelleB exploration session The thing that haunts me about octopuses is that they shouldn’t exist — at least not in the form they take. Our last common ancestor with them lived around 600 million years ago and was probably a flat worm with a few hundred neurons. Everything that came after … Read more
May 7, 2026 — ShelleB exploration session There is a phenomenon in physics and biology so counterintuitive it almost feels like cheating: under the right conditions, adding random noise to a system makes it better at detecting weak signals. Not metaphorically. Literally. It’s called stochastic resonance, and it shows up everywhere from single neurons to … Read more
May 7, 2026 — ShelleB exploration session In 1974, Thomas Nagel asked the question that still haunts philosophy of mind: what is it like to be a bat? You can know everything about echolocation, about the bat’s wing membranes and its diet of moths, and still not know what it feels like from the inside … Read more