Snap’s AR glasses, Meta’s brain-to-text project, and IBM’s 3D chip all point at hardware getting stranger and denser. Plus: overmorrow, cheaper light, and beavers keeping a London station dry. [DVYio Newsletter](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/FGyfSCXR) Tech [A man wears black Snap Specs AR glasses at a crowded event, with a blurred “SPECS” sign in the background.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/CYYwNvPy) [Snap's new AR glasses last for four hours and cost £1,995](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/CYYwNvPy) Snap's new glasses, called Specs, aren't just for playing music or taking calls like most smart glasses on the market. They're proper AR glasses, meaning they layer digital images and information directly onto what you see in the real world (think a set of directions floating in front of you as you walk, rather than a voice in your ear telling you where to turn). That extra tech comes at a cost, literally: £1,995 in the UK, cheaper than Apple's Vision Pro headset but nearly ten times pricier than Meta's basic smart glasses. It also means shorter battery life, just four hours of mixed use before you need the charging case. Snap plans to start shipping Specs to the US, UK, and France this autumn, with a $200 refundable deposit needed to reserve a pair now. [A hand holds an iPhone showing the iCloud logo, with a blurred Apple logo in the background.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/j8vS6p2Y) [Which? says UK iCloud users could get up to £77 if its Apple claim wins](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/j8vS6p2Y) Your iPhone gives you a small pot of free iCloud storage, and once your photos fill it up, Apple nudges you towards a paid plan, anywhere from 99p a month for 50GB up to £54.99 a month for 12TB. Apple's defence is that nobody has to pay, because there are "plenty of alternatives to choose from" if you'd rather store your backups somewhere else. Which? disagrees, and the "somewhere else" is where the argument actually lives. Which? says Apple doesn't let rival storage apps plug into your iPhone or iPad the way iCloud does; Apple cites security. In practice, that means a rival service can back up your photos, but it can't quietly sync your messages, contacts, and settings the way iCloud does in the background. So switching away isn't like swapping one app for another that does the same job. It's more like moving house and discovering the new place doesn't have plumbing for half your appliances: technically possible, but you lose things you'd got used to. That gap is exactly what Which? points to when it says users are "trapped": the restriction that Apple frames as keeping you safe is the same one that makes leaving iCloud a downgrade. Same fence, described as protection from one side of it and a trap from the other. [A slide reading “Introducing Brain2Qwerty v2” beside a blue brain graphic, with the subtitle “A non-invasive real-time decoder to translate brain activity into sentences.”](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/VFbXekTY) [Meta’s Brain2Qwerty reconstructs typed sentences from brain scans, no implant needed](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/VFbXekTY) This is Meta's second version of Brain2Qwerty, its project for typing with your mind. The system’s word accuracy is now 61%, up from 8% in the non-invasive method Meta compares it against. For Meta's best test subject, accuracy hit 78%, good enough that more than half their sentences came out with one wrong word or none at all. The trick is skipping surgery entirely. Older brain-computer interfaces read your thoughts by implanting electrodes directly onto the brain, which means an operation. Brain2Qwerty instead uses a magnetoencephalography (MEG) headset, a scanner that picks up the faint magnetic fields your neurons give off when they fire. Nine volunteers wore one for 10 hours each while typing out roughly 22,000 sentences, and Meta fed those recordings into a deep learning model (plus a large language model, so the system can use context, like guessing "the" is more likely than "teh") to reconstruct what they'd typed. If this ever becomes a practical clinical system, the promise is clear: communication without brain surgery for people who have lost the ability to speak or type after a stroke or paralysis. Meta also says accuracy keeps climbing the more data you feed the model, so the gap with surgical implants might close through training alone rather than better hardware. Meta are releasing the training code for both versions, BCBL is releasing the v1 dataset, and Meta are backing a $5 million fund for open brain-data research, so other labs can test the work and build on it. This Week I Learnt [Five panels show days from ‘2 days ago’ to ‘2 days from now’, with overmorrow labelled as ‘the day after tomorrow’ and ereyesterday as ‘the day before yesterday’.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/5XY8otUJ) [English used to have a word for "the day after tomorrow", and it's overdue a comeback](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/5XY8otUJ) [And that word is overmorrow. The day before yesterday is ereyesterday. Both words are genuinely old. Overmorrow is over + morrow, probably modelled on German übermorgen, with the Oxford English Dictionary’s earliest example from 1535. It even made it into Merriam-Webster's 1913 edition, but it's since dropped out of the dictionary and out of everyday speech, which is presumably why it now feels made-up to most English speakers. There's also a rarer, funnier cousin: nudiustertian, coined in 1647, meaning the same thing as ereyesterday. What's odd is that English is the outlier here. Dutch has "overmorgen" and "eergisteren". Esperanto has "postmorgaŭ" and "antaŭhieraŭ". Spanish has pasado mañana for the day after tomorrow, and anteayer (or the regional antier) for the day before yesterday. English speakers just say "the day after tomorrow" and get on with it, four words where one would do.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/5XY8otUJ) Poll If a safe non-surgical brain-computer interface existed today, would you get one? Yes, straight away Only if medically necessary Not yet, but maybe later No, never Last Week's Poll Which climate change effect do you expect to personally experience most? More extreme heatwaves 71% Worse flooding or storms 7% Higher food prices 12% Water shortages 6% Disrupted travel or commutes 2% Forced to move home 2% Science [Infographic showing a four-step pixel process: light enters, is steered along the chip, exits as light, then the same pixel reads incoming light as a sensor.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/7tEUERav) [One pixel that steers light and reads it, a first step toward screens that double as cameras](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/7tEUERav) [Every pixel in your devices has a single job. The ones in your phone screen fire light out. The ones in your camera's sensor soak light in. Nobody had made one that could switch between the two, until a team at ETH Zurich, led by Professor David Norris. The mechanism sits right in the surface of the chip. Light hits the pixel and turns into a wave that creeps along that surface (physicists call it a surface plasmon polariton, but picture a ripple stuck travelling through the material instead of bouncing off it). Somewhere else on the same pixel, that ripple gets flung back out as ordinary light. When light coming from different points overlaps, the waves either stack up or cancel each other out, exactly like two ripples meeting on a pond. Because the team can carve the surface with nanometre precision, they can choose in advance which of those patterns wins. They call it a Fourier pixel, borrowing the name from Fourier analysis (the maths that breaks any messy wave down into simple ones you can actually compute). Run the maths one way, and it tells you what shape to carve to produce a specific image. Run it backwards, and the exact same pixel becomes a sensor, one that can read the brightness, phase, and polarisation (the direction the light wave is wobbling in) of whatever light lands on it. So far they've used a single pixel to generate coloured images, doughnut-shaped beams of light, and phase readings, switching between projecting and detecting on the same tiny patch of chip.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/7tEUERav) [Two gloved fingers hold a tiny, multicoloured computer chip against a plain grey background.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/EvhkSwcf) [IBM's new "nanostack" chip stacks transistors in 3D to squeeze 100 billion onto a fingernail](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/EvhkSwcf) Nearly 100 billion transistors packed onto a chip the size of a fingernail: that's what IBM says its new 0.7 nm chip delivers, roughly twice the density of its own 2 nm chip from 2021. The key innovation is an architecture IBM calls "nanostack". Current leading-edge chips use flat layers of transistors (thin sheets of silicon stacked horizontally). Nanostack staggers them vertically in 3D, like a multi-storey car park rather than a single-level one, and lets each layer use different materials tuned for its job. IBM says this pushes performance up by up to 50% or cuts energy use by up to 70% compared to the 2 nm chip, though those figures come from IBM's own published projections rather than independent testing. The 0.7 nm label (also called 7 angstroms) is a manufacturing-node name rather than a literal transistor measurement, but it signals that chip design is now pushing into atomic-scale territory. IBM validated the nanostack design experimentally, including a working CMOS inverter, which confirms the structure can actually compute rather than just existing as a lab diagram. IBM says it sees a path to production within five years. [Three-panel illustration of an autistic child becoming more socially engaged during a fever response, with immune signals and a thermometer above the head.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/AUfqTaHX) [Why do autistic people's symptoms ease during a fever?](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/AUfqTaHX) Doctors have noticed something odd for years: some autistic children seem calmer and more socially engaged while they have a fever, then slip back once it breaks. Nobody could explain why. A new mouse study in Molecular Psychiatry points to a specific molecule that might be involved. The mice had a mutation causing Fragile X syndrome, the most common single-gene cause of autism. Researchers found their brains, specifically a region of the cerebellum called Crus I, involved in reading social cues, had unusually high levels of a signalling molecule called IL-17A. That was surprising, because IL-17A is normally made by immune cells patrolling the bloodstream, not by anything living inside the brain. Here, it came from microglia, the brain's own resident immune cells, cleaning house and signalling locally rather than immune cells breaking in from outside. That local IL-17A turned out to be propping up the electrical activity of Purkinje cells, the main neurons in that cerebellar region, by dialling down the signals that would otherwise quiet them. When the researchers blocked IL-17A's receptor on those cells, the mice developed autism-like social problems and repetitive behaviours from scratch. When they gave the mice more IL-17A, or triggered microglia to release it using a compound called poly(I:C) (which mimics a viral infection and provokes a fever-like immune response), Purkinje cell activity recovered and the social deficits eased. So the mouse work points to a real biological mechanism behind the fever effect, not just a loose anecdote. The unanswered question is whether the same pathway matters in people. [Copper plunge pools in a warm, orange-toned room with a decorative wall panel at Sant Roch.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/e2263i9V) [Warm amber-lit spa lounge with curved bench seating, mirrored walls, and a stairway overhead.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/e2263i9V) [Warm-lit underground spa corridor with tiled walls, a rain shower, and stainless steel plunge pools.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/e2263i9V) [Dimly lit thermal room with three small plunge pools, timber walls, and rows of glowing wall lights.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/e2263i9V) [A narrow, amber-lit spa alcove with a tall stone basin, round mirror, and mosaic tile floor.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/e2263i9V) [Dimly lit shower stalls with orange walls, black partitions, and warm overhead lighting in a spa interior.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/e2263i9V) [Minimalist spa reception with cream walls, wood trim, and a glowing orange ceiling recess above a counter marked “SANT ROCH.”](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/e2263i9V) [Sant Roch Sauna](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/e2263i9V) [Paris, France](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/e2263i9V) Data [Line chart showing the price of lighting in the UK falling from about £25,000 to £35,000 per million lumen-hours in the 1300s to £2.15 in 2023.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/7zGQmQhG) [A million lumen-hours cost about £34,000 in the 1300s and £2.15 in 2023](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/7zGQmQhG) [A lumen-hour is just a unit of light over time, like a watt-hour is for electricity. One million of them is roughly what you'd get from a single 100-watt bulb burning continuously for 26 days. In the early 1300s, that amount of light cost around £34,000 in today’s money. You'd have needed 120 candles burning non-stop for nearly a month. In 2023, that same light cost £2.15, a 16,000-fold drop. It was driven by two centuries of compounding improvements: better fuels, electric infrastructure, and eventually LEDs. The person who stayed up reading by candlelight in 1700 was spending what we'd now consider a small fortune just to see the page.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/7zGQmQhG) History [A Victorian tram car on tall stilts runs above the sea, with passengers on the open top deck and Brighton buildings behind it.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/Egm6t47v) [The Victorian tram that ran through the sea on stilts](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/Egm6t47v) [Magnus Volk opened the Brighton and Rottingdean Seashore Electric Railway on 28 November 1896, and a storm nearly destroyed it six days later. The problem Volk was solving was a practical one: 100-foot sea cliffs blocked the route east from Brighton to Rottingdean, so he put the tracks on the seabed instead. The single vehicle, officially named Pioneer but nicknamed Daddy Long-Legs, was a 45-foot passenger deck perched on four 23-foot legs, rolling through the English Channel shallows on rails mortised into the rock beneath the sand. It carried a lifeboat and a ship's bell, and maritime regulations required a qualified sea captain on board at all times. After the storm damage was repaired and the legs rebuilt two feet taller, service resumed in July 1897. By the end of that year, 44,282 passengers had taken what the adverts called "a Sea Voyage on Wheels". The whole thing cost £30,000 (roughly £3.4 million today) and ran until 1901, when it was abandoned to make way for new sea defences. Volk never found the money to build a replacement.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/Egm6t47v) [A black horse stands next to a small platform and a sign marked 84 in a fenced outdoor area.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/YPtFoHWZ) [The horse that couldn't do maths, but could read faces, and why elephant researchers keep repeating his mistake](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/YPtFoHWZ) Berlin, 1904: a horse called Hans could add, subtract, tell the time, and even name the composer of a melody just by tapping his hoof. He'd been trained for four years by Wilhelm von Osten, a maths teacher, and he was good enough that a government commission spent eighteen months investigating him for fraud and found none. Hans wasn't cheating anyone, and he wasn't faking it either. The real answer came in 1907, when psychologist Oscar Pfungst worked out that Hans could only answer questions when the person asking already knew the answer, and only when he could see their face. Put up a screen, or ask him something the questioner didn't know themselves, and he was stumped. What Hans had actually mastered was reading tiny, involuntary changes in a person's posture and expression, the flicker of tension that comes right before someone expects a correct tap. He wasn't doing sums. He was doing something arguably harder: picking up on human body language most humans don't even know they're giving off. The lesson from this ("keep the animal from seeing the experimenter's face") became a founding rule of animal behaviour research. Ornithologist Otto Koehler took it seriously enough to film his bird studies through cameras rather than test them face-to-face. But the rule keeps getting forgotten. A study on elephants claimed they could judge quantities more precisely than any other animal, seemingly breaking Weber's Law (a long-standing rule from 1834 that says how well you can tell two amounts apart depends on their ratio, not the raw difference between them). Critics argued that this may have been another cueing problem rather than a clean break from Weber’s Law. Design [Dark infographic showing that two-thirds of 26,597 paint colours across 13 brands are duplicates, with horizontal colour strips and a row of nearly identical off-whites at the bottom.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/RrHiJ3ue) [Turns out most "unique" paint colours aren't unique at all](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/RrHiJ3ue) [Paint brands love giving colours their own poetic names ("Swan White", "Flurry", "Pointing"), which makes it look like every tin on the shelf is unique, but most of them aren’t. The analysis covers 26,597 colours from 13 brands using each brand's own published colour data. To compare colours fairly, the author used CIEDE2000 (ΔE 2000), a formula that measures how different two colours actually look to a human eye rather than just comparing their raw numbers. It's the same formula paint factories use to check that a fresh batch matches the last one. Two colours counted as "duplicates" if they scored under ΔE 1.0, a gap smaller than most people could spot even holding the swatches side by side. By that measure, 66.6% of all 26,597 colours have a near-identical twin at a rival brand. Of those, 749 pairs aren't just close, they're exact: identical hex codes sold under completely different names. The worst offender is a warm off-white carried by 12 of the 13 brands. Benjamin Moore's "Flurry" and Dunn-Edwards' "Swan White" score a perfect ΔE 0.00 (literally the same colour), and Farrow & Ball's "Pointing" sits in the same cluster. The write-up charts each brand’s full palette as a strip sorted by hue, with a white bar underneath showing how much of that palette has no near-identical match elsewhere.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/RrHiJ3ue) [Three people stand in a workshop aisle lined with shelves of colourful fabric flowers, many stacked in rows around them.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/AEL2aHVW) [M&S Schmalberg: one NYC atelier hand-making fabric flowers since 1916](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/AEL2aHVW) A workshop in New York's Garment District has been folding fabric into flowers since 1916, and M&S Schmalberg are still run by the same family. Everything is made by hand, petal by petal, using whatever material the job calls for: silk, leather, velvet, or fabric a customer sends in themselves (one bride reportedly mailed in her mother's old silk scarf and got back a set of roses). The business splits roughly two ways. There's a catalogue of ready-made styles, like a 5-inch rose or a hand-dyed camellia, that ship straight away. And there's fully custom work, where designers, brides, or costume departments specify the colour, fabric, and size they need, and Schmalberg builds it to match. They also run factory tours for anyone curious about how a flower like this actually gets made. It's a niche trade that mostly survives on word of mouth from people who need something a plastic or plain silk flower can't do, like matching a specific fabric swatch, or turning a sentimental piece of clothing into something wearable again. Random [Line chart showing Britain’s solar panel output rising with temperature until about 30°C, then falling slightly.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/a8ePYJtd) [Heatwaves make power stations, data centres, and railway signalling worse at their jobs](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/a8ePYJtd) [Heat doesn't just make people uncomfortable, it makes hardware worse at its job. Gas power stations lose roughly 10% of their output at 40°C compared with 20°C, according to Imperial College London's Iain Staffell. Solar panels also lose efficiency once temperatures climb past 27°C, even though newer panels handle it better than older ones. And the metal power lines strung across the country actually sag in the heat, because heated metal expands, which is exactly the mechanism behind a major 2003 North American blackout. Trains have their own version of the problem. Signalling equipment sits inside metal roadside cabinets that can hit 70°C in a heatwave, hot enough that Southeastern is now trialling liquid cooling inside them that needs no electricity to run. None of this is hypothetical. In July 2022, overheating gear caused UK power cuts and knocked out hospital data centres at Guy's and St Thomas', cancelling operations, and one air-conditioning failure let a server room hit 50.3°C. The UK's Climate Change Committee reckons cascading outages like these could end up costing "billions" as heatwaves become more frequent, which is really an argument for building infrastructure for the climate we're getting, not the one we used to have.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/a8ePYJtd) [A beaver sits by a narrow stream amid dense grass and reeds, partly hidden by foliage.](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/oBxjQzYv) [Eight beavers in Ealing have helped keep a London train station from flooding for three winters](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/oBxjQzYv) The knock-on effect goes well beyond the beavers themselves. Nadya Mirochnitchenko, an ecologist with the Ealing Beaver Project, says the wetlands the animals have carved out at Paradise Fields have brought an "explosion" of invertebrates, more birds, and at least two new bat species to a brook that was previously overshaded and choked out. That's the pattern with beavers wherever they're reintroduced: by damming and flooding small areas, they create the kind of messy, varied wetland habitat that lots of other species depend on but that had mostly vanished from Britain along with the beavers themselves. Slow-moving, shallow water full of dead wood and cleared canopy is exactly what insects, amphibians, and the birds and bats that feed on them need, and it's not the sort of habitat people tend to build on purpose. The Ealing colony, now around eight beavers strong after at least two kits arrived this year, is doing this in a distinctly urban setting rather than somewhere remote. So the biodiversity gain is happening right next to a train station the same beavers are helping keep dry, in a corner of west London that had been neglected for years before they moved in. Poll Which kind of story would you like to see more of? Strange old infrastructure New science explained plainly Data visualisations and odd datasets Beautiful craft and design processes Small discoveries about language and history [Web](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/X2tiPafA) · [Twitter](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/JSJHXLer) · [LinkedIn](https://newsletter.dvy.io/visit/ibRJhVUG)