Hi everyone!
A few months ago, I bought one of those small e-readers that many influencers had been raving about on social media.
Payed for with my own money. Not sponsored in any way.
The thing I love most about this device is how simple and focussed it is. It doesn’t try to be an all-round gadget. You can only read books on it. No notifications, no web browser, no note-taking; heck, it doesn’t even have a built-in dictionary.
It reminds me of my iPod Nano. One device, one job, and weirdly enough, that limitation is the feature.
There's something almost rebellious about that in 2026. Everything around us is getting smarter, more connected, more agentic. And yet, here I am, falling in love with a dumb, single-purpose device. But that's exactly why I like it so much.
Enjoy this edition of the newsletter,
Xavier
👨🏫 Simply Explained
🤓 Cool Stuff I Found on the Internet
Watchmaking school
Canada has a professional watchmaking school that trains up to 20 students for companies like Rolex and TAG Heuer. It was founded after World War 2 to help veterans learn a trade. The school is on the third floor of an elementary school in Quebec.
Air Horse One
How do you get horses to race on the other side of the planet? You put them on a cargo plane. Wealthy owners can pay tens of thousands for a “first-class” flight with roomier stalls, grooms, a vet on board, and sometimes even a compression suit.
Jellyfish secrets
Some jellyfish don’t just patch cuts. They regrow tissue in minutes with no scar. In the transparent Clytia hemisphaerica medusa, cells literally walk across a wound to seal it. Why is this important? Our skin has a tendency to form scars while healing. Researchers are studying jellyfish to see if we can copy their healing techniques.
Tom Riddle's Diary
If you're a Harry Potter fan, you'll love this: this clever person used AI to turn his reMarkable tablet into Tom Riddle's diary. You write a question on the tablet, wait for your scribbles to fade away, and see a handwritten answer appear. It's super cool! Just watch the demo video on X.
Pausing LHC
CERN switched off the Large Hadron Collider on June 29th as part of a planned upgrade. LHC is known for discovering the Higgs Boson and over 85 other particles. Over the next 4 years, technicians will upgrade the particle accelerator so it can produce more powerful collisions. This will allow them to study collisions in more detail and search for new particles.
⏳ On this day...
1893 - Kōkichi Mikimoto harvested Japan's first artificial pearl. Instead of waiting years for a random oyster to make one by accident, humans could grow them on demand, and the pearl industry changed forever.
1962 - The Telstar satellite relayed the first live transatlantic TV signal. Viewers in Europe suddenly saw events from North America in near real-time.
1979 - America's first space station, Skylab, fell back to Earth and broke up over the Indian Ocean. Chunks of it rained down on Western Australia. Some pieces are still in museums today.
👽 Space
Space datacenters
AI needs power. Big Tech’s latest idea? Put the datacenters in space. SpaceX alone has floated plans for up to 1 million orbital datacenter satellites, with Blue Origin, Starcloud, and others pitching hundreds of thousands more. Now, environment groups are saying it might be best to pause first and think about the environmental impact.
NASA doubts Starliner
Boeing’s Starliner spacecraft is facing more challenges as NASA is raising questions about whether it will ever carry astronauts. There were multiple issues on the last test flight, and now, 11 years later, it still isn’t certified to fly humans again.
⚡️ Energy & Environment
High temperatures increase risk of mental health issues
A new study reveals a link between temperature spikes and psychiatric admissions. Experts believe high temperatures can directly affect brain function, disrupt sleep, and alter mood. This can increase impulsivity, distress, and risky coping behaviors. The effect was even more pronounced during cooler months with unexpected heat spikes, suggesting our bodies and minds might struggle to adapt to sudden temperature changes.
Nuking the Arctic
This fun article explores how humans have been meaning to terraform Earth in the past. In the 90s, Russia wanted to manufacture a ‘second moon’ to heat up Europe. Another idea was damming of Gibraltar to lower the Mediterranean by 200 meters. And my absolute favorite: the Soviets considered melting part of the Arctic by detonating hydrogen bombs. As we now consider high-tech solutions for the climate crisis, this history offers a useful and humbling perspective.
🧠🤖 Artificial intelligence
Everyone a unique web experience
Imagine landing on a coffee-machine site and the whole page reorganizes around outdoor brewing because you were just searching for camping gear. Adobe's Carlos Sanchez showed this at the AI Engineer World's Fair: an 'agentic site' that reads your intent, pulls from the brand's existing content, and assembles a one-off page in about one or two seconds for roughly a penny or two. Will future websites assemble themselves around our preferences?
Brain cells as a service
What if your cloud compute was literally alive? Australian startup Cortical Labs runs a datacenter in Melbourne filled with CL1 boxes. Each box holds roughly 200,000 human neurons grown on a silicon chip, kept alive with onboard life support. And you can program them! People have already taught these nuerons to play Pong and Doom.
AI looking for electricians and plumbers
While everyone worries AI will eat their office jobs, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says the real bottleneck is physical. Data centers need electricians, plumbers, and carpenters by the hundreds of thousands. At Davos he called it the largest infrastructure buildout in history.
AI agents that weaponize bugs
Finding a security flaw in software is hard. Turning it into a working exploit is even harder. Turns out, AI agents are great at both! Both GPT5.5 and Claude Mythos were able to bypass security measures of modern operating systems. Yikes!