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The bootlace worm found washed up on Scottish beaches can stretch to more than 55 metres when uncoiled, making it longer than a blue whale, and its mucus contains a peptide that paralysed crabs and killed or permanently paralysed juvenile cockroaches in laboratory tests
The bootlace worm Lineus longissimus, a strand of black tissue only millimetres wide, was measured at 55 metres on a Scottish beach in 1864 — longer than any blue whale. Its mucus can kill crabs and cockroaches.
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Ireland's data centres used 5 per cent of the country's metered electricity in 2015, but by 2025 they were using 23 per cent — more than every urban household in the country put together
If you can't keep your Bitcoin on an exchange that might freeze withdrawals, or in a hot wallet on a laptop that might get hacked, cold storage was the last answer anyone had left — and on 30 July roughly 1,082 coins drained out of devices that had never once been connected to the internet
Microsoft Japan gave roughly 2,300 employees five consecutive Fridays off in August 2019 without cutting their pay — and sales per employee came in 39.9% higher than the same month a year earlier. The experiment also forced a rethink of wasted work: 30-minute meetings became 46% more common, while employees increasingly replaced meetings with online collaboration.
In 1926, Henry Ford cut his factory workers from six days a week to five and discovered something industry considered deeply counterintuitive: Ford's own experiments showed they could produce at least as much in 40 hours as they had in 48 — an idea manufacturers across America would eventually adopt.
AI's hidden water footprint may have reached 765 billion litres in 2025 — consumed in data-centre cooling and the power plants supplying them. That's more than twice the volume of bottled water the entire world buys in a year.
Epoch AI estimates that frontier models could fully use up the available stock of useful public human-written text sometime between 2026 and 2032. After that, developers may increasingly turn to private datasets and enormous quantities of AI-generated synthetic data — raising a strange possibility: a growing share of what future AI learns may ultimately have been written not by humans, but by earlier AI systems.
European space-tech funding reached €2.9 billion in H1 2026, up 622%, but debt and a handful of sovereign-infrastructure bets explain most of the apparent explosion
AI helped solo professionals match two-person teams in a 776-person experiment, suggesting success in an AI-shaped workplace may depend on learning to cross expertise boundaries
Facebook said its users were separated by 3.57 degrees, but the 2016 result meant 4.57 friendship links on average across 1.59 billion active accounts, not all humanity
The claim that ChatGPT consumes a 500ml bottle of water for every 10 to 50 responses came from one modelled GPT-3 scenario, not a universal measurement; location, cooling and electricity supply can change the result
The people who rise fastest in most organisations are rarely the most competent, they are simply the most confident, and decades of research suggests we are almost incapable of telling the two apart.
