Strangeness
The Black Fungus Radiation Can’t Kill
Some things grow in darkness. Others feed on it. Deep in the irradiated skeleton of Reactor 4, Chernobyl’s sarcophagus of steel and concrete, scientists discovered something that should not exist: life. Not just surviving, but thriving. A black fungus clinging to the charred graphite of a nuclear core, growing toward the radiation like moss stretching toward sunlight. The name? Cladosporium sphaerospermum. A harmless-sounding organism with a truly alien appetite. What this fungus does is more than resist radiation, it consumes it, transforming invisible death into metabolic energy through a process scientists now call radiosynthesis. And it’s not just a freak
Read moreProject Overmatch Goes Live: US Navy Just Blinded China’s Kill Chain
Something changed in the Western Pacific this week, and most of the world has not yet noticed. On 28 November 2025 the US Defense Innovation Unit quietly confirmed that Project Overmatch, the Navy’s cornerstone of the Pentagon’s Combined Joint All-Domain Command and Control (CJADC2) architecture, has achieved Full Operational Capability with Carrier Strike Group 1 operating east of Luzon. No parades, no carrier-deck ceremonies, just a short post on the DIU site that most mainstream defence correspondents appear to have missed entirely. For anyone who has spent years modelling how a real shooting war over Taiwan or the South China
Read moreChina’s Battery Material Monopoly: The West’s 2028 Crisis
You can sanction a tanker. You can seize a gold bar. You can even, in a pinch, seize an oilfield. But you cannot sanction a chemistry lab in Ningbo that turns flaky grey graphite into perfect black spheres the size of dust particles. That lab doesn’t fly a flag. It doesn’t sit on a shipping lane. It just quietly decides whether your drone swarm lifts off tomorrow or stays on the tarmac. And right now, every single one of those labs belongs to China. This is the part nobody in Brussels or Washington wants to say out loud: the great
Read moreArctic Data Centers Boom: The 2025 Doomsday Rush
Arctic data centers are spreading fast. In the land of midnight sun and melting permafrost, nations are quietly burying their digital souls. Not for penguins, not for Instagram likes, but for the day the lights go out for good, whether that’s a Taiwanese earthquake, a Chinese cyber-killswitch, or a solar flare that turns every transformer on the planet into modern art. Russia’s Rosatom is already stringing small modular reactors across its Arctic coast like Christmas lights for the apocalypse. Norway’s Aker Group just broke ground on a 230 MW hyperscale campus in Narvik that will export cold-compute the way the
Read moreWhy the West Is Struggling: The Hidden Collapse of the Double Income Economy
There was a time when the single earner household was not a fantasy. It was the backbone of middle class life. One income covered the mortgage, paid the bills, fed the family, and left room for mild luxuries that didn’t require loans or side hustles. Today that world feels fictional. The economic foundations that supported it have been quietly removed while politicians still speak to voters as if the structure remains intact. The truth is simple. The double income household was once a choice. Now it is a mandatory life support system for families earning anywhere near the average. It
Read moreAllied Shipyards and the American Comeback
There was a time when “Made in America” adorned the hulls of warships that dominated the oceans. Now, that steel pride has rusted into a logistical liability. In 2025, the U.S. quietly accepted a bitter truth: it cannot outbuild China alone. With China controlling up to 65% of global shipbuilding output and rapidly churning out a navy that dwarfs the Pentagon’s projections, America’s naval superiority has become a memory. Enter the doctrine of Maritime Statecraft, a pivot away from industrial autarky. Instead of trying to rebuild domestic capacity from scratch, the U.S. is outsourcing naval muscle to allied shipyards. Under
Read moreGoogle’s AI Chip Deal with Meta Threatens Nvidia’s Dominance
Nvidia has been the undisputed king of the artificial intelligence chip market for the better part of a decade. Its processors have powered everything from chatbot training to real-time language translation, image generation and the backbones of massive AI companies. If you were building anything remotely powerful in AI, you were paying Nvidia for the privilege. But that near-religious dependence on Nvidia may have just been cracked wide open by the one company with enough silicon, capital and audacity to do it: Google. Until now, Google’s Tensor Processing Units, its custom AI chips built in-house, were kept locked away behind
Read moreThe Rise of AI Drone Hunters
The Octopus interceptor drone (read AI Drone Hunters) didn’t appear because Ukraine wanted another flashy prototype. It appeared because the entire logic of air defence broke down under the weight of numbers. When Russia began sending waves of Shahed-136 loitering munitions into Ukrainian airspace, the threat wasn’t technological sophistication. It was economics. The Shahed is a crude delta-wing drone with a simple piston engine and a GPS navigation system, but its cost, typically between twenty and fifty thousand dollars, made it catastrophically efficient. Every launch forced Ukraine to choose between protecting its infrastructure or burning through scarce Patriot and NASAMS
Read more2025 Economic Trends You Need to Know
If you take the global economy at face value in 2025, you might think we’ve made it through the storm. Growth sits at roughly 3 percent, inflation is drifting lower, and the headlines sound relieved, almost triumphant. The message is simple: the “soft landing” happened, the worst is over, and the world can finally exhale. Except none of that is true. Beneath the tidy averages, the global system resembles a cracked porcelain bowl held together by surface tension alone. The synchronised world of the early 2000s, where supply chains ran like clockwork and capital flowed with the innocence of a
Read moreChina’s Starlink Blackout Plan
China’s Starlink blackout test over Taiwan wasn’t because a few engineers got bored. They simulated it because their invasion plan cannot work unless Taiwan goes dark. The PLA watched what happened in Ukraine with growing discomfort as Starlink kept the entire country online despite missile strikes, power outages, and cyberattacks. It was an object lesson in how a small nation can keep fighting, coordinating, and targeting even after a conventional assault cripples everything else. Chinese analysts have been picking apart that lesson for two years, and the conclusion they reached is brutally simple: if Taiwan stays connected, the invasion fails.
Read moreWe Were Sold Globalisation. Now We’re Paying for It
For three decades, globalisation was marketed as a bulwark against war. Entangled economies, shared dependencies, and mutually assured prosperity were supposed to make full-scale conflict irrational. It was elegant, seductive, and ultimately flawed. The architecture of globalisation was not accidental. It was deliberately structured to create disincentives for war through the binding power of commerce. Nations that traded deeply with each other would be less likely to risk conflict, as any act of aggression would damage their own economic wellbeing. Capital, talent, and production were all to flow freely, forming a lattice of interlocking interests too costly to sever. This
Read moreSmall Modular Reactors: Are We Living in Fallout’s Prequel?
In November 2025, a nuclear startup called Valar Atomics flipped the switch on a moment we weren’t supposed to reach this soon: cold criticality at Los Alamos. That’s engineer-speak for “the reactor went live”, without melting anyone’s face off. No mushroom clouds, no Chernobyl flashbacks. Just quiet validation that a tiny, helium-cooled reactor stuffed with TRISO fuel can achieve a self‑sustaining chain reaction in a lab built for war. This isn’t just some DOE science fair moment. It marks the dawn of a new age in nuclear, modular, decentralised, faster than regulators can blink. A venture‑backed race to install microreactors across the world, not in megaprojects
Read more