Shlomo Strauss — Technology, Science, Business
A bilingual (Hebrew / English) blog by Shlomo Strauss — short, carefully researched posts on technology, science, and business, plus a weekly Taste of Science.
Recent posts
- The explosive physics of potassium and its vital role in plants — Pure potassium triggers violent Coulomb explosions in water, yet this reactive metal is absolutely essential for plant survival and global agriculture.
- The Shared Logic of 19th-Century Elevators and Modern AI — While modern AI servers rely on microscopic transistors instead of moving parts, they operate on the exact same logic gates used in 1880s elevators.
- Building self-improving AI through rapid iteration cycles — Applying rapid iteration principles to AI allows developers to build automated systems that continuously review and improve their own code.
- The biology of forest recovery after severe wildfires — Specialized fungi and fire-adapted plants use the heat and smoke of wildfires to trigger rapid ecological regeneration in scorched forests.
- How BitTorrent paved the way for modern streaming and Web3 — While often associated with piracy, BitTorrent's decentralized network laid the crucial groundwork for modern streaming services, Web3, and Bitcoin.
- Vint Cerf proposes a new internet protocol for AI agents — One of the internet's founding fathers is designing a universal protocol to let AI agents communicate and transact directly without human interfaces.
- The physics and extreme weather systems of mega-fires — Mega-fires generate intense heat that triggers pyrolysis and creates independent weather systems capable of producing lightning and 200 km/h winds.
- Google hardwires Transformer architecture into new Gemini chips — Google is tackling massive AI compute costs by developing custom ASIC chips with the Transformer architecture hardwired directly into the silicon.
- How Taylor Swift music videos help combat plant blindness — Dr. Glaucia Silva uses Taylor Swift music videos to anchor botanical concepts, successfully overcoming the cognitive bias known as plant blindness.
- Beyond Food: How Soybeans Power Jet Engines and Plastics — Beyond agriculture, soybeans possess unique biological properties driving innovations in jet fuel, winter tires, and safer plastics.
- How AI threatens reading yet enables custom printed books — As visual media and AI reduce our reliance on text, generative tools offer a paradoxical solution by creating highly personalized physical books.
- Power Grid Anomalies Expose Transnational Crypto Laundering — A Chinese crime syndicate's hidden Bitcoin mining and money-laundering operation was dismantled after algorithms detected power grid anomalies.
About Shlomo Strauss