https://aussiescience.com/Things I didn’t understand, explained simply.2026-11-04T13:30:00+00:00Brendan Faulds https://aussiescience.com/ai-and-us/whats-real/2026-11-04T13:30:00+00:002026-11-04T13:30:00+00:00

Last time, we followed what AI uses. This time, it's what AI makes, and whether you can trust your own eyes and ears. Early in 2024, a finance worker in Hong Kong joined a video call with his company's chief financial officer and several colleagues. They looked and sounded like people he knew.

https://aussiescience.com/ai-and-us/energy-and-water/2026-11-01T13:30:00+00:002026-11-01T13:30:00+00:00

Last time, we left the courtroom for the machine room. And AI takes something you can touch: electricity, and water. In 2025, Google says its data centres and offices consumed about forty-one billion litres of water, a third more than the year before. So how much energy and water does AI really use?

https://aussiescience.com/how-ai-works/chips-and-power/2026-10-29T13:30:00+00:002026-10-29T13:30:00+00:00

Last time, we watched an agent work in a loop, calling a model again and again. Every one of those calls is arithmetic, done on a chip, in a building, drawing power from a grid.

https://aussiescience.com/how-ai-works/agents/2026-10-28T13:30:00+00:002026-10-28T13:30:00+00:00

Last time, we watched a sentence steer random noise into a picture. But you've probably heard that AI can now do things: fix a program, fill in a form, click around a website by itself. What is an AI agent, and what can it really do on its own?

https://aussiescience.com/ai-and-us/who-owns-it/2026-10-28T13:30:00+00:002026-10-28T13:30:00+00:00

Last time, we ended on a simple fact: these models were trained on other people's work. In 2025, Anthropic, the company that makes Claude, agreed to pay one and a half billion US dollars over about half a million books. Other companies are still in court. So who owns what AI learned from?

https://aussiescience.com/how-ai-works/picture-from-sentence/2026-10-27T13:30:00+00:002026-10-27T13:30:00+00:00

Last time, we saw a chatbot make things up by accident. Image generators make things up on purpose. You type a sentence, and a little later there's a photo of a place that never existed. The strangest part is where many of them start: not with a sketch, but with a square of pure random static.

https://aussiescience.com/how-ai-works/hallucination/2026-10-26T13:30:00+00:002026-10-26T13:30:00+00:00

Last time, a politely tuned chatbot explained why some experts say you should eat socks after meditating. So why does AI make things up so confidently? In May 2025, researchers asked three chatbots, ChatGPT, DeepSeek and Llama, for the title of one computer scientist's PhD thesis.

https://aussiescience.com/how-ai-works/internet-to-chatbot/2026-10-25T13:30:00+00:002026-10-25T13:30:00+00:00

Last time, we opened the box: attention, and transformers that learn it in parallel on graphics chips. But a transformer that has read the internet still isn't a chatbot. Ask it a question, and it may just carry on, as if your question started a list. So how do you turn the whole internet into a chatbot?

https://aussiescience.com/ai-and-us/jobs/2026-10-25T13:30:00+00:002026-10-25T13:30:00+00:00

Last season ended on a question you may have asked yourself. The headlines swing from mass unemployment to nothing to see here. This season, AI and Us, we go to the evidence instead, and we say what each study actually measured. So let's start with the big one. Is AI going to take my job?

https://aussiescience.com/how-ai-works/attention/2026-10-24T13:30:00+00:002026-10-24T13:30:00+00:00

Last time, a chatbot wrote one token at a time, and we treated the network inside as a closed box. We stopped on this sentence. The trophy didn't fit in the suitcase because it was too big. What was too big? The trophy, obviously. Now change one word: because it was too small.

https://aussiescience.com/how-ai-works/next-word/2026-10-23T13:30:35+00:002026-10-23T13:30:35+00:00

Last time, we saw data, chips and better methods make AI suddenly good at recognising pictures. But a chatbot writes back whole sentences, in good grammar, on almost any topic. So what is it actually doing? The answer sounds far too simple. It guesses what comes next, then does it again, and again.

https://aussiescience.com/how-ai-works/why-2012/2026-10-21T13:30:00+00:002026-10-21T13:30:00+00:00

Last time, we watched a network learn by passing the blame for its mistakes backwards. That recipe, backpropagation, was made famous by a 1986 paper. Then, after an early burst of excitement, it spent years on the sidelines.

https://aussiescience.com/how-ai-works/learning-by-being-wrong/2026-10-20T13:30:17+00:002026-10-20T13:30:17+00:00

Last episode's artificial neuron multiplies each input by a weight and adds them up. Each weight is like a dial, and the dials decide what the network does. Big language models, in papers from 2020 to 2023, had tens of billions of them or more. Nobody sets them by hand.

https://aussiescience.com/how-ai-works/learning-without-rules/2026-10-18T13:30:10+00:002026-10-18T13:30:10+00:00

Last time, we met machine learning: the part of AI that learns from examples instead of following rules people wrote. How can a computer learn something nobody told it? Start with a job that sounds easy to write rules for: spotting junk email.

https://aussiescience.com/how-ai-works/neural-network/2026-10-18T02:37:49+00:002026-10-18T02:37:49+00:00

Last time, Arthur Samuel pointed to a road he didn't take: a network of simple switches inspired by nerve cells. Today's chatbots took that road, with billions of numbers, in what's called a neural network. The name sounds like a brain. So what is one, and how much is it really like the thing inside your head?

https://aussiescience.com/how-ai-works/what-is-ai/2026-10-18T02:33:24+00:002026-10-18T02:33:24+00:00

Say AI to five people, and you might get five different pictures. A chatbot that writes your emails. The app that steers you around traffic. A robot villain from a film. The filter that quietly binned your spam this morning. Are those all the same thing?

https://aussiescience.com/programming/javascript/2026-10-12T20:55:24+00:002026-10-12T20:55:24+00:00

Almost every website runs some JavaScript. The survey firm W3Techs found it on 98.9 per cent of the websites it tracks, as of the seventh of October 2026. Yet the first version was put together in about ten days, in May 1995, as a sidekick to a bigger language. So how did a ten-day sidekick end up running the web?

https://aussiescience.com/programming/java-and-csharp/2026-10-12T20:55:19+00:002026-10-12T20:55:19+00:00

Write once, run anywhere. That was the promise Sun Microsystems made for its new language, Java, in the nineteen-nineties. In episode two, we saw that compiled code is a list of numbers that only one family of chips understands. So how can one program run on any computer? And what's the catch?

https://aussiescience.com/programming/language-framework-ide/2026-10-11T20:31:45+00:002026-10-11T20:31:45+00:00

Ask a few programmers what they work in, and you'll hear answers like JavaScript, React, Node, or VS Code. They sound like four of the same thing. They aren't. One is a language, one calls itself a library, one is a runtime, and one is a place where you write code.

https://aussiescience.com/programming/code-to-chip/2026-10-11T20:31:30+00:002026-10-11T20:31:30+00:00

Here's a complete piece of a program, three lines long. It takes two numbers, a and b, and hands back their sum. You can read it. But the processor in your laptop can't read a single word of it, because a processor only runs instructions stored as numbers. So how does code you can read become something a chip can run?

https://aussiescience.com/programming/html/2026-10-11T20:31:09+00:002026-10-11T20:31:09+00:00

Tell a room of programmers that you code in HTML, and sooner or later someone will tell you that HTML isn't real programming. It's the web's core language, the one web pages are written in.

https://aussiescience.com/movie-physics/airlock/2026-10-11T20:30:38+00:002026-10-11T20:30:38+00:00

In the films, an open airlock is the end of the line. The hatch slides back, someone tumbles out, and you brace for the worst: will they swell, burst, freeze solid in an instant? But what would really happen to a human body in a vacuum? And how do we know, when nobody runs that experiment on purpose?

https://aussiescience.com/movie-physics/giant-monsters/2026-10-11T20:30:27+00:002026-10-11T20:30:27+00:00

In the 1954 film Godzilla, a monster rises out of the sea and walks into Tokyo. The original was about fifty metres tall. By 2019, it had more than doubled. So here's the puzzle. If you took something built like you and simply made it that big, could it even stand up? Not fight, not roar, just stand.

https://aussiescience.com/movie-physics/outrunning-explosions/2026-10-11T20:30:16+00:002026-10-11T20:30:16+00:00

A car erupts into a huge orange fireball, and the hero strolls towards the camera without looking back. Or he sprints, the flames rolling after him a step behind, and dives clear just in time. Audiences have come to expect exactly that big orange fireball, as one Hollywood effects supervisor put it.

https://aussiescience.com/movie-physics/laser-bolts/2026-10-11T20:30:03+00:002026-10-11T20:30:03+00:00

In a lot of science fiction, a ray gun doesn't fire a beam. It fires a bolt: a short, glowing streak you can watch cross the room. In the official Star Wars lore, a Jedi, using the Force, can predict incoming blaster bolts and deflect them with a lightsaber. It looks fantastic.

https://aussiescience.com/movie-physics/nuking-asteroids/2026-10-11T20:29:49+00:002026-10-11T20:29:49+00:00

A rock the size of Texas is heading for Earth. In the film Armageddon, the plan is to land on it, drill an eight-hundred-foot hole, drop a nuclear bomb in, and split it in two, so the halves sail past either side of the planet. It's a great piece of cinema. But could a nuclear bomb really split an asteroid?

https://aussiescience.com/movie-physics/fridge-nuke/2026-10-11T20:29:37+00:002026-10-11T20:29:37+00:00

A siren is wailing, and an atomic bomb is minutes from going off. The only shelter to hand is a refrigerator in a mock house. So you climb in, pull the door shut, and hope. Could that possibly work? It sounds like a joke, but one of the film's own makers says scientists gave it even odds.

https://aussiescience.com/programming/which-first/2026-10-11T20:29:18+00:002026-10-11T20:29:18+00:00

This season we've met HTML, JavaScript and its runtime Node, TypeScript, PHP, Python, C and C plus plus, Java and C sharp, Rust, Go and SQL. So if you've never written a line of code and you want to start, which one should you learn first? The honest answer is that there isn't a single right one.

https://aussiescience.com/programming/sql/2026-10-11T20:29:05+00:002026-10-11T20:29:05+00:00

Your banking app, your phone's contacts, the shop that just took your order: behind a great many apps is a database, and very often the app talks to it in a language called SQL. SQL grew out of an idea published in 1970. New programming languages arrive every few years.

https://aussiescience.com/programming/ide/2026-10-11T20:28:53+00:002026-10-11T20:28:53+00:00

All season we've been writing code, and now we look at where people write it. Yet code is just text, and you could write every program in this series in the plainest text editor. In episode one we called the IDE, the integrated development environment, the workshop. So what does that workshop actually do?

https://aussiescience.com/programming/rust-and-go/2026-10-11T20:28:37+00:002026-10-11T20:28:37+00:00

Last episode ended on a hint: garbage collection is one way to prevent some memory bugs, but it isn't the only one. Yet between 2006 and 2009, a programmer at Mozilla and a team at Google each started a brand new one: Rust, and Go.

https://aussiescience.com/movie-physics/banking-spaceships/2026-10-11T20:28:05+00:002026-10-11T20:28:05+00:00

Picture a space battle on screen: a fighter tilts its wings and swoops round in a graceful curve, just like a plane. It looks right, because tilting is how planes turn. But in space, that tilt does nothing to where it's going.

https://aussiescience.com/movie-physics/sound-in-space/2026-10-11T20:27:50+00:002026-10-11T20:27:50+00:00

Welcome to Hollywood Physics, where we take the movie moments we love and ask what would really happen. First up, the biggest bang in cinema. A starship blows up, the screen fills with fire, and the whole theatre shakes with the boom. Now picture yourself floating out there, a few kilometres away.

https://aussiescience.com/programming/php/2026-10-11T20:26:49+00:002026-10-11T20:26:49+00:00

Last time we ended on a number: 40.1 percent of all websites run on WordPress, and WordPress is written in PHP. Programmers have joked about PHP for years. One famous essay called it an embarrassment. So why does a much-mocked language still run so much of the web? And is the mockery deserved?

https://aussiescience.com/programming/c-and-cpp/2026-10-11T20:26:35+00:002026-10-11T20:26:35+00:00

Last episode ended underneath Python, where the fast parts are written in C and C++. Python's own interpreter is written in C as well. So is Linux, and what its makers call the most widely deployed database in the world, and much of the browser you might be watching this in.

https://aussiescience.com/programming/python/2026-10-11T20:26:03+00:002026-10-11T20:26:03+00:00

Python has a reputation. It's easy to read, easy to learn, and slow. Yet, by GitHub's 2025 count, it's the main language for new AI projects, and AI is some of the most demanding computing there is. So how can a slow language run some of the most demanding software there is? And is it really slow at all?

https://aussiescience.com/programming/typescript/2026-10-11T20:25:49+00:002026-10-11T20:25:49+00:00

Last time, we saw Deno run a language called TypeScript, straight out of the box. TypeScript is JavaScript with extra rules. Rules usually slow you down, and JavaScript is famously relaxed about what you can write. Yet millions of programmers now choose those rules on purpose.

https://aussiescience.com/movie-physics/faster-than-light/2026-10-11T20:25:13+00:002026-10-11T20:25:13+00:00

In Star Wars, ships don't cruise between the stars; they jump to hyperspace. The franchise's own databank, describing its fictional galaxy, says hyperdrives let starships travel faster than the speed of light, through an alternate dimension called hyperspace. Nearly every space story needs some version of that trick.

https://aussiescience.com/programming/frameworks/2026-10-11T20:22:26+00:002026-10-11T20:22:26+00:00

Open almost any app in a browser and things change while you watch: a message count ticks down, a cart fills up, a feed grows. Behind many of those apps sits a framework, with names like React, Angular or Vue. So why do so many websites use one? First, let's check how many really do.

https://aussiescience.com/programming/nodejs/2026-10-11T19:50:09+00:002026-10-11T19:50:09+00:00

JavaScript was built to live inside web pages. Yet today the same language answers requests on servers, runs desktop apps, and powers the tools programmers use to build websites. So how did a language made for the browser get out? The answer is a program called Node.js, and a very old idea about waiting.

https://aussiescience.com/movie-physics/enhance/2026-10-11T19:41:49+00:002026-10-11T19:41:49+00:00

You know the scene. Detectives crowd around a screen, a grainy security-camera frame, and somebody says the magic word: enhance. They zoom in again and again, until they can read a number plate, or see the killer reflected in the victim's eye. In real life, zoom in on a security frame and you get bigger squares.

https://aussiescience.com/maths-puzzles/birthday-paradox/2026-10-04T04:13:03+00:002026-10-04T04:13:03+00:00

Explains why 23 people make 253 pairs, and why gut instinct only counts the pairs that include you. Works through the exact 50.7 per cent, checks it against real Australian and US birth data, untangles the credit between Davenport and von Mises, and shows how the same maths drives attacks on hashes.

https://aussiescience.com/maths-puzzles/monty-hall/2026-10-04T04:09:20+00:002026-10-04T04:09:20+00:00

Plays out every game to show why switching wins two times in three, and uses Bayes' theorem to explain how the host's knowledge shifts the odds. Covers Marilyn vos Savant's 1990 column and the angry letters, and why a host who opens a door at random leaves it fifty-fifty.

https://aussiescience.com/maths-puzzles/point-nine-nine-nine/2026-10-04T04:07:21+00:002026-10-04T04:07:21+00:00

Tests the usual arguments, one third times three and ten x minus x, and shows they assume what they set out to prove. Follows endless decimals from Simon Stevin to Cauchy's limits, Weierstrass and Dedekind, and explains why the three dots name a limit that is exactly one.

https://aussiescience.com/maths-puzzles/pi/2026-10-04T04:05:58+00:002026-10-04T04:05:58+00:00

Explains why pi is the same for every circle, and follows the hunt for it from Archimedes' polygon cage to Liu Hui, Zu Chongzhi and Madhava's infinite series. Shows why Lambert's proof makes pi irrational, why Lindemann's 1882 result rules out squaring the circle, and what the Indiana pi bill said.

https://aussiescience.com/maths-puzzles/zeno/2026-10-04T04:05:03+00:002026-10-04T04:05:03+00:00

Lays out Zeno's arguments as Aristotle reported them, then shows why infinitely many shrinking steps can add up to a finite total. Works through Achilles' race to eleven and a ninth seconds, contrasts the harmonic series that never settles, and explains how the idea of a limit answers the arrow.

https://aussiescience.com/maths-puzzles/graph-theory/2026-10-04T04:04:16+00:002026-10-04T04:04:16+00:00

Explains Leonhard Euler's 1735 proof that the Königsberg walk is impossible: every place passed through uses bridges in pairs, and all four had an odd count. Follows that idea into graph theory, Hamilton's hard routes, Dijkstra's shortest-path method and the shortcuts route planners use today.

https://aussiescience.com/maths-puzzles/godel/2026-10-04T04:03:01+00:002026-10-04T04:03:01+00:00

Explains what a formal proof is, Hilbert's hope for a complete and consistent mathematics, and how Kurt Gödel coded sentences as numbers to build one that says it can't be proved. Sets out what the two incompleteness theorems do and don't say, Turing's halting problem, and the continuum hypothesis.

https://aussiescience.com/maths-puzzles/primes-and-rsa/2026-10-04T03:22:09+00:002026-10-04T03:22:09+00:00

Explains why multiplying primes is easy but factoring the product seems hard, and works through RSA with toy keys on a 33-hour clock. Covers Diffie and Hellman, the MIT trio and GCHQ's secret earlier version, what TLS 1.3 actually uses, and the move to post-quantum locks.

https://aussiescience.com/maths-puzzles/infinity/2026-10-04T03:19:45+00:002026-10-04T03:19:45+00:00

Contrasts two ways of comparing size, counting and pairing, and follows the idea from Aristotle and Galileo to Hilbert's hotel and Georg Cantor. Explains the diagonal argument showing the decimals can't be listed, why there's no largest infinity, and the open continuum hypothesis.

https://aussiescience.com/maths-puzzles/zero/2026-10-04T03:17:47+00:002026-10-04T03:17:47+00:00

Separates zero's two jobs, a placeholder for an empty column and a number in its own right. Traces it through Babylon, the Maya, a dot carved in Cambodia in 683 and Brahmagupta's rules of 628, and explains why dividing by zero has no answer.

https://aussiescience.com/australian-science/wifi/2026-10-04T03:04:36+00:002026-10-04T03:04:36+00:00

Explains how indoor echoes cap wireless speed, and how CSIRO's 1992 patent beat them by splitting data across many slow lanes, with error correction and interleaving. Separates what came from Bell Labs and the IEEE, and follows the US lawsuits, with licence income CSIRO puts at around 430 million.

https://aussiescience.com/australian-science/polymer-banknotes/2026-10-04T03:01:54+00:002026-10-04T03:01:54+00:00

Starts with the 1966 Times Bakery forgeries and the 1968 Thredbo meeting, then explains how a diffraction grating defeats a camera and why it needs smooth plastic film. Follows David Solomon's CSIRO team to the 1988 note, forgery rates since, and the Securency bribery case.

https://aussiescience.com/australian-science/spray-on-skin/2026-10-04T03:00:59+00:002026-10-04T03:00:59+00:00

Explains how shallow wounds heal from hair follicles, and why lab-grown skin sheets took at least three weeks. Follows Fiona Wood and Marie Stoner's spray of a patient's own cells, its use after the 2002 Bali bombings, and what trials of ReCell do and don't show.

https://aussiescience.com/australian-science/hpv-vaccine/2026-10-04T03:00:03+00:002026-10-04T03:00:03+00:00

Explains how HPV's E6 and E7 proteins disable a cell's brakes, and why the vaccine had to be an empty shell. Follows Ian Frazer and Jian Zhou's 1991 particles in Brisbane, the US patent case they won in 2007, and the evidence so far on warts, infections and cervical cancer.

https://aussiescience.com/australian-science/stomach-ulcers/2026-10-04T02:58:50+00:002026-10-04T02:58:50+00:00

Robin Warren spotted spiral bacteria in stomach biopsies in 1979, and Barry Marshall only got them to grow after plates sat over Easter 1982. Explains how Helicobacter survives acid, what Marshall's 1984 drink did and didn't prove, and how trials changed minds before the 2005 Nobel Prize.

https://aussiescience.com/australian-science/ultrasound/2026-10-04T02:57:39+00:002026-10-04T02:57:39+00:00

Explains how echo timing gives depth, and why higher frequencies show finer detail but reach less deep. Credits the overseas pioneers, then shows how the Sydney group of George Kossoff and William Garrett developed grey scale, which keeps the faint echoes from inside organs that earlier screens threw away.

https://aussiescience.com/australian-science/penicillin/2026-10-04T02:56:11+00:002026-10-04T02:56:11+00:00

Explains why Fleming's 1928 discovery stalled, and how Howard Florey's Oxford team, including Ernst Chain and Norman Heatley, extracted penicillin and proved it in eight mice in 1940, then grew it in bedpans and pottery. Also covers how it bursts bacteria, and how resistance appeared almost at once.

https://aussiescience.com/australian-science/cochlear-implant/2026-10-04T02:54:40+00:002026-10-04T02:54:40+00:00

Explains how the cochlea maps pitch to place, why a hearing aid can't help once hair cells are gone, and how Graeme Clark's Melbourne team built an electrode that slides round the spiral and a speech code that worked. Credits the earlier Paris and Vienna implants, and notes objections from many in the Deaf community.

https://aussiescience.com/australian-science/black-box/2026-10-04T02:53:15+00:002026-10-04T02:53:15+00:00

Follows the 1950s Comet crashes, which left no survivors to explain them, and fuel chemist David Warren's 1954 memo proposing a wire loop that keeps the last two minutes of cockpit talk. Covers years of official reluctance, the 1958 visit that took it to London, and how modern recorders survive impact and fire.

https://aussiescience.com/australian-science/parkes/2026-10-04T02:51:11+00:002026-10-04T02:51:11+00:00

Explains how a parabolic dish collects and focuses a faint signal, then sorts out who carried which minutes: Honeysuckle Creek showed the first step, Parkes nearly all the rest, and Goldstone the sound. Also covers what The Dish got wrong, and Parkes' work on pulsars and fast radio bursts.

https://aussiescience.com/silicon/logic-from-switches/2026-10-04T00:55:47+00:002026-10-04T00:55:47+00:00

Shows how pairs of n-type and p-type transistors make CMOS gates, and why NAND gates alone can build any logic. Covers George Boole, Claude Shannon's relays, binary adders, why idle CMOS draws almost no power, the clock, the flip-flop as one bit of memory, and Hans Camenzind's 555 timer.

https://aussiescience.com/silicon/why-can-sand-think/2026-10-04T00:52:28+00:002026-10-04T00:52:28+00:00

Uses energy bands to explain why copper conducts and glass doesn't, and why silicon is really an insulator with a narrow gap. Follows silicon from quartz to a single crystal ten or eleven nines pure, and shows why it replaced germanium, whose leakage ran away as it warmed.

https://aussiescience.com/silicon/integrated-circuit/2026-10-04T00:48:59+00:002026-10-04T00:48:59+00:00

Covers the tyranny of numbers, Jack Kilby's 1958 germanium chip with hand-bonded gold wires, and how Jean Hoerni's planar process let Robert Noyce put the wiring on the oxide. Walks through photolithography layer by layer, and explains why big dies and dust push up the cost of each good chip.

https://aussiescience.com/silicon/switch-and-amplifier/2026-10-04T00:47:40+00:002026-10-04T00:47:40+00:00

Compares the two kinds of transistor. The bipolar junction transistor needs a steady base current, while the MOSFET's insulated gate summons a channel and draws almost nothing at rest. Covers Atalla and Kahng's 1959 device, Dennard scaling, and why, by one estimate, 99.9 per cent of transistors shipped are MOS.

https://aussiescience.com/silicon/diode-and-rectifier/2026-10-04T00:45:30+00:002026-10-04T00:45:30+00:00

Explains the depletion region, the hill of locked charge where p meets n, and why silicon's comes out near 0.7 volts. Shows how forward and reverse bias make a one-way valve, how four diodes and a capacitor turn mains AC into one-way current, and why gallium arsenide glows while silicon stays dark.

https://aussiescience.com/silicon/doping/2026-10-04T00:43:59+00:002026-10-04T00:43:59+00:00

Explains how a phosphorus atom brings a loose spare electron and a boron atom leaves a hole, making n-type and p-type silicon. Covers Russell Ohl's cracked rod at Bell Labs in 1940, why one dopant atom per billion matters so much, and how ion implantation puts atoms in place.

https://aussiescience.com/silicon/1947/2026-10-04T00:42:29+00:002026-10-04T00:42:29+00:00

William Shockley's field-effect amplifier failed, and John Bardeen traced the problem to electrons stuck in surface states. Walter Brattain's gold contacts on germanium then amplified about a hundred times by injecting holes. Also covers Shockley's junction transistor and the 1956 Nobel Prize.

https://aussiescience.com/silicon/data-centres-and-next/2026-10-04T00:27:32+00:002026-10-04T00:27:32+00:00

Explains why heat is now the limit: leakage stopped voltages falling, Dennard scaling broke around 2006 and clock speeds stalled at a few gigahertz. Then covers the industry's workarounds, from extreme ultraviolet light made by blasting tin droplets to chiplets, wide-gap materials and silicon photonics.

https://aussiescience.com/silicon/special-purpose-silicon/2026-10-04T00:26:17+00:002026-10-04T00:26:17+00:00

Explains why a processor spends far more energy fetching and decoding each instruction than doing the sum, and how ASICs, FPGAs and GPUs trade flexibility for efficiency. Follows Bitcoin mining's move to ASICs, AlexNet's 2012 win on two graphics cards, and Google's TPU.

https://aussiescience.com/silicon/memory/2026-10-04T00:24:42+00:002026-10-04T00:24:42+00:00

Explains static RAM's six-transistor loop, Robert Dennard's one-transistor DRAM cell that leaks and is refreshed roughly every 64 milliseconds, and flash memory's floating gate sealed in glass. Ends with why flash wears out, and why computers stack fast SRAM, then DRAM, then flash.