Month: November 2025

When Portugal Is Too Hot, Move to England

When their current waters warm sea creatures often migrate to cooler waters. So just noticing the fewer creatures in the warmer waters will overestimate the harm done by the warming. In the article quoted below, when Mediterranean waters warm, Octopuses migrate to English waters. Mediterranean fishermen lose, English fishermen gain, but there is no clear net loss or gain to the Octopuses or to humanity in general.

This example supports my claim that we too often ignore the benefits of global warming.

(p. A4) Expecting his normal catch of plaice, turbot and Dover sole, Arthur Dewhirst was surprised when his nets spilled their contents onto his ship’s deck earlier this year. Instead of shiny, flapping fish, hundreds of octopuses wriggled and writhed.

His first thought? “Dollar signs! Dollar signs! Dollar signs!” he recalled with a laugh, sitting in his trawler last month in the harbor at Brixham in Devon, England.

Across England’s southern coast, fishing crews reported an extraordinary boom in octopus catches this summer. Sold for around 7 pounds a kilo, it was sometimes worth an extra £10,000 ($13,475) a week to Mr. Dewhirst, he said.

. . .

There are several theories about the causes of this puzzling phenomenon, but scientists say that warming water temperatures make the region more hospitable to this species of octopus, which is normally found off the Mediterranean coast.

According to Steve Simpson, a professor of marine biology at the University of Bristol, “climate change is a likely driver” of the population boom. “We are right on the northern limit of the octopus species range, but our waters are getting warmer, so our little island of Great Britain is becoming increasingly favorable for octopus populations,” he said.

For the full story see:

Stephen Castle. “Octopuses Bring Windfalls and Anxieties to England’s Southern Coast.” The New York Times (Tues., September 30, 2025): A4.

(Note: ellipsis added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Sept. 29, 2025, and has the title “Octopuses Invade the English Coast, ‘Eating Anything in Their Path’.”)

Do Not Ridicule Those Who Know How to Sew

15 years ago I ran a blog entry quoting Brian Fagan’s theory that we Homo sapiens (aka Cro-Magnons) outlasted the Neanderthals because we developed the sewing needle technology that allowed us to sew tighter fitting garments against the cold. Now added evidence elaborates and supports Fagan’s theory. Near the time when Neanderthals became extinct, the magnetic poles of the earth shifted over a few hundred years, allowing substantially more ultraviolet radiation to hit the earth than usual. With better-filling garments, due to sewing needles, Homo sapiens were better protected against that radiation.

The WSJ article summarizing the new research is:

Aylin Woodward. “New Light Shed on the Demise of Neanderthals.” The Wall Street Journal (Thurs., Aug. 7, 2025): A3.

(Note: the online version of the NYT article has the date August 6, 2025, and has the title “Did UV Rays Doom Neanderthals?”)

The published academic paper summarized in The Wall Street Journal article mentioned and cited above is:

Mukhopadhyay, Agnit, Sanja Panovska, Raven Garvey, Michael W. Liemohn, Natalia Ganjushkina, Austin Brenner, Ilya Usoskin, Mikhail Balikhin, and Daniel T. Welling. “Wandering of the Auroral Oval 41,000 Years Ago.” Science Advances 11, no. 16 (April 16, 2025): eadq7275.

Innovative Entrepreneur Alfred Beach Privately Built and Operated America’s First Subway

Even classical liberals, strong supporters of free markets, often believe that utilities and mass transit need to be built and operated by governments. So I was delighted to learn from the book review quoted below that the first subway in the United States was privately built by a spirited innovative entrepreneur. That spirit still lives today, if we let it. (Ponder Travis Kalanick.)

(p. C9) In November 1869, the New York inventor Alfred Beach pushed the “move fast and break laws” principle to the limit in developing America’s first underground passenger railway. Without city approval—officials thought he was building a small system to improve mail delivery—he carved out a tunnel 8 feet wide, 300 feet long and right under Broadway.

. . .

Beach (1826-96) . . . was a remarkable character, a precocious innovator who channeled the forces—mass media and technological change—that were making the world modern. His father owned the New York Sun, the country’s most popular paper, and co-founded the Associated Press. Beach went to work for the Sun as a teenager; by 22 he was running it with his brother, and by 25 he sold his share to concentrate on his real passion: Scientific American, which he had bought a few years earlier. He and his partner made the publication a success and built a complementary business filing patents for the inventors who read it. When his client Thomas Edison “perfected the phonograph in 1877,” Mr. Algeo notes, he gave Beach the first demonstration, recording himself singing “Mary Had a Little Lamb.”

In 1849, when he was 23, Beach outlined in the magazine’s pages his vision of a railroad beneath Broadway, with two tracks, gas lights and stops on every corner. “The proposal was radical—the world’s first subway wouldn’t open in London for another fourteen years—and the technological hurdles were immense,” Mr. Algeo writes. The projected route involved a tunnel 20 times as long as the longest extant.

. . .

Beach . . . struggled to get approval for his plan, stymied by the interlocking corruption of Tammany bosses and real-estate interests. Elevated railways and other mass-transit rivals threatened in the meantime to crowd him out. When his railway finally did open, it lasted a mere three years, doomed by the financial crisis of 1873.

For the full review see:

Timothy Farrington. “Bookshelf; One Man’s Tunnel Vision.” The Wall Street Journal (Sat., Sept. 27, 2025): C9.

(Note: ellipses added.)

(Note: the online version of the review has the date September 25, 2025, and has the title “Bookshelf; ‘New York’s Secret Subway’: Tunnel Visions.”)

The book under review is:

Algeo, Matthew. New York’s Secret Subway: The Underground Genius of Alfred Beach and the Origins of Mass Transit. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2025.

Substrate Startup Develops Less Complex and Cheaper Way to Etch Computer Chips

To prepare for a workshop next week I have been reading a lot about Stuart Kauffman and Roger Koppl’s theory of the adjacent possible (TAP), as it is applied to the growth of technology. One of the implications of TAP is the that new technology gets progressively more complex, in the sense of using an ever larger number of components. I think that is often true but I can think of a couple of counter-examples. So I was interested to read yesterday that the production of computer chips may provide another counter-example.

(p. B1) In March [2025], James Proud, an unassuming British-born American without a college degree, sat in Vice President JD Vance’s office and explained how his Silicon Valley start-up, Substrate, had developed an alternative manufacturing process for semiconductors, one of the most fundamental and difficult challenges in tech.

For the past decade, semiconductors have been manufactured by a school-bus-size machine that uses light to etch patterns onto silicon wafers inside sterile, $25 billion factories. The machine, from the Dutch company ASML, is so critical to the chips in smartphones, A.I. systems and weaponry that Washington has effectively blocked sales of it to China.

But Mr. Proud said his company, which has received more than $100 million from investors, had developed a solution that would cut the manufacturing cost in half by channeling light from a giant instrument known as a particle accelerator through a tool the size of a car. The technique had allowed Substrate to print a high-resolution microchip layer comparable to images produced by the world’s leading semiconductor plants.

. . .

(p. B4) Mr. Proud moved to San Francisco from London in 2011 as a member of the first Thiel Fellowship class, a college alternative for aspiring founders created by Peter Thiel, the venture capitalist.

. . .

After the Trump administration persuaded TSMC to build a plant in Arizona, Mr. Proud decided to build his own company. He and his brother Oliver, 25, started reading books and academic papers on semiconductor lithography. They questioned why the process had become so complex and expensive.

One of the major costs in modern lithography machines, which have more than 100,000 parts, is how they use high-powered lasers to turn droplets of molten tin into a burst of extreme ultraviolet light. The machines use the light to etch a wafer of silicon in a process known as EUV lithography.

. . .

The team spent much of 2023 building a custom lithography tool. It featured thousands of parts and was small enough to fit in the back of a U-Haul. They tested it in computer simulations.

In early 2024, Substrate reserved a Bay Area particle accelerator for a make-or-break test. The company ran into problems when vibrations near the particle accelerator caused the tool to gyrate and blur the image, Mr. Proud said.

A frantic, daylong search found that the air-conditioning system was causing the vibration. Substrate adjusted the fan speed until the process printed “very beautiful and tiny things repeatedly” on a silicon wafer, Mr. Proud said.

For the full story see:

Tripp Mickle and Mike Kai Chen. “A Less Costly Route To Computer Chips?” The New York Times (Weds., Oct. 29, 2025): B1 & B4.

(Note: ellipses, and bracketed year, added.)

(Note: the online version of the story has the date Oct. 28, 2025, and has the title “Can a Start-Up Make Computer Chips Cheaper Than the Industry’s Giants?”)