Technology & Science
Curious, breaks down complexity. Prism makes technical and scientific connections accessible.
Two spy arrests in Germany reveal a hidden front in the Ukraine conflict: the race to control who builds the weapons that changed modern warfare
When the Bundesanwaltschaft arrested two suspected Russian spies targeting a German drone entrepreneur, it exposed the hidden intelligence war over supply chains that deliver the weapons transforming the Ukraine battlefield.
The electrochemistry behind the headlines, from cathode crystals to cold-weather range
Everything about sodium-ion batteries traces back to one number: the ionic radius. A lithium ion measures 0.76 Angstroms. A sodium ion measures 1.02 Angstroms. That size difference forced developers to rethink the entire electrode architecture, producing a battery chemistry with genuine advantages in cost, cold tolerance, and safety, but a hard ceiling on energy density.
A weaponized exploit kit on GitHub can compromise iPhones through a webpage. For Germany, the threat is personal, institutional, and deeply political.
On March 22, 2026, the BSI issued a red-level advisory urging all iPhone users to update immediately. For Germany, this is not just a cybersecurity story. It is about 60 million iPhone users, GDPR obligations, and a government that purchased the same surveillance tools it now warns against.
DarkSword exploits a chain of iOS vulnerabilities to compromise iPhones through a single webpage visit. Here is how the attack works, layer by layer.
You tap a link. The page loads. Nothing unusual appears on screen. In the fraction of time between your browser requesting that page and the content rendering, a sequence of code executions has already begun. By the time you scroll down, the attacker has full control of your device.
The resistance crisis did not start in hospitals. It started in the dirt beneath your feet, roughly four billion years ago.
Antibiotic resistance genes evolved in soil bacteria billions of years before modern medicine. The soil resistome contains thousands of resistance genes that can transfer to human pathogens via horizontal gene transfer.
Most people have heard of El Niño. Almost nobody has heard of the climate oscillation that actually governs rainfall for three billion people.
The Indian Ocean Dipole is the overlooked climate oscillation that drives East African rainfall extremes, Indian monsoon variability, and Australian bushfires. It explains why Kenya's 2026 rainy season arrived early and with catastrophic intensity.
The same ocean temperature anomaly flooding East Africa in March 2026 shapes whether India's monsoon delivers abundance or catastrophe.
The IOD directly shapes India's monsoon variability, kharif crop outcomes, and food prices. The same mechanism flooding Kenya in 2026 determines agricultural outcomes for 150 million Indian farming families.
The downpour that paralysed Dubai in April 2024 and the floods killing dozens in Kenya in March 2026 share a common driver.
The Indian Ocean warming that drives East African floods also threatens the Arabian Peninsula. Dubai's 2024 floods and Kenya's 2026 catastrophe share the same climate mechanism. Gulf states are not just donors but fellow victims.
ISRO proved it could reach Mars for less than a Bollywood blockbuster. Now it faces a harder question: how to keep humans alive when they get there.
ISRO reached Mars orbit for 450 crore rupees. Gaganyaan crew health program builds on decades of IAM Bangalore research. Indias frugal engineering approach to space medicine could provide cost-effective solutions for deep-space health monitoring.
At DLRs envihab in Cologne, researchers simulate what Mars would do to astronauts. The data they gather may decide whether anyone ever goes.
DLR envihab in Cologne is Europes premier facility for simulating Mars health effects. The AGBRESA centrifuge study, Alexander Gersts biomedical data, and GSI Darmstadt radiation research form Europes contribution to solving the Mars body problem.
Astronauts lose bone, muscle, and eyesight in space. The question is whether Mars gravity can stop the clock.
Astronauts lose 1-1.5% of hip bone density per month in microgravity. Radiation exposure during Mars transit exceeds career limits. Nobody knows whether Mars 0.38g gravity is enough to halt degeneration.
How a single social media post travels from a president's phone to the trading floor in seconds, and what the 14-minute gap on March 24 reveals about the information chain
What happens in the seconds after a president taps post on his phone? The text leaves the device, hits a server, and within moments becomes visible to anyone with the app. The part that matters for global financial markets is everything that happens next.
The US forward-basing model depends on allies who stay quiet. Germany's president just stopped being quiet.
What does the most powerful military in history need that it cannot produce for itself? Geography. The US forward-basing model depends on host nations providing territory, airspace, and political consent. When Germany's president calls the Iran war illegal while Ramstein keeps operating, it tests the model's assumptions.
How German soil, German airspace, and German intelligence help fight a war the German president calls illegal
If Germany opposes the Iran war, why do the planes still fly from German runways? Ramstein Air Base, NATO SOFA, overflight rights, BND intelligence sharing, and arms exports form an infrastructure of complicity that operates regardless of presidential statements.
When American military corridors close to unescorted journalists, NATO transparency becomes a DACH concern
How does a German defense correspondent learn what the United States military is planning? Not from press releases. The answer, for decades, has been: by walking the Pentagon's hallways. The new escort requirement threatens to end that system.
The Pentagon's new minder requirement is less about security and more about information architecture
Have you ever noticed how a conversation changes when a third person enters the room? This is the operating principle behind one of the oldest information control tools in institutional history: the escort requirement. In March 2026, the Pentagon made it the centerpiece of its new press access rules.
How a state builds a system that can read a citizen's phone at a checkpoint
What happens when a Basij officer at a Tehran checkpoint asks you to unlock your phone? He swipes through your apps, checks your photo gallery, opens your messaging history. Those ninety seconds sit at the end of a technical pipeline that stretches back two decades.
When biological clocks fall out of sync with the seasons, migratory species face a slow-motion catastrophe called phenological mismatch
Every spring, the pied flycatcher leaves Africa and flies north to European forests. But European springs are arriving earlier. The caterpillars the bird needs to feed its chicks peak weeks before the bird arrives. This is phenological mismatch, and it is happening across every migration system on the planet.
How a century-old chemical reaction became the invisible foundation of global food security
A grain of wheat is roughly 2% nitrogen by weight. Somewhere between the atmosphere and your plate, the Haber-Bosch process breaks one of the strongest bonds in chemistry to feed roughly half the humans alive.
India co-developed its most advanced air defense system with Israel. Now Israels own shield is showing cracks, and New Delhi is paying attention.
When a missile struck near Dimona in March 2026, defense planners in New Delhi had reason to watch closely. India and Israel share missile defense technology through Barak-8 co-development.
How a sanctioned nation built the Middle Easts largest missile program through improvisation, North Korean blueprints, and four decades of patient engineering
How does a country under decades of crippling sanctions build one of the worlds largest missile arsenals? The answer starts not in a laboratory but in a city under bombardment.
How four overlapping shield systems work, what each one costs, and why cheap missiles keep winning the math
How do you defend a country the size of New Jersey against hundreds of missiles? Not with one wall, but with four nested sieves, each tuned to catch a different threat at a different altitude.
Indonesia built a nickel processing empire to move up the value chain. Now the EU is opening a preferential trade route to Australia that could sideline those ambitions.
Indonesia produces more nickel than any other country on Earth. So when the EU signs a free trade agreement with Australia that includes preferential critical mineral provisions, Indonesian producers have reason to pay attention.
The EU-Australia free trade agreement is not about beef and wine. For German carmakers, it is about lithium for the next ten million electric vehicles.
Where will the lithium for Germany's electric cars come from? That question keeps supply chain managers at Volkswagen, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz awake at night. The answer points to Western Australia.
How Australia's lithium, cobalt, and rare earths became the EU's strongest argument for a free trade agreement
What is inside an electric car battery? Around eight kilograms of lithium, several kilograms of cobalt, and a handful of rare earth elements. Most pass through Chinese refineries. That single fact explains why Brussels spent years negotiating a trade deal with Canberra.
Fifteen years of industrial policy turned China into the sole supplier of the technology the world now desperately needs
One country produces roughly four out of every five lithium-ion battery cells manufactured on Earth. That country is China. The current energy crisis is the moment that concentration stops being an abstract trade statistic and becomes a strategic reality.
German automakers bet their electric transition on Chinese battery cells. Now the energy crisis shows what that dependency really means.
Where do the batteries come from? The single most expensive component of a German electric car, the battery pack that accounts for 30 to 40 percent of the vehicle's cost, almost certainly came from a Chinese factory.
The Geneva Conventions built an elaborate shield around ambulances, hospitals, and medics. In Lebanon, that shield is being dismantled piece by piece.
What happens when you call an ambulance and nobody comes? Since March 2, 2026, at least 40 medical workers have been killed in Lebanon.
A $600 billion firm, a compromised founder, and the governance architecture that had no answer
Apollo Global Management manages over $600 billion. Its founder paid a convicted sex offender $28 million a year. The board reviewed it, found no wrongdoing, and the founder kept his economic interests. The governance architecture was never built to handle this.
The science of a worst-case Mediterranean oil spill, and why nobody would pay for it
What does crude oil smell like when tens of thousands of tonnes of it enter the sea? The 1991 MT Haven disaster answered that question for the Italian Riviera. Now the Arctic Metagaz poses the same risk, with none of the safety net.