Lightning still isn't solved. NASA's ALOFT aircraft campaign found gamma-ray flicker patterns matching Joseph Dwyer's runaway-electron avalanche theory, and a 2025 result from Xuan-Min Shao argues cosmic-ray showers may seed strikes by ionizing cloud particles at unexpected angles. The physics inside a thundercloud now looks closer to a particle collider than to a Franklin-era spark.

Willison spent the year drawing a clean line between 'vibe coding' (no review, no responsibility) and 'agentic engineering' (ship with care). Now he admits the line is dissolving in his own practice — he's pushing agent output to production unreviewed because the success rate makes it feel reasonable. A short, candid piece about normalization of deviance happening in real time, from someone with the standing to notice it in himself.

At 81, Stan Crooke — the man who built Ionis into the antisense-oligonucleotide company — is running a nonprofit that designs custom drugs for patients whose mutations affect fewer than 30 people on Earth. Huggett's profile of n-Lorem is also a quiet argument that the regulatory and economic frameworks for n-of-1 medicine have finally cracked open: 50 patients treated, 400 applications in. The first patient, Susannah, walked again.