Marcus Webb 
What is cloud computing? It is the practice of renting computing power, storage, and software from someone else’s building, delivered over a network, billed by the minute or the gigabyte. The cloud is not floating and it is not abstract. It is a warehouse full of servers in a place with cheap electricity and good … Read more
How does wifi work? It converts digital bits into radio waves, broadcasts them on a frequency nobody needs a license for, and relies on a receiver to turn the wobble back into bits. There is no special “internet” in the air. Your router is a very small radio station, and your laptop is a very … Read more
What is an api? It is a set of rules one program uses to ask another program for something, without needing to know how that other program is built inside. The weather app on your phone does not calculate tomorrow’s temperature. It asks a server, in a precisely formatted sentence, and the server answers with … Read more
AI vs machine learning gets treated as a rivalry, or worse, as two spellings of the same thing. Neither is right. Machine learning is one technique inside artificial intelligence, and the two terms describe different levels of a hierarchy that also contains deep learning and, at the bottom, specific model architectures. The distinction is not … Read more
How do large language models work? At the bottom of every chatbot reply sits one repeated operation: guess the next token. A token is a chunk of text — usually a word piece, sometimes a whole short word, sometimes a single character. The model scores every token in its vocabulary, picks one, attaches it to … Read more
Jet lag is not imagination. Fly from New York to Tokyo and your liver, muscles, and immune cells are still running on New York time while the sun says otherwise. What is circadian rhythm, at its core, is a set of internal clocks that expect the day to be about 24 hours long — and … Read more
Pinch your nose and bite into an apple. You get sweetness, some acidity, a little texture — and almost no apple. The flavor was never in your mouth. How does taste work is really two questions: how the tongue detects a handful of chemicals, and how the brain assembles those signals into what you experience … Read more
A yawn is a strange package: mouth wide, eyes squeezed shut, deep breath in, tears often running, and a stretch through the jaw and neck. It lasts four to six seconds and happens in every vertebrate studied. Why do we yawn has been asked for centuries, and the answer is still partly open. The Oxygen … Read more
You inhale a few thousand bacteria with every breath and swallow more with every meal. Most are dead before you notice, killed by a system with no central control room and no single cell in charge. How does the immune system work is best answered as a sequence: three layers, each slower and more specific … Read more
How do our eyes work? The camera analogy gets you started and then misleads you. Your eye does most of its focusing before any adjustable part, has a blind spot the brain quietly erases, and detects light with a sensor that is installed backward. All of it works well enough that you can read this … Read more