Long Reads

Longer explainers,
fewer dead ends.

Deeper how-tos, history, and tech explainers from the Make Tech Easier editorial team. Pieces here get extra research and review.

Russia still custom-builds the Soyuz return seats for ISS crew members using plaster casts taken weeks before launch, because astronauts grow as much as five centimetres taller during a long-duration stay and a seat moulded to their Earth-shaped spine would no longer fit the body that comes home

Scott Kelly came back from the International Space Station in March 2016 measurably taller than the brother he had left behind on Earth.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 12, 2026

Mycorrhizal fungi colonised plant roots roughly 450 million years ago and biologists now suspect plants could never have moved out of the oceans onto bare rock without them, meaning every forest on Earth — including the redwoods, the Amazon, and the boreal belt — is still running on a partnership older than trees themselves

The first land plants did not have roots. They had stubby green tissue pressed against bare Ordovician rock about 450 million…

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 11, 2026

The "CrackBerry" nickname stuck for a reason — and the variable-reward psychology that hooked early-2000s executives on their BlackBerrys is the exact same machinery now running every push notification on every smartphone in your pocket

Twenty-five years ago, the only people sleeping with their email device on the nightstand were lawyers, bankers, and a handful of executives whose firms paid for a BlackBerry Enterprise Server licence.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 11, 2026

Suzanne Simard sealed paper birch and Douglas fir seedlings inside plastic bags, fed them carbon-14 and carbon-13 dioxide, and nine days later found carbon had crossed between species through fungal threads in the British Columbia soil beneath her boots

Suzanne Simard’s 1997 forest experiment did not show trees whispering to each other.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 10, 2026

A species of jellyfish called Turritopsis dohrnii can revert its adult cells back to a juvenile polyp stage when injured or starving, effectively restarting its life cycle, and biologists have so far failed to identify any natural limit to how many times it can do this.

The tiny jellyfish Turritopsis dohrnii can reorganise its adult cells back into a juvenile polyp when stressed, restarting its life cycle indefinitely. Biologists have observed more than ten reversals in a single animal and have yet to find any limit.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 10, 2026

Octopuses possess roughly 500 million neurons distributed across their body, with two-thirds located in their arms rather than their central brain, meaning each arm can taste, problem-solve, and react to stimuli independently of whatever the octopus is otherwise paying attention to.

The octopus carries about 500 million neurons, but only a third sit in its central brain. The rest run its eight arms, each able to taste, decide, and act on its own.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 10, 2026

The Roman aqueduct at Segovia, built around the first century AD without mortar, still carried water into the 1970s, its 167 granite arches held together by nothing but the precise weight distribution of stones cut to fit each other within fractions of a millimeter.

The Aqueduct of Segovia delivered drinking water to a Spanish city for nearly nineteen centuries using nothing but precisely cut granite blocks held in place by their own weight. It was finally retired in 1973 — not because it failed, but because car exhaust was eating the stone.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 10, 2026

In 1843, Ada Lovelace described a brass-and-punched-card engine that could act on symbols as well as numbers, even composing music if harmony could be reduced to rules, inside seven translator’s notes three times longer than the paper itself

In 1843, Ada Lovelace looked at Charles Babbage’s unbuilt Analytical Engine and described something stranger than a calculator.

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 10, 2026

ARPANET sent its first message on 29 October 1969 from a lab at UCLA to a machine at Stanford, and the message was supposed to read 'LOGIN' — but the system crashed after the L and the O, meaning the first word ever transmitted over the network that became the internet was, by accident, 'LO'.

At 10:30 p.m. on 29 October 1969, a graduate student named Charley Kline sat at a Scientific Data Systems Sigma 7 computer in…

By Make Tech Easier Editorial Team · Jun 9, 2026