The phonics debate: what the reading wars were really about
Systematic phonics won the evidence argument for teaching children to decode, but decoding was never the whole of reading, and the…
Amelia Hart
Amelia Hart
Technology Correspondent
Amelia Hart covers artificial intelligence, consumer tech and the platform economy. She has written about the technology industry for more than a decade.
Nuclear fusion versus fission: why the clean giant is always thirty years away
Fusion's celebrated ignition results measure energy at the plasma, not the plug, and the gulf between those two numbers explains why…
Amelia Hart
The SIM swap scam: how phone numbers became keys to everything
SIM swap fraud exploits the gap between what a phone number can unlock, bank logins, email resets, one-time codes, and how casually…
Amelia Hart
How new elements get made and named
Superheavy elements are forged one atom at a time by slamming ion beams into rare actinide targets, then survive milliseconds before…
Amelia Hart
How spam filters decide what you never see
Modern spam filtering is a reputation economy built on SPF, DKIM and DMARC authentication plus machine-learned sender scores, and the same…
Amelia Hart
How tides actually work: the Moon is only half the story
The textbook picture of two lunar bulges cannot explain real tides: they are resonant waves sloshing in ocean basins, which is why the…
Amelia Hart
Why your broadband speed is not what the advert said
Advertised broadband speeds are peak-time medians measured at the router, so contention on shared lines, copper distance, and wi-fi physics…
Amelia Hart
How earthquakes are measured and why magnitude is not damage
Moment magnitude records the energy released at the fault on a logarithmic scale, but depth, soil conditions and building codes decide the…
Amelia Hart
How undersea cables carry the internet and why they keep getting cut
Roughly 500 submarine cables carry almost all intercontinental data, laid and mended by a few dozen specialist ships, which turns anchors…
Amelia Hart