siner.io

siner.io is where siner publishes personal projects.

The main project right now is Beyond Headlines, a YouTube channel and multilingual blog that explains the science, history and economics behind the news, with every claim tied to a published source.

Projects

Latest from Beyond Headlines

• Why Do Prices End in .99?

  Why do so many prices stop one cent short of a round number? The penny itself barely matters. What matters is the first digit: across 22 million used-car auction sales, cars just under 80,000 miles sold for about $210 more than cars just over it. This video follows the left-digit effect from 19th-century cash registers to supermarket scanner data, used-car auctions, heart surgery decisions at age 80, and the year Israel banned prices ending in 99, and asks who is really being fooled: shoppers, or the stores that price for them.

• Did Vikings Really Find the Sun with a Crystal?

  Without a magnetic compass, Norse sailors crossed the North Atlantic by the sun. When clouds hid it, they may have used a "sunstone": a crystal that reads the polarized pattern of the sky. This video separates what is documented (medieval sailing directions, the Uunartoq dial, sunstones in Icelandic church inventories), what is a story (the allegorical tale of King Olaf and Sigurd), and what physics and experiments show, including a 2018 simulation of 1,000 voyages to Greenland. No sunstone has ever been found at a Viking site.

• Who Gets the $166 Billion Tariff Refund?

  In June 2026 the U.S. government paid out $49 billion in customs refunds, about twice what it collected that month. In Treasury records going back to 2015, net customs receipts had never fallen below zero until this spring. The money is part of about $166 billion in tariffs the Supreme Court ruled illegal in February. It goes back to the importers of record, with interest, while the shoppers who paid higher prices are not part of the process. This video follows the money with Treasury data, the court record, and research on who actually paid.

• How Does Anesthesia Switch Off Your Mind?

  Every year, hundreds of millions of operations rely on general anesthesia, and the first public demonstration took place 180 years ago this October. Yet science still can't fully explain how these drugs switch consciousness off, or how it comes back.

• Why Does Cilantro Taste Like Soap?

  To some people cilantro tastes fresh and citrusy. To others it tastes like soap. The soap is real chemistry the leaf shares with soap, and a smell receptor gene near OR6A2 is involved, but that gene explains only about half a percent of the difference between people. Here is what the rest of the answer looks like, and what you can try if you're on the soap side.

• Why Flights Over Greenland Look Like a Detour on a Flat Map

  Fly from Los Angeles to London and the plane on the seat-back map swings north over Canada and Greenland. On a flat map that looks like a detour. On a globe it is the shortcut: about 8,760 km instead of 9,730 km for a steady compass heading.