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 Does Taipei 101 Hang a 660-Tonne Ball Near Its Top?

  On 8 August 2015, during Typhoon Soudelor, the 660-tonne steel ball near the top of Taipei 101 swung a full meter. It is a tuned mass damper, and the building was never in danger of falling. This video explains why skyscrapers are built to sway, why slow building sway can cause motion sickness (Taipei 101 sways at about 0.15 hertz, near a frequency associated with motion sickness), how a tuned pendulum reduces motion, what the damper did in the typhoon and in earthquakes (far less than viral videos suggest), and what engineers learned from Citicorp Center, the Tacoma Narrows Bridge, London's Millennium Bridge, water-tank dampers and Shanghai Tower's magnetic damper.

• Can Birds See Earth's Magnetic Field?

  For years, robins in a German university's bird lab could not pick their migration direction. The cause turned out to be the faint electrical noise of the city around them, and shielding their huts with grounded aluminium brought their compass back. This video follows how scientists worked out that migrating birds carry a magnetic compass: ink-pad funnels, robins that read the tilt of Earth's field instead of north and south, a compass that only works in light, radio waves that scramble it, a brain area that links it to vision, and the leading suspect, a protein in the eye called cryptochrome 4 whose chemistry may depend on quantum physics. Nobody has yet shown it working inside a living bird.

• What Makes Your Knuckles Crack?

  What is the crack you hear when you pull a finger? In 1947, researchers used X-rays to study knuckle cracking and linked the sound to a gas pocket forming in the joint. In 1971, another team proposed that the sound came from that bubble collapsing. In 2015, a team in Canada filmed a knuckle cracking inside an MRI scanner: the pocket appeared and stayed visible while the finger was still being pulled. In 2018, a mathematical model suggested that a partial collapse could still make the sound. Then there's the warning about arthritis. For 50 years, doctor Donald Unger cracked his left-hand knuckles at least twice a day, while his right hand cracked only rarely.

• 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.