The yield curve plots the interest rates on US Treasury debt from the shortest maturities (a few weeks) out to 30 years. Normally it slopes upward: lenders want more to tie money up for longer. When short-term rates rise above long-term ones, the curve is “inverted”, and that has happened before every US recession since the late 1960s. That record made inversion the most quoted recession signal in finance. Then the curve stayed inverted for more than two years from 2022 to 2024 and, as of October 2026, no recession has followed.

Three agencies rate most of the world’s traded debt: S&P Global Ratings, Moody’s and Fitch. They use the same underlying ladder, written two different ways. S&P and Fitch use letters with plus and minus signs. Moody’s uses a different capitalisation and adds the numbers 1, 2 and 3. This page lines the scales up notch by notch and covers the short-term scales, the default symbols, outlooks and watches, historical default rates, and the vocabulary that goes with all of it.

Most laws aimed at the most powerful AI models decide who is covered by counting training compute. The unit is FLOP, the total number of floating-point operations used to train a model. This page compares the thresholds now written into law, what each one triggers, and when the obligations start. Last updated: 15 September 2026. The short version The EU sets its line at 10^25 FLOP. California, New York, Illinois and South Korea all use 10^26, which is ten times higher.

Backcasting is a planning method that starts with a defined future outcome and works back to the present, asking what has to happen (and in what order) for that outcome to be reached. Forecasting runs the other way. It takes today’s trends and projects them forward to see where they lead. That sounds like a small difference in direction, yet it changes the question completely. A forecast asks what is likely.

Since 2023 China has built a licensing system around the minerals and metals it dominates. The controls started with gallium and germanium and now cover rare earths, graphite, battery materials and the technology used to process them. This page lists each measure by date, notes what is suspended and what still applies, and gives a status table at the end. Last updated: 15 September 2026. Why these minerals matter China leads in refining for most strategic minerals.

A “3nm” chip has no important feature that measures 3 nanometres. Node names stopped describing physical sizes decades ago and now work as generation labels, each one promising a denser, more efficient chip than the last. This page explains where the names came from, how the big foundries’ labels line up, and which numbers actually tell you something. Last updated: 15 September 2026. Where the names came from Through the 1990s a node name roughly matched the length of a transistor’s gate.

US export controls and sanctions come with a thick layer of acronyms. News stories about Nvidia, Huawei or chip tools often use them without explanation. This glossary defines the terms that come up most, grouped by the agency or rulebook they belong to, with a note on how each one shows up in practice. Last updated: 15 September 2026. The agencies BIS (Bureau of Industry and Security) The part of the US Commerce Department that runs export controls on commercial and dual-use items, meaning goods, software and technology with both civilian and military uses.

Subsea cables carry almost all international internet traffic, and they break often. The industry records roughly 150 to 200 faults a year, most caused by fishing gear and ship anchors in shallow water. Since 2023 a cluster of breaks near geopolitical flashpoints has drawn much closer attention. This log records the significant incidents in date order, with the suspected vessel, what investigators found and where each case stands. Last updated: 15 September 2026.

This page tracks the main US rules that limit China’s access to advanced chips, AI accelerators and chipmaking equipment. It starts with the October 2022 package and runs to the guidance Washington issued in 2026. Entries are in date order, and each one says what changed and who felt it. Last updated: 15 September 2026. How the controls work The Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) sits inside the US Commerce Department and writes the Export Administration Regulations (EAR).

A book cipher uses an ordinary published text as the shared secret. Sender and receiver own the same edition, and the encoded message is nothing more than a set of pointers into it. The appeal is obvious. No suspicious key material, no cipher machine, nothing incriminating on a shelf that also holds forty other books. For roughly four centuries this was one of the better options available to spies, conspirators and diplomats working without institutional support.