Hugin & Munin Journal

Desert and sand are so closely joined in the popular imagination that the connection feels almost definitional: dunes, heat shimmer, bare sky, and a horizon made of grains. Yet deserts are defined by dryness, not by their surface material. Some are sandy, but many are dominated by gravel, exposed rock, salt flats, mountains, or hard-packed sediment. Antarctica is a desert too. Sand is no more exclusive to deserts than water is exclusive to oceans. It occurs on beaches, in riverbeds, beneath forests, across agricultural fields, and within ordinary soils. Explaining a sandy desert therefore requires two different answers: where the grains came from, and why they remain exposed or accumulate in that particular place. Aridity matters, but it is not enough. Dry conditions reduce vegetation and surface moisture, making loose sediment easier for wind to move. The sand itself still has to be produced, transported, sorted, and trapped. A dune field is the visible result of that whole sequen...

Energy debates often look settled from a distance. Renewables are expanding, costs are falling and the direction of travel seems clear. Yet electricity systems are not assembled from moral categories. They are built from technologies with different production profiles, construction risks, physical constraints and political vulnerabilities. Solar, wind, storage, grids and nuclear are often discussed as though they were competing answers to one question. They are not. A solar panel produces when sunlight is available. A wind turbine follows another weather pattern. A battery moves electricity through time but does not create it. A transmission line moves power between places. A nuclear plant can provide large quantities of low-emissions electricity largely independent of daily weather, but brings financing, construction and operational risks of its own. The difficult question is no longer simply whether electricity should be decarbonised . It is how to assemble a system that continue...

Artificial intelligence is no longer only speeding up isolated scientific tasks. In some fields, it is beginning to change how candidate solutions are generated, which experiments are attempted and where researchers direct their attention. AI systems can propose hypotheses, search molecular and mathematical spaces, plan experiments, analyse results and generate synthetic examples. They are not replacing science as a whole, but they are redistributing effort within parts of it. A 2025 perspective in npj Artificial Intelligence surveys the use of large language models across the scientific process, from literature review and hypothesis formation to experimental design and analysis. It also makes an important qualification: AI’s impact on fundamental science, defined as the discovery of new principles or laws, remains limited. Since that perspective appeared, the boundary has moved further. A 2026 Nature paper on Co-Scientist reported AI-generated scientific hypotheses taken throug...

A familiar theory of innovation says that progress becomes harder because the low-hanging fruit is picked first. Early discoveries lie close at hand; later advances require larger machines, larger teams, deeper specialisation and more money. Nicholas Bloom, Charles I. Jones, John Van Reenen and Michael Webb developed an influential empirical version of this argument in “Are Ideas Getting Harder to Find?” . Across semiconductors, agriculture, medicine and firm-level innovation, they found research effort rising substantially while measured research productivity declined. Their most striking example is Moore’s Law: maintaining the historical rate of improvement in chip density requires far more researchers than it did in the early 1970s. There is considerable truth in this. Mature fields accumulate technical difficulty. Once obvious routes have been explored, the remaining work often requires greater precision, more infrastructure and command of a much larger body of knowledge. The m...

Venture capital attracts criticism for familiar reasons: too much money chasing fashionable ideas, companies scaling before they understand their customers, founders and investors protecting themselves while employees discover that their options are worthless. Look only at the visible failures and the verdict seems straightforward. Yet venture capital also finances a kind of company that ordinary debt handles badly. A young firm may have little collateral, uncertain revenue, a prototype rather than a product and a serious chance of producing nothing valuable at all. Requiring regular loan payments while those questions remain unresolved can end the experiment before it produces an answer. The usual defence of venture capital nevertheless states the case too neatly. Venture investors do not absorb failure on behalf of society. They construct portfolios in which losses are expected because a small number of exceptional companies may repay them many times over. The financial write-off...

The idea of reclaiming deserts carries an obvious appeal. It suggests that landscapes dismissed as barren can be brought back into productive ecological systems through persistence, investment and scale. China’s work across its northern drylands is often offered as proof that this is already happening. Vegetation cover has increased across large areas, soil conservation has improved and restored vegetation has helped reduce wind erosion and dust over long periods. Those gains are real, but the phrase “Great Green Wall” makes them sound simpler than they are. The central lesson is not that deserts can be conquered by planting enough trees. It is that degraded drylands can often recover when intervention fits the local climate, water balance and ecological history. The same effort can fail—or damage a functioning desert ecosystem—when it imposes dense vegetation where the land cannot support it. The most useful question is therefore not how green a restoration project looks. It is ...