About

What we follow

The front page is a live feed rather than an edited publication. It draws on five subject areas:

• Renewables Photovoltaics, perovskites, wind, storage and battery materials.
• Computer Science Machine learning, distributed systems, cryptography, quantum computing.
• AI & Big Data Neural networks, data mining, recommender systems, explainable AI.
• Photonics Optical devices, fibre and integrated photonics, lasers, nonlinear optics.
• Semiconductors Device physics, GaN, circuit design, graphene and 2D materials.

Where the feed comes from

Papers are drawn from OpenAlex, an open catalogue of scholarly work, and from Crossref, which carries metadata deposited by the publishers themselves. Both are filtered to the topics above and sorted by publication date. Technical discussion comes from Hacker News. Nothing is editorialised and nothing is stored: the page queries all three sources directly in your browser as you scroll.

Privacy and storage

This site sets no cookies, and carries no analytics, tag manager or tracker of any kind. Every script it loads is served from this domain — nothing is pulled from a content delivery network, and there are no external fonts or stylesheets.

Nothing you do here is kept on the server. These are static pages with no database and no accounts: the feed, the encryption tool and the games all run entirely inside your browser, and nothing they produce is uploaded. The only record of a visit is the ordinary web-server log kept by the hosting provider.

Two small preferences are kept in your browser’s own local storage:

• xrn:theme Whether Paper mode — the plain white, high-contrast style for e-ink and other simple screens — is switched on.
• xrn:category Which topic filter you last chose on the feed, so the front page opens where you left it.

Both are written only when you actively change the setting, and both exist purely so the site behaves the way you left it. Unlike a cookie, local storage is never attached to a request: these values stay on your device and are never transmitted anywhere. That makes them strictly functional storage under GDPR/ePrivacy Directive an exempt from a consent banner. Clearing this site’s data in your browser removes both, and everything returns to its defaults.

Contact

Questions about the network or proposals for collaboration are welcome.

Network members can reach their own mailbox through the webmail link in the menu.