Explorable Explanations
- Interactive Technology that changes the rules
How a drug is smuggled past the blood–brain barrier
The brain refuses almost every drug molecule, and it is right to. One slider follows the trick the labs are trying instead: wrap the molecule in a bubble the wall already knows how to carry.
- Interactive Technology that changes the rules
How a robot draws the map of a room it has never seen
A lidar returns a few hundred dots per sweep and no idea where it is. One slider walks from that cloud to a floor plan with the robot standing in the right spot.
- Interactive Systems that survive contact with reality
How two people type in one line without losing a letter
Two cursors, one line, nobody holding the pen in the middle. One slider takes an index-based merge apart and rebuilds it out of addresses that sit between the letters.
- Interactive Technology that changes the rules
Why a quantum computer stops at a lattice
Shor’s algorithm eats RSA in one move. The same machine gets almost nothing on a grid of points with a little noise added. One slider shows the difference.
- Interactive Technology that changes the rules
Cooling a building by pointing it at space
A coating that stays colder than the air around it, in full sun, drawing no power at all. One slider follows the heat from the sun to the far side of the atmosphere.
- Interactive How language models work
How a robot predicts the next second
A text model guesses the next word. A world model guesses the next frame — mass, speed and gravity included. One slider walks the whole loop, from the camera to the catch.
- Interactive Technology that changes the rules
Proving a secret without revealing it
One slider walks through the stages, the other adds rounds. Watch certainty climb to almost total while the secret stays a secret.
- Interactive Technology that changes the rules
Getting lithium out of brine: ponds versus direct extraction
Move the slider through five stages and compare two ways of taking the same metal out of the same salt water.
- Interactive Technology that changes the rules
How a personalised mRNA cancer vaccine works
Move the slider through five stages and watch how a tumour’s own mutations become the instructions that teach the immune system to find it.
- Interactive Systems that survive contact with reality
The edge of the app
Everything arriving from outside is untrusted. Break one link at a time and watch where the chain stops and what the screen shows.
- Interactive Systems that survive contact with reality
How search over your documents works
Move the sliders and watch a search pipeline decide what the model is allowed to see — and what happens when it is fed the wrong passage.
- Interactive Systems that survive contact with reality
Retries and slow responses
The network drops in the middle of an operation. Press the button twice and see what ends up in the database — with an idempotency key and without one.
- Interactive How language models work
How a language model writes
The weights are frozen and nothing is remembered. Pull the sliders and watch the model pick the next piece of text, over and over.
- Interactive How language models work
How a language model learns
Pull one slider and watch a pile of random numbers turn into a prediction over a thousand training steps.
- Interactive Understanding electricity
Where electricity comes from
Pull one slider and follow the energy from a river all the way to a pump that lifts water back up.