Information isn’t sterile. It’s stranger than you think.
Somehow, information often feels like a world of 1's and 0's. Mullaney Published Jul 27, 2026 1:30 PM EDT Add Popular Science (opens in a new tab) More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Excerpted from How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information by Thomas S.
- ▪Somehow, information often feels like a world of 1's and 0's.
- ▪Mullaney Published Jul 27, 2026 1:30 PM EDT Add Popular Science (opens in a new tab) More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News resul
- ▪Excerpted from How We Disappear: A Personal History of Information by Thomas S.
Popular Science files mainly under science. We currently carry 121 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
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Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Popular Science |
| Canonical URL | https://www.popsci.com/science/how-we-disappear-book-excerpt/ |
| Publication time | Mon, 27 Jul 2026 13:30:00 -0400 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-27T17:31:32.093Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-27T17:31:32.093Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | 6nGOn2qV64PX · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Science Physics Information isn’t sterile. It’s stranger than you think. Somehow, information often feels like a world of 1's and 0's. The bigger picture is much weirder. By Thomas S. Mullaney Published Jul 27, 2026 1:30 PM EDT Add Popular Science (opens in a new tab) More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. Credit: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. Get the Popular Science daily newsletter💡 Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Email address Sign up Thank you! By signing up, you confirm you are 16+, will receive newsletters and promotional content and agree to our Terms of Use and acknowledge the data practices in our Privacy Policy.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Popular Science.
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