Interactive Tech Journalism
Issue 5 • January 2026
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Welcome to DevTech News

I hope you had a wonderful holiday season and a festive New Year. For the first issue of 2026, we have the latest breakthroughs blended with some nostalgia content.

As I was composing the issue and researching what to put in the Numbers Game section, I discovered that 1995 was a significant milestone year for many technologies. There were so many big names that debuted that I decided to restructure the usual format so I could do the content justice. Beyond that, though, we've got the usual lineup of weird and interesting stories, tools, and more. Below are the headliners. Enjoy!

Featured Stories

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DevTech

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How to Build Truly Responsive Components with Container Queries

Bryan Paronto explores how container queries finally solve the decade-long problem with media queries: they only know about the viewport, not the actual space available to components. Instead of creating separate ProductCard and ProductCardSidebar components, container queries let elements respond to their parent container's size, making truly reusable components possible.

With Tailwind 4.0 now including container queries natively, developers can use @container and @ prefix variants to create components that adapt based on available space rather than viewport size. This enables component libraries that work anywhere, dashboard widgets that adapt to grid cells, and design systems without endless size variants—all with 92.5% browser support.

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Quick Hits

Evil Martians turned "vibe code cleanup" into a reusable AGENTS.md file that teaches AI models to generate production-ready Rails code by encoding engineering best practices.

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CSS scroll-state queries bring enhanced scrollytelling capabilities to web development, enabling animations and state changes based on scroll position.

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AI

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2,000-Year-Old Scorched Scrolls Read for the First Time with AI Help

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 AD, it destroyed Pompeii and buried Herculanum's ancient library - the only complete library from antiquity that survived to modern times. The superheated mud carbonized hundreds of papyrus scrolls, leaving them as fragile, unreadable fragments. For 1,700 years, scholars knew these scrolls contained lost Roman texts but couldn't read them without destroying them.

A breakthrough competition led by University of Kentucky's Brent Seals used AI and high-resolution CT scanning to virtually "unroll" the carbonized scrolls. After a software engineer spent 20-30 hours learning to recognize "crackle" textures in the scans, three students including a 21-year-old American trained AI models to detect ancient Greek letters. The result: 2,000 clearly readable letters of text unseen for nearly 2,000 years. If successful with all excavated scrolls, this could double the entire surviving corpus of ancient Roman literature.

Watch Video

Quick Hits

More than 21% of YouTube videos shown to new users are now "AI slop" - low-quality, AI-generated content used to farm views.

Read Article

In the latest sign that humanity is absolutely doomed, a couple in the U.S. used ChatGPT to name their newborn baby.

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CyberSec

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Hired to Prevent Crime, CyberSecurity Pros Decide to Commit Crime Instead

Two cybersecurity professionals who were supposed to protect companies from ransomware attacks have pleaded guilty to orchestrating the very crimes they were hired to prevent. Ryan Goldberg, a manager of incident response at cybersecurity firm Sygnia, and Kevin Martin, a ransomware negotiator at DigitalMint, deployed ALPHV/BlackCat ransomware against five companies, causing over $9.5 million in losses while successfully extorting $1.3 million from a Florida medical company.

The irony here is almost too perfect to believe. These are the exact people companies call when they get ransomware attacks - the incident responders and negotiators. It's like hiring a firefighter who's secretly an arsonist, or a locksmith who moonlights as a burglar. Both defendants now face up to 20 years in prison and must forfeit $342,000 each. I guess the lesson here is: when you're getting cybersecurity advice, maybe double-check that your consultant isn't the one planning to hack you next week.

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Quick Hits

Chrome, Safari, and Edge are all leaky when it comes to privacy, but alternatives like Brave, Firefox, and Mullvad offer better protection against browser fingerprinting.

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AI agents autonomously discovered a critical zero-day vulnerability (CVE-2025-54322, CVSS 10) in global networking gear, marking the first agent-found remotely exploitable RCE published.

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BioTech

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Five-Year-Old Mini Brains Can Now Mimic a Kindergartener's Neural Wiring

Harvard researchers have kept brain organoids alive for seven years, watching as these pea-sized blobs of lab-grown neural tissue slowly developed the complexity of a kindergartner's brain. Each organoid contains up to two million human neurons and other brain cells, offering an unprecedented look into how our brains develop over nearly two decades—longer than any other animal.

As these mini brains become increasingly sophisticated, pressing ethical questions emerge: Could they one day feel pain or become conscious? Stanford researchers recently linked four organoids into a neural 'pain pathway' that responded to chili pepper chemicals with synchronized activity. While there's no evidence they can think or feel, experts are calling for global regulation committees to navigate the ethical minefield of lab-grown consciousness.

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Quick Hits

Scientists have engineered the first fully synthetic brain tissue model without any animal-derived materials, enabling more reliable and humane neurological drug testing.

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CRISPR researchers resurrected an ancient gene humans lost 20 million years ago, dramatically lowering uric acid levels and preventing gout and fatty liver disease.

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Tales from the Analog

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He's Been Walking Around the World for 27 Years. One of the Biggest Lessons He's Learned Is How to Be Happy

Karl Bushby was 29 when he left Hull, England with $500 and a dream no one had ever achieved: walking an unbroken path around the world. His "Goliath Expedition" began in 1998 in Chile and has taken him across continents with two simple rules - he can only walk or swim, and he cannot return home until he arrives entirely on foot.

After 27 years of walking 30 kilometers daily, crossing the Darien Gap, being detained by Russian authorities, and swimming across the Caspian Sea, Bushby discovered his greatest lesson wasn't about physical endurance. "The hardest thing over 27 years was losing the women you fall in love with," he says. "The happiest times were when I was in those relationships." He's learned that despite hunger, danger, and isolation, this world is "a hell of a lot friendlier than it might appear."

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Quick Hits

Andy Bostinto became the world's oldest bodybuilder after competing at age 100 years and four months, but he's more proud of receiving his Bronze Star for World War II service. "I enjoy training, and people ask me when I am going to stop. I tell them I'll stop when I stop breathing."

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Two adopted women who worked together as restaurant colleagues and joked about being sisters discovered through a DNA test that they actually are biological siblings, reuniting their entire Dominican Republic family.

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It's How They Said It

Grok is awesome
— Elon Musk, owner of X, commenting on a tone-deaf repost about Grok's capabilities while remaining silent on the trending Grok sexual images controversy.
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The Numbers Game

30 YEAR ANNIVERSARY

1995 was a watershed year in technology. Many of today's well-recognized names across coding languages, websites, gaming consoles, and other technologies got their start that year. In some instances, they had earlier milestones in 1994 or before, but their actual launches happened in 1995. Click on any of the names below to get the backstory.

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JavaScript

Created in 10 days, now runs 98% of websites.

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IPv6

Still fighting for adoption 30 years later despite solving IPv4 shortage.

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eBay

Launched as AuctionWeb in September, now handles billions in auctions.

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Windows 95

Brought personal computers to mainstream America.

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Yahoo

Incorporated in March as web directory, became internet giant.

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Toy Story

Pixar created the first fully computer-animated film.

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Amazon.com

Website launched in July, transforming online book sales.

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Match.com

Launched in April as the first major online dating service.

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SSL 2.0

Netscape created web security foundation still used today.

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Tools and Resources

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OpenCode.ai

This open source AI coding agent has taken the developer community by storm with 41,000+ GitHub stars and 400,000+ monthly users. OpenCode works across multiple interfaces—terminal, desktop app, and IDE extensions—supporting 75+ LLM providers including Claude, GPT, and Gemini.

What sets it apart is its flexibility and transparency: no mandatory AI subscription, support for local models, and clear data policies per provider. It features concurrent agent sessions, automatic LSP integration, shareable debugging links, and even includes "Zen"—curated AI models specifically benchmarked for coding tasks. Perfect for teams wanting powerful AI assistance with full control over their model choices.

Check it Out
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AI SDK

Vercel's free, open-source TypeScript library that transforms AI application development from hours to minutes. This unified SDK lets you switch between AI providers (OpenAI, Claude, Hugging Face) with a single line of code change, while handling complex challenges like streaming, tool integration, and error recovery automatically.

Features real-time streaming responses, generative UI capabilities, structured JSON output generation, and works seamlessly with React, Next.js, Vue, SvelteKit, and other frameworks. Developers report dramatically reduced development time thanks to its built-in abstractions for multi-turn interactions, stream parsing, and provider switching.

Check it Out
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Cover Your Tracks

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's free privacy tool that reveals exactly how trackable your browser is across the web. It analyzes your browser fingerprint—screen resolution, fonts, plugins, time zone, and other identifying characteristics—then provides a detailed privacy assessment showing whether you're blocking trackers and ads effectively.

Transforms abstract privacy concerns into concrete, measurable data with actionable recommendations for improvement. Learn how browser fingerprinting works, discover which settings make you more trackable, and get specific guidance on privacy-focused extensions and browser configurations. Essential for anyone wanting to understand and improve their digital privacy.

Check it Out
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What Am I Looking At?

Thousands of drones creating coordinated light patterns in night sky

You're looking at thousands of drones operating as a single coordinated swarm, controlled by just one computer. This isn't CGI or special effects - it's real Chinese engineering pushing the boundaries of autonomous coordination technology. Each individual drone maintains perfect synchronization with thousands of others while creating massive, intricate light patterns across the night sky.

In 2025, China put on the show a total of 63 times, setting and breaking its own Guinness World Records several times. The biggest record breaker thus far employed 11,787 drones to dazzle spectators. Although the technology is used for entertainment, observers note that it has potential applications in other areas, ranging from emergency response to agriculture and defense.

Watch Show Highlights

Image Credit: Xinhua News

Martin's Corner

Martin's Corner

As always, I appreciate you for joining me for another issue of DevTech news.

Last month I mentioned that I was experimenting with GSAP and I still am. It's really fun and you can do a lot of cool things with it, but it's way more difficult than just building something with React and Tailwind. I've hit a lot of roadblocks, powered through some, learned some things along the way, and am plugging away. Maybe by next month's issue I'll have something to actually share. We'll see.

In the meantime, if you come across any interesting stories, tools, or other content that you think would make a solid inclusion in the February issue, feel free to shoot me an email. Have a great month ahead.