January 2026 – TechieTonics

The Sphere Model of Consciousness and Identity Beyond Computation

January 31, 2026February 1, 2026 Pooja Kashyap

What if consciousness isn’t about being smart, but about being stuck? I’m sure there comes a time in most of our life, when we’re standing at a crossroad, torn between two paths. Your logical mind says one thing, your gut says another, and the longer you stand there wrestling with the choice, the more uncomfortable you become. That tension, that sense of being trapped between incompatible options, might be the secret ingredient missing from artificial intelligence.

Measuring Earth From the Moon

January 28, 2026January 28, 2026 Pooja Kashyap

When was the first time you heard the term, “earthshine”? For me it was while I was reading Arthur C. Clarke’s Earthlight, and there was this passage where colonists on the Moon looked up at Earth hanging in their sky.

AI Is Learning to Predict and Control Cell Fate with scDiffEq

January 27, 2026January 27, 2026 Pooja Kashyap

Have you ever realized that at the very beginning, you started out as just one tiny cell. From that single cell, all the different parts of your body, like your brain cells, heart muscles, blood cells, even skin developed. The question is, how does that one original cell somehow “know” what to turn into? How does it decide to become a brain cell or a heart cell, instead of just staying the same?

Adaptive Architecture Powered by Mini Robots That Can Bloom

January 25, 2026January 25, 2026 Pooja Kashyap

I’m not really into top-down approaches. I believe that in most effective systems, decisions happen at the individual level. For instance, take the case of ants or bees, while there’s structure, there isn’t constant centralized control. Individuals act based on local information, and coordination emerges naturally without waiting for hierarchical alignment.

Book Review: Astronautics by Ulrich Walter

January 24, 2026January 24, 2026 Pooja Kashyap

I’ve never been particularly good at math (at school) and when it comes to physics, the equations made me squint. And yet, I find myself completely captivated by the mechanics of how we fling those massive capsules filled with humans into space. And somehow bring them back alive.

Retina-Inspired LiDAR and the Shift Toward Adaptive Machine Vision

January 21, 2026January 21, 2026 Pooja Kashyap

Have you ever noticed that our eyes don’t focus on every single brick in every building with the same intensity as when we are walking down the street? Instead, our brain “gazes”, narrowing its focus on, which it thinks is super important, like a child chasing a ball towards the road or a cyclist drifting too close. Everything else stays in view, but it fades into the background, without demanding any attention. This is our macula at work, delivering sharp detail exactly where our attention is needed most.

Book Review: Cybernetics by Norbert Wiener

January 16, 2026January 16, 2026 Pooja Kashyap

What if our brain is actually a computer? I can trace that thought back to growing up with Small Wonders on television in the mid-1990s (in India it was aired during the times). That strange little serial where a machine didn’t just calculate, but learned and slowly began to feel familiar.