This Week I Learned - Week 29 2026

This Week I Learned - 

* Microsoft's Phi-4 Mini is widely regarded as one of the most capable models under 4 billion parameters. It punches significantly above its weight class, outperforming older 7B and even 70B models in specific reasoning tasks. It runs at a smooth 13–18 tokens per second on flagship devices with 8 GB+ RAM (like the iPhone 16 Pro/17 Pro or Galaxy S25/S26 series).

* From The Batch:

- PrismML, a Caltech spinout backed by Khosla Ventures, publicly released compressed versions of Alibaba’s Qwen model on Tuesday, shrinking it from 54 GB to under 4 GB so all 27 billion parameters run on an iPhone (15 or newer). PrismML achieves the compression by reducing the models to ternary or binary quantization, reducing each value from 16 bits to just two or three possible values. 

- Two people asking the same model for business feedback, one in Hindi and one in Russian, may receive substantively different advice not because they’re using different models, but because the same model calibrates its character differently depending on the language it’s processing.

- It takes more than a decade and costs more than $1 billion to develop a drug in the United States, and the government approves only around 50 drugs a year. Finding new uses for drugs that are already approved, and new treatments for diseases that share underlying biological mechanisms, is an especially efficient use of time and funds. Robin is an open-source agent that proposes existing drugs to treat a given disease. 

* According to Airtel's Unlimited 5G Data Offer Terms & Conditions, customers aren’t allowed to share their unlimited 5G data through a mobile hotspot. If you use more than 300GB in a month, they’ll still cut off your unlimited 5G and cap you at 2GB per day. 

* USB tethering is faster and more stable than a mobile hotspot for sharing a phone's mobile internet with a laptop or computer using a USB cable. You have to turn on the tethering option in your phone's settings in order to share.

* Cityfinance.in is Janaagraha's platform tracking financial data for 4,000+ Indian cities. 

* Currently, less than 8% of Indian citizens hold a passport.

* Goldmines, a company founded by Manish Shah, dominates nearly 80% of the Hindi-dubbed cinema market. - The India Notes

* Behenic acid, also known as docosanoic acid, is a saturated fatty acid with the chemical formula C22H44O2. It is primarily derived from the seeds of the moringa tree and is used in various applications, particularly in cosmetics as a thickener, cleansing agent, and opacifier. Behenic acid is valued for its emollient properties and is commonly used in skincare formulations.

* Jo Nagai, a 10 year old young boy from Kobe, Japan, presented a 33-page research paper at the 2024 International Congress of Entomology showing swallowtail butterflies retain learned aversions through metamorphosis.

Jo contacted entomologist Dr. Martha Weiss after noticing his hand-raised butterflies behaved differently from wild ones; together they adapted her moth experiment using lavender scent paired with mild vibration from a muscle therapy device on caterpillars.

Trained butterflies (70% avoidance) and their untrained offspring and grandchildren showed the same lavender aversion in Y-maze tests, demonstrating potential transgenerational inheritance of the behavior via a home science project.

* A cat’s sense of smell is incredibly powerful—they have up to 200 million scent-sensitive cells in their noses, compared to only about 5 million in humans. A dog's sense of smell is even more powerful, roughly 10,000 to 100,000 times more sensitive than a human's. Their noses contain over 300 million sensory receptors (compared to our 5 million).

A perfume scent that feels mild to you hits pets like dogs & cats like a "scent tsunami," causing extreme sensory overload, stress, and anxiety.

When you spray perfume, microscopic droplets linger in the air and settle on nearby surfaces, including your cat’s fur. Because cats are fastidious self-groomers, they will lick their fur to clean themselves, meaning they directly ingest the perfume chemicals and oils. Cats are obligate carnivores, and their livers lack a key enzyme called glucuronyl transferase. This enzyme is required to break down and detoxify many chemicals, particularly plant-derived compounds (like phenols and essential oils) and synthetic chemicals commonly used in perfumes. Because they cannot metabolize these toxins, they can easily build up in their system over time, leading to cumulative toxicity.

Ingredients like phthalates (used to make scents last longer) act as endocrine disruptors and can damage a cat's liver and kidneys over time.

* Savlon antiseptic disinfectant liquid uses blind-friendly Braille labels or tactile markings on their packaging to improve accessibility for the visually impaired.

* Walking depends on our brain expecting each step of a staircase to be the same height, so even one stair that’s a bit off can throw off our balance by disrupting our sense of position and automatic movement patterns, even if we notice it visually. 

* Singapore's Mottainai Food Tech has a mission to use unconventional and underappreciated ingredients, which can be nutritious and widely available throughout Asia.

The inspiration for the name comes from the Japanese term mottainai, which laments waste - BBC

* In 2021, Vandana Shiva advised the government of Sri Lanka to ban inorganic fertilizers and pesticides stating "This decision will definitely help farmers become more prosperous. Use of organic fertilizer will help provide agri products rich with nutrients while retaining the fertility of the land." The policy applied overnight, with the main purpose to save State foreign exchange bills on imported fertilizers, caused a crisis with a significant reduction of farming output in several sectors, hitting the tea industry in particular and reducing rice yields were by one third.  The ban was overturned seven months later.

* The nickname Iran-e-Sagheer" meaning "Little Iran" or "Lesser Iran," has been used historically to refer to Kashmir, especially by Persian writers and later historians. It reflects the deep Persian cultural influence that developed in Kashmir over several centuries, particularly from the 14th century onward. Persian became the language of administration, literature, and scholarship under successive Muslim rulers, much as it did across much of South Asia.

* The size of an engine is referred to by its cubic centimetres (“cc”), which measure the total volume inside all the cylinders and represent the engine’s displacement. Higher cc generally means more power and torque, but also lower fuel efficiency. Lower cc engines are common in hatchbacks and compact cars like Maruti Alto K10 (998cc), Renault Kwid (999cc), Tata Tiago (1199cc), while high cc engines are found in luxury sports cars and SUVs like Toyota Fortuner (2694cc), Mahindra Thar (2184cc), Jeep Meridian (1956cc). 

* "...when teaching becomes content, it begins obeying the logic of content. That logic – shaped by Meta’s recommendation engine – rewards outrage, oversimplification, and para-social intimacy. The semiotics of the classroom shift. The teacher is no longer a symbol of institutional knowledge and fair authority. She becomes an influencer: a personal brand whose value depends on likeability scores. Here, enforcing discipline, giving a student a poor grade, or delivering hard feedback become threats to the brand." - The dangers of being a ‘cool teacher’, Nabeela Siddiqui in The Hindu

* "Distinguish failures from mistakes. Failures can happen despite good execution. Mistakes often stem from poor judgment, emotional reactions, or a lack of awareness about your circumstances. Understanding the difference helps you focus your reflection." - Mistakes to Meaning by Joshua Steiner, Michael Lynton