Open research program · computing signal out of public data · updated July 2026
The signal is already in the data. Nobody went and got it.
Across many fields, rich public records sit un-computed. The discipline that owns the data does not use the method, and the discipline that owns the method does not know the data is there. We go get the signal. We compute the ocean’s unobserved past from physics, reconstruct lost economic history from ledgers that had to balance, and re-test published scientific claims on their own data. Different fields, one instinct, checkable every time, honest throughout, nulls included.
Where the work has gone
Three angles, one method
Computational ecology · the worked example
The eel spawning ground is “warming in place”
Where does the European eel spawn, and is climate moving it? The 22 to 24°C spawning isotherms slide about 190 km poleward, faster than the SST-gradient front that bounds the spawning zone. The simple front-displacement story is wrong. We couple differentiable models to the physics of currents, temperature, and the Earth’s magnetic field to compute what no instrument ever recorded. Our strongest paper-ready result.
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The honest null
A cross-species law that did not survive independent data
The eel pattern suggested a general anchoring theory of climate and reproduction. It blind-tested at about 88% across 101 species, then collapsed when we hid the species identity, and returned a null on independent fish-recruitment data. We publish the failure in full. A hypothesis, not a law.
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Marine carbon removal · new
We measured where ocean carbon removal actually goes
Ocean alkalinity enhancement is credited on models too coarse to see the fronts where treated surface water is pulled down before it can trade its carbon with the air. We measured that missing process in two independent high-resolution ocean models. At open-ocean fronts, 16 to 38 percent of the water is subducted below the winter mixed layer first, and coarsened to crediting resolution the number drops to about zero. The carbon is not lost, it re-emerges over decades, outside the horizon it was sold on. The over-count concentrates on the subpolar and Southern Ocean waters where alkalinity is most often proposed. The full portfolio, science, policy, and investment, is drafted and open for review, carrying the registry gap of about 0.5 percent of contracted tonnes physically realized and the investability screen. Honest throughout, including the sign that flips for biological methods.
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Computational history · new
Three colonial ledgers that check themselves
The data-side twin of the eel work. One computes the past from physics, this one recovers it from records that had to balance. Dutch East India Company, Batavia: 18,321 voyages, the books reconcile to 98.6 percent. Sound Toll Registers: 2.15 million ship passages through the Øresund, 1497 to 1857, where the Amsterdam to St-Petersburg and London trade axis flips between 1807 and 1815, confirmed by the Napoleonic closure of the strait that dropped traffic 98 percent in two years. Spanish-empire royal treasuries: 202,585 line items, where barely one percent of inter-treasury transfers appear in both the sending and receiving books, so the missing half is the finding.
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Reproducibility · new
Re-testing published claims on their own data
Many published machine-learning models report near-perfect accuracy that comes from data leakage, not real signal. On fully public ICU data, a single correct change to how the data is split moves a model from 0.93 to 0.80. We are building an open screener that flags leakage-prone setups from a paper and its public data. We reproduce the authors’ own number first, we critique methods not motives, and we report risk, not verdicts. A public good, not an accusation.
Method · working prototype
The method
How we choose what to compute
Rich public data the field already trusts, a question that field cares about, a mature method that maps onto it, and above all a way to check the answer. Built-in ground truth, like a ledger that must balance or a fragment that must physically fit, or a hard external one, like a modern instrument re-measuring the same thing. If we cannot check it, we do not claim it. The hardest part is novelty, finding the rich record the owning field has not yet computed.
On-demand engine
Open data asset
A harmonized 14k-species climate-reproduction database
Reproductive thermal limits, thermal tolerance, range-shift outcomes, and life-history traits from six public databases, GBIF-resolved, with an autonomous ingestion pipeline. A reusable community resource, independent of any model.
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The full notebook
Read the whole research notebook
Timeline, datasets, every test we ran, what held up and what did not. Leading thoughts at the top, full progression below. Everything traces to a number. Raw data is reproducible from DOIs.
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Provenance
Every data source we reviewed
The exhaustive catalogue: what we ingested and analyzed, what is a standing ocean/climate input, what is request-gated and pending, and what we reviewed and set aside (with reasons). Licences and status throughout, nulls and embargoes included.
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For fun · sci-comm
10 Clickbait Articles After Researching Eel Sex
The whole saga, told the way the internet would tell it. An AI navigated by quantum mechanics, found a universal law, and was gloriously wrong. Every headline is clickbait, and every one is a real result.
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New · quantum
Can a quantum computer compute the compass in a bird’s eye?
The radical-pair magnetic compass may be how birds, turtles, and eels navigate. We ran it on IBM’s quantum hardware and mapped, honestly, where a quantum computer helps: a laptop still wins the tractable version, the field’s standard shortcut is ~2x off, raw device noise erases the signal, and the real quantum machine for the full problem is ~end of decade. We measured the limit instead of hyping it.
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New · open data platform
SorbentBase: an open database of water-treatment sorbent performance
Gas adsorption has NIST ISODB. Aqueous water treatment had nothing. We mined 26,000+ sorbent-performance measurements from the full text of ~1,700 open-access papers, with experimental conditions, mechanism, molar-normalized capacity, and a source link on every row. Queryable and live.
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Work in progress
Manuscripts & releases
Submesoscale subduction biases ocean-alkalinity-enhancement efficiency atlases at ocean fronts
Manuscript + full portfolio + open code · target Nature journal, seeking co-authors
A Sargasso eel-spawning isotherm migration that outruns the front
arXiv preprint · climate / marine ecology
A differentiable larval-transport engine that reconstructs spawn origins
arXiv preprint · methods, the engine behind the reconstructions
Why cross-species climate-vulnerability indices fail (the anchoring framework, retired)
arXiv preprint · methods / negative result
A both-ends reconstruction of the Dutch East India Company’s intra-Asian trade
Deposited on Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.21071241) · arXiv (econ.GN) next
The Sound Toll network and the 1807 to 1815 reordering of northern trade
Deposited on Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.21071241) · arXiv (econ.GN) next
Reconciliation residuals as an anomaly engine in the Spanish-empire treasuries
Deposited on Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.21071241) · arXiv (econ.GN) next
An open leakage screener for published prediction models
arXiv preprint + Zenodo · open tool
Open release: the harmonized climate-reproduction database
Zenodo dataset + data paper
Under research · to consider
Open questions we’re still chasing
- •Whether any cross-species climate-vulnerability index can be validated at all against a literature-scored outcome, given the research-effort confound that retired ours (the subject of the negative-results write-up)
- •Radical-pair (quantum) magnetonavigation: we computed the cryptochrome quantum compass on real IBM quantum hardware and, after error mitigation, watched its signal switch off as the field collapses toward the Laschamp geomagnetic excursion. The physics runs on a quantum computer. Whether the eel actually uses it is the open question.
- •Closing the Spanish-treasury external legs with the Cuban and Philippine ledgers, then matching transfers caja-year by caja-year
- •The Sound Toll captain and ship career network, resolving 1.1 million identities across three centuries
- •A standing scan of newly published public datasets for the next record worth reconstructing
- •Reproducibility audits beyond clinical machine learning, anywhere code and data are both public
- •Trait-based climate-vulnerability screening from the harmonized database, model-independent
- •Whether the anchoring axis is operationalizable at all, or irreducibly expert judgment
Open & reproducible
How we work
Every figure and claim links to a finding note and a script. Raw datasets are reproducible from their DOIs. We pick problems where the answer can be checked, by a ledger that must balance, a fragment that must fit, or an independent instrument, and we report only what the evidence supports, stating plainly what is not claimed. When a result fails, we publish the failure. We welcome data, critique, and collaboration.
We default to fast, open dissemination. Most results go to arXiv as preprints, and code and data are deposited to Zenodo with a citable DOI. The three history reconstructions above are deposited at doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21071241. Formal peer review is worth the effort for some results and not for others, and we say which is which rather than letting work sit in a queue for a year.
Steps Ventures · an independent open-science effort.