Reporting with the measured record kept on the page.
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Dam the outlet of five rivers and the sea stops coming in. What follows is a water supply, a flood defence and a very large engineering commitment.
6 min read
Animal drifters, from single cells to jellyfish. What do zooplankton eat, what eats them, and why the answer changes with depth.
A climate scientist at Reading stripped the axes, the legend and the numbers off the temperature record. Removing information is what made it travel.
Sources Meteorological observations Land Transport Authority, COE bidding results Housing & Development Board, resale flat transactions Department of Statistics Singapore, SingStat Table Builder
Five things worth the time, in order.
The sun stays down for more than a day. Where can the polar night be seen, how dark it really gets, and the four grades of darkness inside the polar circles.
ScienceFour different structures can each claim the title, depending on whether you measure height, bulk, reservoir or output. None of them is wrong.
TechAn ocean currents map is really two maps printed on top of each other. Wind drives the top few hundred metres; density drives everything below.
ScienceHow many new species are discovered each year is a question with a surprisingly firm answer, and it is much larger than most people guess.
ScienceHow do animals communicate, and how would you prove it? The test is not whether information moved. It is whether the receiver behaved differently.
Science
Twenty-three horses learned to touch one of three symbols to say blanket on, blanket off, or no change. Then they used them according to the weather.
The daily migration of marine animals should stop when the sun does not rise. Instead it keeps running on a 24.8-hour day, timed to the moon.
The finding is about candidates on a ballot, not about voters or supporters. It is a claim about who gets selected to stand, and how much looks are worth.
Metal prices peaked in 2011 and fell for years. Iron ore lost 77 per cent from its high. The mistake was reading a structural shift as a cycle.
A tribunal decided one cycle courier was not self-employed. Nine years of litigation later, the boundary it tested has been redrawn twice more.
On 20 June 2013 the overnight rate hit 13.44 per cent. The central bank had the tools to stop it well before that and chose, for a while, not to.
| Category | Premium | Change | 36-month trend |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cat A Cars up to 1600cc / 130bhp | S$123,890 | -1.7% | |
| Cat B Cars above 1600cc / 130bhp | S$129,910 | +0.0% | |
| Cat C Goods vehicles and buses | S$91,545 | -2.5% | |
| Cat D Motorcycles | S$10,503 | +3.0% | |
| Cat E Open category | S$131,000 | +0.8% |
Category A premium · Sep 2020 to Aug 2026
197 exercises since Jan 2010 Land Transport Authority, COE bidding results
Median of the last 12 months, towns with 20 or more sales
Housing & Development Board, renting out of flats — approved contracts approved contracts, not asking prices
A build-to-order flat never passes between two buyers, so there is no series of transacted prices to aggregate. The board announces a project, prices it with grants already applied, and allocates by ballot among eligible applicants. What gets published per exercise is a range, not a record.
Everything on the other tabs comes from a market: two parties agreeing a number, recorded afterwards. That is what makes a median meaningful. A ballot produces an allocation, and a median allocation is not a price.
A new flat is cheaper than a resale one nearby and comes with a ballot, several years of construction and a five-year holding period before it can be sold. The resale flat is available now. The difference between the two figures is what that wait is worth.
Eligibility runs on citizenship, on forming a qualifying household and on income ceilings that differ by flat type. Location is priced through the conditions attached rather than through the price alone.
Read the explainerRoughly eight in ten residents live in public housing, and that market publishes every transaction. The private market — condominiums, landed property, new launches — records its transactions through the planning authority's own developer interface, which is available on a registered key.
The numbers that circulate freely are asking prices. An asking price is what a seller hopes for, published by a party with an interest in it being high, and it is not what anybody paid. Charting one beside a transacted median would put two different kinds of number on the same axis.
The town medians on the other tabs track the private market closely, because the two compete for the same buyers at the upper end. When Bukit Timah and Queenstown pull away from the rest, that spread is largely a private-market effect showing up in public-housing prices.
A public flat is a 99-year lease with rules on who may buy it and when it may be sold. A private one is not. Comparing the two on price alone leaves out most of what separates them.
Median across the whole record, Jan 2017 onward
Worked from the published rules: repayment capped at 30% of gross income, a 75% loan ceiling, 25-year tenure, and the 4% rate floor used to test eligibility. It is a ceiling, not an offer.
Housing & Development Board, resale flat transactions aggregated 2026-08-18
Performance, places and the way they were made.
All culture → All lifestyle →
A piano gives way mid-set and the pianist keeps going. It reads as a gag. It is closer to a trained reflex, and swing bands train for it.
A Dutch sculpture festival built rooms out of compacted sand and let people sleep in them. CNN noticed. The organiser was already fully booked.
The photogenic ones are arch dams in narrow gorges, and they look that way because the rock is doing most of the structural work.
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Official planning-area geometry.
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Median resale price as the fill, with the live traffic cameras and the five district pages over it. Switch to a single layer for its own read-out and legend.
Each marker is a camera publishing a still image. Select one to see its latest frame.
Five district pages, each with the local outlook, rail lines and housing figures. All districts →
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Singapore caps the number of vehicles on the road by auctioning a ten-year right to own one. The quota, the bidding cycle and the price it produces.
Around eight in ten residents live in flats built by a statutory board. How the build-to-order queue, the resale market and the grant structure fit together.
The rail network that carries most of the island’s daily journeys: lines, reliability reporting and how disruption is measured.
Congestion charging by gantry, priced by road and time of day. What it charges for, and what replaces the gantries.
A compulsory savings scheme that funds retirement, housing and healthcare out of the same monthly contribution.
The measured record, the instruments behind it and what a warming ocean does to a low-lying island.
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