Publications
Our own writing
Everything else here is someone else's journalism, translated. These are pieces written from measurements across the whole archive — things visible only when 30 newsrooms sit in one table.
Science
Your leg muscle talks to your brain — and now we can read the message
“Exercise is the best antidepressant,” people say — but why it works stayed a black box for a long time. A new study in Molecular Psychiatry names a molecule: apelin, a protein tha
3 September 2026
Language
The world's most widely understood word started as a newspaper joke
In March 1839 a Boston editor wrote “oll korrect” and abbreviated it: O.K. It was a joke. Two centuries later those two letters are used in nearly every language — and almost no on
30 August 2026
Football
Sabah win 5-2 in extra time and Azerbaijani football makes history for the second time
After losing 1-2 in Bucharest, Sabah beat Hapoel Be'er Sheva 5-2 in Baku tonight (6-4 on aggregate) and moved to the edge of the Champions League league phase. It is only the secon
26 August 2026
Neuroscience
Motivation does not come first — action brings it
We all wait: let a little motivation arrive, then I'll start. A 440-person trial published in The Lancet suggests the sequence runs the other way. The brain's dopamine system is th
25 August 2026
History
1962: one man said no, and there was no nuclear war
The thirteenth day of the Cuban Missile Crisis. In 50-degree heat, aboard a Soviet submarine that has been out of contact with Moscow for two days, the captain orders a nuclear tor
24 August 2026
History
A volcano exploded, and two years later the world had Frankenstein and the bicycle
In 1815 Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia. In 1816 Europe and America had no summer — snow in June, failed harvests, horses starving. In that rainy summer Mary Shelley wrote *Fran
23 August 2026
Earth science
The largest desert on Earth is feeding the largest forest on Earth
Every year 27.7 million tonnes of Saharan dust cross the Atlantic and fall on the Amazon. The phosphorus in it almost exactly replaces what the rainforest loses to rain. The dust c
22 August 2026
Measurement
12,449 stories in a week — and half of them from five addresses
One week in the Sözaltı Xəbər archive: 12,449 articles from 51 newsrooms. Forty-six per cent of them come from just five sources. That number measures who types fastest, not what h
21 August 2026
Analysis
822 drones: the new price of war
Ukraine sent 822 drones this week. A Shahed costs about $35,000; the Patriot that stops it costs $3 million. That ratio decides more about who wins than the weapons do.
17 August 2026
Design
Your phone starts at 1, your calculator at 7 — only one of them was studied
In 1960 Bell Labs tested telephone keypad layouts on people. Then it asked the calculator makers why theirs was upside down. The answer: nobody had ever looked into it.
16 August 2026
Cartography
Why north is up — and why it used to be east
There is no physical reason for north to be at the top of a map. In the Middle Ages, east was. A short history of how a habit comes to look like a law.
16 August 2026
Analysis
The world's news day peaks at 17:00 Baku time
Thirty days, 13,733 articles, 30 outlets. We measured our own archive hour by hour, and the shape that emerged is not the world's rhythm — it is London and New York office hours.
16 August 2026
Data
Our own data fooled me: the case of the short headline
I measured 7,872 articles and got a clean answer: long headlines get read less. Then I split the same numbers by outlet and the answer reversed completely. This is statistics' most
16 August 2026
Language
143 days: how Azerbaijan lost a letter and took it back
When the new alphabet was adopted in December 1991, the letter ə was not in it. It came back 143 days later. That decision was the technically inconvenient option — and thirty year
16 August 2026
History
Why New York got 212: the city ranking hidden inside phone numbers
In 1947 America handed out telephone area codes, and it did not do so at random. The fewer clicks a code took on a rotary dial, the bigger the city. The result was a hidden ranking
16 August 2026
Science
The world is about to stop correcting time — just as Earth starts speeding up
In 2022, governments agreed to stop adding leap seconds by 2035. In those same years the planet unexpectedly sped up. The result may be something never done before: taking a second
16 August 2026
Language
75,000 headwords, 289,000 entries: what Azerbaijanis actually want explained
Over fourteen years people have created more than 75,000 headwords in this dictionary. Seven in ten are not words at all — they are sentences, situations, feelings with no name. An
16 August 2026
Science
1941: a bomb changed how she spoke, and her neighbours took her for German
When Oslo was bombed, shrapnel struck a thirty-year-old woman called Astrid. When she learned to speak again, she sounded German. She was not speaking any foreign language — the ac
16 August 2026
Neuroscience
You cannot tickle yourself — and that explains how you see reality
A small oddity: the same touch tickles from someone else's hand and not from your own. Follow that detail and you arrive at the biggest idea in modern neuroscience — the brain does
16 August 2026