During times of political turmoil, history often gets rewritten, erased, or lost. That is what happened to the legacy of Jan Czochralski, a Polish chemist whose contributions to semiconductor manufacturing were expunged after World War II.

In 1916 he invented a method for growing single crystals of semiconductors, metals, and synthetic gemstones. The process, now known as the Czochralski method, allows scientists to have more control over a semiconductor’s quality.

After the war ended, Czochralski was falsely accused by the Polish government of collaborating with the Germans and betraying his country, according to an article published by the International Union of Crystallography. The allegation apparently ended his academic career as a professor at the Warsaw University of Technology and led to the erasure of his name and work from the school’s records.

He died in 1953 in obscurity in his hometown of Kcynia.

The Czochralski method was honored in 2019 with an IEEE Milestone for enabling the development of semiconductor devices and modern electronics. Administered by the IEEE History Center and supported by donors, the Milestone program recognizes outstanding technical developments around the world.

Inspired by the IEEE recognition, Czochralski’s grandson Fred Schmidt and his great-grandnephew Sylwester Czochralski launched the JanCZ project. The initiative, which aims to educate the public about Czochralski’s life and scientific impact, maintains two websites—one in English and the other in Polish.

“Discovering the [IEEE Milestone] plaque changed my entire mission,” Schmidt says. “It inspired me to engage with Poland, my family history, and my grandfather’s story [on] a more personal level. The [Milestone] is an important award of validation and recognition. It’s a big part of what I’m building my entire case and my story around as I promote the Jan Czochralski legacy and history to the Western world.”

Schmidt, who lives in Texas, is seeking to produce a biopic, translate a Polish biography to English, and turn the chemist’s former homes in Kcynia and Warsaw into museums. The Jan Czochralski Remembrance Foundation has been established by Schmidt to help fund the projects.

The life of the Polish chemist

Before Czochralski’s birth in 1885, Kcynia became part of the German Empire in 1871. Although his family identified as Polish and spoke the language at home, they couldn’t publicly acknowledge their culture, Schmidt says.

When it came time for Czochralski to go to university, rather than attend one in Warsaw, he did what many Germans did at the time: He attended one in Berlin.

After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in metal chemistry in 1907 from the Königlich Technische Hochschule in Charlottenburg (now Technische Universität Berlin), he joined Allgemeine Elektricitäts-Gesellschaft in Berlin as an engineer.

Czochralski experimented with materials to find new formulations that could improve the electrical cables and machinery during the early electrical age, according to a Material World article.

While investigating the crystallization rates of metal, Czochralski accidentally dipped his pen into a pot of molten tin instead of an inkwell. A tin filament formed on the pen’s tip—which he found interesting. Through research, he proved that the filament was a single crystal. His discovery prompted him to experiment with the bulk production of semiconductor crystals.

His paper on what he called the Czochralski method was published in 1918 in the German chemistry journal Zeitschrift für Physikalische Chemie, but he never found an application for it. (The method wasn’t used until 1948, when Bell Labs engineers Gordon Kidd Teal and J.B. Little adapted it to grow single germanium crystals for their semiconductor production, according to Material World.)

Czochralski continued working in metal science, founding and directing a research laboratory in 1917 at Metallgesellschaft in Frankfurt. In 1919 he was one of the founding members of the German Society for Metals Science, in Sankt Augustin. He served as its president until 1925.

Around that time he developed an innovation that led to his wealth and fame, Schmidt says. Called “B-metal,” the metal alloy was a less expensive alternative to the tin used in manufacturing railroad carriage bearings. Czochralski’s alloy was patented by the German railway Deutsche Bahn and played a significant role in advancing rail transport in Germany, Poland, the Soviet Union, the United Kingdom, and the United States, according to Material World.

“Launching this initiative has been fulfilling and personally rewarding work. My grandfather died in obscurity without ever seeing the results of his work, and my mother spent her entire adult life trying to right these wrongs.”

The achievement brought Czochralski many opportunities. In 1925 he became president of the GDMB Society of Metallurgists and Miners, in Clausthal-Zellerfeld, Germany. Henry Ford invited Czochralski to visit his factories and offered him the position of director at Ford’s new aluminum factory in Detroit. Czochralski declined the offer, longing to return to Poland, Schmidt says. Instead, Czochralski left Germany to become a professor of metallurgy and metal research at the Warsaw University of Technology, at the invitation of Polish President Ignacy Mościcki.

“During World War II, the Nazis took over his laboratories at the university,” Schmidt says. “He had to cooperate with them or die. At night, he and his team [at the university] worked with the Polish resistance and the Polish Army to fight the Nazis.”

After the war ended, Czochralski was arrested in 1945 and charged with betraying Poland. Although he was able to clear his name, damage was done. He left Warsaw and returned to Kcynia, where he ran a small pharmaceutical business until he died in 1953, according to the JanCZ project.

Launching the JanCZ project

Schmidt was born in Czochralski’s home in Kcynia in 1955, two years after his grandfather’s death. He was named Klemens Jan Borys Czochralski. He and his mother (Czochralski’s youngest daughter) emigrated in 1958 when Schmidt was 3 years old, moving to Detroit as refugees. When he was 13, he became a U.S. citizen. He changed his name to Fred Schmidt after his mother married his stepfather.

Schmidt heard stories about his grandfather from his mother his whole life, but he says that “as a teenager, I was just interested in hanging out with my friends, going to school, and working. I really didn’t want much to do with it [family history], because it seemed hard to believe.”

Portrait of Jan Czochralski Byla Sobie Fotka

In 2013 Polish scientist Pawel E. Tomaszewski contacted Schmidt to interview him for a Polish TV documentary about his grandfather.

“He had corresponded with my mother [who’d died 20 years earlier] for previously published biographies about Czochralski,” Schmidt says. “I had some boxes of her things that I started going through to prepare for the interview, and I found original manuscripts and papers he [his grandfather] published about his work.”

The TV crew traveled to the United States and interviewed him for the documentary, Schmidt says, adding, “It was the first time I’d ever had to reckon with the Jan Czochralski story, my connection, my original name, and my birthplace. It was both a very cathartic and traumatic experience for me.”

Ten years after participating in the documentary, Schmidt says, he decided to reconnect with his roots.

“It took me that long to process it [what he learned] and figure out my role in this story,” he says. “That really came to life with my decision to reapply for Polish citizenship, reacquaint myself with the country, and meet my family there.”

In 2024 he visited the Warsaw University of Technology and saw the IEEE Milestone plaque honoring his grandfather’s contribution to technology.

“Once I learned what the Milestone award represented, I thought, Whoa, that’s big,” he says.

Sharing the story with the Western world

Since 2023, Schmidt has dedicated himself to publicizing his grandfather’s story, primarily in the West because he doesn’t speak Polish. Sylwester Czochralski manages the work in Poland, with Schmidt’s input.

Most of the available writing about Czochralski is in Polish, Schmidt says, so his goal is to “spread his story to English-speaking countries.”

He aims to do that, he says, through a biography written by Tomaszewski in Polish that will be translated to English, and a film. The movie is in development by Sywester Banaszkiewicz, who produced and directed the 2014 documentary in Poland. Schmidt says he hopes the movie will be similar to the 2023 biopic about J. Robert Oppenheimer, the theoretical physicist who helped develop the world’s first nuclear weapons during World War II.

The English and Polish versions of the website take visitors through Czochralski’s life and his work. They highlight media coverage of the chemist, including newspaper articles, films, and informational videos posted by YouTube creators.

Schmidt is working with the Czochralski Research and Development Institute in Toruń, Poland, to purchase his grandfather’s home in Kcynia and the mansion he lived in while he was a professor in Warsaw. The institute is a collection of labs and initiatives dedicated to honoring the chemist’s work.

“It’s going to be a long, fun journey, and we have a lot of momentum,” Schmidt says of his plans to turn the residences into museums.

“Launching this initiative has been fulfilling and personally rewarding work,” he says. “My grandfather died in obscurity without ever seeing the results of his work, and my mother spent her entire adult life trying to right these wrongs.

“I’m on an accelerated course to make it [her goal] happen to the best of my ability.”

On Tuesday, WIRED published details of ICE’s planned expansion into more than 150 office spaces across the United States, including 54 specific addresses. If you haven’t read that yet, you should, not least because there’s probably one not far from you.

ICE has designs on every major US city. It plans to not only occupy existing government spaces but share hallways and elevator bays with medical offices and small businesses. It will be down the street from daycares and within walking distance of churches and treatment centers. Its enforcement officers and lawyers will have cubicles a modest drive away from giant warehouses that have been tapped to hold thousands of humans that ICE will detain.

Normally a leasing frenzy like this would happen out in the open; it would involve multiple bids, renovations of selected spaces, all the process and bureaucracy that makes government work slow but accountable. Not so here. The General Services Administration, which manages federal government properties, was asked to skip standard operating procedures in favor of speed and discretion. Internal documents reviewed by WIRED make clear that these locations, and the way in which they were acquired or planned, were intended to be a secret from the start.

They should not be. Which is why we published them.

ICE has more than $75 billion at its disposal, along with at least 22,000 officers and agents. Its occupation of Minneapolis is not an anomaly; it’s a blueprint. Communities deserve to know that they might be next. People have a right to know who their neighbors are, especially when they amount to an invading force.

What we’ve reported so far fills in only part of the puzzle. It shows what ICE had planned as of January, not beyond. More than 100 addresses remain unknown, some of them in high-concentration states like New York and New Jersey. The specific nature of the work being done in some of these offices remains unclear, as is how long ICE plans to be there.

The need to resolve these questions is urgent as ICE continues to metastasize. At the same time, the Department of Justice has become increasingly aggressive in its dealings with journalists, and has repeatedly claimed that revealing any identifying information about ICE agents or their activities is “doxing.” In Minnesota and beyond, ICE and CBP agents have treated observers as enemies, arresting and reportedly harassing them with increased frequency. The DOJ has been quick to label any perceived interference with ICE activity as a crime.

The Trump administration moves quickly by design, banking on the inability of courts, lawmakers, and journalists to keep pace. WIRED will continue to report on this story until we have the answers.

Knowing where ICE will go next is not the same as stopping the agency’s campaign of cruelty and violence. But it gives communities time to prepare for a surge of immigration enforcement in their streets. It gives legislators both locally and nationally insight into the unchecked scope of ICE. And it signals to the administration that it cannot act with impunity, or at the very least total secrecy.

So please, go look where ICE is setting up shop near you. And know that there’s plenty more of this story to tell.

This is an edition of the Inner Loop newsletter. Read previous newsletters here.

from the fuck-em-for-existing-I-guess dept

Technically — TECHNICALLY! — we still have a system that relies on three co-equal branches to ensure that any single branch can’t steamroll the rest of the system (along with the nation it’s supposed to serve) to seize an unequal amount of power.

Technically.

What we’re seeing now is something else entirely. The judicial branch is headed by people who are willing to give the executive branch what it wants, so long as the executive branch is headed by the Republican party. The legislative branch — fully compromised by MAGA bootlickers — has decided to simply not do its job, allowing the executive branch to seize even more power. The executive branch is now just a throne for a king — a man who feels he shouldn’t have to answer to anyone — not even his voting bloc — so long as he remains in power.

The courts can act as a check against executive overreach. But as we’ve seen time and time again, this position means nothing if you’re powerless to enforce it. And that has led to multiple executive officials telling the courts to go fuck themselves when they hand down rulings the administration doesn’t like. A current sitting appellate judge no less made a name for himself in the Trump administration by demonstrating his contempt for the judicial system he’s now an integral part of.

Only good things can come from this! MAGA indeed!

And while this is only one person’s retelling their experience of being caught in the gears of Trump’s anti-brown people activities, it’s illustrative of what little it matters that there are three co-equal branches when one branch makes it clear on a daily basis that it considers itself to be more equal than the rest of them. (via Kathleen Clark on Bluesky)

This is from a sworn statement [PDF] in ongoing litigation against the federal government, as told by “O.,” a Guatemalan resident of Minnesota who has both a pending asylum application as well as a Juvenile Status proceeding still undergoing in the US. None of that mattered to ICE officers, who arrested him in January 2026 and — within 24 hours — shipped him off to a detention center more than a thousand miles from his home.

O. was denied meals, access to phones, access to legal representation, stuffed into overcrowded cells, and generally mistreated by the government that once might have honestly considered the merits of his asylum application.

But the real dirt is this part of the sworn statement, which again exposes this administration’s complete disinterest in adhering to orders from US courts, much less even paying the merest of lip service to rights long considered to be derived from none other than the “Creator” himself.

ICE did not tell me that my attorney had been trying to call me and contact me while I was in Texas. They didn’t tell me my attorney Kim, had retained another attorney, Kira Kelley, to file a habeas petition on my behalf, or that a court had granted it and ordered my release. They just kept holding me there and occasionally trying to get me to self-deport.

[…]

I was put in a cold cell where I had to sleep on the bare cement floor. Around 10 in the morning my cellmate asked to speak to an ICE officer. Three officers came into the cell so I had a chance to speak to them too. One officer told me that I “had no chance of returning to Minnesota” and that “the best thing for [me] is self-deportation.” She told me that if I fought my case, I would spend two to three more months here in El Paso. She offered me $2600 to self-deport. I refused. I wanted to talk to my attorney. They didn’t tell me the judge had already ordered my release and return to Minnesota. If I hadn’t managed to talk to my attorney who told me a while back that I was ordered released, I might have given up at this point and signed the self deportation forms because the conditions were so unbearable.

So… you see the problem. A court can order a release. But the court relies on the government to carry out this instruction. If it doesn’t, the court likely won’t know for days or weeks or months. At that point, a new set of rights abuses will have been inflicted on people who should have been freed. When the government is finally asked to answer for this, it will again engage in a bunch of bluster and obfuscation, forcing the court system to treat the administration like a member of the system of checks and balances even when it’s immediately clear the executive branch has no desire to be checked and/or balanced.

While more judges are now treating the executive branch as a hostile force unwilling to behave honestly or recognize restraints on its power, the imbalance continues to shift in the administration’s favor, largely because it can engage in abusive acts at scale, while the court is restrained to the cases presented to it.

But if you’re outside of the system, you can clearly see what’s happening and see what the future holds if one-third of the government refuses to do its job (the GOP-led Congress) and the other third can’t handle the tidal wave of abuses being presented to it daily. The executive branch will become a kingdom that fears nothing and answers to no one. But the bigger problem is this: most Americans will see this and understand that this will ultimately destroy democracy. Unfortunately, there’s a significant number of voters who actually welcome these developments, figuring it’s better to lick the boots of someone who prefers to rule in hell, rather than serve the United States.

Filed Under: cbp, dhs, mass deportation, trump administration

It seems the entire world and their cousin are either streaming or hosting a podcast, and we aren’t ones to judge. Instead, we’ve tested the very best microphones around. Whether you want a USB microphone for streaming on your PC or a wireless mobile option, you’ll find the very best right here.

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