Editorial
Well, Ten Is A Good Start, Isn't It
It's hard to find where to draw milestones for projects, but I think ten weeks of newsletters is not a bad start at all, especially considering what's going on in the world right now.
When I started writing Tales, I did so in full knowledge that I might get to week three and find it incredibly tedious, or run out of stories to include, or hit some other form of wall that happens with so many side projects. Instead, it's been quite fun, it encourages me to keep engaged with what's happening, and I've heard from quite a few of you that you really enjoy it - so thank you for reading!
I hope you continue to enjoy it, that it keeps you informed, and that it gives you a useful glimpse into the work that keeps our world moving - and maybe encourages some of you to build a giant weather-controlling laser of your own someday.
Land
Whoops, I May Have Hit The Bridge
We haven't talked about bridges for a little bit, so here's this week's Bridge Incident. A truck hit a bridge on Interstate 16 in Georgia, USA, and managed to shift it six feet (about two metres) off center.
This may seem impossible for just a truck at first glance, but a lot of bridges of this type are a single solid span just resting on their supports either side, with room for expansion and contraction as the temperature changes. That means a big enough impact can just... shift the bridge.
In this case, the Georgia Department of Transportation closed the freeway because the bridge deck was, to quote, "off center". That's maybe an understatement, but thankfully they managed to get it all fixed up and safe to travel under after only a couple of days. I like to think it was done with some very precise ramming of the bridge with a truck from the other side, though I imagine the real solution was far more sensible.
Trees Are Really Good And We Should Plant More
This is hardly a revelation, but trees are great. Not only are they pretty, house wildlife, and produce oxygen, but they also have a distinct cooling effect - above and beyond just the shade they provide.
As the world slips further into climate change and most countries' response is approximately "we promise to write an angry letter about it by 2030", we need to consider how we adapt to rising temperatures and extreme weather alongside trying to reverse the effects. Heat waves are going to become pretty common, and we need to be able to design cities and communities that are livable during them.
This is where trees come in. Planting them in a developed area can lower the average temperature by up to 5°C (10°F), which when you're facing a heatwave can be a really substantial difference. It's not enough by itself, but it's a simple solution with almost no downsides, and we need as many of those as we can get, especially in an era where the amazon rainforest is no longer a CO2 sink.
Sea
The Moon's A Bit Wobbly And So Is The Sea
In case you somehow thought the effects of climate change were not visible enough, you'll be delighted to hear that right now, the moon's "wobble" is in fact making flooding and sea level rise less severe than it might be otherwise. Of course, this doesn't affect all floods - like the awful rain-based ones that have caused so much destruction in Germany and Belgium this week - but tidal flooding does account for quite a bit of damage.
See, like most orbits, the moon's orbit is not perfectly circular, and it's also not only affected by the Earth. Without going into full orbital mechanics, the upshot is that it's on a nineteen-year cycle where it changes how much it affects tides, and right now, we're in the "low" part of the cycle.
What does that mean? It means high tides are not as high as they could be and the effects of sea level rise are masked. Come the 2030s, though, that'll reverse and tides will be amplified, which does not sound great at all - especially if you live somewhere like Florida, where you can't even build tidal barriers as the ground itself is porous.
Sky
Yes, We Have A Giant Weather Control Laser, Why Do You Ask?
Controlling the weather has long been a trope of fantasy and science fiction - calling the very forces of nature down at your whim, either to cause havoc or just to make sure your crops grow well. And of all the forces of the weather, why not have a go at controlling lightning?
Well, in something out of a unused James Bond plot, scientists in Switzerland have decided to try and control lightning by using a giant laser. They're hoping they can use it both as a "lightning rod", diverting lightning to an area of their choosing, as well as coaxing extra lightning out of a cloud.
They claim this is all for safety reasons and to improve lightning protection and that sort of thing, but personally it all sounds like a huge front operation for an evil mountain lair. I still want one, though.
Space
Hurrah For Hubble
Hubble has been having issues for a while now - its payload computer (the bit that powers all the science) was playing up, and rendering it rather useless. There's a backup computer on board, but the process to switch over to it has not really been done before, and so it took a lot of prep work before they were ready to go - you can't just pop up there and fix it if you break it.
Fortunately, not only have they managed the switch to the backup computer, they also found what the fault was on the original one. Of course, it's not really possible to fix the broken computer - Hubble was very much designed around the Space Shuttle, and with it retired, there's no way to spacewalk out to it in orbit and bang it with a hammer.
Still, Hubble has been doing amazing science for three decades after a rather rocky start with its mirror problems, and its successor, the James Webb Space Telescope, has been delayed again and again. Fortunately, it seems like the JWST might finally be on track to launch this year.
Who Is Too Busy To Go To Space?
After Blue Origin made a big press event of auctioning off the final seat on their first crewed mission - that will poke just above the Kármán line, unlike Virgin Galactic's recent launch - the anonymous winner of that auction has decided to pull out due to a "scheduling conflict".
Now I'm no millionaire and I'm nowhere near being able to buy a seat on a space flight, but it does seem a little odd to splash out US$28 million to be on the very first crewed flight of a rocket and then... not go on it. I get many reasons not to want to be on the first one, but being too busy is a new one on me.
I hope whatever they're doing instead is absolutely enthralling, and they've made 18-year-old Oliver Daemen very happy as he is the substitute passenger on board the first flight, after being bumped up from the runner-up spot in the auction.
Medicine
Some Chemotherapy Is Surprisingly Explosive
Temozolomide is one of the many strange and exotic substances used in chemotherapy, and it turns out that, even after using it for decades, it has a property nobody knew about - it's really quite explosive.
I'm surprised nobody just... tests for this on new chemicals, given that anyone with a chemistry degree would look at the structure of the molecule here and go "well it looks like it should explode", but I guess everyone assumed someone else had tested it. Turns out, it does explode, and it does so really quite spectacularly, so that's fun.
Also, half the reason this story is here is that it is written by Derek Lowe, who these days writes a lot about medicine and COVID specifically, but his excellent writing is most famous in the form of Things I Won't Work With, which is a tour-de-force through a set of chemicals you really never want to be near, and I highly recommend it.
And Finally
I'm Bowled Away
Good foundation design and construction is essential to building structures properly - use the wrong type of aggregate, or forget about drainage, and suddenly the whole building is in a very unhappy situation.
You often only see how well foundations were done when you demolish them, though, and that's why it's rather unusual that underneath the concrete pad of this home's porch there was a rather unusual form of aggregate - 158 bowling balls.
Now I'm no structural engineer, but I'm not sure they're one of the recommended materials for concrete foundation pads. Still, some of them seem serviceable, so maybe it's time for the homeowner in question to take up bowling?