Land
Why Is Roman Concrete So Good?
You may think of concrete as a distinctly modern building material, but it has been around since at least Roman times - and one of the reasons we know this is that the Roman concrete structures are still partially standing and remarkably resilient, compared to their modern counterparts.
Part of it was certainly luck - one element of the aggregates they used, lucite, actually dissolves over time and strengthens the concrete bonds within the material (as opposed to modern concrete, where often steel rebar is used for reinforcement, which deteriorates over time). They were also great architects, though, designing very structurally sound buildings.
We're still studying their concrete and working out how to improve our own mixes, without compromising on some of the other improvements we've made over the years (like a much higher strength per unit area).
Turns Out A Giant Power Link Is Difficult To Fix
The giant undersea power cable between England and France that burned up in a nasty incident last month - partially helping to propagate the UK's current energy crisis - is going to take a lot longer to repair than even I had thought, as it's scheduled to take about two years to get it back up and running.
To be fair, HVDC (high voltage direct current) cables are no joke - the sheer amount of power you can pump down those things is only dwarfed by the size of the conversion stations either end that turn it from AC into DC and back again. This picture of the valve hall for New Zealand's HVDC cable should give you some idea of just how ridiculously big this equipment is.
We're Starting To Run Out Of Colours Now
If I asked you to cast your mind into the future and think about what might be impacted by supply chains, you'd probably have reasonable answers you worried about - food, power, or even toilet paper. However, in a rather unusual twist, it appears that we are instead running out of the colour blue.
Now, fortunately this is not a shortage on the abstract concept of the colour, but instead on the pigment used to make blue paint - so if you were thinking about repainting a feature wall in blue, you might want to pass on that until next year.
The paint company in question also say they're running out of the waterproof additive used to make outdoor paint, and the material they use to make paint cans. Yet another complex supply chain just wrecked by the ravages of COVID.
Sea
If You Make A Line Of Shipping Containers, Do They Vanish?
The shipping crisis continues to roll on around the globe, and California's ports are particularly feeling the crunch. Container ships are sitting offshore for weeks at a time waiting for a spot to unload.
One twitter thread from last week detailed Ryan Peterson, CEO of Flexport, taking a ride around the port of Long Beach with one of their shipping partners. The thread outlined what he believes is the root of the problem - a lack of space to shuffle containers around so empty ones can be removed from road chassis to make room to ship new ones out.
Well, it appears his thread and requests to talk to local government were somewhat successful, as the city of Long Beach relaxed the container-stacking zoning rules shortly afterwards from 2 to 5 high, giving the ports and yards a bit more space to work with in order to get containers shuffled around. It's not going to be the thing that totally fixes the problem, but it's a start.
How Do You Un-Sink A Ship? Wait For A Volcano.
Volcanoes are tremendously destructive, but they can also be very constructive - volcano island chains are constantly making new land by just pouring lava into the sea and cooling it off. In this case, it seems that with that new land came some rather unexpected extras.
See, as a new volcanic islet appeared from the ocean in the Japanese Ogasawara island chain, the tectonic activity raised the neighbouring island of Iwojima, exposing a whole set of sunken World War 2 ships that were previously mostly hidden under the ocean, apparently part of a port the US was trying to build at that time.
The new islet may not be up for very long - apparently they quite often sink under the waves again - so we'll see how that affects the neighbouring island or not. For now, though, these ships are exposed once again after almost a century under the waves.
The Ticking Time Bomb In The Red Sea
In the red sea floats the lonely oil tanker FSO Safer, abandoned in 2017 - just chock full of oil and deteriorating by the day, a time bomb that will at some point leak and flood the Red Sea with one of the largest oil slicks seen in modern times.
Not only will it cut off access to the ports of Yemen, it will also clog up the desalination plants in the region, threaten food supplies, and may badly impact the Red Sea coral reefs, which are some of the few in the world that seem to be tolerant of warming waters (and so are pretty important given climate change).
The UN wants to go in and inspect the ship, but there's problems getting agreement between the UN-recognised government of Yemen and the local Houthi rebels, who would quite like the UN to fix the ship rather than just taking a look. Hopefully they come to an agreement soon.
Sky
Is It A Laser Bird? Is It A Laser Plane? Yes, It's A Laser Plane.
There was a lot of consternation in California recently as several different people reported being scanned by a strange green light from the sky, rushing over them before moving onwards. In this case, however, it was not aliens, but rather bathymetric (water depth) LiDAR scans.
LiDAR scans are done by survey planes flying very precise patterns over terrain or water, bouncing thousands of laser pulses a second off the landscape and measuring the exact distance to the terrain by how long it took to reflect. They regularly get down to centimetre accuracy, and are incredibly useful tools for building super accurate models of terrain and water flow.
The kind you use for land surveying, though, is an almost invisible near-infrared laser, so don't expect to see green flashes any time a survey aircraft is overhead. Instead, the green is only used for underwater surveys, as water is a fantastic absorber of infrared light.
The Junkyard Jet
This is a wonderful Twitter thread about a plane that was abandoned way too close to the runway in Nagpur, India - for twenty-four whole years - and quite how it got there.
I'm not going to spoil too much, but it does involve an Indian tire magnate, a rather optimistic airplane mechanic, and some (honestly rather expected) engine problems.
Space
Lucy Needs A Bit More Sun
NASA's Lucy mission to visit twelve different asteroids is off to a rocky start, as the spacecraft had one of its two solar panels fail to deploy properly after launch.
Fortunately, the array is at least partially out, and the rest of the mission is going well and the spacecraft is now on "cruise mode" on the way to its first slingshot, but NASA are still trying to work out how open the solar panel is by looking at measurements and data. Hopefully they can figure out what went wrong and maybe remedy it.
On a related note, if you want to just marvel at how orbital planning works these days, this animation of the mission trajectory is astonishing as it slingshots around the Solar System visiting a whole bunch of asteroids with almost zero propellant.
Heists
My Voice Is My Password
"Deepfakes" are on the rise in crime, and this heist is here to directly prove it - thieves cloned the voice of a company director and used it to direct a fraudulent bank transfer to the tune of US$35 milllion.
They only got away with $400,000 of it, it seems, but that's still a pretty big windfall for just cloning someone's voice, and it's only going to get easier and more commonplace. Deepfaking video calls is probably just around the corner, and maybe one day even in-person masks - though if you believe the CIA's former Chief of Disguise, they have already been able to do that for quite a while.
Stolen From Right Above Their Noses
Another church bell was unfortunately stolen in recent weeks from St Matthew's in Withernsea, East Yorkshire, and what is particularly notable is that the church staff didn't notice the bell was missing until it was meant to ring for the Sunday service and... nothing happened.
It turns out the thieves dropped it three stories down from the bell tower to remove it, causing a lot of damage to the cellar doors in the process, but to quote the vicar, "it didn't occur to us to look up".
If you happen to have the bell in your posession, the church would appreciate it turning back up in the grounds in a reverse heist.
Why Exactly Are Americans Spying On Their Own Country?
This rather fascinating report into internal US espionage over the past half-century examines exactly why people leaking secrets are doing it, and more interestingly how the reasons (and the kind of people) change over time.
Some notable conclusions include the fact that money is rarely a motivator, and this hasn't changed over time - instead, the increasingly large reason that it's happening is "divided loyalties", which I'm pretty sure is report speak for "didn't entirely believe in the US".
They're also pretty evenly divided between civilians and the military, and curiously the percentage using illegal drugs has declined since the 1980s. There's a lot more interesting insight in there if you have the time and a warm drink to read the report by.
And Finally
Get Your Ducks In A Row
In important science news, close studies of ducklings swimming behind their mother has revealed that the ducklings are using "wave-riding" in order to reduce the amount of effort they need to expend, and in some cases being pushed forwards purely by wave action.
The effect continues though the column of ducklings and has a significant impact even quite far down the line, which could be useful for future studies of our own of efficient formations of ships or aircraft. Or, I guess, if you want a reason to go study ducklings (don't we all?)