Land
Concrete, Concrete Everywhere
What is humanity's greatest achievement? Literature? Music? Spaceflight? Well, those are all great, but... how about concrete? The Construction Physics newsletter dives into some of the details behind this most essential of materials.
If you look at what we produce as output by mass, concrete is basically what humanity does, with almost everything else being a rounding error. Hell, we're on track to have more concrete on Earth than the entirety of natural biomass sometime in the next few decades if you look at the charts in this article.
The writeup also touches on the carbon output of concrete - in that it's not quite as bad as it seems, if you look at what exactly you can replace it with, as well as the fact concrete actually absorbs CO2 over its lifetime. Sure, it might not be time to bring back brutalism just yet, but concrete... well, there's no getting rid of it.
Now All It Needs Is Some Maple Syrup
Vancouver is a beautiful place, with a wonderful public transport system in the form of its automated metro, SkyTrain. It's also a very cold and wet place for a good chunk of the year, with sticky, wet snow getting all over the trains, and making the doors stick.
How do you clear that snow and ice out from the gap behind the doors? Do you use a chunk of aluminium, or some wood? Well, they used to, but that wasn't Canadian enough, and so now... they use hockey sticks. Of course.
TransLink also say they have special third-rail collection shoes for their trains in winter and custom-designed deicing systems for their overhead trolleybus wires, but honestly all I can think of now is a bus with a pair of hockey sticks on top that just sweeps ice off the wires.
Sea
Flash Flash. Flash. Flash Flash Flash.
Lighthouses are nice. They let you know where you are, or if you're not sure where you are, at least let you know where land is. But have you ever wondered what it would be like to see all of them at once?
Well, wonder no longer, because now you can, with this animated map of lighthouses around the world. Not only do they flash in the correct colours and sequences, but their circles even represent how far they're visible from!
About the only thing this map probably isn't good for is actual navigation, though maybe if you zoom in enough it becomes a little less overwhelming?
Sky
Seriously Though, We All Need Less Light
As I have been very fortunate to experience, there is nothing quite like a truly dark sky. Go to somewhere with no light pollution, give yourself a full hour to night-adjust, and you can experience the wonder of seeing the night sky just rammed full of stars, and if you're lucky, even see the Milky Way cast a shadow.
New Zealand, in its mostly-unspoilt wonder, is one of the best places in the world for this, and the people of that fine country are apparently quite keen to keep it that way. Lighting colours, fixtures, directions and timing can all be adjusted to massively reduce light pollution, and in some cases lights can just be completely ripped out.
There are dark-sky regions around the world, but a whole nation doing it would be a first. I do think we could push for better lighting regulations worldwide, though - we just don't need the level of light we blast out from our towns and cities, and I feel a lot has been lost by not being able to see the stars.
This One Is A Lot More Than 1.21 Jigawatts
Lightning. It's big, it's powerful, and it's scary when you're too close to it. But what if, rather than your boring, run-of-the-mill standard lightning, that lightning bolt was also five hundred miles long?
Well, that's what happened above Louisiana, Texas and Mississippi this week, as an absolute unit of a lightning bolt spread across all three states, setting a new record for the longest bolt observed (thanks, space-based lightning satellites). I would not want to be anywhere near that one.
Another fun fact? The record for the longest-duration lightning bolt is over seventeen seconds, and was recorded in Argentina and Uruguay a couple of years ago. Seventeen seconds. What does that even look like? The mind boggles.
Silicon
How Do You Fix A Problem Like Marine, Ah, Cables?
As we discussed last issue, Tonga recently experienced the most explosive volcano eruption of the last couple hundred years, and maybe unsurprisingly, this damaged their fibre optic internet cable that ran along the sea bed somewhat near said volcano.
Most countries have redundant links, but Tonga just had the one, and so now the whole country is on rather less-good satellite internet and needs that cable fixed, pronto. A cable-laying ship is heading towards the break site at full speed to get it repaired, thankfully, but repairing fibre optic cables is not an easy process.
This lovely guide from Reuters explores both what the cable is made up of (and how tiny the actual important part of it is), as well as what it takes to locate, haul up, repair, and then re-bury the cable. It turns out it's a little trickier than fixing the one to your house.
Industry
The US Is, Apparently, Actually Building Public Transit?
I don't believe this until I see it, but it appears that the USA might finally be turning the corner - at least slightly - on having good public transportation. Twenty-two tracked or guided lines are meant to open this year, as well as plenty more express bus services (which, while I prefer trains over buses, are still nice).
Unfortunately, at the time of writing, the map itself appears to be down, but hopefully it will come back soon. In the meantime, I'm going to instead plug the increasing viability and popularity of aerial cable cars (gondolas) - they have minimal footprints, very decent throughput, and are well-understood engineering problems since we've had them around for over a century. Just ask Paris, who are the latest city to consider adding one into their transport system.
Medicine
Hopefully, Now We Can End The Other Pandemic
While the COVID pandemic is probably the only pandemic that most people will say they've lived through, the HIV pandemic has been around for a lot longer and it's a lot more deadly.
We've made great strides in treating it and preventing it in the almost forty years it's been known to us, but both our current methods for those are long and costly - pills every day, and out of reach of a lot of people in developing countries.
A working HIV vaccine would, quite literally, be one of the biggest advancements in medicine in recent history, and Moderna's candidate started human trials this week - and yes, it's based on research they did for the COVID vaccine. It'll be a while before we get the results of the trials, but if they're successful, we might yet eradicate HIV and maybe, just maybe, over time we can save more people than COVID has taken from us.
Heists
That's Weird, I Swear There Used To Be A Postbox Here
The bright red letterbox is a staple across the UK. Always ready and waiting to receive whatever post you might have - be that a nice postcard or, more recently, COVID testing kits - they're everywhere.
Well, almost everywhere, as there's been a spate of postbox thefts, in East Anglia specifically. At least ten different towns and villages have woken up to find their postbox missing, with only an angle-ground stump remaining.
It's suspected to be theft for resale as collectors' items, rather than purely metal theft - some collectors will pay almost anything to get their hands on an original (especially one of the very old ones), and where there's a high price, there's some criminals with power tools willing to procure what's needed.
All we need now is a set of trap postboxes, filled with cameras and angry geese, just waiting to turn the scales on the perpetrators. That, or a high-budget TV series with a detective moodily driving around East Anglia tracing down the suspects.
And Finally
For This Recipe, Just Add Water
Shipping delays and problems are common these days for a myriad of reasons, but usually you can find the thing you want eventually.
If you're looking for one of the new cookbooks Turkey and the Wolf or Dinner in One, though, you're in for a longer wait, as every single copy of the cookbooks was lost at sea in a storm.
Unless you have a handy submersible and want to go looking for them at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean, you will now instead have to wait another six months for them to be reprinted and available. Though I will laugh if those shipments also go missing somehow.