Land
It's Really Very Long
What exactly is a suspension bridge, and how do you determine the longest one? Opinions vary, but the generally accepted definition is that it should be the longest main span between two towers, ignoring any extra bridge bits that are on the sides.
And it is with that definition that the category has a new top entrant - the 1915 Çanakkale Bridge, which crosses the Dardanelles in Turkey and which has a main span which is over two kilometres long. It replaces the previous entrant, the Akashi Kaikyo Bridge in Japan, which has been happily occupying the spot since 1998.
The race to build ever-larger suspension bridges has definitely calmed down in recent decades, though China has been churning out some absolutely massive units as of late. None of the suspension bridges have anything on the longest bridge in the world, though, which is a whopping 164 kilometres long.
What Does It Take To Dig A Tunnel?
This is a fun video from the UK's HS2 (High Speed 2) project, which is building a high speed rail link between London, Birmingham and Manchester. It's been fraught with a lot of political challenges, but what's more interesting are the engineering challenges.
One of the biggest is the Chiltern Tunnel, a ten-mile tunnel that dives under the Chiltern Hills and avoids both some messy geography and some equally messy politics. It's a somewhat standard TBM operation, but this video is a wonderful and not-too-long at the equipment it takes, including both the TBM itself, as well as the transport vehicles and the bridge-that-also-lays-concrete.
The Busiest Railway In America, Apparently
Amtrak would like to expand, and bring the wonders of passenger rail to the line between Mobile and New Orleans, with a very moderate two trains a day.
Freight trains rule in the US, though, and the freight company that currently uses the line argues that it's just too busy with existing freight to let any passenger trains run. Amtrak suspects this rather isn't the case, though, so they put up a Twitch livestream of this supposedly busy railway, which was mostly the sound of birds over a very quiet railway line.
It prompted the freight company into action, revealing they run up to an astonishing ten trains a day. Ten! How could you possibly squeeze a few more passenger trains into that busy schedule?
Sea
It's Ever Difficult
The Ever Forward, the sister ship of the Suez-Canal-blocking Ever Given, is still stuck off the coast of Washington DC. In fact, it's very stuck - they have been totally unable to refloat it in place.
What do you do when you can't refloat a giant, loaded cargo ship? Well, you unload it. One container at a time, in the middle of the sea. It is... well, it's not very fast, as you can imagine.
This is while they're also trying to dredge near it, and once they've done enough of both, they'll give it another shot. It's really very stuck, though - it basically ploughed at full speed into the sandbank when it missed a turn, which is significantly harder to undo than getting stuck in a canal, it seems.
Silicon
That Pesky Terahertz Gap
Between microwaves and infrared light, lies a part of the electromagnetic spectrum that is just super hard to use - the Terahertz Gap. It's too high frequency for traditional radio circuits to work, but too low frequency to use light-emitting designs, and it does not go very far in air.
The gap is slowly closing though, as research teams close in on it from either end. Radio designs are being made to cycle fast enough to emit in the terahertz range, and lasers are being cooled enough to emit there.
What do we do when we get there? It's not exactly clear, but it's a whole new way of looking at the world, which probably has a lot of engineering and medical applications. The article also claims it could "make USB run faster", which would be nice, but is maybe a little less exciting.
Nature
The Lone Toronto Chimney
In an empty lot in Toronto, there's just one building element - a lone chimney, standing proud amongst the plants and snow. It seems rather out of place, until you learn exactly why it's there.
See, the Chimney Swift is an endangered species that lives in the area, and the local law says that if you demolish one of their potential habitats (a chimney), you have to rebuild one within a certain amount of time.
Normally, that would mean adding a decorative chimney to the new building that would be on the site, but since this was a demolition, they instead built a standalone chimney just so there's a habitat for any local swifts. The swifts didn't evolve to use chimneys, of course - they evolved to use hollowed-out trees - but it turns out they're a pretty good replacement, and some swifts have even moved in.
Industry
Taking Winter Into Summer
Traditional batteries are good at storing energy for a few days. Maybe a week or two. But at some point, the self-discharge will get to them, and you can't really keep energy super long term.
That could change, though, with a freeze-thaw battery design being developed. It uses different battery chemistry to enable it to store energy longer term - for months, even, allowing energy recovered in one season to be offloaded into another (for example, greater solar output in summer pushed into winter).
It's not yet clear how this will quite be more effective than load-shifting seasonally - normally you'd just do more industrial activity when there's more power available, after all. Always nice to see some new battery technologies get developed past the normal ones though.
Heists
They Didn't Have A Head For Heists
In relatively local news, a delivery truck was robbed here in Denver recently. That much is somewhat normal, but the twist is what was stolen - heads. Human heads.
The boxes weren't labelled "Human Heads", though - merely "Exempt Human Specimen" - so the thieves likely didn't know what they were stealing. Still not sure that makes an attractive robbery target, though?
That said, maybe they just wanted something appropriate for the rather aptly named Dead Guy Days up the road in Nederland. Needless to say, if you do see someone near the Rocky Mountains trying to shift a lot of frozen heads, please let the authorities know.
It's Rather A Big Fine, Eh
That most Canadian of crimes, the Great Maple Syrup Heist of 2012, has received a rather late update. The perpetrator was caught and sentenced in 2016 to an eight-year prison sentence that he's currently serving, but his fine has just gone up rather significantly.
Initially only set at one million Canadian Dollars, it's now been increased to nine million, to be repaid within the next ten years. I'm not exactly sure how they think he has that much spare, given he's in prison and all, but it apparently must be made very clear that maple syrup is Serious Business.
If you're not familiar with the original heist, I highly recommend you read up on it. It was a rather clever scheme, foiled only by laziness and deviating from the original plan (replacing syrup with water in storage barrels).
Oh No! My Cheese!
In a heist I think my doppelganger might have planned, a criminal gang stole a very large amount of cheese from a dairy farm in the Netherlands last week - over 150 wheels of cheese, as well as a trailer to haul it all.
Of course - somehow - every wheel of cheese in the Netherlands somehow has a unique serial number engraved into it, so they'll be hard to shift within the country - though I image it's not terribly difficult to remove to shift the cheese on the... cheese black market? It's all a little odd.
With food costs going up, though, this may not be the last of this. At least giant wheels of cheese are a bit easier to steal than milk? Harder than almonds, though, as those don't have any serial numbers. Well, not yet.
And Finally
Finally, The Glitter Mystery Is Solved
For years, there has been a great mystery in the world of glitter. The glitter manufacturers of the world make a lot of glitter. Seriously, a LOT. And the glitter manufacturers had one great secret - they wouldn't tell anyone what their biggest customer was.
The internet has been on the case ever since a report came out about this, and many theories were put up and shot down. Cards aren't enough volume. Neither is makeup. Food doesn't work. Who was using all this glitter?
After some extensive investigation, it appears the result has finally been found - boat paint! A lot of proper investigative journalism has revealed this darkest of glittery secrets, and honestly, the path there is more interesting than the answer itself, as you can read or listen to in the linked podcast transcript!