Land
The LHC Is Back
After a several year break to maintain and upgrade the Large Hadron Collider, it's back in operation, probing the mysteries of the universe and hopefully not making microscopic black holes.
Not only did they make it even more powerful - it can now cause collisions with energies of 13.6 trillion electronvolts - they can also deliver a lot more particles to the various experiments, hopefully giving even more chances to see that rare, one-off collision that proves or disproves something very powerful.
If you'd like a direct look into the heart of the beast, you can see all of their status displays in real time, too. Just don't expect to understand most of it unless you have deep opinions on supersymmetry.
Sea
Tap Here To Check For Swans With Lasers?
What do you do when you have miles and miles of canals, and a whole bunch of locks to get all those boats moved up and down them? Well, you used to employ a whole bunch of bridge keepers, but times, they are a-changin'.
A lock is a large, dangerous thing that can easily crush, maim or flood something if not operated correctly, but the bridge keepers generally keep an eye on things, and those that were converted to be controlled by boaters generally have a lot of safety interlocks. But this is 2022, so clearly, we also need to be able to open them via an... app?
Yup, the Trust has been converting several Gloucester locks to be opened via an app, with laser detection to ensure there's no obstructions, but things aren't going so well. Reasons it's not working include "bad weather" and "swans flying under the bridge", which last time I checked is most of the UK, most of the time, so... let's hope they fix it to handle those?
Green Ships
Maersk, one of the largest shipping companies in the world, are looking into how to make their shipping operations more green.
It's not making battery-electric ships though - batteries are still quite heavy for the amount of power they contain, and you need a lot of power for a container ship. Instead, they're looking into making the ships run on bio-methanol - which does emit greenhouse gases, but is technically carbon-neutral if you specifically grow extra plants to make it.
It's not quite the leap I would hope for, but it's nice to see progress. I still think we should really look into making wind-powered ships again, though - sometimes the old ideas are still good, though they might need a few extra turbines and batteries.
Ever Free
Finally, the Ever Forward, whose stranding we've covered in a couple of different issues this year, is free from the sandbank it ploughed straight into off the coast of Washington, D.C.
It was a mammoth effort - they used dredgers to lower the sea bed, plucked containers off of the deck to try and reduce its weight, and tugs to try and pull it off the sand.
If the nice folks at Evergreen could try and avoid getting any more container ships stuck, especially in globally-important canals, that'd be great, please. The supply chain crisis is bad enough already.
Sky
Ah Yes, The MiG... Business Jet?
The MiG 25 is one of the most famous icons of the Soviet Cold War military machine, for maybe not the best reasons. But before it was a supersonic fighter, it had a different, original life - as a business jet.
Not a very big one - only five to seven passengers - but it's an interesting alternative history where it was instead zipping around the sky with rich business people making deals, rather than being loaded to the brim with ammunition.
There are few surviving pictures of these original prototypes, but you can still see the MiG design heritage in the shape of it. I am a little sad that the days of supersonic travel stayed firmly in the second half of the 20th century - it would be nice if the flight home was a bit shorter than 10 hours - but they did absolutely guzzle fuel.
Nature
Waiter, Waiter, Are These Mosquitoes... Organic?
The quest to eradicate humanity's biggest enemy is underway - yes, that's right, mosquitoes. Malaria, dengue fever, zika... there's a long list of nasty diseases that mosquitoes carry.
Well, certain species of mosquitoes. One of the nice things about trying to eradicate the disease-carrying variants is that there's plenty of other, nicer mosquito species ready to step in and fill the ecosystem niche that opens up - after all, there are some good things mosquitoes do other than bite us (get eaten by birds, for example).
The weapon of choice right now is genetically engineering mosquitoes to pass on deadly genes into the gene pool, release them, and let them essentially breed death back into the wild population. The results from one of the first actual trials of this are back, and they're positive, but not quite "blow me away" levels. Still worth keeping an eye on, though.
The Sea Lion Buffet
Sea lions. They're large, they're noisy, and they really, really love fish. So, what happens when sea lions figure out how to get into a salmon farm? Mayhem.
A whole bunch of sea lions have invaded a salmon farm in British Columbia, and unsurprisingly, it's very hard to get them to leave. It's not all good for the sea lions, either - they run a large risk of getting entangled in the ropes and nets used to create the farm.
This kind of farming is also kind of frowned upon (and it's worth noting that the salmon being farmed are atlantic salmon, which would be bad for the local pacific salmon if they escaped), so the whole thing is not great from beginning to end. Well, apart from some presumably very happy sea lions.
Industry
Two Dimensional Polymers
The people of MIT are at it again, this time with some really interesting materials science. They've managed to make an incredibly strong plastic that is "stronger than steel" and certainly sounds very exciting in terms of potential applications.
The key to the strength is the polymer structure - rather than the normal plastic approach of entangling a lot of one-dimensional polymer chains, this new plastic instead has two-dimensional polymer lattices, previously thought impossible, and giving it potentially very impressive strength.
Of course, like all advances in materials science, we have to wait and see how easy it is to convert this from something in the lab into something that can be manufactured at scale, but I'm very ready for ultra-strong plastics to be a thing. Maybe alongside some transparent aluminium?
Please Don't Mail Osmium
The United States Postal Service has a long list of shipping charges and things it will accept into the mail. You can mail live birds, fish, scorpions, and even live bees (though, they do occasionally lose shipments of bees, which is even more worrying).
One service they do offer, though, is the small flat-rate shipping box - one flat rate for as much as you can stuff in there, though there is a 4lb weight limit when used internationally. Domestically, though? There's a noted 70lb weight limit.
As Paul Sherman notes on Twitter, there is literally nothing you could put into the box that would make it weigh 70lbs while simultaneously allowing it to exist on Earth. Osmium, the densest substance known to man, would only make it weigh about 60lbs even if you managed to completely fill the box.
Clearly, the USPS are just hedging their bets against someone scooping up a neutron star and popping it in their nearest mailbox. Or something like that, anyway.
And Finally
Are Flapjacks Cakes?
One of the stupidest things about the UK's VAT system is the endless debates about something being a cake or not. See, cakes have a 0% rate on VAT, whereas sweets and biscuits attract the normal 20% VAT, so there's a pretty big profit reason to want the things you make to be cakes.
Jaffa Cakes are maybe the most famous entry in this particular register of mystery, going though a long legal battle to see if they were chocolate-covered cakes or biscuits. In the end, they were decided to be cakes by the court, and so got the 0% rate.
Now, flapjacks (the UK version, which is like a soft granola bar, not the pancakes) have come before the Cake Courts, and they have gone the other way - apparently, flapjacks are not sufficiently cakey enough.
Well, if they're modern flapjacks. If they're more like 1970s ones, apparently, those are cakes. Maybe they're less chewy? Who knows - it's just a very funny thing to have the court systems of one of the world's richest countries engaged in very precise definition of what is a cake and what isn't.