Editorial
Mind The Gaps
I was unfortunately ill the last two weeks with the world's currently most popular virus, which was really rather unpleasant, and of course meant I chose to lie in bed rather than do an issue of Tales.
Thankfully, I'm mostly back to normal now, so here is a normal issue! Next time might be a little tricky as I'm off to the UK to go attend (and help with) Electromagnetic Field, but it might also be a good chance to do some on-the-ground stories from the festival itself, so we'll see what I come up with. Until then, enjoy some stories about tunnels, blood and cake.
Land
Go Go Gadgetbahn
Everyone loves a gadgetbahn - taking the idea of a railway (that tried and tested concept with a lot of standards) and somehow making it new and unique, so that they can get investment, presumably.
Most of these ideas are startups or R&D departments trying to justify their existence, but this one - while bearing a lot of the standard hallmarks of one (automation! underground!) is also apparently somewhat funded by the Swiss government, which means it might actually have a chance.
The Swiss are at least very good at digging giant tunnels through mountains, so I do trust them to build smaller train tunnels, but it does still smell a little bit like a solution in search of a problem (as much as I really, really want giant underground automated cargo networks to exist, so good luck to this one)
Sea
Push Button, Receive Water
Desalination is increasingly important as climate change wreaks havoc on previously-reliable sources of freshwater, but a lot of desalination solutions are high-maintenance, needing consumables like filters to be changed out regularly.
An MIT team has invented a new small-scale (suitcase-sized) desalinator that uses electricity to separate the salt from the water (via two different processes - ion polarisation and electrodialysis).
It seems like it's a little less power-efficient than some existing methods, and a little slower, but being entirely self-contained with minimal maintenance makes it potentially very attractive for a lot of individual or distributed use-cases where a larger desalination plant doesn't make sense.
Sky
The Drones, They Demand Blood
Drones have transformed a couple of things - they've made the aerial videography industry way more accessible, and removed the quiet soundscapes near several tourist attractions. There's something properly good in all this though, and that's time-sensitive deliveries in very remote areas.
In particular, Rwanda has been trialling drones for blood deliveries for a few years now, and they have shown themselves to be decently faster than the alternative (delivery by road). They obviously excel in cases where there's very indirect roads and mountainous terrain, which Rwanda has quite a lot of.
They're a lot more expensive than someone in a delivery vehicle, though, and more sensitive to weather (something that mountains tend to have a lot of). Still good news overall, though.
Space
No, Wait, That's Not Venus
Back in the height of the Space Race, there were several attempts to get a lander onto the rather hostile surface of Venus. Some of them reached Venus, and some of them didn't do so well, ending up in a failed orbit around Earth.
Now, once of them is set to re-enter Earth's atmosphere after decades of its orbit decaying, but this one has a new twist - rather than burning up in the atmosphere like most spacecraft, this one is a lander designed to survive Venus. It will happily survive re-entry into Earth's atmosphere.
What that means is, some part of Earth's surface is soon to get a very rapid visit from a Soviet lander. Hopefully it will be in the ocean or some uninhabited plains somewhere, rather than crashing into a kitchen or something.
Nature
Is It A Legume? Is It Fertiliser? No, But Kind Of?
Food. It's important, and we grow a lot of it using fertiliser, a lot of which comes from fossil fuels. Fertiliser, though, is mostly a nitrogen source, and the atmosphere is over three-quarters nitrogen - so why can't plants just get it from the air?
Well, there's one set that can - legumes. They pair with bacteria in the soil to naturally fixate nitrogen (which is why farmers often rotate crops in fields to include legumes every few years, to improve soil quality).
Now, some bioengineering has apparently resulted in a barley plant that does the same thing, which is really promising as it's an entryway into the world of making all staple crops do this, massively reducing our need for fertiliser.
Moon Plants?
There's lots of things we need for a base on the Moon. Water, air, power, food, and probably a decent internet connection are all on the list. One of the things that would be nice to have to help with the air and food bit? Plants.
The problem, of course, is that the moon is not made of soil, or even cheese, but instead of nasty, sharp regolith. Thus, some scientists have taken it upon themselves to see if plants will grow in this as a substrate - when otherwise given the right water and fertiliser - and it seems that yes, they will indeed.
This is not super surprising, since plants will grow in almost any medium (ask the hydroponics people), but it's good to know that we can just use the stuff that's already there rather than shipping something over.
Industry
Basalt Batteries
Batteries! Everyone's favourite technology frontier continues to provide as we try to find places to dump renewable energy into for baseload smoothing, and the latest frontier is apparently... stone.
In reality it's just another heat-based storage solution, using basalt as the heat conductor and a load of rock wool as the insulation to keep it hot (apparently up to 500°C).
It's not quite clear to me what the advantage of this is over other similar thermal batteries - perhaps the specific heat capacity of basalt is higher than other potential materials (like molten salts), or maybe it's just a lot cheaper. Still, as always, the more battery research the better, in my mind.
Eat! That! Plastic!
Landfills are an ubiquitous solution to the problem of plastic waste, since it doesn't biodegrade. Of course, the reason it doesn't biodegrade is not that it's theoretically impossible - the chemical chains in plastic are very similar to a lot of organic chemistry - it's that nothing has evolved to eat it yet.
Well, we're trying to encourage that process along, and the latest breakthrough is a "low temperature" enzyme that breaks down PET, one of the most common plastics. Now, low temperature here still means relatively toasty - it's just "below 50 Celsius" - but that's a temperature you could reach relatively easily in a dedicated facility, and it apparently does its work in a few days, rather than a few centuries.
Fighting Cheese Fraud With Chips (The Other Kind)
There's very few places that are allowed to make real, genuine Parmigiano Reggiano - it's one of those heavily protected place-of-origin foodstuffs - and the market for fraudulent cheese is almost as big as the value of the real stuff.
For ages, wheels of genuine Parmigiano have had unique serial numbers etched into them to try and provide traceability and some way to check that you've got the genuine stuff. Now, they're moving up one level - by adding tiny RFID tags into the outer case of the cheese.
There's some weird mention of blockchain in the article, which doesn't really make any sense, but I imagine just having an easy way to scan cheese will be an improvement to keeping the whole thing in order. I wonder if they'll try adding chips to olive oil next.
And Finally
Is This Your Cake, Madam?
Meri Mion, of Italy, was 13 when American soldiers stole a cake from her windowsill as they were fighting nearby German forces - in 1945, at the end of World War Two.
In a move that brings to mind the phrase "better late than never", the US Army has presented her with a replacement cake, a mere 77 years later. Unfortunately, the size of the cake does not appear to be corrected for inflation, but the replacement cake does at least look very delicious, so that's something?