Editorial
Back From Electromagnetic Field
Well, I'm not sure why I thought I'd be able to write a newsletter during a week of very active running around and helping keeping an event going, but I realised soon enough - on the plus side, EMF this year was absolutely fantastic, and there's plenty of photos to see some of the wonder yourself.
Setting up and tearing down an entire power grid, internet grid, DECT telephone network and more is enough infrastructure in itself, and when the video of the EMF Infrastructure Talk is up, I'll be sure to link it. In the meantime, though, the rest of the world moves on, so let's see how!
Land
Canada Now Has A Second Land Border
Hans Island is a tiny speck of land in the Arctic sea, and for years, has been disputed between Canada and Denmark, each of them claiming ownership over this very unremarkable piece of geography.
Now, though, an agreement has been reached to split the island down the middle, and give half to each country - something you could argue was the right call all along, but it's particularly notable as it means Canada now has a land border with Denmark (or technically, the Danish Realm, via Greenland).
Given that both countries had only one land border before, they've both doubled the number of land borders they have, and it has made the Wikipedia "Borders Of Canada" page a little confused, as it used to just redirect to the good old US-Canada border page. Still, though, this means we're one step closer to Canada being in Eurovision, right?
Sea
Now The Army's Doing Wet Solar Too
The rather oddly-named field of "floatovoltaics" - placing solar panel farms on water, rather than land - has gained a new supporter in the guise of the US Army, who deployed a 1MW array in North Carolina recently.
Putting solar panels over bodies of water is, in my eyes, a win-win - it frees up land for other uses (farming, for example) and also reduces evaporation, especially important in these times, when the American West is seeing reservoirs drop to dangerous levels.
Is it a little harder to build and maintain than ones on land? Of course. But we need all the help we can get in switching to renewables fast, and the US Army has a hell of a history of polluting to help pay back, so this is a good start.
Sky
Filling The Spanish Skies With Airships
In "this has got way further than I expected but I still won't believe it until I see it" news, a Spanish airline has signed a deal for ten airships to fly regional routes in Spain.
Hybrid Air Vehicles have been pushing to get some real customers for a while, and they've flown a test version of this aircraft before, but like so many airships, it suffered a rather nasty run-in with some high winds (and in an improvement versus its ancestors, self-deflated to avoid any further damage).
That means they've not actually built or flown any airships since 2017, but they plan to start building a fleet of these things Real Soon Now. I really, really hope this gets going, because I will go almost anywhere to ride on an airship.
Space
It's Like Project Orion, But Less Stupid
Nuclear. Rockets. Applying the word "nuclear" to almost anything tends to make it better, and this is still true of rocketry, where DARPA are really eager to get nuclear-thermal rockets working.
This is not the "hundreds of tiny explosions" propulsion of the Project Orion/nuclear pulse propulsion era, but instead using a nuclear reaction to heat more standard propellant and chuck it out of the back. They're really promising from an efficiency standpoint, and far less radioactive than you might think.
That said, we haven't totally got one working yet, but DARPA are keen to throw money at someone to do so. In the modern world of much cheaper costs for kilograms-to-orbit, I am hopeful that we can get something up there and try it out soon.
Goodnight, Sweet Probes
The Voyager probes have been travelling through space for over four decades, surviving hardware errors, travelling through the helioshock, and just in general going way further than anything ever has (or will, for a while).
Out there, in the inky darkness of deep space, the Sun is just another small star in the sky, and so the probes have been surviving by converting the heat from a chunk of radioactive plutonium into a meagre flow of electricity to keep them phoning home.
The plutonium is slowly cooling off, though, as its radioactivity fades, and the probes are facing the end of their lives as their power runs out. They'll hopefully last past 2025, but it's only a matter of time until they go to sleep forever.
Silicon
They Actually Made A High-Yield Plastic Processor
Plastic processors continue to advance out of the realm of theory and into full existence, with an actual high-yield design making it through the production process.
These processor designs are weak and not very powerful at all - there's orders of magnitude fewer transistors than even the ones you find in embedded devices - but they are highly flexible, able to curl up around a toothpick.
The key approach versus previous attempts seems to be that they designed a new processor architecture around the limitations of the process, rather than trying to adapt an existing processor architecture down. I'm not sure where these will turn up next, but I look forward to my socks somehow needing firmware updates.
Industry
Now What Do We Do With All These Batteries?
Electric cars have so many advantages over internal combustion engines, that there's only really two things left against them - range per unit of weight, and battery cost.
People often talk about the cost of the batteries as they are created - especially the somewhat dubious places that lithium is often sourced from - but the other end of the cycle is just as problematic, as recycling these batteries is not nearly as easy as it could be.
It's not that it's uneconomical on the face of it - what better place to get refined lithium and rare earth metals than something with them already refined and separated? Instead, it's the lack of standardisation, hard-to-undo construction with lots of glue, and labelling of what exact kind of battery chemistry is used.
We need a lot of work put in on all three, so recycling companies can easily work out what they're dealing with and extract the good bits, rather than only understanding a few major brands and handling those. It's still a better thing to aim for than pumping the air full of fossil fuel remnants, though.
They're Still Trying Wireless Power
Beaming power wirelessly has always been one of those seemingly unachievable things that people keep trying anyway. Wireless phone chargers already lose about 50% of their power in the process, though, so how can we hope to go further than a centimetre or so?
Well, efforts have been continuing, and they've got pretty decent, though there's still the unavoidable side-effect that if you're beaming several kilowatts (or more) of power through the air, anything in the way tends to get a little bit... cooked.
The most recent innovation here was a virtual guard around the beam that cut it off if something strayed into the path (to avoid it getting cooked), but we still seem a little bit far away from the ultimate goal of beaming power from giant space-based solar panels down to the ground.
Please Proceed, Perovskite Photovoltaics
Silicon-based solar cells have come a long way in the last 70 years, but they're still kind of expensive and energy-intensive to produce. That's why it's particularly interesting that one of the alternative semiconductors - perovskite - appears to finally be getting more viable.
It can be created at room temperature, and it's a lot more flexible than silicon-based panels, with the slight tradeoff that they used to only last a few minutes. Thankfully, that's now been extended to "30 years under ideal outdoor conditions", which is hopefully at least 10 years in practice.
Like all materials advances, it'll take a while to come into its own and compete on price and efficiency, but any advance in solar power is a good one!
And Finally
Wavy Walls
How do you build a wall with less bricks, but still somehow make it stronger? It turns out, you don't build it straight - you make a continuous, self-supporting set of curves, meaning you only need use a single layer of bricks.
Now, I'm not sure if they are more practical than straight walls - try mowing the grass around these, or running lights along them - but they do look pretty great.