Sea
Lithium Ahoy! Maybe!
Lithium is vital in the modern world - it's in basically every modern high-capacity battery, including electronic devices and all those electric cars everyone is so excited about - but it's rather a pain to get a hold of. Lithium mining is a dangerous, messy business, and often done in places with questionable labour practices.
So, then, imagine everyone's eagerness to get lithium from seawater - which contains 5,000 times more lithium than what we can find on land. Unfortunately, it's also considerably harder to get it out, and many have tried and failed to make the process economical.
However, it looks like we may finally have cracked it, not only bringing lithium down to approximately US$5/kg to be extracted, but also making hydrogen and chlorine in the process, which are also valuable in their pure form. Obviously, all press releases like this should be taken with a large pinch of (sea) salt until they are actually scaled up and proven economical, but there's good potential here.
Undersea Cables Are Even More Difficult Than You Thought
The world is very reliant on undersea cables to connect networks and the internet together, and while the physical process of laying that cable is itself an incredibly challenging task - requiring special ships that are booked out years in advance - there's also plenty of politics in the way, too.
See, the governments at either end of a cable are quite interested in looking over each application carefully, and it appears there's a political shift away from landing cables in Hong Kong, presumably due to increasing Chinese involvement that the US government does not seem to be happy with.
The article explains it better, but HK was on the verge of becoming a undersea cable hub, and yet now it seems like people may be shifting their cable endpoints to elsewhere - Singapore, for example. Cable endpoints tend to cluster together so that routing between them is easier, so we might see some new "hubs" emerge - but it's also an industry that can't move particularly fast.
Sky
Planes And Cicadas Don't Mix
President Biden's press plane was delayed this week after the omnipresent hum of periodical cicadas - the biggest brood of which is emerging this year after 17 years dormant - got a little too close for comfort and completely filled the engines of the plane, which - and you don't need to be an expert to know this - isn't good for it.
Air Force One seems to have avoided the same fate, fortunately, but the replacement press plane did have to fly into Washington D.C. through a swarm of cicadas so dense that it showed up on weather radar. Fun.
Silicon
More Chips Is Never A Bad Thing
The global microchip shortage shows no signs of easing in the short term, so it's probably perfect timing for Bosch to have opened their newest microchip plant over in Dresden, Germany. The one billion Euros they spent on the thing is, hopefully, going to start paying for itself right away.
It's not going to solve the crisis all by itself - and it's not spec'd to be able to make particularly high-end chips - but in a time when basically all microchips are hard to get, it's some small but welcome relief, at least. Maybe it'll help ease the car shortage a little right as all the car rental agencies are trying to buy back the fleets they sold off last year.
A Slight Internet Oops
One of the world's major CDN (Content Delivery Network) providers - Fastly - went down for the first time in half a decade this week, causing one of those giant site outages where a lot of operations people panic, and then feel slightly better when they realise everyone else is also down.
Affected sites included CNN, the New York Times, and a good portion of the UK Government, as well as many others - Fastly has a client list most companies would envy. They were down for an hour or two, with some journalists taking to Google Docs or Twitter to try and get the news out there - with, uh, varying results.
Their postmortem was up impressively quickly and indicates that a valid customer change triggered something in their network - sounds like they're going to shore up testing and response time, which is honestly the right call here. Hopefully it's more than 5 years until the next one.
Vulcoinology
The global idiocy that is cryptocurrency (in most of its forms) continues to sweep across nations, this time landing on El Salvador, where the President has now declared that they're going to offer cryptocurrency mining facilities that are powered using... volcano power.
The power is actually standard ground geothermal near the volcanoes, rather than some Bond-villian-style facility on top of one, but it's still a bit much. In the meantime, cryptocurrencies' power usage continues to basically undo all the renewable energy progress that's been made in the last few decades.
I can only hope that we can get popular cryptocurrencies moved to proof-of-stake soon (rather than proof-of-work, the one that burns power) so we can end up with just a Ponzi scheme that doesn't also contribute to environmental catastrophe.
Nature
Wow, Bachia!
In truly good news for both human health and ecosystems, a new method of controlling disease-carrying mosquitoes using a specialised Wolbachia strain seems to be doing remarkably well controlling dengue fever, while also not harming the mosquitoes.
Nobody really likes mosquitoes, and there are plenty of programs aimed at trying to eradicate vast swathes of them completely, but they are a crucial part of the ecosystem in some areas, so it's probably nice to have a method that stops them carrying a deadly infection while also not killing them all. Let's just hope we can make some similar progress for malaria.
Heists
This Time, The Heist Is Criminals' Data
In a piece of social engineering I honestly have to tip my hat to, the FBI and Australia's AFP have managed to take down a large chunk of the criminal underworld by getting everyone in it to use a cool new, special encrypted messenger called "An0m" - which, naturally, was controlled by the FBI the whole time.
It only ran on special phones, and they managed to make it special and exclusive-seeming enough that criminals literally came to suppliers asking for them, and crime heads distributed them themselves to their various workers. Oh, and also every single message was BCC'd to the FBI in real-time.
I am slightly concerned this will renew calls for encryption to be banned unless the government has a backdoor (remember, if they have a backdoor then everyone does once it's worked out), but in the short-term, congratulations to all involved for managing to pull this off.
And Finally
Can You Deliver To 74,996th and 1,860th?
In a move that is bound to make at least some New Yorkers incredibly smug, the fabled road grid system of Manhattan has now been extended to every place on earth, so you, too, can give people incomprehensible pairs of numbers and expect them to be able to find you.
It does, at least, have less confusion potential than What Three Words (as mentioned last week), but I don't recommend using these coordinates for emergency rescue any time soon. At most, confuse one of NYC's famously-good set pizzerias by seeing if you're in their delivery radius.