Land
Is Power In The US Actually That Unreliable?
One of the things I noticed when I moved from the UK to the US was that the power system seemed quite a bit more unreliable - and that's backed up by most statistics. This set of interviews digs into that and some of the root causes and reasoning.
Among some other interesting points, I like the discussion of exactly which metric to look at - as with all metrics, each one is bad in its own way - as well as the discussion of cost (power here is very cheap) and the US's very large amount of incredibly rural areas with power supplied to them.
I have no doubt in my mind that the US power system is under-invested - even if I choose to ignore Texas and their almost self-inflicted power problems - but it's interesting to read some insight from industry insiders into exactly what the differences versus Europe and Asia's systems is, specifically - as those latter ones tend to be a lot more "reliable", no matter what metric you go for.
New Lego, Old Plastic
Lego is arguably one of the most famous plastic products in existence, and they're also one of the most picky when it comes to the properties of the plastic they use for their bricks. Lego bricks both have to be non-toxic and durable, and also have the perfect clutch power - how well they hold onto each other when pulled apart.
For this reason, they've been unable to use recycled plastics, and currently burn through a lot of fresh plastic (and thus oil) every year. Now, though, it seems like they're getting close to a recycled plastic blend that has the right properties - unlike the previous attempts, where the clutch power was so strong you literally couldn't pull the bricks apart.
Ah Yes, It's On The Shelf Three Kilometres Down
Museums are more than the objects they have on display - a lot more, usually. The bulk of many museums' collections are stored behind the scenes in the archives, with staff meticulously cataloguing them and restoring them to preserve them for future generations.
In the case of the Science Museum Group in the UK, they really have a lot - over 150 years of artifacts, in fact - and up until now, they'd been storing them in an increasingly scattered set of locations, in what seems like a "wherever you can find" sort of deal.
They need to worry no longer, though, as their new facility has six square kilometres of floor space and 30,000km of shelving, making the task of storing history that much easier. I am very excited to go visit when they finally get it all up and running and open for tours in a few years - nobody appreciates infrastructure quite like science museums.
The Pursuit Of A Perfect Pitch
Football (soccer) pitches, it turns out, are modern works of science and art - carefully grown and managed by experts in their field to provide just the right kind of surface bound and traction, all while standing up to the intense use they get during a match.
The linked article goes through some of the history of the modern pitch, the sheer lengths the groundskeepers will go to so they look good for big competitions, and there's also a fun bit in there about how the surfaces vary by sport - American football wants a pitch with more traction than "normal" football for example, and tennis wants grass so hard and bouncy it's basically asphalt.
As someone vigorously replacing his water-hungry turf because I live in a very dry area, I can't help but think that the UK climate helps a lot with growing the grass so well, but I also don't want to detract from the sheer amount of work these people put in to get that grass so, so perfect.
Sea
The Evergreen Problems Of The Ever Given
The Ever Given incident in the Suez was a little before the start of Tales From The Infrastructure, so we never covered it back then, but it really did have a worldwide impact - both on the media as well as shipping.
Of course, it was dislodged many months ago and canal traffic resumed, but the ship is still stuck in the canal - but this time, for legal reasons. Everyone is, of course, suing each other over the ship and the impact it had, and the Suez Canal Authority and the owner of the ship are arguing over whether the Suez Canal pilots or the ship's captain were responsible for ship navigation when the accident occurred.
Meanwhile, the poor crew are stuck onboard a ship going nowhere. Thankfully they're still honouring the end of the crew's contracts and replacing them with new staff, but imagine being one of those new crew members starting your new cargo ship contract just to go sit in the Suez Canal endlessly.
Space
It's Not Quite Galactic Yet, But Virgin's Commercially In Space
Virgin Galactic has been awarded the first ever "spaceline" commercial operations license the FAA has given out - the space version of a commercial airline license. Their recent test flights have been looking good, and the FAA certainly seems happy, as they gave this out with three test flights left to go.
It's worth noting that their spacecraft (SpaceShipTwo) is suborbital - you're not going to be doing laps around the Earth or docking with the ISS in it - but that still opens up the option of point-to-point suborbital passenger travel (rather than just space tourism), and the planned SpaceShipThree should be an orbital spacecraft.
I am a big fan of their spacecraft design, if not only because they're the only ones still really pursuing the spaceplane dream, rather than the tried-and-tested ballistic capsule that SpaceX are using. SpaceX's Starship is impressive - once they get that powered landing right - but nothing is quite as elegant as a spaceplane gliding back down to earth, if you ask me, and my bias as an occasional airplane pilot.
A Visitor From The Beyond (Well, The Oort Cloud)
It's still early days on this one, but it looks like there may be an Oort Cloud object that's made its way into the inner Solar System and is on path for a tour around the Sun, coming almost as close as Saturn before it shoots off to an impossibly far distance of 0.86 lightyears at the furthest point of its orbit.
Even more excitingly, it seems massive enough to be a proper dwarf planet, so it's a lot bigger than the usual comets and other visitors from the outer reaches of the Solar System. Hopefully we can get some science missions out to it to say hello in the few decades it's relatively close.
Silicon
Western Digital Whoops
Customers with Western Digital My Book Live products woke this week to found them entirely wiped, after what appears to have been an exploit somewhere in the cloud service they used to talk to the Internet and do the "Live" part of their name.
Now, the product and support for it were discontinued years ago, but it does bear wondering - what should the end of life on a product specifically sold for archival storage be? How much are WD at fault in this?
Personally, I think you should either fully patch and support online devices with a tied cloud service or turn the service off completely and open-source the code and firmware so the work can be taken on by others - but until Right To Repair laws get anywhere close to this topic, we're left with a legal quagmire and a lot of dangerously unpatched old devices.
Heists
A Nutty Heist
This week's heist is, remarkably, about pistachios - someone made off with 42,000lbs (about 19,000kg) of the tiny, tasty nuts in central California earlier in the month, but it seems they have now found the culprit red-handed (and, presumably, emitting a nice, nutty aroma).
Nuts are actually incredibly valuable for their size and weight - their "value density is high", if you will - so the heist is not actually that much of a surprise. And, as the article helpfully notes, "pistachios don’t have serial numbers", making tracking impossible - though now, I do have to wonder what would happen if we did try and give individual nuts serial numbers. Or maybe tiny QR codes burned into them with a laser.
And Finally
Hovertrain! Hovertrain! HOVERTRAIN!
Unsatisfied with the mere thought of a monorail, in the 1970s the UK thought it could do one better and, for some reason, embarked on a Hovertrain project - essentially, a monorail/hovercraft hybrid where the lack of physical contact between the track and the train would allow it to - in theory - be propelled to 250 miles per hour by linear induction motors.
For reasons I can't possibly fathom, it was shut down and never really saw success past a test vehicle, but it seems like they've found a lot of the old footage of the tests, so I look forward to seeing that in an upcoming documentary.