Category Archives: Reviews

Science: Stone Age Burial Site In Kenya, Metal-Free Rechargeable Batteries

The earliest evidence of deliberate human burial in Africa, and a metal-free rechargeable battery.

In this episode:

00:44 Human burial practices in Stone Age Africa

The discovery of the burial site of a young child in a Kenyan cave dated to around 78 thousand years ago sheds new light on how Stone Age populations treated their dead.

Research Article: Martinón-Torres et al.

News and Views: A child’s grave is the earliest known burial site in Africa

09:15 Research Highlights

How warming seas led to a record low in Northwestern Pacific typhoons, and the Arctic bird that maintains a circadian rhythm despite 24 hour sunlight.

Research Highlight: Warming seas brought an eerie calm to a stormy region

Research Highlight: The world’s northernmost bird is a clock-watcher

11:35 A metal-free rechargeable battery

Lithium-ion batteries have revolutionised portable electronics, but there are significant issues surrounding their recyclability and the mining of the metals within them. To address these problems, a team of researchers have developed a metal-free rechargeable battery that breaks down to its component parts on demand.

Research Article: Nguyen et al.

Covid-19: Global Impact Of India’s Case Surge (Video)

India has put vaccine distribution to other countries on hold as the country battles the world’s fastest-growing Covid-19 surge. The delay in distribution is hampering the global vaccination effort. Photo illustration: Laura Kammermann

English Estates: ‘Heath House’ – Staffordshire

Leave your wellies at the door. This 19th Century farm in rural Staffordshire looks less farm, more Downton Abbey. Sitting in a cool 404 acres of land, The Heath House Estate is palatial in all aspects (with not a stray chicken in sight).

It’s hard to know where to begin with a property of this magnitude. The main house (could we try the world ‘palace’?) is a spectacular Grade II-listed, Tudor Gothic mansion, designed and built by Thomas Johnson of Litchfield. With five reception rooms, 14 bedrooms, two flats and a service wing, you’re certainly not short on space.

The main house boasts tall, ornate ceilings, beautiful fireplaces and large, grand rooms, and is not hard to see why this property is listed due to its historical and architectural importance.

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Analysis: How China Came To Dominate Rare Earth Minerals (WSJ Video)

Neodymium is critical to making the wheels of a Tesla spin or creating sound in Apple’s Airpods, and China dominates the mining and processing of this rare-earth mineral. So the U.S. and its allies are building their own supply chain. Photo illustration: Clément Bürge/WSJ

Analysis: How Electricity Bills Have Risen Over Time

Retail energy companies compete with local utilities to give U.S. consumers more choice. But in nearly every state where they operate, retailers have charged more than regulated incumbents, meaning you may be paying more for your electricity than your neighbors. Here’s why. Photo Illustration: Jacob Reynolds

Travel: Alaska Tourism’s Post-Pandemic Comeback

Alaskan tourism was slammed by the pandemic, including charter tours. One business owner said he typically had as many as 700 tourists a summer, but last year there were just 12. In a push to get tourism to rebound, Alaska is offering to vaccinate tourists for free and with so many already vaccinated there, many are hopeful for the upcoming season.

Science: Rise Of ‘Exascale Supercomputers’ (Video)

The next generation of computing is on the horizon, and several new machines may just smash all the records…with two nations neck and neck in a race to get there first.

The ENIAC was capable of about 400 FLOPS. FLOPS stands for floating-point operations per second, which basically tells us how many calculations the computer can do per second. This makes measuring FLOPS a way of calculating computing power. So, the ENIAC was sitting at 400 FLOPS in 1945, and in the ten years it was operational, it may have performed more calculations than all of humanity had up until that point in time—that was the kind of leap digital computing gave us. From that 400 FLOPS we upgraded to 10,000 FLOPS, and then a million, a billion, a trillion, a quadrillion FLOPS. That’s petascale computing, and that’s the level of today’s most powerful supercomputers. But what’s coming next is exascale computing. That’s zeroes. 1 quintillion operations per second. Exascale computers will be a thousand times better performing than the petascale machines we have now. Or, to put it another way, if you wanted to do the same number of calculations that an exascale computer can do in ONE second…you’d be doing math for over 31 billion years.