The New York Times published an interesting article about Thomas MacDonell, a rich businessman who has purchased 200,000 acres in Scotland. He intends to restore the peatland in the Glenfeshie valley and use it as a carbon sink to sell offset credit against, while also offering luxury nature based accommodation on the land.
This week I watched Edgar Wright's excellent documentary The Sparks Brothers, about the band Sparks. To my musical shame, I didn't know who Sparks were beforehand, aside from recognising their early hit This Town Ain't Big Enough For The Both Of Us, without knowing the name of the band.
Visual Capitalist published an interesting post showing the breakdown of the main revenue streams for the big tech companies, adding up where all their billions in revenue are made.
SolarisKit, a Scottish B-Corp have developed a flat packed solar water heater that can be assembled in 20 mins and can heat water to 60 degrees Celsius. The kit uses a solar coil to absorb heat from the sun and heat water that passes through the coil. The kit can be daisy-chained to create a home solar water heating system, or as a standalone water heater for camping or garden pools.
Scientists at the University of California have developed a robot that can jump over 100 times its own height. The robot is intended to help explore the moon and can jump up to 32.9 metres.
Scientists have recently discovered that Lemurs sing with categorical rhythm, something that was prior only known to be present with just birds and humans. This informative episode of NPR's Shortwave has all the details, along with some clips of singing Lemurs that happen to be Queen fans!
I finally got around to watching Wolfwalkers, and I was blown away! The story and emotion is fantastic, and the animation composition and perspectives are superb. It should have won the oscar. I highly recommend it, and bonus points to you if you spot Kíla!
IBM published a getting started guide to their Semantic Data Science API. The machine learning product allows data to be mapped to domains and/or concepts, which are then analysed and meaningful insights and extractions are generated. I recently read about a similar AI technique used in the Pivot Project to help with Climate Change, as described in Steve Hamm's book The Pivot.
Researchers from Meiji University in Japan have invented electric chopsticks that trick your mouth into tasting salt without it being present in the food you are eating! The chopsticks send the electrical waveform that activates ions in salty and umami components into the user's mouth to change their taste perception of the food. The hope is using these chopsticks can reduce national salt intake by 20%.
