There are hours of fun to be had using this Traffic Simulator while you strive to achieve peak traffic flow efficiency across a number of different road layouts.
This NPR Shortwave episode describes how scientists at NASA analysed the submissions for use of the new James Webb telescope, as well as Hubble and found a huge amount of unconscious bias was leading to the majority of approvals going to submissions from male scientists. They ran some experiments with the submission procedures and found blind submissions as well as more fact based reviewing procedures removed a lot of the biases from the process.
Google pushed an update to some phones running Android 12 to allow 2G to be disabled by the user. This is significant because cell site simulators used by police in the U.S. can impersonate cell towers and force a phone to downgrade to a 2G connection. This then allows the cell site simulator to crack the weaker 2G encryption in real time and snoop on any phones connected to it.
Kone, the lift (elevator) company published some nice datavis graphs showing a drop in lift use by 80% in the top 10 European cities during the initial pandemic period of February to April 2020. The graphs also show a 134%+ bounce-back for London in 2021, and 300%+ in Chicago.
Tom Whitwell is back this year with another great list of 52 things he learned in 2021, like 105 of U.S. electricity is generated from old Russian nuclear warheads, and your memory resets when you walk through a door.
A new study from The Electrification of Heat (EoH) demonstration project shows that heat pumps were installed in lots of different house types in the UK, which found that heat pumps are suitable for all types of house.
