Celebrating the start of the weekend with an uplifting bundle of positive news nuggets.
Best Twitter Reposte?
Recently, former kickboxer, professional misogynist and online entrepreneur Andrew Tate, 36, sent a boastfully hostile tweet to climate activist Greta Thunberg, 19, about his sports car collection. “Please provide your email address so I can send a complete list of my car collection and their respective enormous emissions,” he wrote. He was probably hoping to enhance his status by mocking her climate commitment. Instead, she burned the macho guy to a crisp in nine words. Cars are routinely tokens of virility and status for men, and the image accompanying his tweet of him pumping fossil-fuel into one of his vehicles, coupled with his claims about their “enormous emissions”, had unsolicited dick pic energy. Thunberg seemed aware of that when she replied: yes, please do enlighten me. email me at smalldickenergy@getalife.com.
Avatar Breaks Even
Avatar: The Way of Water has just cleared $1.5bn at the box office, making it the 10th highest grossing movie of all time. That's good news for Disney as the movie needed to make $1.5bn just to break even!
Solar Harvester
A potentially revolutionary solar harvester just left the planet. The 110-pound prototype will send back data on three unique energy projects. Following a decade of research, including two years of testing origami-inspired components, a small prototype satellite designed to harvest solar energy launched last week aboard SpaceX’s most recent Falcon 9 rocket launch in Cape Canaveral, Florida. If its initial experiments are successful, larger versions could one day beam essentially endless renewable energy back to Earth via microwave transmitters.
Harvesting Sun’s Energy in Space: It sounds like the stuff of science fiction - but Europe might one day be powered by giant floating solar panels orbiting the planet. Read on...
Pedal Power
You may think you've seen it all with the walking desks and under-desk exercise bikes that are on the market. Acer, well known for making laptops, has taken it up a notch and unveiled the eKinekt BD 3 bike desk at the Consumer Electronic Show in Las Vegas. The bike uses kinetic energy generated from pedaling the bike to charge your laptop, phone and other devices. This new desk gives working from home a whole new meaning, because it relies on your exercise effort to properly function.
Walmart's Drones
Walmart's drone delivery service is now available in the Tampa, Orlando, Phoenix and Dallas areas. Close-range drone shipping was seen as a pie-in-the-sky concept just a few years ago. Now it's reality for the millions of Americans in range of a participating store. Shoppers near one of Walmart's planned 34 drone sites can order up to 10 lbs of eligible goods for aerial delivery within 30 minutes. "Once a customer places an order, the item is fulfilled from the store, packaged, loaded into the drone and delivered right to their yard using a cable that gently lowers the package," says Walmart.
Sea Salt Battery
Your electronics could soon be powered by an ultra cheap sea salt battery. Researchers have built a new cheap battery with four times the energy storage capacity of lithium. Constructed from sodium-sulphur (a type of molten salt that can be processed from sea water) the battery is low-cost and more environmentally friendly than existing options. It could be a ‘breakthrough’ for renewable energy, according to lead researcher Dr Shenlong Zhao, from the University of Sydney. “Our sodium battery has the potential to dramatically reduce costs while providing four times as much storage capacity as lithium,” he said.
UK Renewables
A record amount of energy from renewable sources was generated in the UK in 2022, according to new research. The data was analyzed by academics from Imperial College London for Drax Electric Insights. The researchers found that 40 percent of the UK’s electricity was made up of solar, wind, biomass and hydropower last year, an increase of five percent from 2021. The increase in power from renewable sources in Britain resulted in a lowering of carbon dioxide emissions by almost three million tons compared to 2021, a press release from Drax said. Power from renewables has also gone up more than four times in the past ten years. At one point in May of last year, 73 percent of the grid’s power came from renewable sources.
"A smile is an inexpensive way to change your looks."
Charles Gordy
On this Day
7 January 1610: During this month in 1610, Italian astronomer Galileo made the earthshaking discoveries that four moons revolve around Jupiter and that the telescope reveals many more stars than are visible to the naked eye.
Forget New York Fashion Week. In Australia, well-dressed ducks have been stealing the scene at Sydney’s Royal Easter Show for more than 30 years. Read on...
Mood Booster
Join Danny MacAskill on an insane journey biking across the rooftops of Gran Canaria. Mixing vertigo-inducing lines and killer POV-footage.