Tim Harford, writing for Financial Times (not paywalled): Last spring, I returned from the holiday of a lifetime in Japan, and reflected on the richness of the memories it had generated. Time flew by while I was there, but in hindsight 10 days somewhere vividly new had produced more memories than 10 weeks back home. I likened the effect to the compression of a film. Instead of storing each frame separately, video compression algorithms will start with the first frame of a scene and then store a series of "diffs" -- changes from one frame to the next. A slow, contemplative movie with long scenes and fixed cameras can be compressed more than a fast-moving action flick. Similarly, a week full of new experiences will seem longer in retrospect. A month of repeating the same routine might seem endless, but will be barely a blip in the memory: the "diffs" are not significant enough for the brain to bother with. After months of working from home, I now realise that there was something incomplete about this account. New experiences are indeed important for planting a rich crop of memories. But, by itself, that is not enough. A new physical space seems to be important if our brains are to pay attention.

The Covid-19 lockdown, after all, was full of new experiences. Some were grim: I lost a friend to the disease; I smashed my face up in an accident; we had to wear masks and avoid physical contact and worry about where the next roll of toilet paper was coming from. Some were more positive: the discovery of new pleasures, the honing of new skills, the overcoming of new challenges. But I doubt I am alone in finding that my memory of the lockdown months is rather thin. No matter how many new people or old friends you talk to on Zoom or Skype, they all start to smear together because the physical context is monotonous: the conversations take place while one sits in the same chair, in the same room, staring at the same computer screen.>

Software company Atlassian is telling employees that they don't have to return to its offices, unless they want to use them. CNBC reports: "We will seek out amazing, diverse talent unbounded by the physical footprint of our offices," the company said in an internal blog post published on Wednesday. "We will continue to compete for talent in the global hubs, and we will be able to create opportunities for those in places we would have previously not been able to reach." Atlassian's products help software developers and others keep track of code, projects, issues and other work. One of Atlassian's competitors, privately held GitLab, has never had an office despite having grown past 1,000 people.

Atlassian won't be closing its offices, though. All of its locations, including its headquarters in Sydney, Australia, as well as locations in San Francisco, Amsterdam, India, Japan, the Philippines and Turkey, will remain open, and the company expects to adjust them so they can be used efficiently. Employees will be welcome to return to the offices should they want to use them. Some details of Atlassian's plan have yet to be finalized. The company hasn't decided how compensation might change for employees who relocate to other regions, nor has it figured out the right number of people to work in each time zone to ensure a sufficient amount of overlap, the person said. Atlassian will measure outcomes, rather than the number of hours each person spends working, according to the blog post.

The Register reports that Toshiba has transferred its remaining shares of Dynabook to Sharp, thus ending the company's time as a PC vendor. From the report: [...] As the 2000s rolled along Toshiba devices became bland in comparison to the always-impressive ThinkPad and the MacBook Air, while Dell and HP also improved. Toshiba also never really tried to capture consumers' imaginations, which didn't help growth. As the PC market contracted and Lenovo, Dell and HP came to dominate PC sales in the 2010s, Toshiba just became a less likely brand to put on a laptop shopping list.

By 2018 the company saw the writing on the wall and sold its PC business unit to Sharp for a pittance -- just $36 million changed hands - but retained a 19.9 percent share of the company with an option in Sharp's favor to buy that stock. Sharp quickly renamed the business to "Dynabook," a product name Toshiba had used in Japan, and set about releasing new models and reviving the brand. Which brings us to June 30th, 2020, when Sharp exercised its option to acquire the 19.9 percent of Dynabook shares it did not already own. On Tuesday, Toshiba transferred those shares and announced the transaction on Thursday.

New submitter nightflameauto writes: Japan has a working prototype of a real Gundam that is currently undergoing testing at the Gundam Factory. No, that's not the plot of some silly sci-fi movie, it's actually happening. There's a somewhat sensationally-titled video available of the 18-meter (60-foot) robot assembly running some small movement tests where it twists its torso and lifts a leg, then places it back down. Small steps, but the initial plan is to have this beast debut this October in free-standing/walking form. Welcome to 2020. We may have calamity upon calamity, but at least we've got a Gundam.

Christine Ro from the BBC writes about the private agents in Japan, called "wakaresaseya," that you can hire to seduce your spouse or their partner. From the report: The industry is still serving a niche market. One survey showed around 270 wakaresaseya agencies advertising online. Many are attached to private-detective firms, similar to private investigators in other countries (who can also become entangled in relationship dissolution). "Wakaresaseya service costs quite a lot of money," acknowledges [Yusuke Mochizuki, an agent of the "farewell shop" First Group], so clients tend to be well-off. Mochizuki, a former musician who has turned his lifelong interest in detective work into a career, says that he might charge 400,000 yen for a relatively straightforward case in which there's plenty of information about the target's activities, but more if the target is, for example, a recluse. Fees can go as high as 20 million yen if a client is a politician or a celebrity, requiring the highest level of secrecy. (While Mochizuki says that his firm has a high success rate, a consultancy that provides advice on the industry points out that potential clients should be sceptical of such claims, and prepared for possible failure.)

Although some features of the wakaresaseya industry are unique to Japan, similar services exist around the world. They may be less formalized honeytrap or con-artist arrangements, or they may be part of the private-investigations industry. Conventionally "the Western perspective was to sensationalize the industry and almost exoticise it. There's this false exoticisation of Japan that occurs in the West quite frequently." It's difficult to gain a full understanding of the people affected by the wakaresaseya industry, because according to Scott, "people are very reluctant to be seen as associated with it, let alone a victim of it." The industry has a seedy reputation.

As TV and radio producer Mai Nishiyama comments; "There's a market for everything in Japan." This includes a variety of relationship-based services like renting faux family members and the additional services offered by wakaresaseya firms, such as assistance with romantic reconciliation, separating a child from an unsuitable girlfriend or boyfriend or preventing revenge porn. Agents can also be hired to gather evidence that will help a wronged spouse collect consolation money, which is compensation for the dissolution of a relationship. Although the Yamagami International Law Office hasn't worked with wakaresaseya agents, lawyer Shogo Yamagami notes that some clients do work with private agents more generally to obtain evidence of adultery. The consolation payment system means that hiring wakaresaseya agents can be beneficial not just emotionally, but also in practical monetary terms.

After initial success, Japan is facing a reality check on the coronavirus. From a report: The country garnered global attention after containing the first wave of Covid-19 with what it referred to as the "Japan Model" -- limited testing and no lockdown, nor any legal means to force businesses to close. The country's finance minister even suggested a higher "cultural standard" helped contain the disease. But now the island nation is facing a formidable resurgence, with Covid-19 cases hitting records nationwide day after day. Infections first concentrated in the capital have spread to other urban areas, while regions without cases for months have become new hotspots. And the patient demographic -- originally younger people less likely to fall seriously ill -- is expanding to the elderly, a concern given that Japan is home to the world's oldest population.

Experts say that Japan's focus on the economy may have been its undoing. As other countries in Asia, which experienced the coronavirus earlier than those in the West, wrestle with new flare ups of Covid-19, Japan now risks becoming a warning for what happens when a country moves too fast to normalize -- and doesn't adjust its strategy when the outbreak changes. While Japan declared a state of emergency to contain the first wave of the virus, it didn't compel people to stay home or businesses to shut. That was ended in late May and officials quickly pivoted to a full reopening in an attempt to get the country's recessionary economy back on track. By June, restaurants and bars were fully open while events like baseball and sumo-wrestling were back on -- a stark contrast to other places in the region like Singapore which were re-opening only in cautious phases.

Google today unveiled two Pixel smartphones. First is the $349 Pixel 4A, which is available for preorder now and will ship on August 20th. And second, there's the Pixel 4A 5G, which will cost $499 and also ship sometime this fall. From a blog post: With the same incredible camera experiences from Pixel 4 and a redesigned hole-punch design, Pixel 4a brings the same features that have helped millions of Pixel owners take great shots. HDR+ with dual exposure controls, Portrait Mode, Top Shot, Night Sight with astrophotography capabilities and fused video stabilization -- they're all there. The Pixel 4a comes in Just Black with a 5.8-inch OLED display. It has a matte finish that feels secure and comfortable in your hand and includes Pixel's signature color pop power button in mint. Check out the custom wallpapers that have some fun with the punch-hole camera. In addition to features like Recorder, which now connects with Google Docs to seamlessly save and share transcriptions and recordings (English only), Pixel 4a will include helpful experiences like the Personal Safety app for real-time emergency notifications and car crash detection.

Pixel 4a also has Live Caption, which provides real-time captioning (English only) for your video and audio content. New with the Pixel 4a launch -- and also rolling out for Pixel 2, 3, 3a and 4 phones -- Live Caption will now automatically caption your voice and video calls. The Pixel 4a has a Qualcomm Snapdragon 730G Mobile Platform, Titan M security module for on-device security, 6 GB of RAM and 128 GB of storage with an even bigger battery that lasts all day1. [...] This fall, we'll have two more devices to talk about: the Pixel 4a (5G), starting at $499, and Pixel 5, both with 5G2 to make streaming videos, downloading content and playing games on Stadia or other platforms faster and smoother than ever. Pixel 4a (5G) and Pixel 5 will be available in the U.S., Canada, the United Kingdom, Ireland, France, Germany, Japan, Taiwan and Australia. In the coming months, we'll share more about these devices and our approach to 5G.

A group of Japanese lawmakers is seeking to restrict the use of TikTok and other apps developed by Chinese firms, following in the footsteps of India, which has already blocked dozens of Chinese apps, and the U.S., which is floating the idea. From a report: The decision was first reported by Japanese national broadcaster NHK. The lawyers shared the same concern as officials in the U.S. and India that their domestic user data could end up in the hands of Beijing, and planned to submit the proposal to the Japanese government as early as September. Japan was one of TikTok's first overseas success cases despite being considered a tough nut for foreign internet firms to crack. The nascent localization team went all out to attract celebrity users and made its breakthrough with Kinoshita Yukina, a TV personality, after holding "six or seven rounds of discussions" with her studio. Kinoshita's participation ushered in other stars, who brought with them flocks of fans to the platform. In the Japanese iOS store, TikTok has consistently ranked at the top among entertainment apps and is the fifth-most downloaded app across all categories in the country as of this writing, according to research firm App Annie.

Thelasko writes: The world's biggest nuclear fusion project has entered its five-year assembly phase. After this is finished, the facility will be able to start generating the super-hot "plasma" required for fusion power. The $23.5 billion facility has been under construction in Saint-Paul-lez-Durance, southern France. Advocates say fusion could be a source of clean, unlimited power that would help tackle the climate crisis. Iter is a collaboration between China, the European Union, India, Japan, South Korea, Russia and the US. All members share in the cost of construction. Current nuclear energy relies on fission, where a heavy chemical element is split to produce lighter ones. Nuclear fusion, on the other hand, works by combining two light elements to make a heavier one. This releases vast amounts of energy with very little radioactivity. Iter will confine hot plasma within a structure called a tokamak in order to control fusion reactions. The project will aim to help demonstrate whether fusion can be commercially viable. France's President Emmanuel Macron said the effort would unite countries around a common good.

sciencehabit writes: Microbes buried beneath the sea floor for more than 100 million years are still alive, a new study reveals. When brought back to the lab and fed, they started to multiply. The microbes are oxygen-loving species that somehow exist on what little of the gas diffuses from the ocean surface deep into the seabed. The discovery raises the "insane" possibility, as one of the scientists put it, that the microbes have been sitting in the sediment dormant, or at least slowly growing without dividing, for eons. The new work demonstrates "microbial life is very persistent, and often finds a way to survive," says Virginia Edgcomb, a microbial ecologist at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution who was not involved in the work.

What's more, by showing that life can survive in places biologists once thought uninhabitable, the research speaks to the possibility of life elsewhere in the Solar System, or elsewhere in the universe. "If the surface of a particular planet does not look promising for life, it may be holding out in the subsurface," says Andreas Teske, a microbiologist at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, who was also not involved with the new study. Researchers have known that life exists "under the floorboards" of the ocean for more than 15 years. But geomicrobiologist Yuki Morono of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology wanted to know the limits of such life. Microbes are known to live in very hot or toxic environments, but can they live where there's little food to eat? To find out, Morono and his colleagues mounted a drilling expedition in the South Pacific Gyre, a site of intersecting ocean currents east of Australia that is considered the deadest part of the world's oceans, almost completely lacking the nutrients needed for survival. When they extracted cores of clay and other sediments from as deep as 5700 meters below sea level, they confirmed the samples did indeed contain some oxygen, a sign that there was very little organic material for bacteria to eat.

The world's hardware haven is taking a digital leap for pets. From a report: In May, China's southern city Shenzhen announced that all dogs must be implanted with a chip, joining the rank of the U.K., Japan, Australia and a growing number of countries to make microchips mandatory for dogs. This week, city regulators began to set up injection stations across their partnering pet clinics, according to social media posts from the Shenzhen Urban Management Bureau. The chip, which is said to last for at least 15 years and comes in the size of a grain of rice, is implanted under the skin of a dog's neck. Each chip, when scanned by authorized personnel, reveals a unique 15-digit number matching the dog's name and breed, as well as its owner's identity and contact information -- which will help reduce strays.

IEEE Spectrum reports: There's still plenty that can disrupt radio communications... Rather than waiting for a human on Earth to tell the radio how to adapt its systems — during which the commands may have already become outdated — a radio with a neural network can do it on the fly. Such a device is called a cognitive radio. Its neural network autonomously senses the changes in its environment, adjusts its settings accordingly — and then, most important of all, learns from the experience... Worcester Polytechnic Institute and Penn State University, in cooperation with NASA, recently tested the first cognitive radios designed to operate in space and keep missions in contact with Earth. In our tests, even the most basic cognitive radios maintained a clear signal between the International Space Station (ISS) and the ground. We believe that with further research, more advanced, more capable cognitive radios can play an integral part in successful deep-space missions in the future, where there will be no margin for error...

Our own effort to create a proof-of-concept cognitive radio for space communications was possible only because of the state-of-the-art Space Communications and Navigation (SCaN) test bed on the ISS. NASA's Glenn Research Center created the SCaN test bed specifically to study the use of software-defined radios in space. The test bed was launched by the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency and installed on the main lattice frame of the space station in July 2012... Ours would be the first-ever cognitive radio experiments conducted in space...

During the tests, the cognitive radio clearly showed that it could learn how to maintain a communications link. The radio autonomously selected settings to avoid losing contact, and the link remained stable even as the radio adjusted itself...

Overall, the success of our tests on the SCaN test bed demonstrated that cognitive radios could be used for deep-space missions.

Two decades after Japan rolled out an ambitious plan to go digital, the COVID-19 crisis has exposed the government's deeply rooted technological shortcomings as ministries remain stuck in a paper-driven culture that experts say is hurting productivity. Reuters reports: While Tokyo has made "digital transformation" its main policy plank this year, the switch may not prove so easy as bureaucrats from different ministries still aren't able to hold teleconferences together and little of their administrative work can be done online. Analysts say the lack of government digitalization could reduce the incentive for the private sector to go digital in a blow to Japan's efforts to boost productivity.

Much of the problem stems from Japan's preference for paper documents and seal for approval at government offices. "Paper documents and seal are still prevalent. Politicians whom I deal with also prefer face-to-face meetings," a government official told Reuters on condition of anonymity. Adding to its digital woes is Japan's vertically structured bureaucracy: each ministry as well as local governments, for instance, have developed their own computer systems that aren't compatible with each other. Currently, each ministry has developed its own LAN network with various vendors, making it difficult to hold teleconference with each other because of differences in their on-line security policy, a Cabinet Office official in charge of IT strategy told Reuters. Currently, each ministry has developed its own LAN network with various vendors, making it difficult to hold teleconference with each other because of differences in their on-line security policy, a Cabinet Office official in charge of IT strategy, who declined to be named, told Reuters. Overall, it could cost the government 323 million working hours per year if it doesn't go digital, translating into personnel costs of nearly $8 billion, a government regulatory reform panel estimated in a report released in July last year.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Japan Times: Renewable power for the first time contributed a bigger share in the European generation mix than fossil fuels as the fallout from the pandemic cut energy demand. About 40 percent of the electricity in the first half in the 27 EU countries came from renewable sources, compared with 34 percent from plants burning fossil fuels, according to environmental group Ember in London. As a result, carbon dioxide emissions from the power sector fell 23 percent. While power demand slumped, output from wind and solar farms increased because more plants came online in breezy and sunny weather. At the same time, wet conditions boosted hydro power in Iberia and the Nordic markets.

Electricity demand in the EU fell 7 percent overall. Fossil-fuel power generation plunged 18 percent in the first half compared with a year earlier. Renewable generation grew by 11 percent, according to Ember. Coal was by far the biggest loser in 2020. It's one of the most-polluting sources of power and its share is slumping in Europe as the price of carbon increases and governments move to cut emissions. Power from coal fell 32 percent across the EU.

The first Arab space mission to Mars has blasted off aboard a rocket from Japan, with its unmanned probe -- called Al-Amal, or Hope -- successfully separating about an hour after liftoff. The Guardian reports: The Emirati project is one of three racing to Mars, including Tianwen-1 from China and Mars 2020 from the United States, taking advantage of a period when the Earth and Mars are nearest. In October, Mars will be a comparatively short 38.6m miles (62m km) from Earth, according to Nasa. Hope is expected to reach Mars's orbit by February 2021, marking the 50th anniversary of the unification of the UAE, an alliance of seven emirates. Unlike the two other Mars ventures scheduled for this year, it will not land on the planet, but instead orbit it for a whole Martian year, or 687 days.

While the objective of the Mars mission is to provide a comprehensive image of the weather dynamics in the red planet's atmosphere, the probe is a foundation for a much bigger goal -- building a human settlement on Mars within the next 100 years. The UAE also wants the project to serve as a source of inspiration for Arab youth, in a region too often wracked by sectarian conflicts and economic crises. On Twitter, the UAE's government declared the probe launch a "message of pride, hope and peace to the Arab region, in which we renew the golden age of Arab and Islamic discoveries."

The United Arab Emirates has successfully launched a spacecraft towards an orbit around Mars, reports the New York Times. Built by a space physics lab at the University of Colorado, the Hope Mars probe was tested in Dubai, before being shipped to Japan's Tanegashima Island, where it was launched by Mitsubishi Heavy Industries. The launch is being streamed on the web and on YouTube. It will join a fleet of six other spacecrafts studying the red planet from space, three operated by NASA, two by the European Space Agency (one shared with Russia) and one by India. Each contains different instruments to help further research of the Martian atmosphere and surface.

The Hope orbiter is carrying three instruments: an infrared spectrometer, an ultraviolet spectrometer and a camera. From its high orbit — varying from 12,400 miles to 27,000 miles above the surface — the spacecraft will give planetary scientists their first global view of Martian weather at all times of day. Over its two-year mission, it will investigate how dust storms and other weather phenomena near the Martian surface have either speed or slow the loss of the planet's atmosphere into space.
"You'll be hearing a lot about Mars this summer," the Times adds. "Three missions are launching toward the red planet, taking advantage of the way Earth and its neighbor get closer every 26 months or so, allowing a relatively short trip between the two worlds." The next expected launch will be China's Tianwen-1, which could occur between later this week through early August... On July 30, NASA is scheduled to launch Perseverance, a robotic rover that will be the fifth wheeled American vehicle to explore Mars... A fourth mission, the joint Russian-European Rosalind Franklin rover, was to launch this summer, too. But technical hurdles, aggravated by the coronavirus pandemic, could not be overcome in time to meet the launch window. It is now scheduled to launch in 2022.
If the other three spacecraft all launch successfully, they should arrive at Mars early next year.

Saturday the Washington Post (in an article republished in Stars and Stripes) took a closer look at what's known as "superspreading events": Many scientists say such infection bursts — probably sparked by a single, highly infectious individual who may show no signs of illness and unwittingly share an enclosed space with many others — are driving the pandemic. They worry these cases, rather than routine transmission between one infected person and, say, two or three close contacts, are propelling case counts out of control...

Transmission, it turns out, is far more idiosyncratic than previously understood. Scientists say they believe it is dependent on such factors as an individual's infectivity, which can vary person to person by billions of virus particles, whether the particles are contained in large droplets that fall to the ground or in fine vapor that can float much further, and how much the air in a particular space circulates. Donald Milton, a professor of environmental health at the University of Maryland, and other experts have wondered if superspreading events could be the "Achilles' heel" of the virus. If we could pinpoint the conditions under which these clusters occur, Milton argued, we could lower the transmission rate enough to extinguish the spread. "If you could stop these events, you could stop the pandemic," Milton said. "You would crush the curve..."

Some people will not transmit the virus to anyone, contact tracing has shown, while others appear to spread the virus with great efficiency. Overall, researchers have estimated in recent studies that some 10 to 20 percent of the infected may be responsible for 80 percent of all cases... An infected person's viral load can impact how much they "shed"; the differences have been shown to be on a scale of billions of virus particles... A growing body of evidence suggests that SARS-CoV2, like other coronaviruses, expands in a community in fits and starts, rather than more evenly over space and time....

While it's often impossible to identify the person who triggered an outbreak, there have been some commonalities among those who have been pinpointed as the likely source in studies. They tend to be young. Asymptomatic. Social. Scientists suspect these "super-emitters" may have much higher levels of the virus in their bodies than others, or may release them by talking, shouting or singing in a different way from most people... In a study published in Emerging Infectious Diseases by Japan's Hitoshi Oshitani at Tohoku University of 22 superspreading individuals with the coronavirus, about half were under the age of 40, and 41 percent were experiencing no symptoms.

The world's fastest computer is now part of "a vast supercomputer-powered search for new findings pertaining to the novel coronavirus' spread" and "how to effectively treat and mitigate it," according to an emerging tech journalist at Nextgov.

It's part of a consortium currently facilitating over 65 active research projects, for which "Dozens of national and international members are volunteering free compute time...providing at least 485 petaflops of capacity and steadily growing, to more rapidly generate new solutions against COVID-19."

"What started as a simple concept has grown to span three continents with over 40 supercomputer providers," Dario Gil, director of IBM Research and consortium co-chair, told Nextgov last week. "In the face of a global pandemic like COVID-19, hopefully a once-in-a-lifetime event, the speed at which researchers can drive discovery is a critical factor in the search for a cure and it is essential that we combine forces...."

[I]ts resources have been used to sort through billions of molecules to identify promising compounds that can be manufactured quickly and tested for potency to target the novel coronavirus, produce large data sets to study variations in patient responses, perform airflow simulations on a new device that will allow doctors to use one ventilator to support multiple patients — and more. The complex systems are powering calculations, simulations and results in a matter of days that several scientists have noted would take a matter of months on traditional computers.
The Undersecretary for Science at America's Energy Department said "What's really interesting about this from an organizational point of view is that it's basically a volunteer organization."

The article identifies some of the notable participants:

• IBM was part of the joint launch with America's Office of Science and Technology Policy and its Energy Department.
• The chief of NASA's Advanced Supercomputing says they're "making the full reserve portion of NASA supercomputing resources available to researchers working on the COVID-19 response, along with providing our expertise and support to port and run their applications on NASA systems."
• Amazon Web Services "saw a clear opportunity to bring the benefits of cloud... to bear in the race for treatments and a vaccine," according to a company executive.
• Japan's Fugaku — "which surpassed leading U.S. machines on the Top 500 list of global supercomputers in late June" — also joined the consortium in June.

Other consortium members:

• Google Cloud
• Microsoft
• Massachusetts Institute of Technology
• Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
• The National Science Foundation
• Argonne, Lawrence Livermore, Los Alamos, Oak Ridge and Sandia National laboratories.
• National Center for Atmospheric Research's Wyoming Supercomputing Center
• AMD
• NVIDIA
• Dell Technologies. ("The company is now donating cycles from the Zenith supercomputer and other resources.")

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Lithium-ion batteries play a central role in the world of technology, powering everything from smartphones to smart cars, and one of the people who helped commercialize them says he has a way to cut mass production costs by 90% and significantly improve their safety. Hideaki Horie, formerly of Nissan Motor Co., founded Tokyo-based APB Corp. in 2018 to make "all-polymer batteries" -- hence the company name. The making of a cell, every battery's basic unit, is a complicated process requiring cleanroom conditions -- with airlocks to control moisture, constant air filtering and exacting precision to prevent contamination of highly reactive materials. The setup can be so expensive that a handful of top players like South Korea's LG Chem Ltd., China's CATL and Japan's Panasonic Corp. spend billions of dollars to build a suitable factory.

Horie's innovation is to replace the battery's basic components -- metal-lined electrodes and liquid electrolytes -- with a resin construction. He says this approach dramatically simplifies and speeds up manufacturing, making it as easy as "buttering toast." It allows for 10-meter-long battery sheets that can be stacked on top of each other "like seat cushions" to increase capacity, he said. Importantly, the resin-based batteries are also resistant to catching fire when punctured. In March, APB raised $74 million, which is tiny by the wider industry's standards but will be enough to fully equip one factory for mass production slated to start next year. Horie estimates the funds will get his plant in central Japan to 1 gigawatt-hour capacity by 2023.

Spreading rock dust on farmland could suck billions of tons of carbon dioxide from the air every year, according to the first detailed global analysis of the technique. The Guardian reports: The chemical reactions that degrade the rock particles lock the greenhouse gas into carbonates within months, and some scientists say this approach may be the best near-term way of removing CO2 from the atmosphere. The rock dust approach, called enhanced rock weathering (ERW), has several advantages, the researchers say. First, many farmers already add limestone dust to soils to reduce acidification, and adding other rock dust improves fertility and crop yields, meaning application could be routine and desirable.

Basalt is the best rock for capturing CO2, and many mines already produce dust as a byproduct, so stockpiles already exist. The researchers also found that the world's biggest polluters, China, the U.S. and India, have the greatest potential for ERW, as they have large areas of cropland and relatively warm weather, which speeds up the chemical reactions. The analysis, published in the journal Nature, estimates that treating about half of farmland could capture 2 billion tons of CO2 each year, equivalent to the combined emissions of Germany and Japan. The cost depends on local labor rates and varies from $80 per ton in India to $160 in the U.S., and is in line with the $100-150 carbon price forecast by the World Bank for 2050, the date by which emissions must reach net zero to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown.