#14: Simulating a human brain, Hubble, Largest Bacterium Ever, Fusion Energy, Windows 11 goes green, and more!

In issue #7, I shared an article that explained how GPS works (basically fancy clocks floating in space). Now I found an “interactive article” which also explains GPS with cool animations. It was created by Bartosz Ciechanowski, which I mentioned in issue #4 for his interactive article on how internal combustion engines work.

The company Graphcore is building a computer that will handle artificial intelligence models with up to 500 trillion parameters. That’s 25 times more than the famous GPT-3 model, and 5 times bigger than the human brain. However, it’s unlikely that the machine will actually be 5 times better than our grey matter. The brain is very efficient: it’s small, doesn’t use a lot of energy and it can change its physical structure to “compute” things more efficiently (plasticity).

Hubble explores the universe 24/7, and on this website you can see what Hubble photographed on your birthday. In my case, it found the Doradus Nebula (photographed on April 7th, 2013).

Three years ago, The European Space Agency (ESA) launched a special satellite that can find methane leaks. The satellite found a ton of methane leaks, sometimes caused by accidents, but some leaks are due to gas companies venting pipelines for repair or maintenance. Finding these leaks is important because methane is a powerful greenhouse gas.

What happens if you stick a nail into the ground and convert the signal into sounds we can hear? Well, you would hear animals moving and the roots of plants growing! We think of sound as a pressure wave traveling through air, but it can also propagate through soil or water. Many animals use this to their advantage. Elephants communicate over long distances by producing a low-frequency rumble that propagates through the ground. Their distant relatives can pick this up with the soles of their feet!

Scientists discovered a type of bacteria (Thiomargarita magnifica) that can grow up to 2 centimeters in size. That’s as big as a peanut or 5000 times bigger than other microbes. Not only its size is odd, its insides are as well. Bacteria are single-celled organisms. But this one has multiple zones within its cell (organelles) and its DNA is kept in a separate section, something we only see in more complex cells like the ones in our body. This bacteria breaks our current categorization of life.

Microsoft released a Windows 11 beta that will delay the installation of updates until there’s enough “green” electricity available. It does this based on data from electricityMap and WattTime. As we transition to renewable energy sources, it becomes important to shift our electricity usage towards periods with lots of sun or wind. This is one step in that direction, and one that could have a big impact given the popularity of Windows.

Fusion energy is still the holy grail of electricity generation. If we can make it work, we’ll have an endless supply of clean energy. The experimental JET reactor in Oxford recently produced 59 megajoules of energy for 5 seconds. This result is great news for ITER as well, because JET is a small-scale version.

France realized it can’t power the country with clean or renewable energy sources alone. Instead, it will keep nuclear reactors open longer (when it’s safe to do so) and build 6 new reactors of type EPR2. President Emmanuel Macron called it “nuclear renaissance”. The first reactor should begin operation in 2035 and will provide relatively clean energy. In theory, this should buy them enough time to transition to 100% renewable energy!