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Will Lockett
Science writer of space, environment, and technology. I show you the wonders and terrors of our universe & its future. Follow me at
Early 60s era car — Photo by Alex Iby on Unsplash

And why you still can’t buy it.

1957 was a monumental year. The Suez Canal crisis came to a close Russia launched Sputnik and a new tech-lead Cold War spying era kicked off. Whilst these headline events were taking place Ford was quietly working on an astonishing project. It was a concept electric car of the future that could go nearly 5,000 miles on a single ‘charge’. Little did the engineers know that their project would still be revolutionary sixty-five years later. So what was the tech behind this incredible machine? And why don’t we have one yet? …

Photo by Eugene Triguba on Unsplash

2021 has been a year of extreme weather, a small taste of the climate chaos that awaits us in the coming decades. Germany had immense floods, Madrid was carpeted in snow, Texas had horrific snowstorms, the North West USA had the deadly ‘heat dome’ rewriting temperature records and California was ravaged by endless wildfires. But one country fought back. In June 2021, the UAE used drones to create artificial rain to battle an intense heatwave, and it worked! A massive rainfall cooled down the city of Dubai after weeks of searing heat that reached51.8⁰C (125⁰F). But will this new technology…

Tesla Bot —

Elon Musk is making a humanoid robot. That sentence alone will either get you yelling, “the future is here!” or have you cowering under the sofa at the prospect of a Musk Terminator. But, this is Elon, the man who put a fart machine inside a $100k car! Maybe we should be worried about a sarcastic meme spouting robot that you can only buy with Dogecoin? But what is Tesla Bot? Why has a car company made it? And will we ever actually see it?

Let’s start at the beginning with the unveiling of the prototype model of Tesla Bot.

Photo by Emma Francis on Unsplash

Arctic melt water seems to hold a superpower. Or does it?

Climate change is terrifying. The predictions of doughts, floods, storms, hurricanes, failing crops, extinctions and rising oceans can sometimes seem so horrific that they must preside in fiction. After all, Earth’s climate has never changed this rapidly before, at least if you ignore the massive meteor impact that killed the dinosaurs. So if this has never happened before, are we missing something? Is there an ecological process that will stop climate change without our intervention?

Well, some ecologists thought they found it, and whisper it in hopeful, hushed voices.

Over the past few decades, ice sheets and glaciers have been…

Photo by Edson Saldaña on Unsplash

Imagine a world where you could enjoy a juicy steak, succulent bacon-wrapped turkey or a beautifully smoked salmon without impacting the environmental, or killing. It sounds like a dream, right? All the benefits of vegetarianism with none of the drawbacks. But staggeringly, this could be the reality for us all very soon, thanks to a revolution in lab-grown meat.

But how does this revolutionary tech work? How is it better for the environment? Is it really animal cruelty-free? Is it safe for us? When can we expect to see it? And most importantly, does it taste good?

Well, this technology…

The USS Enterprise famously had force fields for defense, air locks and prison cells — Pixabay

Welcome to our sci-fi future

Darth Vader’s bionic body, The Enterprise’s transporters and Storm Trooper’s laser guns are sci-fi concepts that are in just about every space movie ever made. Yet over the past few decades, genius engineers and scientist have made working prototypes of these future technologies. But what about one of the most enduring pieces of sci-fi technology, the force field. Are we close to a functioning, real world force field? Astonishingly yes! Force fields are real and waiting for us to live out our sci-fi dreams!

We currently have three different force field technologies, all of which are in various development and…

Photo by Gerald Schömbs on Unsplash

It was the 70s. Apollo 13 has made its remarkable return home, the Beatles have broken up and the Cold War is in full swing. An American nuclear submarine was on patrol, searching for their Russian counterparts in a clandestine game of cat and mouse when suddenly, without warning, something attacked. Their radar and microphones were destroyed beyond repair leaving the Americans blind in the water. Fear struck at the heart of the US Navy. Was it a new stealthy piece of Russian tech? Or was it something else?

The damage was apparent once the submarine was in the dry…

Photo by Matt Hardy on Unsplash

Turning the tide on Climate Change

The world is starting to wake up to the urgency of climate change. We need to do something drastic to stop ourselves from careering headfirst into a global catastrophe! Right now there is a slew of crackpot ideas out there promising to put an end to this crisis. But by far, one of the most promising is an outrageous idea to geoengineer the oceans to create a vast carbon sink, stopping the clock on climate change and ensuring the health of our oceanic ecosystems. Is this our way out of our climate disaster? Or are we dangerously playing God?


Artist impression of Musk’s Martian city — SpaceX

Mars has a deadly secret

Musk wants to go to Mars by 2024 and, within a decade, take the first steps on the Red Planet. As his Starship continues to develop it seems like this goal is easily attainable! But Musk doesn’t want to stop there. His ultimate ambition is to have a fleet of a thousand Starships, relocating thousands of people to Mars every year, to build the first Martian city. But there is a problem. Something deadly stalks the Martian surface and Musk can’t stop it. So, will Musk’s Martian city be decimated by this Achilles’ heel?

Mars isn’t the second Earth that…

Cherenkov radiation create a blue glow in an operational nuclear reactor — WikiCC

And the dirty secret to why it isn’t used

Nuclear energy has a bad name these days. Whilst it can provide us with carbon-neutral energy the toxic byproducts and potential risk each reactor poses aren’t so eco-friendly. We already have 250,000 tonnes of nuclear waste stored away that will remain deathly radioactive for another 10,000 years, and the Chernobyl and Fukushima catastrophes are stark reminders of the devastation wreaked on the environment and us, when things go wrong. This has caused many to turn to nuclear fusion as a cleaner alternative. However, replicating the Sun on Earth is rather tricky, so viable fusion reactor technology is likely decades or…

Will Lockett

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