By Walt Hickey

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Fuel Cell

The Toyota Mirai is a hydrogen fuel cell-powered personal automobile, and it’s not looking great for the future of the car in America. As it stands, the only place that a hydrogen fuel cell car can be reliably used is in Los Angeles and San Francisco, where the bulk of the hydrogen filling stations in the country are. Shell announced three weeks ago that it’s getting out of the hydrogen station business, meaning that 10 percent of the stations will go offline. As it stands, Toyota has now put out some truly remarkable discounts on the Mirai, which retails for $52,000. Toyota now offers $40,000 off the car, which in addition to $15,000 of free hydrogen over six years and the 0 percent interest loan, this means that for a limited time Toyota will essentially pay you $3,000 for this car.

Tim De Chant, TechCrunch

Spirio

Steinway & Sons produces grand pianos that are acclaimed for their sound, and the company has cooked up a fascinating gadget called a Spirio that is essentially a new twist on the player piano. It adds about $29,000 to $48,000 to the cost of a $150,000 instrument, but it’s a seriously fun device that essentially allows players to record their performance and have the piano play it back to them on the actual piano. It records using optical sensors that measure the velocity at which the hammer strikes a piano wire, with 1,020 levels of sensitivity and taking 800 measurements per second. It’s also able to call up previous recordings from a constantly updated library that now includes over 4,000 recordings, allowing the piano to replicate a performance by one of the greats. This is exciting, and at $29,000 I’ll just need to buy 10 new 2023 Toyota Mirais to afford it.

Seth Mnookin, MIT Technology Review

Modern-Day Cincinnatus

In a country where too often representatives outstay their welcome and continue to serve well past the point of feasibility, one man has assessed his term of office, sees the dignity of a job done well in a single term, and is moving onward to new and thrilling possibilities. That man is Shaquille O’Neal, and that society is Papa Johns, a pizza company on whose board he serves. O’Neal, previously known for other work, has served for five years on the board of Papa Johns and joined the board in 2019 after buying into the business in 2018, at a moment when the chain was reeling from the fallout following the company founder’s fall from grace.

Angela L. Pagán, The Takeout

Thunder

A new study published in Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society took six years’ worth of lightning strike data to build a detailed map of lightning risk in the U.S., finding that Florida led the nation with 112 lightning strikes per square kilometer in 2023. On average, the United States sees 36.8 million ground strikes per year, sees a grand total of 55.5 million strokes of lightning, and also averages 23.4 million flashes.

Chris Vagasky, The Conversation

Sales

In 2023, 25 percent of online sales in China took place via livestreams, where studios of creators who are skilled at hawking merchandise serve as critical salespeople in the digital economy. The U.S. is seen as a likely future market for livestream sales, and in order to prepare, Chinese studios are training Americans to sell stuff on TikTok shop with the latest techniques and outfitting them with a literal translated playbook. Over 20 agencies have popped up in the U.S. with roots in China, and encourage techniques like rhyming catchphrases or ringing a bell with every sale.

Caiwei Chen, Rest of World

Physical

Physical media is more popular in Japan than in the rest of the world, sustaining businesses that still specialize in selling discs and cartridges even as much of the rest of the world now gets digital downloads. Physical games were 70 percent of Japan’s game sales in 2022, with 65 percent of PS5 game sales and 77 percent of Switch game sales being physical. Meanwhile, that tends to be flipped when looking at the global situation: 70 percent of PS4 and PS5 global game sales in 2022 were digital.

Sam Byford, The Verge

Stratospheric Water

Water vapor in the atmosphere can contribute to global warming, and as the world contends with rising levels of CO2, ways to cut atmospheric water have been proposed by geoengineers. A jump in stratospheric water in the 1990s could have increased warming by up to 30 percent. A new technique to dry out the stratosphere proposed in Science Advances would target rising moist air with cloud-forming particles before it gets to the stratosphere, which the researchers argue could be accomplished with as little as 2 kilograms of material per week. The “stratospheric dehydration” won’t solve every problem — it’d offset 1.4 percent of warming caused by added CO2 in the industrial era — but the idea that it can be so targeted, measured in kilograms and not tonnes, is compelling.

Paul Voosen, Science

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