By Walt Hickey

“Peers”

British lawmakers are finally in the process of approving a bill that would strip aristocrats of the right to sit in the House of Lords because of who their daddy was. In 1999, the Labour government evicted 750 hereditary peers from the House of Lords but failed to finish the job because they were worried about making the richest and oldest families in the country too mad. As a result, 92 peers were allowed to stay in the House of Lords because of who their daddies were, and 88 of them are still there, all men. Because the House of Lords is also full of assorted partisans given a seat because they were a good spokesperson or mid-level party functionary, there are now 800 people in it, making it the second-largest legislative chamber in the world. Imagine the difficulties that it’d take for those 88 people — incredibly wealthy, politically connected, went to Eton or Harrow and then almost certainly Oxbridge — to get involved in the government of the United Kingdom through the typical channels, rather than being a distant descendant of one of William the Conquerer’s favourite Cnut-crackers.

Jill Lawless, AP News

RedBox

The thousands of RedBox DVD rental kiosks are very, very obviously never getting picked up by their very bankrupt owner, so tinkerers are buying ‘em up from the places that are still hosting one of the dead machines and, naturally, getting them to play Doom and trying to crack the OS so they can be reused for some cockamamie project. As of August, Walgreens alone claimed it was hosting 5,400 abandoned kiosks in its stores that cost $184,000 a month to remain powered up, and they’re not alone in trying to get the movie-vending albatrosses off their hands. Discords of hackers are being spun up, people are finding transaction records stuck in the units — one had 2,471 records going back to 2015 — and gradually the reverse engineers are figuring out the myriad error codes. Some are planning a clever way to organize their own DVDs, or how to DIY a Redbox device of their own.

Jason Koebler, 404 Media

Meteorites

There are about 70,000 meteorites we’re aware of, and previously we knew the origins of about 6 percent of them — and only because they had been traced to either the moon, Mars, or the large asteroid Vesta based on their composition. A new analysis adds an origin for another 70 percent of them, coming from one of three asteroid families: the Karin family (which formed from a collision in the asteroid belt 5.8 million years ago), the Koronis family (formed from a collision 7.5 million years ago), and the Massalia family (formed by a collision 40 million years ago).

CNRS

Battery

The Department of Energy has thrown together a $670.6 million loan to a company that makes cutting-edge insulating materials woven into an electric vehicle battery that, in the event of an emergency, will slow heat and fire from spreading through the battery pack. Aspen Aerogels is building a plant in Georgia that produces the thermal barriers, which are 1 to 4 millimeters thick and stacked between battery cells, sort of a firewall within a battery. It costs between $300 and $1,000 to incorporate the tech into an EV. The advantage here is that the aerogels it produces are way, way lighter than the existing thermal insulation, which will help make the batteries just as safe at a lighter weight, potentially extending the range of the notoriously heavy EVs. Business is good for Aspen Aerogels, jumping from $7 million in sales in 2021 to $110 million in 2023, which is poised to double yet again this year.

Casey Crownhart, MIT Technology Review

Japan

Spending by foreign visitors has already reached 5.86 trillion yen ($39.1 billion) in Japan in the first nine months of the year as the country experiences a massive tourism boom. That’s already smashing the record of 5.31 trillion yen spent in all of 2023, with still three months to go. The average spend per visitor in the July-to-September period came in at 223,000 yen, which was up 40 percent year over year. The number of visitors in the first nine months came in at 26.88 million, also beating the 2023 full-year tally handily. The government projects that this year they might finish at 35 million visitors.

Hirofumi Kanaoka, Nikkei Asia

Barbie

Mattel, which along with archrival Hasbro dominates the toy business, has been trying to make their supply chains work more efficiently, particularly in light of their hit movie Barbie. The toy market has had a rough couple years in the U.S., hitting huge numbers during the pandemic but then falling sharply. It dropped 8 percent in 2023 compared to 2022, coming in at $28 billion, of which $5.4 billion went to Mattel. The company also had to deal with a big pile of lots of different toys, which it has since streamlined.

Liz Young, The Wall Street Journal

Capture

The number of operating carbon capture facilities in the world increased by 22 percent in the past year, with the 41 commerical-scale carbon capture and storage projects increasing to 50 such projects this year. Beyond that, there are already another 44 projects under construction, and a further 534 in early or advanced development. The math isn’t going great; the currently operating projects trap 51 million metric tons of carbon dioxide per year, which will double once all the projects under construction are running, but in 2023 humans emitted 37,400 million metric tons of carbon — so, a bit of a ways to go.

Carlos Anchondo, E&E News

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