World's Biggest Ship (For Now) Launched

A ship longer than four football pitches in length docked recently in Felixtowe. The CSCL Globe, registered in Shanghai, is currently the largest ship ever built:

The Globe is more than 400m long,  56.8m wide and 73m high, its gross tonnage is 186,000, or about the same as 14,500 buses. It can carry 19,100 standard 20ft containers, enough to stretch for 72 miles.

But its reign as the world's largest ship is about to be ended already. The Oscar built by Daewoo in South Korea, sccheduled for launch shortly, will be able to carry 19,224 containers, or 124 more than the Globe. The Oscar will be 395.4m long, 30.3m deep and 59m in breadth with a gross tonnage 193,000 tons.

To put this in perspective, the Titanic was 46,328 tons and 269m long, so it was a quarter of the Oscar's weight and two thirds its length!

New Most Earth-Like Planet Yet Discovered

NASA scientists operating the Kepler Space Telescope have been scouring the skies for planets with similar characteristics to earth. Such 'exoplanets' might harbour life like our own or indeed provide us safe refuge should we ever need to leave our own planet in a hurry.

Ideally such a planet would be about earth's size, rocky, with an atmosphere and be located in the so-called Goldilocks zone of its star system, not too hot and not too cold in relation to its local star, just like earth is in relation to the Sun. So far over 1000 such exoplanets have been found, of varying degrees of earth-likeness.

And NASA says that the most Earth-like of the new arrivals, known as Kepler 438b, is most likely even more similar to our home than Kepler 186f which was the previous most earth-like exoplanet discovered.

You can read more about the find courtesy of the BBC here.

Electric Car Could Be Charged in Three Minutes

An Israeli company called Storedot demo'ed a rechargeable smartphone battery that can recharge in under 30 seconds. The company demonstrated the technology at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2015) in Las Vegas last week.

That's quite interesting in itself, but the really interesting thing is where Storedot plans to go next with this technology.

The main barrier to the mainstream adoption of Electric cars is the time it takes to recharge them. While a petrol or diesel car can be refilled in a matter of minutes while out on the road, an electric car currently needs an overnight charge before it's ready to go again. That's useless if you're miles away
from home or need to go anywhere soon.

Storedot chief executive Doran Myersdorf told the BBC "We are just starting work on electric vehicles. We intend to show in one year a model of a car that can charge in three minutes. We are 100 per cent sure we can deliver, because the knowhow of how you take one cell and combine thousands of them together has already been done by Tesla."

Tesla Model S Electric Car

That would be a game changer for the electric car, which despite an upturn in sales only sold 14,500 cars last year, compared to millions of noisy and polluting petrol and diesel cars sold each year.

New Antibiotics Discovery is 'Tip of the Iceberg'

One of the biggest problems affecting the battle against infectious diseases is the fact that bacteria are becoming resistant to existing antibiotics on the market, partly due to over-prescription. That's a scary prospect, as antibiotics are what shield us from all manner of infections that might otherwise kill us.

The bulk of antibiotic discovery was in the 1950s and 1960s, but nothing found since 1987 has made it into doctors' hands. After decades of no new discoveries being made, US scientists have made a "game changing" discovery based on growing antibiotics from soil samples that ends the new anti-biotic drought.

And according to scientists, this could be the "tip of the iceberg" of new discoveries too.

Source: BBC News

2014 Was Safest Flying Year Ever

The cautious traveller might be forgiven for being wary of flying given some high profile air crashes that have hit the news of late.

In the news in 2014 crashes such as Malaysia Airlines MH370 which disappeared carrying 239 people, Malaysian Airlines MH17 which was shot down over Ukraine with 298 people, and Air Algerie AH5017 crashed with 116 passengers and crew aboard, hit the headlines.

However, you'd be wrong to conclude that these crashes indicated that air safety is in crisis in any way. On the contrary, 2014 was the safest aviation travel year since records began in 1942. The 20 airliner crashes of 2014, although tragic, is the lowest on record:

Or, to put it another way, whilst there was a spike in fatalities in 2014 due to a couple of large crashes, that's still way down on the peak of air crash fatalities in the 70's, 80's and 90's, and that's despite the fact that low cost air travel means there's way more flights undertaken than ever before:

To put this in perspective, the number of crashes is 2.1 per one million flights, which is pretty damn safe in other words.