Off-Grid Tech

@newstart_2024 Nutritionists fed highly-processed sugar-laden breakfast cereal to a group of rats. They fed the cardboard box the cereal came in to another group of rats. Can you guess which group of rats was healthier, happier & lived longer?

Topsoil isn’t just dirt. It’s the thin, fragile layer that feeds 8 billion people. Lose it, and yields fall, prices rise, and food security weakens. It takes centuries to form and minutes to destroy. One of the most underappreciated assets in our economy.

Every August, the children of a small island off the south coast of Iceland stay up past midnight to save baby birds. The island is called Heimaey, part of the Vestmannaeyjar archipelago. It is home to the largest puffin colony on earth. More than a million adult puffins nest in burrows along the island's grassy cliffs each summer, and when late August arrives, their chicks are ready to leave for the ocean for the first time. The problem is the lights. Baby puffins, called pysjas in Icelandic, navigate by moonlight. When they take their first flight in the dark, the streetlights and harbour lights of the town confuse them. Instead of heading out to sea, they veer toward land, landing in car parks, wandering down streets, huddling under vehicles, and exhausting themselves among the houses of a town that has no idea what to do with them. Every year, the kids of Vestmannaeyjar form what they call the Pysja Patrol. They go out after dark with cardboard boxes, chase down the disoriented chicks by hand, and bring them home. In 2024 alone, the children of an island with 4,500 inhabitants rescued more than 4,200 pufflings. Roughly one bird for every person who lives there. The next morning they take the boxes to the cliff edge, reach in, and throw each bird gently into the wind toward the sea. The tradition has been running for generations. Since 2003 every rescued puffling is first taken to the local natural history museum to be weighed, measured, and tagged before release. The data collected by children with cardboard boxes has contributed to decades of scientific research on one of the world's most important seabird populations. Iceland is home to sixty percent of all the world's puffins.

🇨🇳China sold 231,000 electric heavy vehicles in 2025 - an increase of 182%. It takes five minutes to swop batteries. Electric trucks are also substantially cheaper to run than diesel trucks.

In 1970, a 23-year-old physics student at Imperial College London found himself at a life-altering crossroads. Brian May was deep into his doctoral research on cosmic dust—specifically the zodiacal dust cloud, the tiny particles that drift through the solar system and scatter sunlight. His PhD was well underway, and a promising academic career in astrophysics lay ahead. But there was another path calling him. May was also the lead guitarist of a newly signed rock band named Queen. With a record deal secured and tours on the horizon, the band’s momentum was building fast. Faced with an impossible choice between the guitar and the telescope, May made his decision: he paused his studies and bet everything on music. Queen’s ascent was meteoric. By the mid-1970s, they had become a global phenomenon. Timeless anthems like “Bohemian Rhapsody” and “We Will Rock You” exploded onto the charts, while May’s iconic homemade guitar, the Red Special, helped define the band’s legendary sound. Stadiums sold out worldwide, and millions of albums flew off the shelves. Yet throughout his rock stardom, May never fully let go of his scientific passion. Even at the height of Queen’s fame, he stayed connected to astrophysics—reading journals, attending lectures when possible, and maintaining contact with his former supervisor, Professor Michael Rowan-Robinson, who had once told him: “You can always come back and finish.” Thirty-six years after stepping away, in 2006, May decided the time had finally come. He reached out to Rowan-Robinson, and together they revived the long-dormant project. Though the field had moved forward and his original data needed updating, his early observations still held real scientific value. Balancing his ongoing music career with late-night research sessions, May updated his work, incorporated new findings, and refined his analysis. In 2007, at the age of 60, Imperial College London officially awarded him a PhD in astrophysics—not an honorary title, but one earned through rigorous research and peer review. Dr. Brian May had finally completed what he started more than three decades earlier. His journey is a powerful reminder that passion has no expiration date. Whether on stage under stadium lights or studying the dust between the planets, Brian May proved it’s never too late to finish what you began.

After a dangerous high speed chase through Olympia, deputies in Thurston County take the driver in custody THAT HAS BEEN ARRESTED 97 TIMES BEFORE. Lawrence Warren Hatch 45-year-old from Marysville, Washington celebrated his 98th arrest with a DUI, eluding, and possession of narcotics. While searching the truck, deputies found thousands of dollars in stolen merchandise and had a custom bong device built into the dash of the truck so he could comfortably smoke drugs while driving. Progressive proponents of restorative justice believe the 99th time will be the charm.

That's cool. The Deepway Star electric semi for Foodstuffs NZ has arrived. If diesel runs out or gets too expensive, this truck will soldier on with food deliveries. This is the sort of thing we need during an oil crisis.

People in general have not yet understood how cheap battery storage has become. I assume the technology will receive even more funding now that gas/petrol prices keep escalating. Energy independence will be the goal of more nations now.

2001. Larry Page and Sergey Brin sit for their first-ever television interview. Google has 200 employees. They explain that the company almost didn't get off the ground because they couldn't cash a check. The check was for $100,000. It came from Andy Bechtolsheim, one of the co-founders of Sun Microsystems. Page and Brin showed him what they'd built. He said, "This is great, how about I write you a check?" and just wrote it out. Made it out to Google. The problem was that Google didn't exist as a company yet. There was no bank account. No lawyers. No incorporation paperwork. The check sat in Larry Page's desk drawer for a month. They literally could not deposit it. They're both in their late twenties in this interview. They met at Stanford as PhD students and, by their own account, disliked each other from the start. Brin says Page is "kind of obnoxious." Page doesn't disagree. Brin says they argued about everything, debated every single point, and then realized that was their commonality. They became friends, started building a search engine they never planned to build, and put their PhDs on hold to get it out into the world. The part that stings watching this in 2026 is the rejection tour. Before starting Google, they approached existing search companies to sell or license the technology. They went to Yahoo. David Filo, one of Yahoo's founders, told them, "This is great search technology. Why don't you guys make a company, and maybe we'll use you someday?" They went to Excite. They went to InfoSeek. Same response. Page says a CEO at one of those companies told them: "If our search is 85% as good as the next guy's, that's good enough for us." Page and Brin didn't buy that. They thought the search was too important to be 85% as good. So they started Google. No marketing. No ad campaign. They launched it at Stanford, and it grew 20% per month, every single month, for three years straight. Pure word of mouth. By the time of this interview, they're handling over 100 million searches a day. They get 500 resumes in the mail every single day. The office space around them is 30% vacant because the dot-com bubble just popped, but Google is profitable. Page makes a point of this: "We've been really interested in being profitable, like long before it was fashionable." They'd also just hired Eric Schmidt, former CTO of Sun, as CEO. Brin's explanation for why: "Parental supervision, to be honest." Page adds that they're "past the age where we're rebellious" and that running a search engine used by 100 million people a day with 200 employees is "a large responsibility." The number that caught my eye: when Google started in 1998, it indexed 30 million web pages. At the time of this interview, three years later, they indexed 1.3 billion. The page says that if you printed them all out and stacked the paper, it would be about 70 miles high. And it was doubling every year. Every search company they approached turned them down. Yahoo eventually came back and hired Google to power its own search results. The CEO who thought 85% was good enough ran a company that no longer exists. Alphabet, Google's parent company, is worth about $3.6 trillion today. It has about 190,000 employees. That $100,000 check sat in a desk drawer because nobody had incorporated the company. Bechtolsheim's stake from that investment is now worth billions.

Indonesian president doubles down on solar pledge🇮🇩 “We will build 100 gigawatts of solar panels as quickly as possible. That is my directive and my decision, and we will prove to the world that we can move faster.”

Built in 1891, this German ratchet screwdriver was a century ahead.

We measure the capacity of our transmission grid using a slide rule.⁣ ⁣ Modern sensors unlock 40% more capacity that's already there. Add batteries on both sides of the grid and you solve congestion at 90% less cost.⁣ ⁣ The tech has existed for 20 years. It's time to scale it

In the small Argentine town of Ucacha, workers arrived to remove old wooden utility poles and replace them with new concrete ones. They soon discovered two families of woodpeckers nesting inside the rotting wood. Instead of destroying the nests, the project manager told his crew to carefully cut out the exact sections of wood that held the birds. They strapped those hollowed-out blocks directly onto the new concrete poles at the same height and facing the exact same direction, so the woodpeckers would feel at home. The plan worked perfectly. The birds accepted the upgrade without any fuss and continued raising their chicks in their original wooden homes.

108-Armed Cotton Picking #Robot Harvests 120× Faster Than Humans via @ZappyZappy7 #AgriTech #Robotics #Innovation #Technology #TechForGood

Amazon and Lidl are working with the UK government to clear the way to sell plug-in solar panels for the first time. In response to the conflict in Iran, which sent fossil fuel prices soaring, the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero pledged to make it easier for consumers to install solar panels. Read more: bloom.bg/40QkP60 📷️: Getty Images

Multi-axis 3D printing with curved layers! 🖨️ Researchers from the The University of Manchester introduced a neural network-based computational pipeline as a representation-agnostic slicer for multi-axis 3D printing. Traditional 3D printing works like stacking pancakes, flat layers on top of each other. 🥞 This often requires temporary support structures that get thrown away after printing, wastes material, and creates weaker parts. Multi-axis 3D printing can print along curved paths that follow the object's natural shape. This eliminates support structures and makes stronger parts. But figuring out these curved paths is mathematically complex, you need to avoid collisions, respect what the printer can physically do, and optimize for strength. The neural network solves this automatically. It learns to create a "field" around the object, then extracts curved printing paths from this field. Because the entire process is differentiable (translation for non-math specialists, meaning you can optimize it end-to-end), the AI can directly optimize for manufacturing goals like "no support structures needed" and "make it as strong as possible." Here's the project: ryantaoliu.github.io/NeuralSlicer/ ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news → ziegler.substack.com

BYD plans 20 Canadian dealerships within a year as 6.1% tariff deal opens the floodgates electrek.co/2026/03/24/byd… by @fredlambert

Jazmin Faye Patenaude pleaded guilty on March 18 to driving a motor vehicle without due care and attention in the March 21, 2024, death of Maureen Martin of Nanaimo. globalnews.ca/news/11742464/…

A Nanaimo woman will pay a fine for her role in a 2024 motor vehicle incident at Woodgrove Centre, which killed an 85-year-old woman. Jazmin Faye Patenaude, 24, was originally charged with dangerous driving causing death. #Nanaimo nanaimonewsnow.com/2026/03/23/nan…

In 1985, one woman saved the future internet from collapsing under its own weight. - Meet Radia Perlman - Inventor of the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) - called as the “Mother of the Internet” - Holds 100+ patents - Wrote textbooks used by engineers worldwide - Helped shape how data moves safely across networks - Created a child-friendly programming language called TORTIS - Believes in impact over hype and spotlight solved one of the biggest early internet problems: - Network loops that could crash entire systems - Her solution made networks stable, efficient, and scalable - explained it using a poem - says If you can’t explain it simply, you don’t understand it well enough.” a legendary GOAT 🐐

Goulburn Community #Solar farm is now operational, 288 Local investors now making returns from the farm. 1.4 Mw farm along side a 4Mwh Battery. Proving ownership of renewable infrastructure doesn't have to be built by multinationals. reneweconomy.com.au/pioneering-com…