February 1, 2017

“Any one of these projects would have been the largest battery storage facility ever built. Combined, they amount to 15 percent of the battery storage installed planet-wide last year.” Tesla is among the companies betting that lots of small batteries daisy-chained together can supplant gas storage facilities like the one that blew up last year in Los Angeles. / Bloomberg

“We found a reef where the textbooks said there shouldn’t be one,” a scientist told National Geographic last year after long-rumored corals were located near the mouth of the Amazon. It won’t be there long if planned oil exploration moves forward. / Greenpeace, The Guardian

Dozens of men have come to the victim’s home and work seeking sex after a vengeful ex posted a fake profile, but a 1996 rule grants Grindr broad immunity against situations like this. / Wired

It wasn’t the 540 million year-old aquatic creature’s fault. It’s just that it seems to have eaten and expelled its microscopic food from the same hole, as it had neither eyes nor gills nor anus. / yahoo.com

“There appears to be a kind of physics of things doing stuff, and evolving to do stuff. Meaning and intention—thought to be the defining characteristics of living systems—may then emerge naturally through the laws of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics.” The best synopsis of how entropy underpins biology we’ve yet read. / Quanta

Since Mary Douglas’ groundbreaking work on risk and culture, anthropologists have paid keen attention to the difference between real and perceived risks. / monoskop.org