Heat Storage Bricks and Using AI to Understand History

Heavy industries generate around a quarter of global emissions, and alternative energy sources cannot consistently generate the amount of heat that factories need to create their goods.

Enter the heat batteries. A growing number of companies are working on systems that can capture the heat generated by clean electricity and store it for later in piles of bricks. They believe these bricks could be the key to bringing renewable energy to some of the world’s biggest polluters.

Many of these heat storage systems use simple designs and commercially available materials, which means they can be built quickly, wherever they are needed. Although still in its infancy, the technology could be one of the building blocks of a new climate-friendly industrial sector. Read the full story.

—Casey Crownhart

How AI is helping historians better understand our past

Historians have begun to use machine learning to examine historical documents, including astronomical tables like those produced in Venice and other modern cities.

Proponents claim that the application of modern computing to the past helps to establish links across a wider swath of historical records than would otherwise be possible, correcting the distortions resulting from analyzing history from one document to that time.

But it introduces its own distortions, including the risk of machine learning slipping biases or outright falsifications into historical records. Read the full story.