Greetings again fellow Bandits! We’ve got another live Friday TechBandits session planned for 11am EDT!
https://www.twitch.tv/techbanditry
Quite a hodgepodge of Science, Technology, Engineering Arts and Math today… and I’m going to start for the story that should probably be kept until GameBandits next week… but the news waits for no nerd… and everyone loves a good drama…so:
Fortnite’s Epic Games really resented Apple taking their 30 per cent cut on the billions of dollars Epic makes on their in-game currency, Fortnite’s Vbucks. So they knocked 20 percent off every purchase made directly through Epic instead of the “easier” sale through apple. The thing is, Apple’s contract says that they get 30% from each and every sale via it’s apple store, which is pretty much the ONLY way of getting a game or app onto apple’s iphones and ipads…and so they pulled Fortnite completely from their App Store for breach of contract! But the drama doesn’t end there! Epic then sues Apple for anti-competitive behaviour and makes a video mocking Apple with it’s own famous 1984 commercial! Check this out!
Which is obviously taking a jab at this old Apple classic!
If you want all the gorey details The Verge has a great article about it all:
https://www.theverge.com/2020/8/13/21366438/apple-fortnite-ios-app-store-violations-epic-payments
Whew! Now that breaking news is sorted we can turn our attention back to things closer to home… like our garbage trucks!
I had no idea that we were doing this… but it’s such a simple idea and I love it! Using the methane given off by garbage to fuel the garbage trucks that pick it up… so of course I did a little digging and found a little more about how Toronto is using Biogas plants to keep things green:
You can even do the same thing yourself on a smaller scale with your own food scraps…and you’ll get free cooking gas and liquid fertilizer in return!
While we’ve been enjoying our summer days, it seems scientists have been comparing our artic to surface of Mars and coming up with some new ice!
By comparing the red planet to the Canadian Arctic scientists now believe that there was never a moister, warmer, river covered early Mars… only sheets of martian ice!
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200803120154.htm
And speaking of martians… how you like this alien-looking deep sea beastie showing up in your fishing nets!? It seems that the tiny isopods in shallow water have a deep sea cousin… and a much bigger cousin at that!
https://www.futurity.org/deep-sea-giant-isopod-bathynomus-raksasa-2422042/
And finally we see how hard it is to be a bee… especially these days!
There’s a lot of things out to get bees… everything from pollution, pesticides, global warming, disease and now these horrid looking Varroa Destructor mites that can infest a hive and can lead to complete colony collapse!
Few can explain things as well as the fine folks at Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell… so I’ll let them tell you all about the death of bees!
Without bees, we’re in big trouble! Now, obviously it would be much better if we could keep them around, but we’re already looking at ways that we can automate all the pollinating that they do… including robot bees! (see, I always have to get a robot or two in here!)
But recreating our fabulous flying bees is complicated, let alone having them perform the actual transfer of pollen needed to keep our crops growing ! Which is where bubble blowing drones come in!
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/06/drone-delivered-soap-bubbles-could-help-pollinate-flowers
And finally for no other reason than I love it… here’s Monty Python being brilliantly ridiculous and then singing their “Eric the Half-a-Bee” song!
See you all at 11am!