Edition 9 – Gardening Treasures, Weather Shortage, Wi-Fi Democracy

Interesting News

Lockdown Gardening in Britain Leads to Archaeological Discoveries

Some people in England have literally struck gold in their backyards after finding artifacts dating back to the 16th century. In one instance from Hampshire, gardeners found 63 gold coins and one silver coin from the reign of King Henry VIII. This is just one of more than 47,000 archeological finds reported across England and Wales this year, as coronavirus lockdowns have driven people to take up gardening to pass the time.

National Weather Service Faces Internet Bandwidth Shortage

For the past decade, the National Weather Service has been plagued by infrastructure failures. While most of us never use the NWS trove of data directly, the popular weather apps we love all rely on this data for accurate forecasting. Because the volume of data has increased, and so has the number of weather apps and services constantly pulling this data, the NWS has seen their websites crash during critical severe weather events, buckling under the heavy demand. This kind of outage for such a critical service can hurt efforts to alert the public of dangerous conditions that can endanger lives and property. As a result, the NWS is considering limiting the bandwidth used for certain data. The idea is that this throttling can keep systems up and running to serve more critical alerts in serious weather conditions.

India To Set Up Massive Network of Public Wi-Fi Hotspots

The forward-thinking Indian government has launched the PM-WANI (Prime Minister Wi-Fi Access Network Interface) project to democratize Internet access. Even though more than one billion people in India today enjoy some of the world’s cheapest mobile data plans, this project will focus on bringing remote villages online using high-speed fiber optic cables to ensure a more reliable and faster connection than 4G, which is still mostly limited to urban areas. The project seeks to replicate the success of public call offices, which were set up in neighborhood stores a few decades ago to democratize phone access.

Tech Fact of the Week

Have a look at this amazing graphic explanation of how a jet engine works:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L24Wf0VlTE0