Using solar power and what they refer to “super sponges,” a team of engineers at the University of Texas at Austin have developed a neat, and potentially life-saving, magic trick: pulling water out of thin air. The sponges are actually hydrogels, gel-polymer hybrid materials that are designed to hold and contain substantial amounts of water.

Since 1989, when Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web, the software and open standards layered over the physical infrastructure of connections we know as the internet, he’s been splitting time between lectures and running the Web standards organization, the World Wide Web Consortium.

At the end of 2018, China’s Satellite Navigation Office announced that the country’s GNSS (called BeiDou or ‘BDS’) is now available as a global service. Originally, worldwide coverage was not expected to be achieved until 2020, but this early completion of the system means that China