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Science and Technology links (December 8th 2018)
- The energy density of lithium-ion batteries doubled between 1995 and 2005 but only increased by about 15% between 2005 and 2015. It is estimated that there is relatively little further gains in energy density possible with lithium-ion batteries. However, our mobile devices typically consume far less power than they did only a few years ago while offering faster processing.
- In China, 78% of all research institutes focus on science and engineering, and only 12% focus on the humanities. A quarter of the top universities have a science and engineering focus.
- In the US, if I know your zip code, your gender and your birthdate, I can nearly uniquely identify you.
- In wealthy countries, happier people are more likely to have children.
- It is sometimes stated that beyond physical differences, the brains of men and women are identical. Rosenblatt (2016) disagrees: “Brains are indeed typically male or typically female.” Falk and Hermle (2018) further observe that the more that women have equal opportunities, the more they differ from men in their preferences. Zhang et al. (2018) have a related finding:
On average, women show stronger preferences for mates with good earning capacity than men do, while men show stronger preferences for physically attractive mates than women do (…) we found little evidence that these sex differences were smaller in countries with greater gender equality.
- It seems that very large mammals co-existed with the dinosaurs.