materialworld

Value, Importance & Tomatoes 🍅

Value, Importance & Tomatoes 🍅

I wrote something for today's Sunday Times. The theme won’t come as much of a surprise if you’ve read a few of my other recent pieces here: that solving the current energy crisis and for that matter hitting net zero is a lot more complicated (and interesting!) than

Jelly rolls and coking drums: a bottom-up look at batteries 🔋

Jelly rolls and coking drums: a bottom-up look at batteries 🔋

I’ve spent a lot of the past few months thinking about batteries, which turn out to be one of the most fascinating topics in modern economics. Here’s a film I’ve made for Sky News about it. Please do watch it! The main problem I had while researching

The thing we're trying to escape is the thing we need to help us escape

The thing we're trying to escape is the thing we need to help us escape

Long before he was famous for sexual misconduct, Louis CK was famous, at least in some circles, for having given voice to one of the funnier commentaries on technology and the economy: “Everything’s amazing and nobody’s happy”. You get the overall point: the minute a certain technology is

We need more maps

We need more maps

Were it not for a mapping error, or rather a series of them, Christopher Columbus might never have sailed for America. When he set out across the Atlantic in 1492, the Italian explorer did so confident in the understanding that provided he headed in a roughly straight line westwards from

Rare earths: everything you ever wanted to know

Rare earths: everything you ever wanted to know

Or rather: everything you never really wanted to know but certainly ought to know, especially since the device you're reading this on almost certainly has rare earths in it

The most underrated material in the modern world

The most underrated material in the modern world

Concrete. A blot on the urban landscape, right? Boring, ugly, lifeless and destructive, right? Well hold on. Because here are a few reasons why concrete is actually surprising, dynamic & incredibly complex. And not just that: it is one of the most overlooked cogs in the modern machinery of civilisation. This