News of the week selected by Impactscool – December 16th

Melting glaciers in a 50-years timelapse

The glaciers around the world are slowly retreating, it’s known for a long time, but nevertheless it is difficult to understand when we find ourselves in front of these ice giants that occupy entire valleys. For example, in Greenland, on average, each glacier has retreated 5 km from 1985 to 2018. And this trend is common throughout the world. A series of timelapse videos obtained thanks to satellite images show the movement that the glaciers make in 50 years in a few seconds and it is therefore easier to understand how quickly the ice front is moving backwards and how much, due to global warming, we are meeting their disappearance.

Walmart will start testing autonomous deliveries

The automatic shopping delivery systems are in a period of intense experimentation: in Houston, Walmart will begin to deliver the shopping to the home of some customers thanks to special autonomous vehicles produced by Nuro. These tests will be used to refine and improve the system: in fact there are many things to improve, such as the management of any obstacles along the way or, from a legislative point of view, the creation of an ad hoc regulation for the presence on the street of this type of vehicles.

The first plant for human composting will open in 2021

Since 2021, Seattle residents will be able to choose to compost their bodies after death. This is a first time begun with the approval of a law that allows this type of operation in addition to cremation and burial. It is called Recompose and will be the first establishment to offer this type of service: the body will be laid in a special hexagonal case where the composting process takes place. In 30 days the body is transformed into fertile soil that can be used by relatives of the deceased to grow trees, an operation, unlike traditional ones, which contributes positively to the environment.

Oculus Quest gets rid of controllers

Oculus Quest, the Facebook VR headset, now allows hand tracking without the need for any type of controller. The update uses the viewer cameras to locate your hands and create a copy of them in the virtual world. For now the option to activate this works is experimental and there will not be much support but with its constant improvement we could soon see this system more and more used.