May 24, 2016 at 12:23AM

Today I Learned: 1) There are fewer carbon atoms (atoms!!) in a bacteria than there are transistors in a modern computer processor. Think about what that implies about computational efficiency of living systems... and also what that implies about human silicon-manufacturing technology. 2) The Earth is losing hydrogen at a rate of about 3 kg/second. Where is it going? It's literally floating off into space. Hydrogen is light enough that Earth can't permanently keep it grounded at typical global temperatures. 3) ...about the straddling bus, a proposed public transportation technology to rival the subway. A straddling bus is a bus. A big bus. A bus so big that it fits *over and around* the road, with a tunnel in the middle that cars can pass through (or allowing it to run right over cars). The idea is that it functions similarly to a subway, but less expensively (because it doesn't require building and maintaining a tunnel) and is more cool-looking. A straddling bus system was proposed at a 2010 tech exhibition in Beijing, and a test project was mapped out. Beijing authorities never gave the proposal a go-ahead, on grounds that the technology wasn't mature enough yet. This year, it's been re-proposed, and there's hope that it might get built. Thanks to Mengsha Gong for finding this fact!