A quick look around at any coffee shop, city sidewalk, or sadly, even at a traffic light will tell you that people are on their phones a lot. But exactly how much is that? For Americans in 2023, it was a mind-boggling 100 trillion megabytes, according to the wireless industry lobbying association CTIA. The group doesn’t discuss their methodology in the press release, so it’s a little hard to make judgments on that number’s veracity, or the other numbers they bandy about, such as the 80% increase in data usage since 2021, or the fact that 40% of data is now going over 5G connections. Some of the numbers are more than a little questionable, too, such as the claim that 330 million Americans (out of a current estimate of 345.8 million people) are covered by one or more 5G networks. Even if you figure that most 5G installations are in densely populated urban areas, 95% coverage seems implausible given that in 2020, 57.5 million people lived in rural areas of the USA. Regardless of the details, it remains that our networks are positively humming with data, and keeping things running is no mean feat.

If you’ve ever wondered what one does with a degree in wildlife biology, look no further than a study that looks into “avian-caused ignitions” of wildfires. The study was led by Taylor Barnes, a wildlife biologist and GIS specialist who works for a civil engineering firm, and concludes that some utility poles are 5 to 8 times more likely to spark a wildfire than the average pole due to “thermal events” following electrocution of a bird, squirrel, bear, or idiot. Unfortunately, the paper is paywalled, so there’s no information on methodology, but we’re guessing a grad student or intern spent a summer collecting animal carcasses from beneath power poles. It’s actually very valuable work since it informs decisions on where to direct wildlife mitigation efforts that potentially reduce the number of service outages and wildfires, but it’s still kinda funny.

From the “How to get rid of a lot of money in a hurry” files comes a story of a bad GPU made into an incredibly unattractive purse. About the only thing good about the offering, which consists of a GeForce GT 730 video card stuffed into a clear plastic box with a gold(ish) chain attached, is the price of $1,024. The completely un-dodgy GPUStore Shopify site also lists a purse fashioned from an NVIDIA H100 Tensor Core GPU for a cool $65,536. At least somebody knows about base two.

And finally, if you’ve struggled with the question of what humanoid robots bring to the table, chances are pretty good that adding the ability to fly with four jet engines isn’t going to make things much clearer. But for some reason, a group from the Italian Institute of Technology is working on the problem of “aerial humanoid robotics” with a cherub-faced bot dubbed iRonCub. The diminutive robot is only about 70 kilograms, which includes the four jet engines generating a total of 1,000 newtons of thrust. Applications for the flying baby robot are mostly left to the imagination, although there is a vague reference to “search and rescue” applications; we’re not sure about you, but if we’re lost in the woods and half-crazed from hunger and exposure, a baby descending from the sky on a 600° plume of exhaust might not be the most comforting sight.