Coca-Cola CEO says company has outmaneuvered Ozempic because it’s been preparing for a low-calorie future for years | Firms are exploring sodium batteries as an alternative to lithium | Wildlife Poop Is the Climate Solution You've Never Heard Of | Why Has Microsoft Put Xbox Game Pass Subscription Numbers In A Black Box?

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Coca-Cola CEO says company has outmaneuvered Ozempic because it’s been preparing for a low-calorie future for years - Fortune

Many of the biggest food and beverage manufacturers in the world are nervously eyeing weight-loss drugs, wondering what the trend will mean for their bottom line.

But Coca-Cola, the third-largest soft beverage producer in the world, isn’t worried, according to its CEO.

That’s because for years the company has been investing in diet and zero-sugar alternatives to its most popular products, like the classic Coca-Cola drink as well as Sprite and Fanta.

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Firms are exploring sodium batteries as an alternative to lithium - The Economist

They power tiny phones and two-tonne electric cars. They form the guts of a growing number of grid-storage systems that smooth the flow of electricity from wind and solar power stations. Without them, the electrification needed to avoid the worst effects of global warming would be unimaginable. And in 2019 they earned three of their pioneers a Nobel prize.

But lithium-ion (Li-ion) batteries have downsides. Lithium is scarce, for one. And the best Li-ion batteries, those with layered-oxide cathodes, also require cobalt and nickel. These metals are scarce, too—and cobalt is also problematic because a lot of it is mined in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where working conditions leave much to be desired. A second sort of Li-ion battery, a so-called polyanionic design that uses lithium iron phosphate (LFP), does not need nickel or cobalt. But such batteries cannot store as much energy per kilogram as layered-oxide ones.

A clutch of companies, though, think they have an alternative: making batteries with sodium instead. Unlike lithium, sodium is abundant: it makes up most of the salt in the oceans. And chemists have found that layered-oxide cathodes which use sodium rather than lithium can get by without cobalt or nickel to jazz them up. The idea of making sodium-ion (or Na-ion) batteries at scale is therefore gaining traction. Engineers are tweaking designs. Factories, particularly in China, are springing up. For the first time since the Li-ion revolution began, lithium’s place on the electrochemical pedestal is being challenged.

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Wildlife Poop Is the Climate Solution You’ve Never Heard Of - Scientific American

Looking across the Serengeti at herds of honking wildebeest, most of us would be awed by the exuberance of these migrating masses, resplendent in their magnitude. Not Joe Roman. The conservation biologist sees a vital distribution network that flows through the bodies of all those grazers, dispensing valuable mineral resources across ecosystems. To put it another way, Roman sees dumped feces and rotting carcasses.

In the same way that trees function as Earth's lungs, migrating animals—eating, pooping and dying along the way—circulate nitrogen and phosphorus from deep-sea gorges to mountain peaks and from the poles to the tropics. These elements form the basic building blocks of DNA and help to power our cells. “Animals are the beating heart of the planet,” Roman tells us. This becomes evident at the start of the book, when he visits the island of Surtsey off the coast of Iceland.

Surtsey was formed by a volcanic explosion in 1963, making the island younger than most of the scientists studying it. This fresh land offered an opportunity to document how animals build an ecosystem, poop by poop. The pioneers are the seabirds, whose fishy guano provides a nutritive anchor for air and seaborne seeds. Their feathers harbor invasive invertebrates, which in turn attract insect-eating birds. Then come the gray seals, whose fecal plumes generate green algal blooms that can be seen from space.

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Why Has Microsoft Put Xbox Game Pass Subscription Numbers In A Black Box? - Forbes

Eight years ago, back in 2015, Microsoft decided it would stop reporting exact hardware sales numbers for Xbox. This was two years into the Xbox One generation where unlike the 360/PS3 generation, it had fallen precipitously behind PlayStation after a rocky launch.

But Microsoft’s position was that it cared more about the Xbox ecosystem, and it would still report things like overall Xbox revenue, of course. Its eyes were on subscriptions, the cloud and things well beyond just one box.

Now in 2023, that remains true, but now Microsoft has decided to quietly stop reporting numbers for its new driver of growth, Xbox Game Pass. Microsoft was very happy to report about huge surges in Game Pass subscriptions during the pandemic. Everyone on lockdown with often little to do but play video games boosted the entire industry, and Game Pass with it, which offered a whole lot of games for relatively cheap.

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