An article appeared in the FT before his dismissal reporting "rumors" that the chairman was the only intelligent and competent person in the company, and that the CEO especially had no formal education in finance (which wasn't true). I think everybody saw this as a move by the chairman to create public pressure on the CEO and to play office politics. So the bank got rid of him.

That's in no small part due to the fact that our current species of crops were selected to be grown conventionally, where height doesn't matter but disease and weather resilience is very important; not optimized for the very different requirements of indoor farming. Once LEDs fall further in costs and dwarf species of staple crops come onto the market, then we will start seeing indoor farming of those too.

Holy moly, what a clickbait title. It absolutely does not do justice to the work of the researchers.

Lithium-metal and anode-less batteries are nothing new, the idea has been around for decades. The concerns with this architecture have always been about poor cycle life and the high risk of battery fire, given that pure lithium is extraordinarily reactive. It's commonly thought that it could only ever be commercialised in a solid-state electrolyte battery for this reason, which is to say, anode-less batteries are nowhere near mass production. The end of this decade is the soonest we could hope to see it used in cars - but that's still a very optimistic timeline.

The research clearly focusses on the cycle life of this battery design. So why not write the article about that?

> The problem with deploying PV en masse is cost/watt

Labour and transport costs are now a significant portion of solar installation costs. More watts/panels therefore improves cost/watt.

Quantum dot solar cells are a long way off commercialisation. They are difficult to reliably produce at scale.

Multi-junction silicon cells are very unlikely to ever be commercially viable for the mass market. The advantage of silicon-perovskite tandem cells is that it's only a small production price increase over current solar cells.