The Crunch: robots slicing tomatoes and climate tipping points

Hello and welcome to another edition of The Crunch!

In this week’s newsletter we have charts on climate tipping points, wildfires, what ingredients are most common in different cuisines – and a robot cutting tomatoes.

But first … leaving Gaza

Hamada was in northern Gaza when Israel invaded after the 7 October Hamas attack. Nahed, a diaspora Palestinian living in New York, had to watch on from afar as Hamada and his family fled south to escape the fighting.

This is the story of two Palestinian musicians, and decade-long friends, told through social media conversations:

You can see and hear the interactive story here .

Four charts from the fortnight

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1. Where Australians can’t find childcare

Almost 6 million Australians live in a childcare desert – an area with three or more kids for each available childcare place. More than 600,000 people live in areas where there is no access to childcare at all.

Availability has increased over the past four years, according to the ABC, but the gap between cities and regions has widened:

This really becomes clear if you have a play with the ABC’s fantastic interactive map :

The Guardian has also covered Australia’s childcare deserts, which you can find here .

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2. Slowly at first … then not so slowly?

Climate scientists have been raising the alarm for decades that increased warming could be pushing some environmental systems towards collapse.

The New York Times have a beautiful map-based feature exploring tipping points in coral reefs, permafrost, rainforests, monsoon systems and more.

Speaking of the climate, we’ll take this opportunity to plug our climate tracker page . It automatically updates each day with global average temperatures, sea surface temperatures and antarctic sea ice extent.

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3. Swept away

At least 160 people have died in recent landslides in the Indian state of Kerala, with hundreds of buildings washed away or damaged.

Reuters have used drones and satellite imagery to visualise how entire settlements were swept away .

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4. Where should we go for lunch

Researchers looked at more than 56,000 online recipes to find patterns in flavours and ingredients in different places around the world. There are some limitations, such as how recipes are assigned to a region. But there’s still lots to learn, such as the average number of ingredients in a recipe (eight) and how popular eggs are.

Our colleague Mona Chalabi visualised how prevalent ingredients are in each region’s cuisine.

Spotlight on … the world on fire

It’s not yet fire season in Australia, but 2024 has already had devastating fires around the world. Here’s a few recent and updating data visualisations of how much burned, where and the impacts:

• The New York Times have created this beautiful (and terrifying) interactive story subtitled The California Counties Constantly on Fire.

• The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is tracking active wildfires in Canada, and the cumulative area burned.

• The Times have also created a regularly updating page tracking air quality and smoke from wildfires.

• Our World in Data is tracking the cumulative land area burned by wildfires globally every week.

• The Washington Post has mapped where wildfires are contaminating drinking water in the US.

Off the Charts

How do you test how well knives can cut? Using a robot arm to cut tomatoes, of course.

Scott Heimendinger, a US-based tech worker and self-described “food geek”, says his startup Seattle Ultrasonics is aiming to improve what we know about how well chef’s knives work.

Scott told The Crunch the dearth of information on how market-leading knives cut food has led him to begin the Quantified Knife project – a series of rigorous, standardised tests to analyse and compare knives.

“Since I couldn’t find any quantified food cutting data for the most popular chef’s knives, I bought a robot and set out to collect those data myself,” he said.

“Over 500 tests, 100K data points, a dozen fact tables, and a fat workbook full of joins and transforms later, and we’ve got some new insights into how food cutting works. Pretty cool!”

Scott has shared some extremely red charts from the project with us ahead of the project launch, showing the different peaks of force as one of the knives cuts tomatoes:

Each shaded area measures the results of an individual cut, while the blue line shows the average of five trials and the white line shows the best performing knife.

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