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UK chip designer ARM has agreed to a whopping buyout offer from Japanese telecoms giant SoftBank for £24.3 billion (~$32 billion)—the deal comes just weeks after Brits voted to exit the European Union.

SoftBank said it would retain ARM's senior management team, brand, and lucrative partnership-based business model.

ARM will remain headquartered in Cambridge, and SoftBank has vowed to double the staff headcount in the UK over the next five years. The smartphone chip designer currently has 4,064 employees on its books worldwide.

Battery research focuses on balancing three competing factors: performance, lifetime, and safety. Typically, you have to sacrifice one of these factors to get gains in the other two. But for applications like electric vehicles, we'd really like to see all three improved.

In an investigation recently published in Nature Energy, scientists demonstrated the ability to use a magnetic field to align graphite flakes within electrodes as they're manufactured. The alignment gives lithium ions a clearer path to transit the battery, leading to improved performance.

The electrodes of Lithium-ion batteries are often composed of graphite, which balances attributes such as a high energy density with non-toxicity, safety, and low cost. Graphite, composed of stacked sheets of carbon atoms, is often incorporated into these electrodes in the form of flake-like particles.

Angkor Wat today, as viewed across the moat that surrounds the 12th century Hindu temple to Vishnu built under the rule of Suryavarnam II. (credit: Bjørn Christian Tørrissen)

The ornate, pinecone-shaped towers of Angkor Wat in Cambodia float above a vast temple complex of shrines, pools, houses, and a perfectly square moat. Today, only a small number of monks remain within the temple walls. The remaining structures have been reclaimed by trees whose roots wind around the stone like cellulose tentacles. Archaeologists have long wondered what life was like here when Angkor was the cosmopolitan heart of the Khmer Empire in the 12th and 13th centuries. Why did so many people abandon this place in the 15th century, never to return?

Unlike a majority of archaeological endeavors, the answers didn't ultimately come from digging up the ground. Instead, our first glimpse of Angkor as it once was came just a few years ago from a sophisticated laser scanning machine mounted on a helicopter.

Invisible city

For centuries, the Angkor region's wealth of artifacts drew looters, archaeologists, and looter-archaeologists. They focused their attention, both good and ill, on Angkor Wat and a few other nearby moated temple complexes. Based on those ruins, the first European explorers to encounter Angkor in the 19th century assumed Khmer urbanites lived in what were basically moated cities of a few thousand people. These European explorers thought Angkor Wat was something like a medieval walled city in Europe, which typically held fewer than 10,000 people. They explained all the moated complexes in the Angkor area by suggesting that maybe the royal family and their people were moving from one moated city to the next over time. But as archaeologists learned more in the intervening century, something about those population numbers seemed off. Beyond the moated cities were vast canal systems and reservoirs hinting at something bigger.