Month in Facts: March

$15

A kite-assisted electric car managed to drive 3,107 miles across Australia in 18 days using just $15 worth of electricity, surely paving the way for our roads to be covered in bits of string in future…

$1 million

IBM’s supercomputer Watson beat two human players on the American gameshow jeopardy to claim a prize of $1 million. However, it did incorrectly think Toronto was in the US, proving that there is still some hope for us measly humans!

11,500 years

Scientists discovered the cremated remains of a child in Alaska, aged 11,500 years. It was the second youngest Ice Age child found in North America and the oldest human remains discovered in the north of the continent.

Two for one

NASA’s Kepler telescope discovered an unusual planetary system where two planets are orbiting a star in the same orbit, both a fixed distance from one another. It is the first such system ever seen.

200 x

Intel’s new transfer cable, Thunderbolt, could achieve speeds 200 times faster than traditional USB 2.0 and 20 times faster than USB 3.0. Apple will be using the cable in future.

Two years

Researchers at the Large Hadron Collider have said that they expect to find the Higgs boson, the theoretical ‘God particle’, by the end of 2012.