If costs continue to fall and safety standards continue to rise, the true promise of air travel would arrive: ordinary people would enjoy a high degree of flexibility and convenience that, until now, has been available only to the rich.

ECONOMIST: Air travel

The company has come up with a designer thermal salt that can hit temperatures in the 700 degree Celsius range, or far hotter than the 500 degree Celsius temperatures possible with ordinary salts.

FORBES: The Most Important Man in Energy Storage? Try Archimedes

It's also worth chucking into the mix that the global average temperature variation between even the strongest El Nino event and the next ordinary year is a fraction of a degree Celsius - certainly less than the rise of about 0.6C that we've seen since the beginning of the study period, in 1950.

BBC: Warm, wet - and warring?

To a degree that is sufficient to set ordinary heads spinning, these commitments have often been juggled simultaneously.

WSJ: The Ecstasy of Influence | Innovator of the Year 2012 Design