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Home > Technology > Rooftop Solar in Australia How Australia Turned Rooftops Into Power Stations Why rooftop solar became part of everyday Australian life—and why batteries and smart energy systems are now beginning the next transformation. From the street, an Australian suburban house can look completely ordinary. Brick walls. Tiled roof. Garage. Driveway. But look from above and the story changes. Across millions of rooftops sit photovoltaic panels quietly producing electricity whenever the sun is available. One system is small. Millions of them are not. Australia now has more than four million homes with rooftop solar, roughly one in three households, and leads the world in household solar adoption per person. Household solar generation has increased roughly twentyfold since 2010–11, while the cost of installing solar per kilowatt has fallen by about 75 percent. This is no longer a niche technology attached to environmentally ambitious hom...

TECHNOLOGY Why QWERTY Still Rules Your Keyboard After 150 Years How a layout created for mechanical typewriters became a global habit that survived computers, smartphones, and generations of new technology. There is something strange about the keyboard you are probably using right now. Your laptop has one. Your desktop has one. Your tablet can display one. Your smartphone probably shows one every time you need to type a message. Yet the basic arrangement of those letters was developed in the age of mechanical typewriters. That means a layout created for machines with physical metal typebars is still being reproduced on devices that have no typebars, no ink ribbons, and sometimes not even physical keys. That raises a much more interesting question than simply asking where QWERTY came from: Why did a solution created for a 19th-century machine s...