Below are the top 5 Fab Facts heard on Episode 31 of Newsy Pooloozi!

In this episode, boy, did we have some electric news for you… That’s right experts predict that electric vehicles will be bought as often as traditional cars in the coming five years. That’s thanks to a load of improvements we talked you through (or should we say we “drove you” through!) – like the super-fast-charging EV batteries being produced in Israel and the solar-charged ones being developed in India. We also heard how Norway is already on the EV road trip (get it?!) – with more than half of the vehicles bought in 2020 being electric. We also discussed how those cute little driverless delivery EV, Nuro’s R2, created in Silicon Valley (of course), are about to be on the road for real. As if all that weren’t enough – we also talked about scientists discovering the oldest cave drawings ever made – of a warty pig! – rocking the art and archeology world… oink, oink… Finally, we shared the story of the  wheel chairing rock climber, who went to new heights on a Hong Kong skyscraper… Yep, you heard right – a rock climber in a wheelchair climbed up a skyscraper.

And the top fab facts that came out of all that were:

FAB FACT NUMBER 1: Electric vehicles – often known by their acronym, EVs run on batteries – but how are the batteries charged?

Most EV batteries are charged by being plugged into the local electricity grid, which is usually powered by fossil fuels, meaning EVs aren’t totally clean or carbon free. 

FAB FACT NUMBER 2: What does a driverless car need to be legal on the roads?

A driverless car, like the Nuro R2, must have an “Autonomous Vehicle Deployment Permit” to be allowed to operate on roads in the USA.

FAB FACT NUMBER 3: Cave paintings were recently found in the Asian country of Indonesia. When do they date from?

They are 44-45,500 years old, dating from the Last Glacial Period, that’s the most recent Ice Age when glaciers covered huge parts of the planet.

FAB FACT NUMBER 4: What are ancient paintings of part-human-part-animal creatures called?

Those human-beast hybrids are called ‘therianthropes (pronounced: theory-n-thropes).

FAB FACT NUMBER 5: The oldest known cave painting is in an Indonesian cave from 45,500 years ago! But how do scientists know this?

Thanks to something called “cave popcorn” – or the calcium deposits on limestone – that formed on top of the cave drawing, scientists can use uranium-series analysis to date the cave popcorn, thus determining the age of the drawing underneath.