Travelling to watch their team play at the World Cup took a little longer than usual for two French fans. Mehdi Balamissa and Gabriel Martin decided the best way to travel from France to Qatar was on two wheels. The friends spent three months travelling 7,000 kilometers by bicycle to reach Qatar 2022 and watch their beloved France defend its title.

“It was a crazy idea, but we’re the kind of people that have big ideas and don’t want to have any regrets,” Balamissa said, as both spoke to CNN Sport a day after arriving in the country. “So, since we are both self-employed, we decided to block off three months of our time and come to Qatar.”

The pair started their mammoth (庞大的) journey at the Stade de France in Paris, home of the French national team, and finished at the stunning Lusail Stadium, the venue that would host the final at Qatar 2022. They would travel on average 115 kilometers per day, taking appropriate rest days when needed. They battled through the heat of the desert in Saudi Arabia as well as flooded woodland areas in Hungary as they made their winding way to Qatar, stopping off at campsites, lodges (乡间小舍) and hotels to sleep.

The idea came about after cycling from France to Italy to watch their country play in the UEFA Nations League last year and they wanted to test themselves with a much longer trip. They hoped their trip would promote the benefits of sustainable travel and said they planned to offer cycling workshops to children from disadvantaged backgrounds when they eventually arrived home.

The two cyclists encountered many problems along the way, including dozens of flat tires, but relied on their infectiously positive attitude to get them through. The pair laugh as they recall the time they had to travel 15 hours to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in order to find a bike repair shop before travelling 15 hours back to the exact point where they had stopped.

“We had many troubles, but we fixed them as we went,” Martin told CNN.

Today, battery power per kilowatt hour costs around only ten per cent of what it did a decade ago. And the expectation is that the costs will continue to fall, both as battery chemistry improves and because manufacturing lots of batteries on a massive scale makes the production of individual batteries cheaper.

You can be forgiven for thinking that this might only be of interest to accountants, but the implications of this are enormous, and will benefit all of us. First and most obviously, it had made the batteries in electric cars cheaper and longer-lasting. And brilliantly, because electric batteries are improving so dramatically, we can already see the results. Last September, 15 per cent of all new vehicle registrations were pure electric vehicles. So the change is starting to happen.

Better batteries don’t just mean better cars, however. They can also help us decarbonise the entire national grid(网格). Storing energy has always been a problem for the grid. Today, only a tiny amount of generated electricity is stored for later use, which leads to lots of power going to waste. But better batteries make it technologically and economically viable to store large amounts of energy from the grid.

It’s conceivable(可想象的) that in the not-too-distant future, alongside other essentials in our homes like a boiler and a fusebox, we might also have an enormous battery in the garage. This would take power from the grid (or maybe even solar panels on the roof), and power appliances and lights in our homes at the times when demand for electricity is high. Home batteries are not yet as established as electric cars, but they are also growing in popularity.

So, given how much technology has improved batteries over the last decade, I can’t help but be strangely optimistic about the future. Batteries may not be as flashy(华丽的) as phones, rockets or other new technologies, but when it comes to technology to fight climate change, they’re definitely leading the charge.

Mindfulness meditation(冥想) is a practice used to achieve mental quiet and a sense of calm. It is a series of steps used to encourage reflection and deep breathing and to increase self-awareness.

A mindfulness meditation course may be as effective at reducing anxiety as a common medication(药物), according to a new study. The research, published on November 9 in JAMA Psychiatry, involved a group of 276 adults with untreated anxiety disorders. Half of the patients were randomly selected to take 10 to 20mg of escitalopram, the generic form of Lexapro, a common medication used to treat anxiety and depression. The other half were assigned to an eight-week course in mindfulness-based stress reduction. The results were stunning: Both groups experienced about a 20% reduction in their anxiety symptoms over the eight-week period.

The patients assigned to the meditation group were asked to attend a mindfulness meditation group class in-person once a week. Each class was around two-and-a-half hours long and held at a local clinic. They were also asked to meditate on their own for around 40 minutes per day. Hoge, the lead author on the study, compared the time commitment to “taking an exercise class or an art class”.

But according to Joseph Arpaia, an Oregon-based psychiatrist specializing in mindfulness and meditation, the daily time commitment is likely too much for many patients dealing with anxiety.

Arpaia says that he has worked to find less time-intensive mindfulness methods to help patients manage their anxiety. One technique he teaches is called a “one-breath reset” that helps patients calm themselves over the course of a single breath.

But despite his reservations, “It’s always interesting to see meditation work, and it works as well as medication,” he said. “My hope would be that people realize that there are things other than medication that can work.”

“My other hope would be that they realize that if sitting and following your breath makes you feel relaxed, great, but it doesn’t make everyone feel relaxed. Find something that does. Read a book, go for a walk, spend time gardening,” he said.