During 1998-2000, AOL was ordering so many free trial CDs that it locked up world production, and music CDs faced 8-12 week delays. It was rumored that certain weeks there were no albums getting fabricated at all, worldwide.
I wonder if history isn’t repeating itself. AOL CDs had pretty much jumped the shark by 2000.
Working with those temps probably not appropriate for an office environment, but on a porch or well-ventilated garage, should economically outperform 110V pretty well.
Running the recycling operation off propane is hilarious. That sounds like an easy way to emit far more CO2 than just burning the plastic and making some new plastic out of the propane.
New Belgium distilling used to take the dregs from their beer batches and ferment them again anaerobically to produce methane they then used to fire some of their boilers.
Then those dregs got composted and used on the landscaping.
There are ways to co-generate fuel for this but I don't want to lose the larger message that PP is producing toy solutions no matter how you zhuzh them up.
Could they get over that in version 5? Probably. But more likely on 6 or 7, and more likely still for another entrepreneur to scoop them and make something real.
Yes, but even then, as an official, you don't know if you'll be sure to get one. A court ruling significantly increases the risk of wilful disobedience for officials and hence dramatically lowers the probability of being ignored.
The ZT (figure of merit) is an apples-to-apples number for comparing one thermoelectric material set to another. Higher is better.
Bismuth Telluride is the standard and has been for decades. It has a ZT of about 1.3. There have been some breakthroughs to exceed that in a few spots, but with limitations. Most of its competitors still exceed a ZT of 1.
This publication’s material is less than 0.01. Not all that newsworthy, unless I’m missing something.
Paper claims that the innovation of this category of materials is about manufacturability. Organic TEMs can be spray-on thin films and foams filled with cheap bulk powders, rather than growing inorganic planar semiconductors; The downsides have been that they're fragile and they aren't very good (by a factor of ~500 worse than inorganic semiconductor TEMs). They report on making them 5x better performance (so only 100x worse), and dramatically less fragile.
Presumably, this would have very different applications.
I think the idea is to use it for extremely low power "ambient computing" and for example wearables where the human provides the heat source (and which need to be flexible).
I think it's an uncomfortable truth that there was some good in Theranos in terms of the unfulfilled needs of society and the potential of diligent work toward realizing those needs with technology.
I don't know how often it's been said by others, but I often think that Theranos would have had an easier time if they hadn't falsified anything. Faking things takes effort too, and aiming a little lower and being less secretive would have been a better outcome. Maybe a different tack is possible through this reboot.
Mr. Evans' silver spoon is worth $10M, so raising $20M against that in such a fraught area is eye-opening. Whether he sees this as part of Elizabeth's redemption arc or just can't quit the hair of the dog that bit him, I guess we'll see.
Elizabeth Holmes' crime wasn't defrauding people, it was defrauding people richer than her. Change my mind.
Most VC's are taking it in the shorts right now anyway, because they're addicted to free money and there's no more free money, and most of them quite frankly suck at spotting good deals. So for the intrepid souls who cast their lot in with Mr. Evans, maybe only Nixon could go to China, and maybe they'll fare better than the stodgy fat-dumb-and-happy B-tier VC's who are not long for this brave new world anyway.
Having read the same book (while on the fourth floor of MDC Brooklyn of all places) I believe the conclusion I read was that they were trying to make it all work with one drop, which was impossible, because of the number of tests they were promising and the low solute concentrations some of those tests had to work with.
But there's a wide gulf between a drop and a 20mL vial. Requiring three drops and claiming half the battery of tests would still be a substantial improvement. That's what they should've done. And I think this new startup can do that.
I interviewed with Theranos toward the very end. I have never been in a place with a bigger show of security, and I've previously worked for years in nuclear weapons laboratories. If this new startup ditches the demonic-possession voice and the arch-military security schtick, and the Wizard of Oz curtain, I might not consider an investment in them as foolhardy as one in Theranos.
I notice they use potassium hydroxide to treat this, and I seriously doubt merely in a catalytic capacity. That means that a lot of electrical input needs to be run into a chlor-alkali plant to make the KOH. If it's just a sprinkling, great. But is it?
Now if you're making moderately valued commodities like sugars or bioreagents, or perhaps even bioplastics, it might be cost-effective in spite of an electrical chlor-alkali input stream.
If you're making biofuels, however, this looks like corn-based ethanol or certain kinds of biodiesel, where there's lots of electrical and petrochemical energy inputs that conveniently get omitted when they tout how great for the environment and home-grown that biofuel energy is. Really hope they're not planning on going the same way with this set of discoveries.
I've been in solar energy as my primary vocation since the 1990's.
I've built solar cars, I've built solar panels, I've installed solar panels, I've designed solar trackers. I know this industry inside and out.
I'd never heard of an east-west array before (though I did experiment with one-cell-wide "crinolations" at 60 degree angles, did not find any value to using them but it was a different application where low-angle light wasn't a factor). I'd never thought of such an array on this scale, at this low angle, before.
I don't think most of the people reading this article quite understand that this is a completely different kind of array topology to flat-plate fixed-tilt, or tracking-based systems. Do yourself a favor, if you consider yourself intellectually curious, and if you came away from skimming this article thinking there's nothing new under the sun, read it again with a keener eye toward the novelty of it.
I have an east/west array on my roof, as my house is positioned with the front facing west.
In the winter it's outperformed by a south facing array (northern hemisphere) but in the summer the east array gets a ton of sun before midday, and crucially, it's getting a ton of sun when the temperatures are a bit cooler, so it performs very well.
I actually use this exact example when encouraging careful attention to paradigms where a fundamental variable is slowly but consistently changing.
It's essentially equivalent to a boundary on a phase diagram: Cost/Watt has fallen past a critical threshold, and suddenly this dramatically different approach just makes more sense.
Another interesting configuration is vertical bifacial panels aligned on North-South axis and interspersed with farming rows. Low-cost panels make it feasible and it doesn't much block agricultural production if the panel rows are spaced far enough apart.
I guess trackers really are an American thing? I’m in solar for ten years in The Netherlands, and I don’t think any utility scale fields use tracking.
For residential roofs east-west placed systems have been an option for the same amount of time. They are now gaining popularity in The Netherlands because of net congestion during midday.
Trackers are useless when the majority of the incoming sunlight is diffuse (as is the case where you live).
Trackers are useful when the majority of the incoming sunlight is direct (America has a mix but the western half and parts of the south have a lot of direct).
Trackers are essential when you use concentrated sunlight.
A tracker that doubles the amount of sunlight hitting a panel is not free, but it also makes the panel take up 2x the area, or more, to avoid shading its neighbor.
The thing people tend to forget about trackers is they offer this trade-off where you can trade shaded area for power per rated panel. When land is cheap and panels (or arrays, heliostats, power towers, etc.) are expensive, trackers make sense.
The reverse has been the case for the past ten years, and continues to get more true by the day. I doubt we will ever see the day return where land is cheap again and/or PV are expensive again.
Thank you, I went back and re-read after seeing you comment and I did indeed miss the big point here. I had been concerned that even if PV costs reach near zero, the fixed install costs would still limit future reductions on solar costs. Clearly not!
It doesn't always come from mining. A huge problem with acid rock drainage (ARD) showed up when they built a freeway in Pennsylvania by merely exposing the rock.
The concept of making batteries out of drainage because both contain sulfur is like making socks out of cow manure because both contain carbon. There's so much of the latter that you could never use it all, but also the ingredient is dirt cheap in pure form.
I have a side project that could convert ARD into industrial strength sulfuric acid, which is unbelievably difficult to buy and transport, despite it being the most common industrial chemical in the world after water.
I'm not sure the belt of pyrite is best labelled as the cause here.
It might have something to do with the inferred activities of Rio Tinto, a transnational corporation that is one of the largest mining firms in the world.
The river was polluted millennia before the Rio Tinto company came into existence. There's been mining operations along the Rio Tinto since ca. 3000 BC.
> But before the mining operations? Probably not very polluted.
From the wikipedia page:
"The discovery of multiple oxide terraces mediated by microorganisms at up to 60 metres above the current water level, and as far away as 20 kilometres from the current river's path, may suggest that the unusual ecosystem is a natural phenomenon since before human mining activities started in this region.[9]"
Unfortunately for this American, having a different set of standards for mathematical notation tripped a "don't these people know the difference between Hz and kHz?" impulse in my brain.
To illustrate: When an American sees "50,000 Hz" we process it as you would process "50 000 Hz". This misunderstanding could be corrected by using two or four significant figures after the decimal. That's too much to ask though, probably requiring a large number of hours to accommodate someone not even from there.
Your site is fine, it's our brains that are more appropriately adjusted. A little disclaimer link or something would help a number of us understand. A large number of otherwise intelligent and educated Americans don't realize this difference in notation and this would be a great opportunity to educate them.
SI allows either but the document should be consistent. Thousands separators are a half width space.
"The decimal marker shall be either the point on the line or the comma on the line. The decimal marker chosen should be that which is customary in the context concerned."
I wonder if history isn’t repeating itself. AOL CDs had pretty much jumped the shark by 2000.