Slashdot Mirror

Didn't you mean "the government desperately want" or "the elite", MIC, or similar? As pointed out, Hollywood's been doing this for quite awhile. And our government admits to wanting to "control the narrative". They didn't even hide the RFP's for it. I'll just leave this here: https://phys.org/news/2011-10-...

What do you think they feed the farmed fish?

When you farm fish, we have the opportunity to break oceanic pollution cycles by feeding them vegetables and grains:
https://phys.org/news/2016-06-...

I don't like YOUR definition of intelligence. Not enough haggis.

As far as I know, intelligence means ability to gather knowledge through external experience

What, so a webcrawler is intelligent? It "gathers knowledge".

I'd typically just boil it down to "learning".

For an 'AI' to truly be intelligent at playing Go, it needs to start with a seed and be shown instructions to Go and learn how to play from that.

Keep up with the times grandpa. That's exactly what they did. No learning sets needed.

if someone programmed the rules for Go into it, then it has not learned to play through intelligence.

You need to better differentiation what you mean by "Shown instructions" and "programmed the rules".

The same 'seed' should also similarly be able to learn to play chess, do s crossword, or identify animals.

You have no idea what a "seed" is do you? It's just some nebulous term you've got rumbling around in your head that's pseudo-magical.

Anyway, the closest thing would be their method of machine learning. Which, for the link above which talks about DeepMind Alpha, it uses neural network and reinforcement learning. YEEEEESSSSSSS it self-taught go, chess and shogi. "The seed" is what DeepMind Alpha is. It's the tool that can learn things. That's the intelligence part. THE SAME TECHNIQUE is also used for object recognition. Hell, I dunno, maybe they could get deepMind to recognize pictures of cats.

Intelligence implies a certain amount of general purpose ability,

No, but general intelligence would be a lot cooler than specific, niche, narrow intelligence.

This is why a human savant that can't talk or understand anything about life but playing Go or Chess is not called 'intelligent'.

Wow, fuck you too dude. Most geeks are just some fraction of autistic savant. I know I'm better at math than English. If you're going to define my intelligence by my weakest link, then I'm going to call you an idiot for your ignorance on the current state of AI.

We use about 30% of energy for transportation. https://www.eia.gov/energyexpl.... In New York, heat pumps aren't very efficient. They all have backup resistive elements that are running every day in winter. Methane looks much more appealing. Again we only need a 30% cut. If we really want to achieve this we could certainly look at heat pumps that use methane as a backup rather than resistive plus some more insulation. That would probably get us there near immediately. But that's also expensive. Adding a resistive element to a heat pump is a couple hundred bucks. Adding a backup methane burner is probably in the thousands (or tens of thousands if you don't already have a chimney)

Since you don't seem to be able to use the Google, I'll get you started,. https://phys.org/news/2015-09-... https://www.epa.gov/no2-pollut... http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

Nice links--none of which show or even claim to show a correlation between Volkswagens specifically and the death rate.

Since you don't seem to be able to use the Google, I'll get you started,.
https://phys.org/news/2015-09-...
https://www.epa.gov/no2-pollut...
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/1...

Whether it proves to be economical (or even ethical) depends greatly on the level of false positives, beyond the false positives, the number of results that show cancer but the particular cancer in question is something that would have no real health consequences, how harmful the treatments for the cancers are, and how expensive the treatments for the cancers are. Witness the evolution of thinking surrounding prostate cancer detection and treatment... a lot of lessons were learned there.

That said, I think there are likely to be huge benefits from taking as many measurements as we can, starting as soon as we can, without acting on them and before in many cases we even know how to act on them. To me it's appalling that we aren't all wearing some bracelet that logs everything it can for future scientific study or potential diagnostic utility... both because part of the reason we don't is you can't trust anyone not to misuse or lose custody of data these days, and the other part of the reason is we'd rather spend our money on a few more pixels per inch or a screen that bends around the side of our cell phones.

Both of those reasons disgust me.

(BTW, for those who think as I do, I think this is a pretty friggin significant development. I can hear the rest of you yawning because it has nothing to do with emojis, bitcoin, or downloading copyrighted entertainment material without paying for it.)

People have tried.

https://phys.org/news/2006-06-...

Silicon surfaces rendered black by pits and bumps only nanometers or billionths of a meter large could in the future help make solar power cells more efficient.

Flat silicon surfaces are normally highly reflective. Scientists want to minimize reflection as much as possible when it comes to solar power cells made of silicon, because the more light they reflect, the less they convert to electricity. Often, anti-reflective coatings are used, which reduce the amount of average reflection in the wavelengths of light solar power cells use by 85 percent to 92 percent.

The novel treatment developed by researchers at the Technical University of Munich can cut the surface reflection silicon experiences by 95 percent to 98 percent across the wavelengths of light solar power cells use, making them black.

"The results are really good when it comes to preventing reflection. It is still speculative as to how much this can boost the efficiency of solar cells. I am optimistic that for traditional designs of solar cells, it could give a 15 to 20 percent improvement with respect to their present efficiency. The performance of some solar cells with novel design could be improved even more dramatically. However, I think we will need a bit of time to show this," said researcher Svetoslav Koynov, a physicist.

Both of those papers deal with overestimation for a particular 15 year period (1998 - 2013) and the second is based on tropospheric satellite measurements rather than ground temperature measurement like the first study. There have are disputing papers that say the divergence is within the bounds of natural variability, and this nature article seems to sum up the divergence issue: "There is no evidence for a change in the long-term warming trend, he says, and there are always a host of reasons why a short-term trend might diverge — and why the climate models might not capture that divergence."

In any case, there have been multiple developments that indicate that the temperature record was biased low over the period both your papers consider in several areas: ocean warming, temperature coverage at the poles, and systematic errors in satellite measurements. Each of which has been found to have a small, but significant, effect on the temperature record. It doesn't look like Fyfe and company have released a new paper that accounts for those issues, yet.

It is, disproportionally in the Arctic. So there is less sea ice there and the difference between the Arctic air and the more southerly air is less pronounced than usual. A larger differential in air temperatures drives stronger Polar Vortex winds. The Polar Vortex is a circular wind pattern that is strong enough to trap the cold air, keeping it in the Arctic where it belongs. When the Polar Vortex weakens, that cold is able to leak out and freeze the middle latitudes.

The key to note though is that the overall global average temperatures are rising, due to the extreme warming at the poles. Occasional colder than normal weather in more temperate areas are nowhere near enough to put a damper on the rising global average.

Other Polar Vortex related cold spells occurred in January 2014 and February 2015.

Links:
https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/what-is-this-polar-vortex-that-is-freezing-the-u-s/

https://science.howstuffworks.com/nature/climate-weather/atmospheric/polar-vortex1.htm

http://science.time.com/2014/01/06/climate-change-driving-cold-weather/

https://www.theweathernetwork.com/news/articles/polar-vortex-explainer/63115

https://weather.com/science/weather-explainers/news/polar-vortex-april-2016-cold-outbreak-east

https://phys.org/news/2014-01-weakened-polar-vortex-blamed-american.html

If I've said it once.... I've said it a hundred times.

Our technology is evolving faster than our species.

• 
  Suicides of teen girls in the USA are up due to cell phones and social media.
  Cell phones are killing our necks.
  In addition to carrying a personal tracking device, governments are using and abusing any and all technology to spy on citizens
  The Sun could wipe out our power grid with a direct hit from a geomagnetic storm, and utilities aren't doing anything to mitigate the risks.
  5 Countries are destroying the ocean with plastics and covering the earth with asbestos.
  And let's not forget about the Doomsday clock and Nuclear Weapons. We still have a cold war posture that could end badly.
  We have governments with cheap gene editing tools CRISPR/CAS9 working to make designer pets that glow in the dark and super biological weapons
  Video Game Addiction is rampant
  The Internet is a Pandora's box of garbage and porn, bad behavior are shaping your minds through YouTube and other video streaming sites.
  The rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer. There will be a tipping point and this will lead to global unrest.

We can truly say it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. If we could all just grow up and use our technology for good, but we can't. Just like light and dark, yin and yang, the good of technology is always accompanied by the evil dark side.

My prediction for 2018 is that AI and machine learning are going to be applied to hacking. AI's will be trained to write code to exploit all things and the exploits will be endless. Humans won't even be able to understand the exploit code as the AI software churns them out. Further I predict human cloning will happen this year and that China/Russia/North Korea will test some pretty nasty hacks on Americas Banks, Stock Market, Telecommunications, and/or gas/electric/water. I also predict that US drug usage will continue to increase (opioids, weed, alcohol) and the life expectancy will continue to decrease and suicide rates will continue to increase. I also predict that based on an increased energy in the atmosphere that storms will continue to grow in intensity. I also predict there will be a war in North Korea due to an error in a rocket test hitting a US ally. Further I predict Russia will take over another ex-Russian republic and China will continue to flex it's military muscle.

7 billion people on the planet. Technology everywhere, and we still can't figure out to behave and share.

I was watching TV with a little child and she was horrified by the war videos on the news and she asked me, "Why is there war? Why are they fighting?"

My answer, "Because, Sharing is hard."

To all reading this, in 2018 do a better job of sharing, loving your neighbor, and using less plastic.

Happy New Year!

And yet,
It is amazing.
What is happening around the world with this.
In fact, it is happening in America,but slowly.

More accurately, the GGP's statement is true only if discussing wet bulb temperature. From the wiki:

A sustained wet-bulb temperature exceeding 35 C (95 F) is likely to be fatal even to fit and healthy people, unclothed in the shade next to a fan; at this temperature our bodies switch from shedding heat to the environment, to gaining heat from it.[7] Thus 35 C is the threshold beyond which the body is no longer able to adequately cool itself.

Further, according to this summary of a recent study (abstract):

In today's climate, about 2 percent of the Indian population sometimes gets exposed to extremes of 32-degree wet-bulb temperatures. According to this study, by 2100 that will increase to about 70 percent of the population, and about 2 percent of the people will sometimes be exposed to the survivability limit of 35 degrees. And because the region is important agriculturally, it's not just those directly affected by the heat who will suffer, Eltahir says: "With the disruption to the agricultural production, it doesn't need to be the heat wave itself that kills people. Production will go down, so potentially everyone will suffer."

So things are not quite projected to become the charred hellscape that GGP envisioned, but still pretty bad for a lot of people.

Normally these edge cases would be socially isolated and unable to cause trouble, but when they find each other online they can form a mob, and a motivated mob (whether rational or not) is a force. It's a case of the organised and passionate minority overpowering the disorganised and ambivalent majority.

https://phys.org/news/2011-07-...

Scientists at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have found that when just 10 percent of the population holds an unshakable belief, their belief will always be adopted by the majority of the society. The scientists, who are members of the Social Cognitive Networks Academic Research Center (SCNARC) at Rensselaer, used computational and analytical methods to discover the tipping point where a minority belief becomes the majority opinion. The finding has implications for the study and influence of societal interactions ranging from the spread of innovations to the movement of political ideals.

"When the number of committed opinion holders is below 10 percent, there is no visible progress in the spread of ideas. It would literally take the amount of time comparable to the age of the universe for this size group to reach the majority," said SCNARC Director Boleslaw Szymanski, the Claire and Roland Schmitt Distinguished Professor at Rensselaer. "Once that number grows above 10 percent, the idea spreads like flame."

As an example, the ongoing events in Tunisia and Egypt appear to exhibit a similar process, according to Szymanski. "In those countries, dictators who were in power for decades were suddenly overthrown in just a few weeks."

The findings were published in the July 22, 2011, early online edition of the journal Physical Review E in an article titled "Social consensus through the influence of committed minorities."

An important aspect of the finding is that the percent of committed opinion holders required to shift majority opinion does not change significantly regardless of the type of network in which the opinion holders are working. In other words, the percentage of committed opinion holders required to influence a society remains at approximately 10 percent, regardless of how or where that opinion starts and spreads in the society.

You can imagine this being the mechanism that totalitarian movements - Communists, Nazis, Islamists etc - take over once they hit 10% of the population. Well that, and violence or threats of violence against their critics.

it's a good thing for a single person to command that much wealth.

The total net worth of all Americans is about $90 trillion. $100 billion is less than 0.1% of that. John Rockefeller once owned 2% of all the wealth in America, so Bezos is 20-fold poorer.

A democracy can't survive that kind of power imbalance.

That would be a concern if all "the rich" were on the same side. They aren't. Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post. The WaPo exposed Roy Moore's sexploits, and has championed other liberal causes. This cancels out the Koch Brothers.

Something's got to give.

"The rich" have had undue influence for at least the last 10,000 years (wealth accumulation mostly coincided with the invention of agriculture). Yet somehow we have muddled through.

The roots of inequality: Researchers chart rising inequality across millennia
Truth About Markets: Why Some Countries Are Rich And Others Remain Poor
Capital (Piketty)
Wealth Inequality in America

A weather balloon, and a camera are a hell of a lot cheaper.

https://phys.org/news/2017-01-...

How do we raise the cost of CO2 naturally? Well, for one it is going to rise as we keep using it up. The price goes down naturally with increased technology and economy of scale.

In other words, you propose doing nothing, except for the one thing (fixing nuclear regulations) that might annoy those anti-nuclear liberals. The problem with this of course is that most fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground, which won't happen naturally.

It's actually worse than that because most articles that explain how "most fossil fuel reserves must stay in the ground" haven't even considered clathrates / methane hydrates, a new CO2-emitting fuel source that is now being explored.

So why not the Republican climate change solution?

I agree, nuclear regulations need improvement in the USA, particularly to facilitate GenIVs and Molten Salt Reactors - offering higher safety at lower cost, but hindered by the current regulatory regime.

But solar energy with no subsidies has already become cheaper than coal near the equator. Look up Swanson's law - the Moore's law of solar. It's hard to imagine solar panels ever being useful during cloudy Canadian winters, but solar in the south plus nuclear in the north makes a lot of sense.

This is the magnified minority effect - Roy Spencer and his co-worker John Christy are the most frequently-quoted of the 3% of climate scientists that minimize or reject human-caused global warming (in their case, minimize). As if simply repeating their opinions ad nauseum makes them correct.

Yes, I've seen that post by Roy Spencer before. His graph relies largely on choosing a very short baseline (1979-1983) to exaggerate the difference between models and measurements (because the difference between models and observations was unusually large in 1979-1983). In contrast, it is normal to use a 30-year period for baselining to eliminate short-term artifacts.

Spencer's graph also shows that measurements of the troposphere are not as high as models predicted; climate scientists generally agree about this but have explored many possible reasons (technical discussion here), whereas Spencer/Christy emphasize just that one interpretation of the data that minimizes global warming. A paper published soon afterward confirmed the hot spot, but I've seen how people who don't want to believe it can dismiss that paper based on its title alone (the title contains the word "homogenised", which deniers take as an indication of fraud.)

It's interesting that Lynnwood highlights that Spencer is 'funded solely by Government grants (not "Big Oil")' - at the same time as other 'skeptics' argue that climate scientists cannot be trusted because you supposedly "have to" believe in man-made global warming in order to get government funding. One thing I've learned well from talking to skeptics is that they are very good at burning the climate science candle at both ends. Another example: mainstream models are claimed to be useless because they are not perfectly accurate, but apparently if a model is produced by Spencer/Christy it can be trusted.

Lynnwood is also confused about the topic of discussion when he says "Puts a bit of a damper on the whole 'models assume we have negative carbon output!' kind of thing". The supercomputer models of the atmosphere, oceans, land and vegetation which Spencer is criticizing are completely different and separate from "models" of future economic activity, some of which optimistically include negative-carbon technology.

The two sets of models are even made by totally different people (economists et al vs physicists, oceanographers, ecologists, et al) Folks like Lynnwood simplistically reduce the work of thousands of scientists around the world into a single concept called "models" which can then be dismissed in its entirety, with little thought.

The direction of the "electrons" is meaningless and I don't think it's helping you to focus on them.

It is the direction of "current" that matters. Whether that is implemented as a stream of negative charge in one direction, or positive charge in the other, is irrelevant.

That may be true in most day to day electronics, but it is not true in all areas. When the electrons or holes are moving through a magnetic field they deflect differently. I remember learning about this back when I was learning basic electronics in the Navy. They had found that in certain materials it is more accurate to think of the holes moving rather than the electrons. And testing those materials in a magnitic field gave differing results based on whether it is holes or electrons moving. Here is a link with similar finding.

It looks with a massive deployment of nuclear power we will run out of the uranium fuel in 5 years.

Fixing the ozone hole (freon) by replacing freon with hydrofluorcarbons was a big mistake, they are far more potent greenhouse gases. Don't pat humans on the back yet, we're not that smart. Ref: https://phys.org/news/2017-11-... Citation provided.

Utter crap. Even the Greenies only claim that road vehicles 'kill' a few thousand seriously ill people who would have died a few days alter anyway.

Utter crap. Pollution is the world's biggest killer and 75% of CO and 50-90% of urban (you know, where most people live) air pollution comes from automobiles. That means it's killing millions of people every year.

Further, it doesn't just kill the weak. It also makes the healthy weaker. And if you were only kind of healthy, it makes you the weak. Then it can kill you.

And that's almost entirely due to diesel particulates, which mostly come from trucks and the Glorious Peoples' Buses.

Wrong again, spanky. Gassers produce just as much soot, and diesels produce less CO2. It takes less energy to refine, and you burn less fuel. The only thing diesels ordinarily produce more of is NOx, which does result in particulate formation; however, DEF injection all but eliminates NOx emissions, meaning that diesels are actually cleaner than gassers if you use DEF injection — which you will note that none of the offending VWs did. Some of those vehicles have actually been retrofit with DEF injection, which is pretty simple; a tank, a pump, and an injector, plus a relay and maybe an IDM (intermediate driver module) for the injector, depending on its trigger voltage. You can predict with a high level of certainty when the engine will produce NOx, so you don't need sensors.

I do have to say that comments on this thread have the lowest signal to noise ratio (or I should say "signal to troll ratio") of any comment thread I've ever seen on slashdot.

Anybody have anything to say about the actual report? (or about the draft report-- NPR apparently got a prerelease version, but the actual final version is due to be released at 2pm today.

Arable land will be lost in some places and gained in others. Just like all throughout history.

https://phys.org/news/2016-07-...

If you really want to limit CO2 output, you need to find a better way to make concrete, or outlaw portland cement.

Yes, people are in fact looking at that: http://www.ipcc-nggip.iges.or....

Cement is only about 5% of global carbon dioxide emissions, though, so at the moment it's not the driver. ( http://blogs.ei.columbia.edu/2... )

People are looking at alternatives: https://phys.org/news/2015-09-...

Two more: Deflector dish

Not sure I see the issue with this one. We have dishes for transmitting all kinds of RF signals now, using them to transmit whatever is used to generate deflector shields doesn't seem to unlikely.

Already some thoughts on this: NASA proposes a magnetic shield to protect Mars' atmosphere:

... they suggested that by positioning a magnetic dipole shield at the Mars L1 Lagrange Point, an artificial magnetosphere could be formed that would encompass the entire planet, thus shielding it from solar wind and radiation. (see third graphic down)

I think we can assume that any water definitely would be in the form of ice?

The bit about water/ice being potentially present in this multi-billion-year-old system of lava tubes is pure speculation on the part of "Zorro", the submitter of TFS, and/or the /. editor msmash, who posted it to the front page. No such theory is presented in the article from The Guardian (to which TFS links), by the press release from JAXA, as published on phys.org (from which The Guardian's article is most likely drawn), or in the abstract of the actual Geophysical Research Letters article (full "text" - meaning PDF, of course - paywalled courtesy of Wiley).

Which makes that part complete bullshit, added by someone who had no basis to include it as part of TFS, other than for the purpose of enhancing its clickbait potential. Or, in other words, business as usual for the new, steadily-deteriorating /.

Damn, I miss CmdrTaco ...

Discovering a volcano doesn't have any impact on the ice sheet. The volcano was already there. We already have very good estimates on the amount of geothermal flux under the ice. Discovering volcano helps tell us where that flux is concentrated and can potentially make models of ice moments more accurate. That said, this polynya is believed to be do to ocean flows. Here's some modeling of that. No need for volcanoes. There's plenty of heat in the lower layers of the waters around Antarctica.

The Weddell Polynya is reasonably well understood

"The Southern Ocean is strongly stratified. A very cold but relatively fresh water layer covers a much warmer and saltier water mass, thus acting as an insulating layer," explains Prof. Dr. Mojib Latif, head of the Research Division at GEOMAR. Under certain conditions, the warm water of the lower layer can reach the surface and melt the ice. "This is like opening a pressure relief valve - the ocean then releases a surplus of heat to the atmosphere for several consecutive winters until the heat reservoir is exhausted," adds Professor Latif

Oh

You know what made us "civilized"? What allowed us to become what we are today? Cooking

Cooking long preceded what's usually defined as the beginning of civilization. As I understand the current thinking, cooking made possible the development of larger brains, beginning around two million years ago.

Civilization is more associated with the change from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture, which brought a whole basket of problems: more population density, more disease, social stratification, centralized government, worse nutrition, and even smaller brains (judging by cranial capacity). "This reduction in brain size however does not mean that modern humans are less intelligent. Human brains have evolved to work more efficiently and utilize less energy." Yes, I'm sure that's true. Humans 20,000 years ago didn't even have IQ tests! How smart could they be?

And the answer is the same reason why NASA doesn't use them - while mobility in them is superb, they're significantly heavier.

This is the reason that people like the National Space Society want to establish manufacturing facilities on the moon and in orbit. Once you already have the item in space, the weight is much less meaningful.

It is still expensive to do orbital plane changes, but now weight just becomes a trade for time. It will just take you longer to get where you want the heavier you are.

Right now we have to deal with launch costs and planetary thinking. So lightweight suits it is.

Chu's limit appears to have been somewhat pragmatic in assuming that certain kinds of electrical circuits could not be feasibly realized.

Chu's Limit—a limit no more — 23 February 2017

He was able to achieve this thanks to two novel advances: non-Foster circuits and internal matching. Non-Foster circuits are active, transistorized circuits that effectively create capacitors and inductors that are negatively charged, meaning the reactance is inverted to that of conventional capacitors and inductors. Coupling this technique with internal matching—embedding the antenna and circuit into one structure—allowed the electrically small antenna to achieve a broader bandwidth, while not sacrificing efficiency. An electrically small antenna is one in which the largest dimension of the structure is less than one-tenth of a wavelength. Most electrically small antennas have less than 1 percent efficiency, but Church was able to achieve an efficiency of 85 percent.

The part I understand: built and measured.

Actually the bee population is increasing now.

The bee population increased 3% in 2017, after dropping 33% in 2016.

https://www.washingtonpost.com...

https://phys.org/news/2017-05-...

In the stock market, and in statistics, that's what's known as a "dead cat bounce".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

or missed the little pic with the bubbles

I see no picture of bubbles in either of these web pages:
From the /. post: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S221128551730441X?via%3Dihub
From your comment: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-scientists-robust-catalyst-hydrogen-oxygen.html

Do you frequently bully the kiddies that way?

I'm smart enough to figure out that someone with a /. id number just slightly higher than mine is in no way shape or form a "kiddie". Thus, as usual, your comment is wrong.

https://phys.org/news/2015-03-... http://www.sciencemag.org/news... If dark matter were simply some existing form of baryonic matter, even if trapped in black holes, then a phenoma like this where dark matter halos separate from collided galaxies and behave under different rules to continue on their existing path should not be possible at all, because it, like all the other ordinary matter involved, it should have followed the same paths gravitationally bound.

They do dribble out periodically. For example:

• Team develops fast, cheap method to make supercapacitor electrodes for electric cars, high-powered lasers
• Superstretchable, supercompressible supercapacitors
• Researchers develop simple way to fabricate micro-supercapacitors with high energy density
• Highly nitrogen and sulfur dual-doped carbon microspheres for supercapacitors

There are also many examples of lab successes in charging lithium and other batteries in times that are equivalent to supercapacitors and with cycle counts beyond 10,000 as shown by this announcement-de-jeur.

So, certainly batteries are going to be hard to beat. But I think supercapacitors will eventually win out due to weight, durability and raw material cost factors. And, I predict that the next 30 years will see as much development in the newly merged material / chemical / biological science as has happened in all of man's history. The problems will be solved.

They do dribble out periodically. For example:

• Team develops fast, cheap method to make supercapacitor electrodes for electric cars, high-powered lasers
• Superstretchable, supercompressible supercapacitors
• Researchers develop simple way to fabricate micro-supercapacitors with high energy density
• Highly nitrogen and sulfur dual-doped carbon microspheres for supercapacitors

There are also many examples of lab successes in charging lithium and other batteries in times that are equivalent to supercapacitors and with cycle counts beyond 10,000 as shown by this announcement-de-jeur.

So, certainly batteries are going to be hard to beat. But I think supercapacitors will eventually win out due to weight, durability and raw material cost factors. And, I predict that the next 30 years will see as much development in the newly merged material / chemical / biological science as has happened in all of man's history. The problems will be solved.

They do dribble out periodically. For example:

• Team develops fast, cheap method to make supercapacitor electrodes for electric cars, high-powered lasers
• Superstretchable, supercompressible supercapacitors
• Researchers develop simple way to fabricate micro-supercapacitors with high energy density
• Highly nitrogen and sulfur dual-doped carbon microspheres for supercapacitors

There are also many examples of lab successes in charging lithium and other batteries in times that are equivalent to supercapacitors and with cycle counts beyond 10,000 as shown by this announcement-de-jeur.

So, certainly batteries are going to be hard to beat. But I think supercapacitors will eventually win out due to weight, durability and raw material cost factors. And, I predict that the next 30 years will see as much development in the newly merged material / chemical / biological science as has happened in all of man's history. The problems will be solved.

They do dribble out periodically. For example:

• Team develops fast, cheap method to make supercapacitor electrodes for electric cars, high-powered lasers
• Superstretchable, supercompressible supercapacitors
• Researchers develop simple way to fabricate micro-supercapacitors with high energy density
• Highly nitrogen and sulfur dual-doped carbon microspheres for supercapacitors

There are also many examples of lab successes in charging lithium and other batteries in times that are equivalent to supercapacitors and with cycle counts beyond 10,000 as shown by this announcement-de-jeur.

So, certainly batteries are going to be hard to beat. But I think supercapacitors will eventually win out due to weight, durability and raw material cost factors. And, I predict that the next 30 years will see as much development in the newly merged material / chemical / biological science as has happened in all of man's history. The problems will be solved.

They do dribble out periodically. For example:

• Team develops fast, cheap method to make supercapacitor electrodes for electric cars, high-powered lasers
• Superstretchable, supercompressible supercapacitors
• Researchers develop simple way to fabricate micro-supercapacitors with high energy density
• Highly nitrogen and sulfur dual-doped carbon microspheres for supercapacitors

There are also many examples of lab successes in charging lithium and other batteries in times that are equivalent to supercapacitors and with cycle counts beyond 10,000 as shown by this announcement-de-jeur.

So, certainly batteries are going to be hard to beat. But I think supercapacitors will eventually win out due to weight, durability and raw material cost factors. And, I predict that the next 30 years will see as much development in the newly merged material / chemical / biological science as has happened in all of man's history. The problems will be solved.

Yes, it's a little like the airlines teaching the pilot how to work an automated flight director instead of how to fly a plane.

To learn computer science, you need to learn basic electricity first, which requires some knowledge of math and physics, which appears to be a show stopper for some people.

It's too early to know because the Juno pics have yet to be re-reprocessed, combined, and enhanced to their fullest.

Here's the results of an amateur's re-processing of Voyager photos. Great PC wall-paper.

An amateur has more freedom to tease out detail than NASA, who could risk being accused of "embellishing" if they overdo it. You can't fire an amateur/hobbyist.

Source:
https://phys.org/news/2015-06-...

By the way, the Great Red Spot has shrunk by about 20% since Voyager.

According to phys.org--

It created an iceberg of about 5,800 square kilometres (2,200 square miles), with a volume twice that of Lake Erie, one of the North American Great Lakes.

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-...

The truth is that the intermittency problem with wind and solar is so severe that when you get more than a few percent tied into the grid it actually has negative value.

Only if you do it stupidly. California is already seeing days where renewable make up 50% of their electric usage and their problems with negative value are relatively small, manageable and are in the process of being mitigated. BTW, the term for what you call intermittancy is the duck curve.

The smart way to do it is:

1. Improve the grid so that, for example, when the wind stops blowing off the east coast you can bring in electricity from the plain states to fill the gap.
2. Build natgas plants that can easily and rapidly spin up and down to also buffer the supply.
3. Include storage as part of the plants. California has recently added that to the law regulating all new forms commercial power generation in the state.

What you can't do is rely on baseload power (like nukes and coal) which get tons of subsidies in the form of guaranteed returns.

What's more, most of the energy used to PRODUCE solar panels, and much of the energy used to produce wind turbines, comes from soot-belching, coal-fired power plants in China, and most of the energy REPLACED BY these devices would have been produced in clean power plants with state-of-the-art "scrubbers" in North America, Europe & Australia.

That's all bullshit of the highest degree.
The energy required to manufacture wind turbines is recouped within about 6 months of operation.

And, in case anyone is interested:
The energy required to manufacture solar panels is a tiny fraction of how much they will generate over their lifetime.
In Middle Europe, where irradiance is about equal to that of Alaska, PV panels built with 10 year old manufacturing technology reached a net energy cost of zero within 3 years. In Southern Europe it was between 0.5 and 1.5 years.
Furthermore for every doubling in solar manufacturing capacity energy used to produce solar panels decreased by 12-13 percent, and greenhouse gas emissions dropped by 17-24 percent. Over the last decade, solar manufacturing capacity has increased 10x.

As for "scrubbers" and coal, China is way ahead of the US.
China recently cancelled construction of 104 new coal plants equal to one third of the US's total installed coal capacity. Even then, China's coal regulations are so much cleaner than the US's that by 2020 not one single US coal plant would be clean enough to legally operate if it were in China.

They're planning on impacting the moon of Didymos-- nicknamed Didymoon-- not Didymos itself.
At present the mass of Didymoon is unknown, but certainly smaller than 527 billion kg.

We already can have Internet capable vibrators, some are even equipped with cameras.

Isn't that great? Very useful if it has a location sensor.... where can a vibrator go?

Electric nose hair trimmers. Electric toilets (Toto and such). Electric screwdrivers. Electric knives.

All of these need to be on the Internet, how have we ever lived before being able to twitt the length of your nose hair...

Climate change has no effect on a year-to-year basis. If we're showing the weather to someone from Year 1900, then ok, but we aren't, so this is just dumb.

To be fair, although I think the Mother Jones article is alarmist, the actual work cited catalogued heat-related deaths documented "for 783 lethal heatwaves in 164 cities across 36 countries," referencing a search of publications dating back to 1980. This was not a one-year study.

Abstract of the original article: https://www.nature.com/nclimat...
Press release from Nature East Asia: http://www.natureasia.com/en/r...
Press release from U. Hawaii Manoa (the institution of the lead authors): http://www.hawaii.edu/news/201...
Article at phys.org: https://phys.org/news/2017-06-...
Article at Science Daily: https://www.sciencedaily.com/r...

Interactive map of number of deadly heat days: https://maps.esri.com/globalri...

There have been plenty of real advances in the last few years, not just speed improvements. For me, the most impressive thing was Generative Adversarial Networks in 2014, but there have been plenty of advances. The most recent article I read was on Relational Reasoning https://www.technologyreview.c... .

Here as some more recent advances
Turing Learning - https://www.sheffield.ac.uk/ne...
Evolution Strategies - https://www.technologyreview.c...
Bayesian Program Synthesis - https://techxplore.com/news/20...
Gaussian Processes - https://www.wired.com/2017/02/...
AI Passes Standard Intelligence Test - https://phys.org/news/2017-01-...
Semi-Supervised Learning For Handwriting Recognition - https://phys.org/news/2016-12-...
Lipreading - https://www.technologyreview.c...
One-Shot Learning - https://www.technologyreview.c...
Differentiable Neural Computer - http://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-...
Bayesian Program Learning - http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech...