âoeThe glass electrolytes allow for the substitution of low-cost sodium for lithium. Sodium is extracted from seawater that is widely available,â Braga said.
It can use lithium or sodium but sodium is cheaper. It may yet turn out that using lithium has advantages which justify the extra cost.
It leaves Musk happy. The megafactory churns out batteries until this (or something similar) gets commercialized, then he switches production to the new battery type. It will let Tesla make more cost-effective electric cars. (If the inventors can impress him enough, Tesla might hire them commercialize it itself. It would be a Muskian thing to do.)
It is people who have invested in lithium mining who are unhappy.
Probably not - no ingredient we've been told about is exceptionally dense. From Wikipedia Li-ion batteries have 100-265 W.h/kg and 250-676 W.h/L, which implies density of about 2.5kg/L.
This page gives typical density of glass as 2.4 to 2.8 kg/L. Sodium metal has density 0.97 kg/L. So the new cell should have similar or better mass density than the Li-ion cells.
If the bacteria are outside of a person, bleach does an excellent job of killing them. If a person with bacteria takes bleach, it does an excellent job of killing them.
If they kill bacteria with antibiotics, yes. If they kill bacteria with alcohol (which is usually the case), then no, they are not bad and will not breed super-bacteria.
I think normal landing will be rockets only, and if they fail it will be too late to parachute, so they are already trusting the landing rockets in a safety critical role. The chutes are there for emergency escape during launch. In this case, the landing rocket fuel has been expended getting away from the exploding launcher.
Only one of the two craft docking needs all that. The other only needs to not rotate and be locatable. In this case two of our three bits (command module and lunar lander) need to be independent spacecraft anyway, even if launched all together like Apollo.
I have considered before that the hardware SpaceX have or are building come quite close to supporting moon landing, and wondered how much of a gap there is and what it would take to bridge it. Unfortunately the article here is very light on detail and does not address my questions.
The Saturn V could put 140 tonnes into LEO. The Falcon Heavy will be able to put 55 tonnes into LEO. If you can split the Apollo hardware into three approximately equal bits, three FH launches could put them into orbit, then they rendezvous and head to the moon. You could probably use the existing second stage as a third stage to take the stuff from LEO to lunar orbit. (I couldn't quickly find the mass of a fuelled Falcon second stage, nor how much mass it could deliver to low lunar orbit.) You could use a Dragon in place of the Apollo command module. Whether you could use a second Dragon as the lunar lander is less clear.
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget) says lunar surface to low lunar orbit requires 1.9km/s delta-v. If you wanted to land and takeoff with the same vehicle, that would be 3.8km/s. SpaceX are planning a 'Red Dragon' mission to land a Dragon capsule on Mars. Low Mars orbit to surface is 4.1km/s (assuming no aerobraking/parachuting) so Red Dragon should be able to land on the moon and return to orbit. However, Red Dragon is unmanned - I don't know whether you have space and mass budget to stuff some people and life support in there also.
The manned Dragon capsule has rockets allowing it to propulsively land - taking from terminal velocity falling through the atmosphere to zero velocity on a landing pad. I don't know how much delta-v this requires, but I expect much less than 3.8km/s.
(Falcon Heavy and manned Dragon capsule have been under development for some time and should fly this year. I don't know how advanced Red Dragon is, but they want to launch in 2020.)
Low mass stars (and this one is very low mass) are dim, so the habitable zone is very close, so tidal effects of the star on the planet are large*, so under normal circumstances the planet will tidally lock to the star, which is not friendly to life. (Although I wouldn't go so far as to say life is impossible on a tidally locked world.)
If the planet has a large enough moon, it will lock to the moon instead, and avoid the star tidal lock (at least for a while.) So I imagine a planet and moon locked to each other and in close orbit around the star. In this case, what will happen to the planet/moon orbit as it gets perturbed by the stellar tides? Will it remain stable, or has the moon only bought me temporary reprieve from stellar tidal lock?
* Back of envelope tidal calculation: Luminosity of star L proportional to mass of star M to 4th power (roughly) Goldilocks orbital radius R proportional to sqrt(L), i.e. R propto M^2 Tidal strength T propto M/R^3 (it is derivative of M/R^2), so T propto M/M^6 = 1/M^5. (It is the 1/R^3 which allows a moon to out-tide the star, despite being very much less massive.) News says this star is 2000 times fainter than the sun, so about 0.15 solar masses So tidal effects of star on habitable planets is about 13,000 times greater than tidal effect of sun on earth. The tidal effect of the sun on the earth are small but noticeable - it causes the difference between spring and neap tides.
If you are claiming that it isn't coastlines and land areas which make continents, but rather regions of continental rock (whether above sea level or not). If this is so, you can no longer justify counting Africa as separate from Eurasia, or North and South America being separate from each other. So you can pick between the traditional 6 continents by land area, or four or five by crustal rock (Eurasia+Africa, Americas, Antarctica, Australia, and Zealandia if you think it is big enough.)
Incidentally, New Zealand may have been almost entirely submerged 24 to 21 million years ago. http://www.lincolnecology.org.... I don't know if there were any other major Zealandia land masses at the time.
"Many older coal plants have been closing in recent years, thanks to stricter air-pollution rules and cheap natural gas."
How often is it economic to do power station coal to gas conversions? Clearly you need to be near a gas pipeline. Can you just replace coal fired boilers with gas fired boilers, or is it more complicated? If instead you're using gas turbines, there is much less commonality between the old and converted power station, and less reason to convert rather than start with a green field.
I think everyone (or nearly everyone) should be taught a minimal amount of coding, not so that they can code, but so that they can appreciate what coding can do (and so they can decide whether they are interested in learning more.)
Here is a parable. Lecturer was approached by Researcher. Researcher was working with DNA sequences and had received a large computer file with many thousands of DNA sequences. These sequences all had a few characters at the beginning and end which were artefacts of the amplification and sequencing process, and needed to be removed before the sequences could be used by the next stage in the process. This was the second such file Researcher had worked with - the previous time, Researcher had spent about a month editing the file in a text editor to remove the surplus characters. Now they dreaded having to do it again, and hoped Lecturer could provide a better way. Lecturer promptly solved the problem in under a minute with a one line Unix command.
Had Researcher had an idea of what programming can do, they'd have sought this help when they received the first file, and saved a month of extreme drudgery. (Incidentally, this really happened, my current boss was Lecturer.)
I present here (not for the first time) the Woodhams Hierarchy of Epistemological Categories: 1) Stuff that you know 2) Stuff that you know where to find out 3) Stuff that you know that somebody knows 3a) Stuff that you know that nobody knows (a category irrelevant to this discussion but important to scientists.) 4) Stuff you know nothing about (Compare to the Rumsfeld Epistemological Categories.)
In the parable, 'how to best modify these DNA sequences' was initially in category 4 for Researcher, but would have been category 3 if they'd ever done some simple programming. The difference between category 4 and category 3 cost them a month. The difference between category 3 and category 1 cost them perhaps 20 minutes - instead of writing the one-liner themselves, they had to find somebody who could write it for them. This pattern is typical - when considering shifts in categories (from 4 to 3, from 3 to 2, and from 2 to 1) the benefit of shift 4 to 3 is greatest, and the cost (i.e. acquiring the knowledge) is lowest.
To be a functioning person, you need stuff in category 1, but people usually undervalue categories 2 and 3, which can cover very much more knowledge than you can fit in category 1.
Many people get motion sickness when in a VR with a moving viewpoint. Having your patient suddenly sit up and vomit would probably not be a good idea during surgery. The simplest solution would probably be to test them on the VR first to see if they are nausea-prone, and choose the surgery VR experience based on that.
Maybe the noble savage really is "serene, peaceful, in tune with nature, never takes more than he gives", precisely because their ancestors learned such a hard lesson and taught their descendants "don't mess up like we did". (I'm not saying it is so, just that it is consistent with the observation of prehistorical extinctions.)
Here is a recent contrary view, where they dated a mega-wombat fossil to 17000 years after the arrival of humans at that location. (However, if web search results are anything to go by, the human-caused-extinction hypothesis seems much more popular.)
They cheated if they broke the rules. Without knowing in details what the rules were, we can't say whether they cheated.
However we do know that a judge who knew in detail what the rules were required them to return the money. This being a civil case, we don't know if what they did was criminally illegal.
I don't see where he lied, so I think the word is misapplied. The second definition comes a little bit closer, but casinos are very much aware that gamblers are adversaries, not allies.
Slashdot Mirror
Here
The above note is not a serious proposal.
But it has much in common with a modest proposal.
From the final (U Texas) link:
âoeThe glass electrolytes allow for the substitution of low-cost sodium for lithium. Sodium is extracted from seawater that is widely available,â Braga said.
It can use lithium or sodium but sodium is cheaper. It may yet turn out that using lithium has advantages which justify the extra cost.
It leaves Musk happy. The megafactory churns out batteries until this (or something similar) gets commercialized, then he switches production to the new battery type. It will let Tesla make more cost-effective electric cars. (If the inventors can impress him enough, Tesla might hire them commercialize it itself. It would be a Muskian thing to do.)
It is people who have invested in lithium mining who are unhappy.
Probably not - no ingredient we've been told about is exceptionally dense.
From Wikipedia Li-ion batteries have 100-265 W.h/kg and 250-676 W.h/L, which implies density of about 2.5kg/L.
This page gives typical density of glass as 2.4 to 2.8 kg/L. Sodium metal has density 0.97 kg/L. So the new cell should have similar or better mass density than the Li-ion cells.
If the bacteria are outside of a person, bleach does an excellent job of killing them.
If a person with bacteria takes bleach, it does an excellent job of killing them.
If they kill bacteria with antibiotics, yes. If they kill bacteria with alcohol (which is usually the case), then no, they are not bad and will not breed super-bacteria.
I think normal landing will be rockets only, and if they fail it will be too late to parachute, so they are already trusting the landing rockets in a safety critical role. The chutes are there for emergency escape during launch. In this case, the landing rocket fuel has been expended getting away from the exploding launcher.
Only one of the two craft docking needs all that. The other only needs to not rotate and be locatable. In this case two of our three bits (command module and lunar lander) need to be independent spacecraft anyway, even if launched all together like Apollo.
All you need do is dock the bits
I have considered before that the hardware SpaceX have or are building come quite close to supporting moon landing, and wondered how much of a gap there is and what it would take to bridge it. Unfortunately the article here is very light on detail and does not address my questions.
The Saturn V could put 140 tonnes into LEO. The Falcon Heavy will be able to put 55 tonnes into LEO. If you can split the Apollo hardware into three approximately equal bits, three FH launches could put them into orbit, then they rendezvous and head to the moon. You could probably use the existing second stage as a third stage to take the stuff from LEO to lunar orbit. (I couldn't quickly find the mass of a fuelled Falcon second stage, nor how much mass it could deliver to low lunar orbit.) You could use a Dragon in place of the Apollo command module. Whether you could use a second Dragon as the lunar lander is less clear.
Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Delta-v_budget) says lunar surface to low lunar orbit requires 1.9km/s delta-v. If you wanted to land and takeoff with the same vehicle, that would be 3.8km/s. SpaceX are planning a 'Red Dragon' mission to land a Dragon capsule on Mars. Low Mars orbit to surface is 4.1km/s (assuming no aerobraking/parachuting) so Red Dragon should be able to land on the moon and return to orbit. However, Red Dragon is unmanned - I don't know whether you have space and mass budget to stuff some people and life support in there also.
The manned Dragon capsule has rockets allowing it to propulsively land - taking from terminal velocity falling through the atmosphere to zero velocity on a landing pad. I don't know how much delta-v this requires, but I expect much less than 3.8km/s.
(Falcon Heavy and manned Dragon capsule have been under development for some time and should fly this year. I don't know how advanced Red Dragon is, but they want to launch in 2020.)
Low mass stars (and this one is very low mass) are dim, so the habitable zone is very close, so tidal effects of the star on the planet are large*, so under normal circumstances the planet will tidally lock to the star, which is not friendly to life. (Although I wouldn't go so far as to say life is impossible on a tidally locked world.)
If the planet has a large enough moon, it will lock to the moon instead, and avoid the star tidal lock (at least for a while.) So I imagine a planet and moon locked to each other and in close orbit around the star. In this case, what will happen to the planet/moon orbit as it gets perturbed by the stellar tides? Will it remain stable, or has the moon only bought me temporary reprieve from stellar tidal lock?
* Back of envelope tidal calculation:
Luminosity of star L proportional to mass of star M to 4th power (roughly)
Goldilocks orbital radius R proportional to sqrt(L), i.e. R propto M^2
Tidal strength T propto M/R^3 (it is derivative of M/R^2), so T propto M/M^6 = 1/M^5. (It is the 1/R^3 which allows a moon to out-tide the star, despite being very much less massive.)
News says this star is 2000 times fainter than the sun, so about 0.15 solar masses
So tidal effects of star on habitable planets is about 13,000 times greater than tidal effect of sun on earth.
The tidal effect of the sun on the earth are small but noticeable - it causes the difference between spring and neap tides.
If you are claiming that it isn't coastlines and land areas which make continents, but rather regions of continental rock (whether above sea level or not). If this is so, you can no longer justify counting Africa as separate from Eurasia, or North and South America being separate from each other. So you can pick between the traditional 6 continents by land area, or four or five by crustal rock (Eurasia+Africa, Americas, Antarctica, Australia, and Zealandia if you think it is big enough.)
Incidentally, New Zealand may have been almost entirely submerged 24 to 21 million years ago. http://www.lincolnecology.org....
I don't know if there were any other major Zealandia land masses at the time.
"Many older coal plants have been closing in recent years, thanks to stricter air-pollution rules and cheap natural gas."
How often is it economic to do power station coal to gas conversions? Clearly you need to be near a gas pipeline. Can you just replace coal fired boilers with gas fired boilers, or is it more complicated? If instead you're using gas turbines, there is much less commonality between the old and converted power station, and less reason to convert rather than start with a green field.
From the summary, a token is 60k-110k gold. How much game time is that?
I think
3) I know what drugs I want
3a) Nobody makes the drugs I want any more
"Dope gets you through times with no money better than money gets you through times with no dope." - FFFB
It is only two out of three, but you can program Perl in Latin.
I agree with this.
I think everyone (or nearly everyone) should be taught a minimal amount of coding, not so that they can code, but so that they can appreciate what coding can do (and so they can decide whether they are interested in learning more.)
Here is a parable.
Lecturer was approached by Researcher. Researcher was working with DNA sequences and had received a large computer file with many thousands of DNA sequences. These sequences all had a few characters at the beginning and end which were artefacts of the amplification and sequencing process, and needed to be removed before the sequences could be used by the next stage in the process. This was the second such file Researcher had worked with - the previous time, Researcher had spent about a month editing the file in a text editor to remove the surplus characters. Now they dreaded having to do it again, and hoped Lecturer could provide a better way. Lecturer promptly solved the problem in under a minute with a one line Unix command.
Had Researcher had an idea of what programming can do, they'd have sought this help when they received the first file, and saved a month of extreme drudgery. (Incidentally, this really happened, my current boss was Lecturer.)
I present here (not for the first time) the Woodhams Hierarchy of Epistemological Categories:
1) Stuff that you know
2) Stuff that you know where to find out
3) Stuff that you know that somebody knows
3a) Stuff that you know that nobody knows (a category irrelevant to this discussion but important to scientists.)
4) Stuff you know nothing about
(Compare to the Rumsfeld Epistemological Categories.)
In the parable, 'how to best modify these DNA sequences' was initially in category 4 for Researcher, but would have been category 3 if they'd ever done some simple programming. The difference between category 4 and category 3 cost them a month. The difference between category 3 and category 1 cost them perhaps 20 minutes - instead of writing the one-liner themselves, they had to find somebody who could write it for them. This pattern is typical - when considering shifts in categories (from 4 to 3, from 3 to 2, and from 2 to 1) the benefit of shift 4 to 3 is greatest, and the cost (i.e. acquiring the knowledge) is lowest.
To be a functioning person, you need stuff in category 1, but people usually undervalue categories 2 and 3, which can cover very much more knowledge than you can fit in category 1.
Many people get motion sickness when in a VR with a moving viewpoint. Having your patient suddenly sit up and vomit would probably not be a good idea during surgery. The simplest solution would probably be to test them on the VR first to see if they are nausea-prone, and choose the surgery VR experience based on that.
Ask your doctor about getting an HPV vaccination.
Maybe the noble savage really is "serene, peaceful, in tune with nature, never takes more than he gives", precisely because their ancestors learned such a hard lesson and taught their descendants "don't mess up like we did". (I'm not saying it is so, just that it is consistent with the observation of prehistorical extinctions.)
Here is a recent contrary view, where they dated a mega-wombat fossil to 17000 years after the arrival of humans at that location. (However, if web search results are anything to go by, the human-caused-extinction hypothesis seems much more popular.)
They cheated if they broke the rules. Without knowing in details what the rules were, we can't say whether they cheated.
However we do know that a judge who knew in detail what the rules were required them to return the money. This being a civil case, we don't know if what they did was criminally illegal.
Con: ... is an attempt to defraud a person or group after first gaining their confidence, used in the classical sense of trust.
Persuade (someone) to do or believe something by lying to them.
A confidence trick
I don't see where he lied, so I think the word is misapplied. The second definition comes a little bit closer, but casinos are very much aware that gamblers are adversaries, not allies.