Go for the gusto. Play Obama's latest SOTU speech. It's nasty, offensive, AND completely untruthful for a 3-in-1.
Congratulations -- you're officially part of the far right. Under 17% of speech watchers disapproved of the speech in general, let alone found it "nasty, offensive, AND completely untruthful". Even though democratic viewers outnumbered Republican viewers 2:1, independents were well represented, and combined with the fact that you expressed much more than simple disapproval, this places you solidly in the right-wing column.
It may be a surprise for you to learn that most of America doesn't think the way you do. They don't view Republicans as an oppressed minority suffering from an evil socialist conspiracy. 58% actually view them as obstructionists. Heck, over 10% of Scott Brown's vote came from Obama voters, who were overwhelmingly trying to punish the democrats for not getting enough done (82% of Obama voters who voted brown support the public option; 86% of Obama voters who stayed home do).
Dude, his voice is so annoying his own ears couldn't take it anymore and shut down.
I'm kidding, of course. His hearing loss was actually the result of him being an unapologetic oxycontin addict.
Hey, stop that. It's not nice to make fun of the mentally disabled. It is NOT his fault that he's a greasy pig-eyed ogre who flunked out of college, and I don't appreciate the implications of your post. And bringing up that he hypocritically abused dangerous amounts of prescription pain killers acquired from an underground drug ring after routinely making fun of drug addicts on his show? That's just low.
How do you stand up against such massive, organized forces when all you have on your side is caucasians, the wealthy, and evangelicals? It's no surprise that Republicans are so oppressed.
Yeah. Last I heard, this is America! If you lived in Communist China, you wouldn't have the freedom to criticize like you're doing now! If it wasn't for our troops fighting for the freedoms you cherish, you'd be speaking German right now!
(Yep -- I can spout vacuous jingoistic aphorisms as well!)
Or was it better to follow the advice of a narrow-minded, bigoted, meritless, and anti-human demagogue simply because he was a fellow Socialist?
Let me guess: he's also not being non-partisan enough.;)
Could you imagine the hellabalu if people where being replaced by robots at this scake right now is someone said there needs to be a shift toward an economic place where people get paid without a job?
"This cake"? Oh great. The AIs are already here, posting on Slashdot, and are already trying to lure us toward handing over control to them with promises of cake.
Actually not true (see above post), but I did misspeak (also see above post). Phases are still quite pronounced on Mars (example), but are mild on Jupiter (example)
Actually, you can, to a small degree (darkening of the limb on either side of the planet)... but to be honest, I was thinking about the inner planets and resolving power when I wrote that.:)
Wait a minute. Why would you recommend against Jupiter and Saturn? Didn't Galileo start with less than a 4" scope? Look where that lead us! Sure, we're spoiled by the Hubble images we see all the time, but it's good to know where it all started.
Galileo did not discover the Great Red Spot. It was discovered much later by Robert Hooke, using a scope with an aperture of over 5". It took months of painstaking observations to spot and track.
I doubt that photo is unedited. It's probably a HDR reconstruction. Even mostly behind the clouds, the moon should be so bright as to be overexposed if the Galilean moons are also clear and visible in frame.
It's sad how light polluted even farmland is these days. I live in eastern Iowa. I mean, you'd think, "Iowa! You must have great viewing conditions, right?"
How much we've polluted our night skies is tragic. If you want a low Bortle limit in the US, you have to go to remote parts of the desert southwest or rockies. And I hate to think of it, but I doubt even that will be the case by the time our kids reach our age.
They're going to be so unimpressed looking at those things through a cheap 4" telescope.
Jupiter: They won't see any cloud bands -- just a glowing white dot. They might see phases on it. They'll see the Galilean moons as four points of light indistinguishable from stars. Saturn: They'll see an oblate bright thing -- Saturn with ears, to quote Galileo. Their imaginations should allow them to picture them as rings. Mars: A slightly tinted dot, probably with phases Venus: They'll see phases on a white dot, nothing else. M31: A faint, barely visible blur M42: An uneven blur
With a stock 4"'er, the only really cool thing you'll see with just your eye is the moon. With a good hydrogen alpha filter, you can get a good look at the sun. With a software image stacker and a camera eyepiece, you might be able to create fair images of some of the larger, brighter nebulae and whatnot. Even lucky imaging won't get you too much out of Jupiter or Saturn, though.
With a 4"'er, you're not going to get any detail out of Jupiter or Saturn. No cloud bands on Jupiter -- just the moons as points of light. Saturn will look like this or this if you're lucky.
1. The moon. 2. How about the moon? 3. You might want to consider the moon. 4. Have you given any thought to the moon?
No special filters needed, and it's by *far* the most visually impressive with a small aperture. If you can get appropriate filters, the sun is another good option. Everything else.... you might see phases on some of the larger bodies. And you'll probably be able to see the Jovian moons as points of light. That's about it. Perhaps a faint blur for the Andromeda galaxy if you're in a good location.
But the moon looks awesome even through a small scope.
And if the battery runs out, you die of a stupid cold.
Why would that happen? Who said anything about eliminating your natural immune system? The idea is to train the immune system to recognize things that it hasn't encountered yet as threats, not keep it from recognizing threats on its own.
Either that, or some idiot *coughmcafeecough* accidentally uploads an antibody definition that fights off red blood cells.
Right. Like that would meet FDA approval. And if it did, why wouldn't a conventional vaccine be at the same risk?
Is this software used for fleet management? It seems like EV fleet owners would be your main customers.
We're actually marketing to a variety of prospects. I can't go into details, unfortunately.
Is it mainly the temperature effect on the batteries, or something else?
Early on, there's a temperature effect on the batteries. As they warm up, it decreases. There's also the need to run the heater, which is often a power hog. And lastly, there's the normal effects of cold weather, such as increased rolling losses.
The first battery I experimented with was the boron-air battery. The idea was that if we could deposit boron from aqueous solution of boric acid, we could build a very high energy density battery. Unfortunately, all that was produced was hydrogen gas when I hooked it to a power supply. I tried different metals (copper, zinc, aluminum, etc), but all produced hydrogen - so I kind of gave up.
Hmm... never heard of a boron-air battery. I recall one team working on a vanadium-boron-air battery, but it was a primary cell and thus couldn't be recharged. Were you trying to create a new chemistry?
Currently, I am experimenting with iron-air batteries. Search and you will find some old papers. I also might try and Edison NiFe some time.
I haven't read too much about iron-air, but NiFe is interesting if only for its extremely long life. Jay Leno's Baker Electric still runs on its original NiFe batteries.:) Just be careful when working with nickel, as it's toxic.
The LISICON membranes are quite neat, but how resistant are they to "clogging"?
Seems that's always a problem with "air batteries" (one of the many very big challenges standing in their way, IMHO -- also price per watt and efficiency tend to be poor). But it shouldn't be a problem with nickel-lithium. For nickel-lithium, you use a traditional NiMH cathode in contact with an aqueous electrolyte, a lithium metal anode in contact with an organic electrolyte, and the membrane separating the two. I'd have to dig up the paper to be sure, but I seem to recall that they expected an energy density in the ~500Wh/kg range.
What do you think of ZEBRA batteries?
If lithium-ion hadn't come around, I think most EV makers would be using ZEBRAs with an ultracapacitor buffer. Energy density is pretty good, they're nontoxic, reasonably cheap, efficient and have good cycle life -- but they have awful power density and have to be kept hot. An ultracapacitor with could not only buffer power demands, but also potentially store enough energy for heating the pack back up if the car has to be stored for a while. Still, those heat requirements do make the engineering a lot more challenging and waste energy. I think you'd have to let the user choose, when they park, whether they want a full shutdown or want the battery to remain heated (but thus draining power).
Either way, we've got li-ion now, so we don't need to worry about that.:) ZEBRAs will continue to find use in specialized applications (I've heard of their production recently for use to add regenerative braking to trains), but I don't expect to see them in many (if any) mainstream EVs.
The problem is that li-ion is currently very expensive, and not very durable.
Ah, but that depends on the chemistry:) And how you treat the cells plays a huge role, too. If you don't carefully load balance and climate-control the cells, and you use ones with a cobalt-based cathode, you'll be lucky to get more than a couple years out of them (i.e., laptops, cell phones, etc). But even the cobalt-based li-ions can last 5-7 years if you baby them -- extensive cooling, esp. during charge, and meticulous load balancing, with a configuration tolerant of cell failures. Tesla has an interesting approach. They assemble cells in parallel in "bricks" (69 cells to a brick), then assemble the bricks in series into "sheets" (9 bricks to a sheet), then assembl
and for now I'll let you gloss over how to make this device small or power it or provide supplies for it
There are a wide variety of ways to power implants, and depends on the power requirements. Everything from primary cells to electromagnetic induction to piezoelectricity to microbial fuel cells to direct glucose fuel cells to betavoltaics. I don't know enough about the process of the immune system "recognizing" a protein as a threat to say what supplies (if any) would be needed, whether the body itself could provide them, or what volume they'd need to take up.
but is this really something you're willing to leave open to wide-area wireless hacking?
It'd pay attention to digitally signed data only, of course. And there could always be the possibility to let the recipient choose whether or not to accept the particular "update".
High school? I never would have guessed. And usually it's glaringly obvious.:)
That's cool that you work in the EV industry. That must be some accurate software to include weather forecasts in vehicle range.
Oh, it has to be!:) Weather -- in particular, temperature -- plays a very large role in EV range. For example, as Lutz recently noted, while he had been getting 40+ miles on his Volt in city driving warmer weather, during Michigan's recent cold snap, it got only 28 miles. We download and parse NWS forecasts (GFS MOS MAV, GFS MOS MEX), then interpolate between them (both geographically and temporally).
It's a neat field:)
I'm a homeschool highschool student who reads about these matters for fun. I experiment, unsuccessfully, with attempts to build batteries.
I'm curious as to what exactly you mean by this. Are you building battery packs or individual cells? If battery packs, what kind of cells are you using? And if building cells, what chemistry? I'm curious how high-tech you're going -- I assume somewhere between "potato battery" and "lithium ion";).
Have you heard of LISICON membranes? They're really neat. They let you use an aqueous electrolyte on one side and an organic on the other while still allowing lithium ions to cross. Plus, they're resistant to dendrite damage if you use a metallic lithium anode (when metallic lithium plates, it tends to form dendrites which can pierce traditional membranes). LISICON membranes are used in Li-air and nickel-lithium cells.
Lithium-sulfur cathodes are also pretty cool. A team from the University of Waterloo had a really clever approach to . They wicked molten sulfur into the pores of mesoporous carbon, then functionalized the surface with polyethylene glycol. This keeps the lithium polysulfides, which tend to be soluble and escape the cathode, trapped inside the pores (they're hydrophobic). They got some really amazing results. The paper is "A highly ordered nanostructured carbon-sulphur cathode for lithium-sulphur batteries". Again, like with li-air and nickel-lithium, probably a wee bit outside of one's capability to build at home -- but still neat.:)
One of the craziest concepts I've run into is that of a "digital quantum battery" (actually capacitor). The paper is a bit dense, but basically, the idea is to print an array of nanoscale vacuum-tube capacitors (lithographically, like with computer chips). When you get that small, quantum effects help keep current from arcing, so they can run them up to huge voltages (by capacitor standards, at least). The electric fields can be made so intense that you can put so much mechanical strain on the electrodes that one needs to be made out of a carbon nanotube for optimal performance.:) And of course, it'd be all nontoxic and have pretty much limitless cycle life.
Modern battery research is pretty fascinating. While the odds of any one tech panning out are low, the odds of every battery tech not panning out are almost nil. Did you know that some of the li-ion batteries starting to hit the market now have silicon anodes instead of graphite? This is brand new, as of January. So forget everything you ever heard about the maximum theoretical energy density for li-ion batteries. Silicon ups it significantly; it can hold as much as 10 times more lithium in the anode.
Even if you're just building battery packs, rather than individual cells, there's a lot that can be done there. I've been tempted myself to mess around with that. In my "ideal" charging setup, cells are separated by a corrugated aluminum foil that acts as a heat sink, with forced air being able to be blown through the channels for cooling. For extreme rapid charging, I'd have the charger itself provide coolant, with the charger cable being actively cooled by the coolant it provides to the vehicle. Coolant would be supercritical CO2, due to its low viscosity
You are actually getting %50 sunlight to hydrogen efficiency at a 0.3 capacity factor with those engines
That sounds about right.
The Mobil M syngas to gasoline (also called methanol to gasoline), is %86 percent energy efficient
That sounds about right as well. And then there's the difference in electricity/gasoline to kinetic energy efficiency for the vehicles themselves.
1kW/m^2 * 1 acre * 1 year = 127,706,349 megajoules.
As I mentioned in my last post, it doesn't work that way. Take a look at what solar farms actually look like up close. Notice all the empty space on the grounds? You have to space them out or they'll shadow each other at any point other than noon and you will have spent a lot of money on hardware that's being used suboptimally. There's also roads and other wasted land. So if you're calculating based on solar input, you need to multiply not just by capacity factor, but a spacing factor as well. Or, conversely, if you want to assume full shadowing, you can't just use the numbers from an existing solar thermal plant; you'll need to calculate that one from 1kW/m^2 as well.
Probably the easiest way is just to compare the efficiencies. Solar thermal plants will generally get you somewhere between 30% and 50% generation efficiency, depending on the tech used (the latter case being the high temperature molten salt plants). Electric motors + inverters will generally get you somewhere in the range of 85-90% average efficiency. Li-ion packs are very efficient (96-99%). Transmission in the US averages 92.8% efficiency. I'm not sure what sort of distribution losses you'd have for your fuel -- I'd wager somewhere along the order of 5-10%. Gasoline engines operate in the mid-30s percent efficiency in peak conditions, but only average about 20% in typical driving conditions. So, putting it all together, you get 23-41% system efficiency vs. ~8% system efficiency. So overall, the gasoline comes off a bit better in the calculations than my first impression, but obviously it's not going to beat out just using electricity.
Still, there is potential if they can do it affordably. That's a heck of a lot more land efficient than biofuels, even algae, and probably cheaper than algae too (the tankage requirements kill it for algae). Still, the hardware costs seem bound to be a lot higher than for solar thermal electricity costs, just judging from a manufacturing complexity perspective.
Also, Rei, are you an energy researcher or something??? You make a lot of really good comments here on/. about energy.
I work in the EV industry, so it's part of my job to stay on top of various battery and fuel technologies.:) My company develops software to provide accurate range calculation to vehicles (including terrain, weather forecasts, etc). While we launched it for EVs since they have particular need for it, it can work with any kind of powertrain, present or future (unless the laws of physics up and change on us!), so I need to stay on top of things. Also, my father works in the oil industry (he's actually the CEO of one of the US's largest refiners), so I get diverse perspectives.
I've always wondered whether some day it might be possible to have an implant that wirelessly receives new data definitions of proteins expressed by various pathogens and have it express the protein in a way that will trigger an immune response. Hence, you can automatically update everybody's immunity. Sort of like a computer virus scanner. "Oh, H10N7 has mutated into a virulent form and is now killing people in Taipei? Everyone within a 300 mile radius of Taipei with an implant who doesn't have a counterindication for it will start expressing antibodies to H10N7."
Obviously not everyone would *have* to have such an implant. But I'd certainly want one. Basically, an automatic flu shot every year, an automatic immunization against pandemics, an automatic immunization in case of biological attack, an automatic immunization against cancer-causing viruses, etc. Whenever an immunization passed FDA approval, if you were ever at risk for it, you could get it. You could even have such implants have two-way communication. If they could isolate what has made you sick, or even just what antibodies your body is producing to attack what's making you sick, they could submit that information for central analysis and outbreak control.
Slashdot Mirror
Go for the gusto. Play Obama's latest SOTU speech. It's nasty, offensive, AND completely untruthful for a 3-in-1.
Congratulations -- you're officially part of the far right. Under 17% of speech watchers disapproved of the speech in general, let alone found it "nasty, offensive, AND completely untruthful". Even though democratic viewers outnumbered Republican viewers 2:1, independents were well represented, and combined with the fact that you expressed much more than simple disapproval, this places you solidly in the right-wing column.
It may be a surprise for you to learn that most of America doesn't think the way you do. They don't view Republicans as an oppressed minority suffering from an evil socialist conspiracy. 58% actually view them as obstructionists. Heck, over 10% of Scott Brown's vote came from Obama voters, who were overwhelmingly trying to punish the democrats for not getting enough done (82% of Obama voters who voted brown support the public option; 86% of Obama voters who stayed home do).
Dude, his voice is so annoying his own ears couldn't take it anymore and shut down.
I'm kidding, of course. His hearing loss was actually the result of him being an unapologetic oxycontin addict.
Hey, stop that. It's not nice to make fun of the mentally disabled. It is NOT his fault that he's a greasy pig-eyed ogre who flunked out of college, and I don't appreciate the implications of your post. And bringing up that he hypocritically abused dangerous amounts of prescription pain killers acquired from an underground drug ring after routinely making fun of drug addicts on his show? That's just low.
Leave him alone.
Well, look at all of the powerful people conspiring to take away the rights of Republicans:
* Illegal immigrants
* Gays
* The poor
* African-Americans
* Environmentalists
* College professors
* Peaceniks
* Atheists
* Potheads
How do you stand up against such massive, organized forces when all you have on your side is caucasians, the wealthy, and evangelicals? It's no surprise that Republicans are so oppressed.
The difference is liberty. And I choose liberty.
Yeah. Last I heard, this is America! If you lived in Communist China, you wouldn't have the freedom to criticize like you're doing now! If it wasn't for our troops fighting for the freedoms you cherish, you'd be speaking German right now!
(Yep -- I can spout vacuous jingoistic aphorisms as well!)
Or was it better to follow the advice of a narrow-minded, bigoted, meritless, and anti-human demagogue simply because he was a fellow Socialist?
Let me guess: he's also not being non-partisan enough. ;)
Glenn Beck?
Could you imagine the hellabalu if people where being replaced by robots at this scake right now is someone said there needs to be a shift toward an economic place where people get paid without a job?
"This cake"? Oh great. The AIs are already here, posting on Slashdot, and are already trying to lure us toward handing over control to them with promises of cake.
Actually not true (see above post), but I did misspeak (also see above post). Phases are still quite pronounced on Mars (example), but are mild on Jupiter (example)
Actually, you can, to a small degree (darkening of the limb on either side of the planet)... but to be honest, I was thinking about the inner planets and resolving power when I wrote that. :)
Indeed, I mentioned hydrogen-alpha in another place in this thread. Your goal is to see detail, not just dim and color the image.
Wait a minute. Why would you recommend against Jupiter and Saturn? Didn't Galileo start with less than a 4" scope? Look where that lead us! Sure, we're spoiled by the Hubble images we see all the time, but it's good to know where it all started.
Galileo did not discover the Great Red Spot. It was discovered much later by Robert Hooke, using a scope with an aperture of over 5". It took months of painstaking observations to spot and track.
I doubt that photo is unedited. It's probably a HDR reconstruction. Even mostly behind the clouds, the moon should be so bright as to be overexposed if the Galilean moons are also clear and visible in frame.
The night sky can be rather unforgiving and frustrating if you don't know what to look for.
Speaking of not being frustrated by the night sky, I can't recommend strongly enough this site. Know your viewing conditions in advance!
It's sad how light polluted even farmland is these days. I live in eastern Iowa. I mean, you'd think, "Iowa! You must have great viewing conditions, right?"
Mediocre at best..
How much we've polluted our night skies is tragic. If you want a low Bortle limit in the US, you have to go to remote parts of the desert southwest or rockies. And I hate to think of it, but I doubt even that will be the case by the time our kids reach our age.
Ooh, forgot about the Pleiades. Sure, they're just points of light, but they're a bunch of clustered pretty blue points of light. :)
You can't come even close to seeing the red spot with a 4" telescope. Lucky imaging on a good quality 6", maybe. Probably not.
They're going to be so unimpressed looking at those things through a cheap 4" telescope.
Jupiter: They won't see any cloud bands -- just a glowing white dot. They might see phases on it. They'll see the Galilean moons as four points of light indistinguishable from stars.
Saturn: They'll see an oblate bright thing -- Saturn with ears, to quote Galileo. Their imaginations should allow them to picture them as rings.
Mars: A slightly tinted dot, probably with phases
Venus: They'll see phases on a white dot, nothing else.
M31: A faint, barely visible blur
M42: An uneven blur
With a stock 4"'er, the only really cool thing you'll see with just your eye is the moon. With a good hydrogen alpha filter, you can get a good look at the sun. With a software image stacker and a camera eyepiece, you might be able to create fair images of some of the larger, brighter nebulae and whatnot. Even lucky imaging won't get you too much out of Jupiter or Saturn, though.
With a 4"'er, you're not going to get any detail out of Jupiter or Saturn. No cloud bands on Jupiter -- just the moons as points of light. Saturn will look like this or this if you're lucky.
But the moon looks great at any magnification.
1. The moon.
2. How about the moon?
3. You might want to consider the moon.
4. Have you given any thought to the moon?
No special filters needed, and it's by *far* the most visually impressive with a small aperture. If you can get appropriate filters, the sun is another good option. Everything else.... you might see phases on some of the larger bodies. And you'll probably be able to see the Jovian moons as points of light. That's about it. Perhaps a faint blur for the Andromeda galaxy if you're in a good location.
But the moon looks awesome even through a small scope.
And if the battery runs out, you die of a stupid cold.
Why would that happen? Who said anything about eliminating your natural immune system? The idea is to train the immune system to recognize things that it hasn't encountered yet as threats, not keep it from recognizing threats on its own.
Either that, or some idiot *coughmcafeecough* accidentally uploads an antibody definition that fights off red blood cells.
Right. Like that would meet FDA approval. And if it did, why wouldn't a conventional vaccine be at the same risk?
Is this software used for fleet management? It seems like EV fleet owners would be your main customers.
We're actually marketing to a variety of prospects. I can't go into details, unfortunately.
Is it mainly the temperature effect on the batteries, or something else?
Early on, there's a temperature effect on the batteries. As they warm up, it decreases. There's also the need to run the heater, which is often a power hog. And lastly, there's the normal effects of cold weather, such as increased rolling losses.
The first battery I experimented with was the boron-air battery. The idea was that if we could deposit boron from aqueous solution of boric acid, we could build a very high energy density battery. Unfortunately, all that was produced was hydrogen gas when I hooked it to a power supply. I tried different metals (copper, zinc, aluminum, etc), but all produced hydrogen - so I kind of gave up.
Hmm... never heard of a boron-air battery. I recall one team working on a vanadium-boron-air battery, but it was a primary cell and thus couldn't be recharged. Were you trying to create a new chemistry?
Currently, I am experimenting with iron-air batteries. Search and you will find some old papers. I also might try and Edison NiFe some time.
I haven't read too much about iron-air, but NiFe is interesting if only for its extremely long life. Jay Leno's Baker Electric still runs on its original NiFe batteries. :) Just be careful when working with nickel, as it's toxic.
The LISICON membranes are quite neat, but how resistant are they to "clogging"?
Seems that's always a problem with "air batteries" (one of the many very big challenges standing in their way, IMHO -- also price per watt and efficiency tend to be poor). But it shouldn't be a problem with nickel-lithium. For nickel-lithium, you use a traditional NiMH cathode in contact with an aqueous electrolyte, a lithium metal anode in contact with an organic electrolyte, and the membrane separating the two. I'd have to dig up the paper to be sure, but I seem to recall that they expected an energy density in the ~500Wh/kg range.
What do you think of ZEBRA batteries?
If lithium-ion hadn't come around, I think most EV makers would be using ZEBRAs with an ultracapacitor buffer. Energy density is pretty good, they're nontoxic, reasonably cheap, efficient and have good cycle life -- but they have awful power density and have to be kept hot. An ultracapacitor with could not only buffer power demands, but also potentially store enough energy for heating the pack back up if the car has to be stored for a while. Still, those heat requirements do make the engineering a lot more challenging and waste energy. I think you'd have to let the user choose, when they park, whether they want a full shutdown or want the battery to remain heated (but thus draining power).
Either way, we've got li-ion now, so we don't need to worry about that. :) ZEBRAs will continue to find use in specialized applications (I've heard of their production recently for use to add regenerative braking to trains), but I don't expect to see them in many (if any) mainstream EVs.
The problem is that li-ion is currently very expensive, and not very durable.
Ah, but that depends on the chemistry :) And how you treat the cells plays a huge role, too. If you don't carefully load balance and climate-control the cells, and you use ones with a cobalt-based cathode, you'll be lucky to get more than a couple years out of them (i.e., laptops, cell phones, etc). But even the cobalt-based li-ions can last 5-7 years if you baby them -- extensive cooling, esp. during charge, and meticulous load balancing, with a configuration tolerant of cell failures. Tesla has an interesting approach. They assemble cells in parallel in "bricks" (69 cells to a brick), then assemble the bricks in series into "sheets" (9 bricks to a sheet), then assembl
and for now I'll let you gloss over how to make this device small or power it or provide supplies for it
There are a wide variety of ways to power implants, and depends on the power requirements. Everything from primary cells to electromagnetic induction to piezoelectricity to microbial fuel cells to direct glucose fuel cells to betavoltaics. I don't know enough about the process of the immune system "recognizing" a protein as a threat to say what supplies (if any) would be needed, whether the body itself could provide them, or what volume they'd need to take up.
but is this really something you're willing to leave open to wide-area wireless hacking?
It'd pay attention to digitally signed data only, of course. And there could always be the possibility to let the recipient choose whether or not to accept the particular "update".
High school? I never would have guessed. And usually it's glaringly obvious. :)
That's cool that you work in the EV industry. That must be some accurate software to include weather forecasts in vehicle range.
Oh, it has to be! :) Weather -- in particular, temperature -- plays a very large role in EV range. For example, as Lutz recently noted, while he had been getting 40+ miles on his Volt in city driving warmer weather, during Michigan's recent cold snap, it got only 28 miles. We download and parse NWS forecasts (GFS MOS MAV, GFS MOS MEX), then interpolate between them (both geographically and temporally).
It's a neat field :)
I'm a homeschool highschool student who reads about these matters for fun. I experiment, unsuccessfully, with attempts to build batteries.
I'm curious as to what exactly you mean by this. Are you building battery packs or individual cells? If battery packs, what kind of cells are you using? And if building cells, what chemistry? I'm curious how high-tech you're going -- I assume somewhere between "potato battery" and "lithium ion" ;).
Have you heard of LISICON membranes? They're really neat. They let you use an aqueous electrolyte on one side and an organic on the other while still allowing lithium ions to cross. Plus, they're resistant to dendrite damage if you use a metallic lithium anode (when metallic lithium plates, it tends to form dendrites which can pierce traditional membranes). LISICON membranes are used in Li-air and nickel-lithium cells.
Lithium-sulfur cathodes are also pretty cool. A team from the University of Waterloo had a really clever approach to . They wicked molten sulfur into the pores of mesoporous carbon, then functionalized the surface with polyethylene glycol. This keeps the lithium polysulfides, which tend to be soluble and escape the cathode, trapped inside the pores (they're hydrophobic). They got some really amazing results. The paper is "A highly ordered nanostructured carbon-sulphur cathode for lithium-sulphur batteries". Again, like with li-air and nickel-lithium, probably a wee bit outside of one's capability to build at home -- but still neat. :)
One of the craziest concepts I've run into is that of a "digital quantum battery" (actually capacitor). The paper is a bit dense, but basically, the idea is to print an array of nanoscale vacuum-tube capacitors (lithographically, like with computer chips). When you get that small, quantum effects help keep current from arcing, so they can run them up to huge voltages (by capacitor standards, at least). The electric fields can be made so intense that you can put so much mechanical strain on the electrodes that one needs to be made out of a carbon nanotube for optimal performance. :) And of course, it'd be all nontoxic and have pretty much limitless cycle life.
Modern battery research is pretty fascinating. While the odds of any one tech panning out are low, the odds of every battery tech not panning out are almost nil. Did you know that some of the li-ion batteries starting to hit the market now have silicon anodes instead of graphite? This is brand new, as of January. So forget everything you ever heard about the maximum theoretical energy density for li-ion batteries. Silicon ups it significantly; it can hold as much as 10 times more lithium in the anode.
Even if you're just building battery packs, rather than individual cells, there's a lot that can be done there. I've been tempted myself to mess around with that. In my "ideal" charging setup, cells are separated by a corrugated aluminum foil that acts as a heat sink, with forced air being able to be blown through the channels for cooling. For extreme rapid charging, I'd have the charger itself provide coolant, with the charger cable being actively cooled by the coolant it provides to the vehicle. Coolant would be supercritical CO2, due to its low viscosity
You are actually getting %50 sunlight to hydrogen efficiency at a 0.3 capacity factor with those engines
That sounds about right.
The Mobil M syngas to gasoline (also called methanol to gasoline), is %86 percent energy efficient
That sounds about right as well. And then there's the difference in electricity/gasoline to kinetic energy efficiency for the vehicles themselves.
1kW/m^2 * 1 acre * 1 year = 127,706,349 megajoules.
As I mentioned in my last post, it doesn't work that way. Take a look at what solar farms actually look like up close. Notice all the empty space on the grounds? You have to space them out or they'll shadow each other at any point other than noon and you will have spent a lot of money on hardware that's being used suboptimally. There's also roads and other wasted land. So if you're calculating based on solar input, you need to multiply not just by capacity factor, but a spacing factor as well. Or, conversely, if you want to assume full shadowing, you can't just use the numbers from an existing solar thermal plant; you'll need to calculate that one from 1kW/m^2 as well.
Probably the easiest way is just to compare the efficiencies. Solar thermal plants will generally get you somewhere between 30% and 50% generation efficiency, depending on the tech used (the latter case being the high temperature molten salt plants). Electric motors + inverters will generally get you somewhere in the range of 85-90% average efficiency. Li-ion packs are very efficient (96-99%). Transmission in the US averages 92.8% efficiency. I'm not sure what sort of distribution losses you'd have for your fuel -- I'd wager somewhere along the order of 5-10%. Gasoline engines operate in the mid-30s percent efficiency in peak conditions, but only average about 20% in typical driving conditions. So, putting it all together, you get 23-41% system efficiency vs. ~8% system efficiency. So overall, the gasoline comes off a bit better in the calculations than my first impression, but obviously it's not going to beat out just using electricity.
Still, there is potential if they can do it affordably. That's a heck of a lot more land efficient than biofuels, even algae, and probably cheaper than algae too (the tankage requirements kill it for algae). Still, the hardware costs seem bound to be a lot higher than for solar thermal electricity costs, just judging from a manufacturing complexity perspective.
Also, Rei, are you an energy researcher or something??? You make a lot of really good comments here on /. about energy.
I work in the EV industry, so it's part of my job to stay on top of various battery and fuel technologies. :) My company develops software to provide accurate range calculation to vehicles (including terrain, weather forecasts, etc). While we launched it for EVs since they have particular need for it, it can work with any kind of powertrain, present or future (unless the laws of physics up and change on us!), so I need to stay on top of things. Also, my father works in the oil industry (he's actually the CEO of one of the US's largest refiners), so I get diverse perspectives.
That post is funny because few people have even heard about cellulosic butanol, so the concept of a person being excited by it is humorous!
I've always wondered whether some day it might be possible to have an implant that wirelessly receives new data definitions of proteins expressed by various pathogens and have it express the protein in a way that will trigger an immune response. Hence, you can automatically update everybody's immunity. Sort of like a computer virus scanner. "Oh, H10N7 has mutated into a virulent form and is now killing people in Taipei? Everyone within a 300 mile radius of Taipei with an implant who doesn't have a counterindication for it will start expressing antibodies to H10N7."
Obviously not everyone would *have* to have such an implant. But I'd certainly want one. Basically, an automatic flu shot every year, an automatic immunization against pandemics, an automatic immunization in case of biological attack, an automatic immunization against cancer-causing viruses, etc. Whenever an immunization passed FDA approval, if you were ever at risk for it, you could get it. You could even have such implants have two-way communication. If they could isolate what has made you sick, or even just what antibodies your body is producing to attack what's making you sick, they could submit that information for central analysis and outbreak control.