And hard vacuum is a very, very poor conductor, therefore there won't be any freezing anytime soon either.
Water evaporates at very, very low temperatures in a hard vacuum, and there's plenty of water in a human that can evaporate. Evaporation requires energy, so the temperature of the rest of the body will drop.
is the red color in these photos and the other Phoenix images the real color of the Mars surface (or at least an accurate reconstruction of what a human eye would see with ambient light there)
It's as close as you can get to reconstructing the real color from a series of monochrome images taken with different color filters.
or is it something NASA arbitrarily adds to impress viewers with notions about "the red planet"?
That Mars is pretty much reddish all over, with some white at the poles, can be easily verified from Earth with a telescope.
If there is no atmosphere/air on Mars, why in the world do we have a parachute on the lander?
Because Mars does have an atmosphere, complete with weather, sandstorms and such.
Also, "captured while its in the air" might not be an appropriate way to summarize the article as there is no air on Mars.
Mars does not have "air" (as in: 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, some random other stuff). Its atmosphere is mainly CO2, and is at much, much lower pressure than Earths. Still, it is definitely an atmosphere and not a near-vaccuum like you'd find on the moon.
Regardless of what happens to a part of the human body that is exposed to a hard vaccum (explodes spectacularly as seen in Hollywood movies vs. just becoming freeze-dried really quickly), and attempts at this are a sure way to earn a Darwin award.
That sounds like what I've wondered (which is what you may be referring to) -- couldn't you have water running directly below the solar power cells?
That was basically what I am referring to. There's a little more engineering involved (how do you interface the solar cells and pipes for the hot water without getting the former wet, but still getting enough heat to the pipes?), but basically you're using some of the energy that the solar cells cannot convert to electricity as a heat source, while at the same time cooling the solar cells (which improves their efficiency).
Ha! Sorry. I've actually heard that argument so often that the mere hint of it sends me over the edge.
Yes, for the layperson there's probably two types of insulation: One that keeps cold and one that keeps warm.:)
I wonder if you could could run an advertising campaign with your "new", "innovative" insulation that does both. I bet that it wouldn't even be the most stupid thing on TV.
I'm sorry, but that's completely wrong. Insulation is a thermal barrier that slows temperature equalization...In English, it keeps hot things hot, and cold things cold.
You don't need to tell me (read my posting again). But if you're in the US, it might help if you tell your neighbors.:)
Still doubt it could handle heating (excepting heat pump or geothermal).
Don't forget _solar_ heating. That way, you can squeeze a bit more efficiency out of the space on your roof, plus it can be used to cool the solar cells, which improves their efficiency also.
I really don't understand why people would rather spend their money on a bigger heating system rather than better insulation.
"Because insulation keeps things warm, and it gets so hot in the summer that we need to use AC to keep the house cool."
Or at least I guess that this is their (obviously flawed) reasoning. Or maybe companies make more money off selling bigger heating systems than selling better insulation.
Three trillion in solar technology would go a looong way.
You could build photo-voltaic systems for 60,000 homes.
3 trillion = 3,000,000,000,000
divided by 60,000 equals 50,000,000
Fifty million dollars per home for a photo-voltaic system ? I think you're a few orders of magnitude off. Make that "You could build photo-voltaic systems for 60,000,000 homes", and you're at least in the same ballpark (if these systems are large _and_ use fairly expensive solar cells).
You can get a 95% efficient PV cell without violating those "thermaldynamic laws".
Citation needed.
Sunlight isn't just visible light. If you want to get that high efficiency and use sunlight, you would need solar cells that are sensitive far into the far infrared range, which means that you'd essentially have to convert heat directly into electricity. Second law of thermodynamics says that that's a no-no.
Of course, if you can somehow shine monochromatic light on a solar cell which is sensitive to exactly that wavelength, you can reach fantastic conversion efficiences that are totally useless in a real-life situation.
So if this is an improvement up to 40%, then it is FAIL. If it can be applied to the existing 40% cells to make them even more efficient then Solar power is about to take off in a big way.
I'd rather have 40% efficiency solar cells at half the cost than 50% efficiency solar cells at the same cost.
Solar power is going to take off in a big way once the price of the panels drops enough. Let's hope this discovery helps with that.
... but pretending that every computer user out there can install an operating system is just delusional. Yes, there are people for whom clicking on "ok" several times (or, g0d forbid, getting the computer to boot from something other than its HDD) is an insurmountable task. They hear "install an operating system" and immediately know that they cannot do it. Regardless of how simple it may seem to you. It's not Solitaire, a web browser, or outlook (express), so they cannot do it and do not even want to try learning it.
And that's the ideal case where there are no problems whatsoever after installing the OS. During my last attempts to install Ubuntu, I had to manually mess with the video driver settings (and that was for an ancient Ati Rage Mobility 3 chipset, nothing newfangled, which ran just fine with the previous version of Ubuntu).
Water heating - sure! Light - sure. But heating? There's not enough angle when the sun strikes the earth in the wintertime, that's why it's cold - the energy is absorbed by the atmosphere.
Erm. Some of my colleagues heat their (superinsulated) houses with solar, with a small electric auxiliary heater. This year, they didn't have to use the auxiliary heater from late January on.
So, sure, you may not be able to heat your house with solar all the time, and in all latitudes, but you can use it to significantly cut your usage of other forms of power for heating.
Perhaps some chemical reaction that pulls carbon from the air directly to make ethane, then another reaction that converts the ethane to ethanol to be piped to places that can burn the ethanol for electricity. Yes, the chemical reactions to pull carbon from the air, and get it into ethanol are wasteful, but for very long distance transfer of energy (100-200+ miles), it would be less wasteful to do that, than to use standard power transmission lines.
Why turn perfectly good ethane into ethanol ? That doesn't make any sense. Ethane is much, much easier to work with than ethanol. Forget fscking ethanol. Ethanol is only good as a fuel when you can make it in bulk from agricultural waste and/or non-food crops (and even then, biomass-to-liquid could also produce a liquid fuel from this stuff that is much, much closer to gasoline/diesel than ethanol). Other than that, keep it in your beer/wine/hard liquor.
At least they seem to have moved on from the stupidity that was the "hydrogen economy".
Oh yeah. There will be a hydrogen economy if/when we manage to get useful energy out of nuclear fusion. Until then, hydrogen is just a fuel with one advantage on paper and a long list of disadvantages in practice.
But why should some VC blow money into it? In a year, he can build it without paying me a cent.
Yes, but then everybody else can also build it without paying anybody, so even if the VC would start doing so then, it would not give him any advantage whatsoever over the competition. If he blows money into it now, he secures the right to that advantage for a longer period of time.
In fact, this might even make patents more valuable (though the 12-months period is likely to be a little too short - make it 3 or 5 years) - if you invest money into the product now, the patent protection will persist for a longer time. If you wait to long, you cannot buy the (exclusive) right to the advantage anymore, and you will not gain any advantage compared to your competitors if you start using it after it has expired.
Unfortunately, I don't have the funds to build it.
That's what venture capital is for. If you can make a good business case (unfortunately, this is where many inventors fail) that you're going to blow the other two mousetrap companies out of the water and reap huge profits, you shouldn't have any trouble finding someone to provide you with the funds.
At some point, stealing the property becomes more difficult than earning it through the current system.
You're leaving out the nasty human factor (game theory calls it "spite"). At some point, someone might decide they'll just trash your stuff instead of stealing it (because the former is usually much, much easier than the latter).
but patents in general do not block people from continuing to use their existing technology.
In that case, you need to look up what a patent continuation is. Used right, it allows you to make your patent eventually cover existing (at the time of the continuation) technology as long as that technology did not exist before the original patent was filed. And once this happens, sue at your hearts content.
The farmers can still use those seeds they have shared for thousands of years.
No, they cannot. Once their crops get cross-pollinated with pollen from the GMOs, they'll either get sued, and/or their seeds will fail to germinate (thanks to terminator and/or traitor technologies. yes, that's really what they are called).
Slashdot Mirror
Water evaporates at very, very low temperatures in a hard vacuum, and there's plenty of water in a human that can evaporate. Evaporation requires energy, so the temperature of the rest of the body will drop.
It's as close as you can get to reconstructing the real color from a series of monochrome images taken with different color filters.
or is it something NASA arbitrarily adds to impress viewers with notions about "the red planet"?
That Mars is pretty much reddish all over, with some white at the poles, can be easily verified from Earth with a telescope.
Yes.
If there is no atmosphere/air on Mars, why in the world do we have a parachute on the lander?
Because Mars does have an atmosphere, complete with weather, sandstorms and such.
Also, "captured while its in the air" might not be an appropriate way to summarize the article as there is no air on Mars.
Mars does not have "air" (as in: 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, some random other stuff). Its atmosphere is mainly CO2, and is at much, much lower pressure than Earths. Still, it is definitely an atmosphere and not a near-vaccuum like you'd find on the moon.
When it's done (digging, that is).
Regardless of what happens to a part of the human body that is exposed to a hard vaccum (explodes spectacularly as seen in Hollywood movies vs. just becoming freeze-dried really quickly), and attempts at this are a sure way to earn a Darwin award.
That was basically what I am referring to. There's a little more engineering involved (how do you interface the solar cells and pipes for the hot water without getting the former wet, but still getting enough heat to the pipes?), but basically you're using some of the energy that the solar cells cannot convert to electricity as a heat source, while at the same time cooling the solar cells (which improves their efficiency).
Yes, for the layperson there's probably two types of insulation: One that keeps cold and one that keeps warm. :)
I wonder if you could could run an advertising campaign with your "new", "innovative" insulation that does both. I bet that it wouldn't even be the most stupid thing on TV.
You don't need to tell me (read my posting again). But if you're in the US, it might help if you tell your neighbors. :)
Don't forget _solar_ heating. That way, you can squeeze a bit more efficiency out of the space on your roof, plus it can be used to cool the solar cells, which improves their efficiency also.
"Because insulation keeps things warm, and it gets so hot in the summer that we need to use AC to keep the house cool."
Or at least I guess that this is their (obviously flawed) reasoning. Or maybe companies make more money off selling bigger heating systems than selling better insulation.
3 trillion = 3,000,000,000,000
divided by 60,000 equals 50,000,000
Fifty million dollars per home for a photo-voltaic system ? I think you're a few orders of magnitude off. Make that "You could build photo-voltaic systems for 60,000,000 homes", and you're at least in the same ballpark (if these systems are large _and_ use fairly expensive solar cells).
Citation needed.
Sunlight isn't just visible light. If you want to get that high efficiency and use sunlight, you would need solar cells that are sensitive far into the far infrared range, which means that you'd essentially have to convert heat directly into electricity. Second law of thermodynamics says that that's a no-no.
Of course, if you can somehow shine monochromatic light on a solar cell which is sensitive to exactly that wavelength, you can reach fantastic conversion efficiences that are totally useless in a real-life situation.
I'd rather have 40% efficiency solar cells at half the cost than 50% efficiency solar cells at the same cost.
Solar power is going to take off in a big way once the price of the panels drops enough. Let's hope this discovery helps with that.
That must be a really, really large house. How many m^2 floor space does it have ?
And that's the ideal case where there are no problems whatsoever after installing the OS. During my last attempts to install Ubuntu, I had to manually mess with the video driver settings (and that was for an ancient Ati Rage Mobility 3 chipset, nothing newfangled, which ran just fine with the previous version of Ubuntu).
Erm. Some of my colleagues heat their (superinsulated) houses with solar, with a small electric auxiliary heater. This year, they didn't have to use the auxiliary heater from late January on.
So, sure, you may not be able to heat your house with solar all the time, and in all latitudes, but you can use it to significantly cut your usage of other forms of power for heating.
Why turn perfectly good ethane into ethanol ? That doesn't make any sense. Ethane is much, much easier to work with than ethanol. Forget fscking ethanol. Ethanol is only good as a fuel when you can make it in bulk from agricultural waste and/or non-food crops (and even then, biomass-to-liquid could also produce a liquid fuel from this stuff that is much, much closer to gasoline/diesel than ethanol). Other than that, keep it in your beer/wine/hard liquor.
Oh yeah. There will be a hydrogen economy if/when we manage to get useful energy out of nuclear fusion. Until then, hydrogen is just a fuel with one advantage on paper and a long list of disadvantages in practice.
Yes, but then everybody else can also build it without paying anybody, so even if the VC would start doing so then, it would not give him any advantage whatsoever over the competition. If he blows money into it now, he secures the right to that advantage for a longer period of time.
In fact, this might even make patents more valuable (though the 12-months period is likely to be a little too short - make it 3 or 5 years) - if you invest money into the product now, the patent protection will persist for a longer time. If you wait to long, you cannot buy the (exclusive) right to the advantage anymore, and you will not gain any advantage compared to your competitors if you start using it after it has expired.
That's what venture capital is for. If you can make a good business case (unfortunately, this is where many inventors fail) that you're going to blow the other two mousetrap companies out of the water and reap huge profits, you shouldn't have any trouble finding someone to provide you with the funds.
You're leaving out the nasty human factor (game theory calls it "spite"). At some point, someone might decide they'll just trash your stuff instead of stealing it (because the former is usually much, much easier than the latter).
Not only that, but if you're really fast you can beat the original product to the market with your copy.
In that case, you need to look up what a patent continuation is. Used right, it allows you to make your patent eventually cover existing (at the time of the continuation) technology as long as that technology did not exist before the original patent was filed. And once this happens, sue at your hearts content.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Continuing_patent_application
By failing to check the bajillion claims of millions of patents with a lawyer's eye.
No, they cannot. Once their crops get cross-pollinated with pollen from the GMOs, they'll either get sued, and/or their seeds will fail to germinate (thanks to terminator and/or traitor technologies. yes, that's really what they are called).