A Note to the Editors: it would be appropriate to italicize the name of a particular vessel - Baden-Wurttemberg, Zumwalt - as the Ars article did. I know that Slashdot submitters are all about copying and pasting from articles, with nary a bit of added value (like explaining the acronym "LCS"), but y'all could at least avoid making things worse by preserving formatting.
Adafruit and Sparkfun are two companies that design and sell electronics components for makers, hardware hackers, and developers. Want to tinker with an arduino and some servos? Need a breakout board for some tiny surface-mount component? Want to augment your clothes with LEDs and sensors? Heard about this Raspberry Pi thing, but don't know the first thing about Linux? These the places to go not only for the easy-to-connect hardware, but also a large amount of information to help you figure it out.
Both companies are committed to open hardware - publishing their designs for all to see and understand. They often publish software libraries for this or that component, too. Most every kit they publish has an introductory video or tutorial to go along with it. Both companies are based in the U.S. ( lot of Adafruit's boards are fabricated and populated at their NYC headquarters.)
"NASA Poised To Topple a Planet-Finding Barrier" is the headline. Was there really a barrier to overcome here, or is it a milestone in improving capabilities?
Chuck Yeager and the X-1 breaking the sound barrier is the archetype of this figure of speech. That genuinely was a barrier, because the aeronautics of supersonic flight are different than subsonic. There is a significant crossover - not exactly a discontinuity, but certainly an abrupt change - when going transonic. Progress in flying airplanes faster and faster went quickly during and after WWII, but stalled for a bit before we achieved supersonic flight.
But since that time, there is this notion that any kind of big discovery or technological achievement is somehow breaking a barrier. My favorite was in the early 2000s, when increasing processor clockspeed was all the rage: "Intel's new chip breaks the 3 GHz barrier!" Well, no, 3 GHz was not a barrier - the chip was not fundamentally different in its construction or operation as one running at 2.9 GHz, or 3.1 GHz. At best, 3 GHz was a milestone - a nice round number that looks good on advertisements. But it's only a round number due to how humans measure things; if our definition of one second were different, or if we didn't count base-10, then that clock speed would be some other, not-so-advertiser-friendly number.
So I'll reiterate my opening question: is this new optical technology really breaking a barrier, or is it a (significant and praiseworthy) discovery that lubricates the wheels of our ever-expanding progress?
So without a proper explanation of how this reactor works, people would assume water is used to turn a turbine (or piston in this case) to generate electricity.
The article has a perfectly good explanation of how this reactor works: the heat drives a Stirling engine. If "people" don't know what a Stirling engine is or how it works, there is Wikipedia (as you linked). If "people" erroneously assume that a Stirling engine requires water, well, I'm not going to spare a lot of sympathy, especially when responding (as I was) to an anonymous coward, and especially when that anonymous coward is making three factually incorrect statements and somehow implying that he knows more than NASA does.
you may be trolling. But just in case you are merely ignorant, and have been living under a rock your whole life:
Uranium does not need water for working electricity. Like all heat engines, what is required is a place to dump the waste heat - to keep the cold end cold (relatively speaking). On Earth, that is efficiently done with evaporative cooling, but that's hardly the only way. How much water does a household Honda generator require? The nuclear sources on the Voyager space probes radiated heat directly into space. The Curiosity rover on Mars - also nuclear-powered - also uses a passive radiator.
There is water on Mars. That is the conclusion of more than two decades of exploration. (Science: it works, bitches!) Water isn't necessarily abundant (i.e., no oceans or rivers these days), but it is there. Some of it is briny subsurface moisture, most of it is ice, and some is tenuous vapor in the atmosphere. All plans for human exploration and colonization on Mars plan to make use of local water.
The same is true with the Moon: it has water. It's less widespread and abundant, but it is there. The best places to find it appear to be in polar craters that are in near-constant shadow.
We could drop a few centrifuges on the planet and run them on solar for years, slowly accumulating usable fissile material before the first astronauts touch down. Of course some infrastructure to load them up would be required... but there's almost certainly going to be a need, for one reason or another, for some type of heavy backhoe drone moving soil around anyway
although for colonization that approach could make sense (bootstrapping your infrastructure from local materials), as a practical matter it's far more efficient to just bring tens of kg of refined thorium from Earth.
The beautiful thing about nuclear is how little fuel mass you need for the electrical output. The article mentions this kilowatt-class reactor uses a chunk of U235 about the size of a paper towel tube. Measuring a tube nearby tells me that's about 4 cm diameter x 27 cm long, or about 340 cm^3. (Let's assume the slug is pure metal, which it probably isn't, and that there aren't any internal voids, like for the control rod(s).) The density of uranium is really high - 19.1 g/cm^3, comparable to gold, and nearly twice that of lead. Even so, this slug of uranium has a mass of only 6.5 kg. For comparison, the Sojourner Rover we sent to mars had a mass of 11.5 kg.
If it is easy to crack for the FBI, it is easy to crack for anyone
To quote CGPGrey: "there's no way to build a digital lock that only angels can open and demons cannot. Anyone saying otherwise is either ignorant of the mathematics or less of an angel than they appear."
This was my reaction, too. For perspective, take that energy value over a year (5.967 million kWh) and convert it to an average power output. You get something like 675 kW. That's nothing. One modest office building might have a 1 MW transformer out back. A typical suburban subdevelopment with a few dozen homes will consume that same amount. (And some of that electricity will be for, say, large TVs delivering that streamed content!)
Where from? The amounts of rock minerals from space dust and organics from reactions on the surface are probably minute.
Io is right next door (so to speak), and spews forth a lot of material from its volcanoes. Some of that material makes it into the Jovian space between the moons. Jupiter's magnetic field is a transport mechanism.
Also: we know that tons - literally, tons - of extraplanetary material rains down on the Earth each day. Jupiter, being as massive as it is, probably sucks up a lot more. Europa is a small target, but is traveling through this inward flux of material and is sure to pick some up.
If you want people to invest, you should have a return rate that is beneficial to them relatively short term, 5 years or better.
Soooooo...what you're saying is that it's time that the price of electricity took into account all the externalities that it has been avoiding all this time? Things like the true cost of pollution, laying waste to entire landscapes, exploiting workers and local populations, etc.
PV has done its part to improve the payback period by reducing costs from tens of dollar per watt back in the 1980s to less than $1/W today. It's time for the other side of the equation to rise as well.
And even if the payback period is, say, 20 years, that is still within the useful life of the panels. It's not like the calendar rolls around to 20 years and the panels suddenly poof into a cloud of silicon dust. They are still usable, just not at their nameplate value. And even then, you'll have been able to know exactly what the cost of your electricity is during that whole time. You could consider purchasing PV as a hedge against future price increases. There are additional benefits that I could go on about, but really, for most homeowners whose homes are well sited, PV does make sense.
So now we have yet another person with defective genes in our gene pool. Great. Modern medicine for the win.
I'm sure that, as the boy matures, he will be well aware of the ramifications of his mutation, and will be duly hesitant to pass it on. Parents can be jerks to their children in many ways, but knowingly gifting them a terrible (often fatal, but now treatable) genetic mutation is not usually something a parent would do.
There are ways to fix this and prevent the mutation from propagating, however. Pre-implantation selection is one possibility, which is already used routinely to screen for other genetic problems. Also: at the rate we are going, we'll probably have ways of completely removing this mutation from his genetic line by the time he is looking to have a family. If not him, then probably by the time his children are reproducing. Third: the article is unclear, but this may be a condition that requires a defect in both the mother's and father's genes - a recessive trait. If his female partner doesn't have the same mutation, then no problem. Finally: who's to say that this guy is going to have biological children? He may have none, he may yet die before reproducing, he may adopt children not genetically linked to him, etc.
The story sounds neat and all, but I can't actually see the purported images. Both links come from Science magazine: one was copied verbatim for the Slashdot posting; the other runs smack into a paywall. Without the pics, it may as well not exist - why bother posting the story at all? My guess is that submitter sciencehabit is a shill for the magazine, and Slashdot bought into it without checking the sources.
We will likely find both better ways to extract ore, and better ways to build batteries.
That was pretty much my reaction, too. When a scarce resource becomes expensive (because of, well, scarcity), we manage to find ways of using less in a product, finding new sources, or finding alternative materials to get the job done. As just one example, look at all the ingenious ways Nazi Germany managed to get around their limited supply of war materials: oil, rubber, steel, etc.
This is more or less an axiom of economic theory. One would think the same magical-free-handers that say electric cars will never displace ICE cars would understand this applies to batteries, too.
I could jump into a long discussion about how anyone, anyone, who thinks it is possible to have perfect encryption that also just-so-happens to let perfectly benevolent law enforcement in, is either ignorant of the technology, lying to achieve some other purpose, or simply doesn't care about keeping us safe from the broader and more potent dangers of weak encryption.
I could do that, but CGP Gray has done a fine job of it in one five-minute video.
There is ample precedent and case law that the EPA not only has the authority to regulate CO2 emissions, it also has an obligation to do so. Here are two relatively recent decisions:
Massachusettes v EPA: a 5-4 decision from 2007 that said that, under the wording of the Clean Air Act, CO2 emissions fall under the EPA's jurisdiction. Indeed, the ruling went so far as to say that the EPA cannot ignore CO2 pollution by failing to regulate it.
Utility Air v EPA: a 7-2 decision from 2014 (authored by Scalia) that, among other things, allows the EPA to regulate the emissions of large stationary polluters - particularly power plants.
I'll grant you that economic progress has brought all of us a long way in the last 150 years, and plentiful energy from fossil fuels has been the main enabler of that. But let's not pretend that there weren't enormous social costs to coal during that whole time.
I'd rather not debate the relative pros and cons of how we got to our present situation. We have enough information now to know that we can't continue this way for another 150 years. Nor, really, even another 50. We have better information, access to better technology, and no compelling argument - social or otherwise - to delay further.
one of the party's central tenets is low taxes on business lead to better outcomes for the country. These sorts of tax breaks are exactly what they stand for.
They are also nominally for a balanced budget and lowering the national debt. They don't seem too concerned with that at the moment.
There was a time, too, when they were purportedly the party that were the hard rationalists, not swayed by touchy-feeling, think-of-the-children arguments. (That kind of mamby-pamby stuff was for bed-wetting liberals, you see.) In other words, the kind of people that would listen to scientists, be persuaded by evidence, and realize this is not all just a hoax, and that something must desperately be done.
Slashdot Mirror
A Note to the Editors: it would be appropriate to italicize the name of a particular vessel - Baden-Wurttemberg, Zumwalt - as the Ars article did. I know that Slashdot submitters are all about copying and pasting from articles, with nary a bit of added value (like explaining the acronym "LCS"), but y'all could at least avoid making things worse by preserving formatting.
Adafruit and Sparkfun are two companies that design and sell electronics components for makers, hardware hackers, and developers. Want to tinker with an arduino and some servos? Need a breakout board for some tiny surface-mount component? Want to augment your clothes with LEDs and sensors? Heard about this Raspberry Pi thing, but don't know the first thing about Linux? These the places to go not only for the easy-to-connect hardware, but also a large amount of information to help you figure it out.
Both companies are committed to open hardware - publishing their designs for all to see and understand. They often publish software libraries for this or that component, too. Most every kit they publish has an introductory video or tutorial to go along with it. Both companies are based in the U.S. ( lot of Adafruit's boards are fabricated and populated at their NYC headquarters.)
"NASA Poised To Topple a Planet-Finding Barrier" is the headline. Was there really a barrier to overcome here, or is it a milestone in improving capabilities?
Chuck Yeager and the X-1 breaking the sound barrier is the archetype of this figure of speech. That genuinely was a barrier, because the aeronautics of supersonic flight are different than subsonic. There is a significant crossover - not exactly a discontinuity, but certainly an abrupt change - when going transonic. Progress in flying airplanes faster and faster went quickly during and after WWII, but stalled for a bit before we achieved supersonic flight.
But since that time, there is this notion that any kind of big discovery or technological achievement is somehow breaking a barrier. My favorite was in the early 2000s, when increasing processor clockspeed was all the rage: "Intel's new chip breaks the 3 GHz barrier!" Well, no, 3 GHz was not a barrier - the chip was not fundamentally different in its construction or operation as one running at 2.9 GHz, or 3.1 GHz. At best, 3 GHz was a milestone - a nice round number that looks good on advertisements. But it's only a round number due to how humans measure things; if our definition of one second were different, or if we didn't count base-10, then that clock speed would be some other, not-so-advertiser-friendly number.
So I'll reiterate my opening question: is this new optical technology really breaking a barrier, or is it a (significant and praiseworthy) discovery that lubricates the wheels of our ever-expanding progress?
Do you hold Hobby Lobby to the same standard?
The article has a perfectly good explanation of how this reactor works: the heat drives a Stirling engine. If "people" don't know what a Stirling engine is or how it works, there is Wikipedia (as you linked). If "people" erroneously assume that a Stirling engine requires water, well, I'm not going to spare a lot of sympathy, especially when responding (as I was) to an anonymous coward, and especially when that anonymous coward is making three factually incorrect statements and somehow implying that he knows more than NASA does.
you may be trolling. But just in case you are merely ignorant, and have been living under a rock your whole life:
Uranium does not need water for working electricity. Like all heat engines, what is required is a place to dump the waste heat - to keep the cold end cold (relatively speaking). On Earth, that is efficiently done with evaporative cooling, but that's hardly the only way. How much water does a household Honda generator require? The nuclear sources on the Voyager space probes radiated heat directly into space. The Curiosity rover on Mars - also nuclear-powered - also uses a passive radiator.
There is water on Mars. That is the conclusion of more than two decades of exploration. (Science: it works, bitches!) Water isn't necessarily abundant (i.e., no oceans or rivers these days), but it is there. Some of it is briny subsurface moisture, most of it is ice, and some is tenuous vapor in the atmosphere. All plans for human exploration and colonization on Mars plan to make use of local water.
The same is true with the Moon: it has water. It's less widespread and abundant, but it is there. The best places to find it appear to be in polar craters that are in near-constant shadow.
although for colonization that approach could make sense (bootstrapping your infrastructure from local materials), as a practical matter it's far more efficient to just bring tens of kg of refined thorium from Earth.
The beautiful thing about nuclear is how little fuel mass you need for the electrical output. The article mentions this kilowatt-class reactor uses a chunk of U235 about the size of a paper towel tube. Measuring a tube nearby tells me that's about 4 cm diameter x 27 cm long, or about 340 cm^3. (Let's assume the slug is pure metal, which it probably isn't, and that there aren't any internal voids, like for the control rod(s).) The density of uranium is really high - 19.1 g/cm^3, comparable to gold, and nearly twice that of lead. Even so, this slug of uranium has a mass of only 6.5 kg. For comparison, the Sojourner Rover we sent to mars had a mass of 11.5 kg.
To quote CGPGrey: "there's no way to build a digital lock that only angels can open and demons cannot. Anyone saying otherwise is either ignorant of the mathematics or less of an angel than they appear."
This was my reaction, too. For perspective, take that energy value over a year (5.967 million kWh) and convert it to an average power output. You get something like 675 kW. That's nothing. One modest office building might have a 1 MW transformer out back. A typical suburban subdevelopment with a few dozen homes will consume that same amount. (And some of that electricity will be for, say, large TVs delivering that streamed content!)
I am reminded of this saying: "a leader with no followers is just a guy taking a walk."
Io is right next door (so to speak), and spews forth a lot of material from its volcanoes. Some of that material makes it into the Jovian space between the moons. Jupiter's magnetic field is a transport mechanism.
Also: we know that tons - literally, tons - of extraplanetary material rains down on the Earth each day. Jupiter, being as massive as it is, probably sucks up a lot more. Europa is a small target, but is traveling through this inward flux of material and is sure to pick some up.
Soooooo...what you're saying is that it's time that the price of electricity took into account all the externalities that it has been avoiding all this time? Things like the true cost of pollution, laying waste to entire landscapes, exploiting workers and local populations, etc.
PV has done its part to improve the payback period by reducing costs from tens of dollar per watt back in the 1980s to less than $1/W today. It's time for the other side of the equation to rise as well.
And even if the payback period is, say, 20 years, that is still within the useful life of the panels. It's not like the calendar rolls around to 20 years and the panels suddenly poof into a cloud of silicon dust. They are still usable, just not at their nameplate value. And even then, you'll have been able to know exactly what the cost of your electricity is during that whole time. You could consider purchasing PV as a hedge against future price increases. There are additional benefits that I could go on about, but really, for most homeowners whose homes are well sited, PV does make sense.
I'm sure that, as the boy matures, he will be well aware of the ramifications of his mutation, and will be duly hesitant to pass it on. Parents can be jerks to their children in many ways, but knowingly gifting them a terrible (often fatal, but now treatable) genetic mutation is not usually something a parent would do.
There are ways to fix this and prevent the mutation from propagating, however. Pre-implantation selection is one possibility, which is already used routinely to screen for other genetic problems. Also: at the rate we are going, we'll probably have ways of completely removing this mutation from his genetic line by the time he is looking to have a family. If not him, then probably by the time his children are reproducing. Third: the article is unclear, but this may be a condition that requires a defect in both the mother's and father's genes - a recessive trait. If his female partner doesn't have the same mutation, then no problem. Finally: who's to say that this guy is going to have biological children? He may have none, he may yet die before reproducing, he may adopt children not genetically linked to him, etc.
The story sounds neat and all, but I can't actually see the purported images. Both links come from Science magazine: one was copied verbatim for the Slashdot posting; the other runs smack into a paywall. Without the pics, it may as well not exist - why bother posting the story at all? My guess is that submitter sciencehabit is a shill for the magazine, and Slashdot bought into it without checking the sources.
That was pretty much my reaction, too. When a scarce resource becomes expensive (because of, well, scarcity), we manage to find ways of using less in a product, finding new sources, or finding alternative materials to get the job done. As just one example, look at all the ingenious ways Nazi Germany managed to get around their limited supply of war materials: oil, rubber, steel, etc.
This is more or less an axiom of economic theory. One would think the same magical-free-handers that say electric cars will never displace ICE cars would understand this applies to batteries, too.
Anecdote from an Anonymous Coward on Slashdot does not count as evidence.
Also, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data".
I could jump into a long discussion about how anyone, anyone, who thinks it is possible to have perfect encryption that also just-so-happens to let perfectly benevolent law enforcement in, is either ignorant of the technology, lying to achieve some other purpose, or simply doesn't care about keeping us safe from the broader and more potent dangers of weak encryption.
I could do that, but CGP Gray has done a fine job of it in one five-minute video.
(some additional context)
There is ample precedent and case law that the EPA not only has the authority to regulate CO2 emissions, it also has an obligation to do so. Here are two relatively recent decisions:
Massachusettes v EPA: a 5-4 decision from 2007 that said that, under the wording of the Clean Air Act, CO2 emissions fall under the EPA's jurisdiction. Indeed, the ruling went so far as to say that the EPA cannot ignore CO2 pollution by failing to regulate it.
Utility Air v EPA: a 7-2 decision from 2014 (authored by Scalia) that, among other things, allows the EPA to regulate the emissions of large stationary polluters - particularly power plants.
I'll grant you that economic progress has brought all of us a long way in the last 150 years, and plentiful energy from fossil fuels has been the main enabler of that. But let's not pretend that there weren't enormous social costs to coal during that whole time.
I'd rather not debate the relative pros and cons of how we got to our present situation. We have enough information now to know that we can't continue this way for another 150 years. Nor, really, even another 50. We have better information, access to better technology, and no compelling argument - social or otherwise - to delay further.
From the standpoint of a balance sheet, an negative externality that the government allows a company to not pay for is a subsidy.
They are also nominally for a balanced budget and lowering the national debt. They don't seem too concerned with that at the moment.
There was a time, too, when they were purportedly the party that were the hard rationalists, not swayed by touchy-feeling, think-of-the-children arguments. (That kind of mamby-pamby stuff was for bed-wetting liberals, you see.) In other words, the kind of people that would listen to scientists, be persuaded by evidence, and realize this is not all just a hoax, and that something must desperately be done.
Is the Fields Medal not good enough?
The Economics Prize was not in Nobel's will, either. It was established in 1968 after the Swedish Bank ponied up the money.
A second example: the 2009 Physics prize was awarded to the inventors of the CCD sensor, which was the basis for digital imaging for many years.
All I can say is: duuuuuuuuuuuude, you just blew my mind. But, like, is my mind really my mind?