beanjuice

Yes, optionally. For some Japanese versions of mirrorless cameras, there is a forced sound even in silent modes.

[0] is a BBC article on the same topic. A large mass of sand which can store energy as heat for months at a time. Is calling it a battery really, accurate? To get the energy back from the sand, you would have to reconvert heat to electricity, which is quite lossy.

[0] https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-61996520

Heres an old video of one such example: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GijJmIz1G7U

There is a comment from Pubpeer [0] on this research [1] if anyone is curious:

"This is not the first flight of an ion-drive aircraft. Seversky was patenting and flying ionocraft in the 1960s [2], hobbyists have been building them for decades under the name "lifter", and a self-contained device that carries its own power supply was developed by Ethan Krauss in 2006.

MIT's device may be the first ionocraft to use wings for lift, however. The previous devices behaved more like helicopters than airplanes, and did not need wings to stay aloft."

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-018-0707-9

[1] https://pubpeer.com/publications/020C19C112F2605CEC4B34CA320...

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GijJmIz1G7U

In hindsight, i didn't write into that comment as much merriment and cheer as I originally intended. This article contains many staples about this community which i find incredibly endearing, including focusing on a strange problem and trying to solve it with the most roundabout method.

I would disagree with you though on the 'DIY' nature of the article, it is certainly a creative solution but the author hasn't necessarily built anything.

That part of my comment was just having some fun along with the author who was also tongue-in-cheek about mentioning Arch. Having spent too much of my life troubleshooting Windows bluetooth issues, I suspect most are in agreement with the author here.

The segment of the population which is both interested enough in what their colleagues are saying, and are interested enough in what their colleagues experience to required change is minimal.

One of the most Hacker News articles ever written. A bad solution (wearing a choker) to a self-generated problem (using Arch) that costs a lot of money.

In summary: this generates more problems than it solves (unless you're a navy seal).

It may however slow the general heating of the planet which has implications for the weather patterns that currently provide water to much of the world.

What if it wasn't blocking ALL sunlight, but just some of the heat-producing infrared portion?

Space debris, solar flares, and rogue states are issues that would impact other solar-shield type solutions (unlike popping).

What the bubbles do address immediately is the manufacture of something in space with a high planar surface area compared to the volume and density (for getting it into space).

I assume you are referring to the link in the article to [0], for me there is a button labelled 'PDF' with a "download arrow" in the upper right next to print. Perhaps there is an extension blocking the button/function?

[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/s42256-022-00495-3.epdf?shar...

As the concept was presented originally in 2015 [1], and based on the fabrication portion, the authors seemingly spent 7 years to get to this point [2]. If in 10 years we are still using multi-junction, rare earth metal based panels, as an optimistic outlook on this work, solar panels could potentially reduce the amount of rare earth/minable materials required and instead use larger areas of solar concentration.

[1] https://ur.booksc.me/book/55710391/7ba74d [2] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41378-022-00377-z#Sec6

We also cannot eat PV modules (for now)

To add on to this comment for anyone curious about ammonia: Green ammonia production is among the top 10 emerging technologies in chemistry in 2021 [1,2]. The Haber-Bosch process consumes 1% of the worlds global energy, and generates 1.4% of the worlds carbon dioxide [3].

That being said there is a lot of research both to generate ammonia from green energy, and the work to harvest ammonia for use as a fuel cell would benefit as a secondary emergent technology.

[1] https://iupac.org/what-we-do/top-ten/ [2] https://www.degruyter.com/document/doi/10.1515/ci-2021-0404/... [3] https://www.nature.com/articles/s41929-019-0414-4

By what basis do you make this estimation? The factors for aging and feeling awake arent exactly comparable.

I would say a large proportion of top chemical/materials science papers are also drawn in only powerpoint (besides data, where origin>matlab>excel).

Yes [0], "Bacterial cell surfaces possess net negative electrostatic charge by virtue of ionized phosphoryl and carboxylate substituents on outer cell envelope macromolecules which are exposed to the extracellular environment."

[0] https://doi.org/10.1016/S0167-7012(00)00224-4

Comment re-pasted from pubpeer [1], as this article contains claims which amy be disingenuous due to data handling.

"This article was reviewed on the error bar podcast episode 25: https://theerrorbar.com/?e=25 & story 106: https://theerrorbar.com/?s=106. The review was done in the light of newspaper headlines about the article. The slightly-edited transcript is copied here:

headline: BRAIN DOESN'T SLOW DOWN UNTIL 60

tweet: analysis of 1.2 million responses on the 'implicit association test' finds that adults' mental processing speed is totally good & constant until age 60. that's good news for all adults over age 35. until you look at the data.

description: in a story likely comforting to middle aged scientists & journalists, the Guardian & Independent reported last week that, Good News: the brain does not slow down until we are aged 60. what did they mean?

the result comes from a quite complicated analysis of an enormously huge set of data. a social psychology project in the USA has collected nearly 2 million responses from people who were asked to categorise things on a computer screen as, for example, 'good' versus 'bad' or as 'black' versus 'white'. they did this 120 times each.

in general, the results of this so-called 'implicit association test' are able to reveal people's unconscious attitudes - in this example, that white things are good & black things are bad. this test is a classic & it relies on people responding as quickly as possible.

in the new study, researchers in Germany downloaded 1.8 million test responses from the free online database. they analysed how people's responses changed as they age, from 10 to 80 years old. using some sophisticated (& unnecessarily complicated) analyses, the researchers reported that, while the total time spent doing the task changes a lot over life, one conclusion is that, in fact, our 'mental processing speed' remains good & strong until age 60.

phew!

evaluation: does mental speed stay high until age 60?

no.

this is not a hard one. with a total of nearly 1.2 million responses, all openly available online & clearly-presented in this paper, it is a fantastically-simple task to fact-check this claim. all we need to do is look at the data.

i've annotated the image to accompany this story on the error bar website. what the image shows is a gradual & continuous increase in mental speed between age 10 to a peak at about 35, then a gradual & continuous decrease to age 80. it's true that the speed of change seems to be different at different ages, but the strong claim that mental speed is 'high & constant until age 60' is contradicted by just looking at the data.

how did it come to this? the error bar dug deeper.

first, this is a massive dataset - which is great - but quite a lot of data were removed, for example anyone performing the task without making errors was excluded. that's a bit odd, if the best responders are removed.

second, the task itself is quite subjective - is something good or bad? or is something black of white? - & although a well-studied task, it's just one task, so conclusions about mental speed in general must be extremely limited.

third, the data are not a good measure of mental processing speed. to test mental speed, we need volunteers to be fully-focussed & making responses as quickly as possible. but the authors included 'response times' as long as nearly 6 seconds, the average times were around 1 second & there were some massive - and unexplained - differences between men's & women's responses.

fourth, one claim in the report is that the 'merely mechanical' processes of seeing the stimuli on screen & making the keyboard press response take as long as half a second in the oldest adults. this is a pure fiction - the study provides no sensible measurement of these sensory & motor processing speeds.

fifth, & amusingly, the authors chose a particular kind of deep, machine-learning analysis because they said it was "not possible" to analyse all the data in a different, simpler, but more computationally-expensive way. but the new analysis only took 32 hours to run on a computer, which makes me wonder how long the full analysis would take & why was there such a rush to get it done?

sixth & critically, the conclusion that mental processing speed is high and constant until age 60 relies only on the authors' choice of how to put a best-fit line on the data. the analysis used requires all the people to be divided into two or more different age groups. for error bar nerds: the data were fit with three straight lines for three age groups. but age is a continuous variable, so why did the authors not just fit a single, continuous curve?

well, listeners, i downloaded the data, sharpened Occam's razor & fit that single curve. it provides a very slightly worse explanation of the data, but that's what you would expected, as it is also a much less-complex explanation."

[1]

Criticism of this work[0] from which may be relevant.

"I could not find any reference to the toolset used to identify the websites being visited by the scanned users. I think this is important for external verification of the validity of the data. If the software is public and known, could the authors reference it? If the code is new, could the authors deposit it along the rest of the code in the OSF repository? This should not be a problem, since the authors do not have any conflict of interest."

[0] https://pubpeer.com/publications/3CE766FE19680525B332FA0004A...

Some equations can be incredibly simple, and explained as a part of text. I'm sure Cormac McCarthy is speaking about some abstract proof that would jolt the reader no matter what. But "Writing quality is a product of clarity and simplicity, (q = c*s)" doesn't have to be the high crime McCarthy claims.

Thank you for continuing to do such an excellent job.

You don't always get to choose what you're interested in, as much as it might seem on HN.

Is there a group of people who use WhatsApp who care about e2e encryption and hold it as the standard? Surely its common knowledge that you cannot trust the parent company of WhatsApp, or its encryption since being broken.

Would you mind elaborating on what you are afraid of happening, and what you think the cause is?

Along this thread, I would be curious to know if there is statistics available for how many acres of forest grow per year, versus how many acres are burned?

In the grand scheme of things, the academia complex is funded by taxpayers to produce academic work. It used to be that journals would at least do good editorial work, help with editing, formatting, and perhaps even graphics. All of this work is now on the author, so the question increasingly becomes, why does a taxpayer not only pay for the lab to produce research, but also the $3,000 to 5,000 or more fee to have something published, depending on the journal. Furthermore, once the research was paid for by the taxpayer, the scientist's time wasted to format the research, and the journal paid for the privilege to publish the paper- these institutions have to pay once again for access to these papers once published. In a way, journals in the 21st century are double or triple dipping on citizens, all so we can share our work.

Also consider that by the numbers, most of academia wasn't even born native English speaking, whether they now live in an English speaking country or not.

A personal note, I'm a native english speaker living abroad, with a non-native-english speaking superiors. While their writing is quite good, i find myself battling constantly for what we might consider 'better, more clear' writing, in favor of the current scientific writing 'trends' in our field.

A successful paper or two with a weird phrase or typo will end up reshaping that field to adopt this language, as authors of subsequent work attempt to align themselves to the original topic.

At the moment, it would seem apple is at least a bit more responsible with their walled garden. Their users don't get served ads, aren't forced to have Teams now always running, and in general are subject to far less bloatware.