If two New Hampshire men aren't a match for the Devil, we might as well give the country back to the Indians. -Stephen Vincent Benet (1898-1943)
U.S. Air Force successfully completes test flights of all-electric aircraft: ‘It’s going to make things faster and simpler’ (Stephen Proctor, August 20, 2024, The Cool Down)
The series of test flights evaluated the plane’s performance in real-world scenarios like resupply, cargo delivery, and personnel transport, including during combat. The plane can carry up to five people or 500 pounds of cargo, has a range of 288 miles, and can be recharged in less than an hour.
Scientists make incredible breakthrough with new aircraft technology (Leslie Sattler, August 19, 2024, The Cool Down)
Exciting news for the future of air travel: A groundbreaking study from Swedish scientists suggests that most flights within a 750-mile radius could be powered by hydrogen as soon as 2045.
Are We Thinking Ourselves Sick? (River Page, August 7, 2024, Free Press)
This problem was only made worse in 1980 with the publication of the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, a sort of psychiatrists’ bible. Before then, psychiatrists had only a paragraph of descriptions of mental illnesses to rely on. In the DSM-III, more detailed criteria were listed. Dr. Edward Shorter, who studies the history of medicine, and appears in the film, says the thinking went something like this: “Well, we’re going to have a set of operational criteria in order to qualify, for example, depression. There are plenty of symptoms you could have. If you can check five boxes and you’ve had these symptoms for two weeks, then you qualify for the diagnosis of depression.”
“This sounds like science,” Shorter says. “In fact, it’s not really.”
Then, in the early ’90s, the DSM-IV updated its autism criteria, allowing, for the first time, individuals without significant language or intellectual incapacities to be diagnosed. Additionally, it lowered the number of traits required for a diagnosis from eight to six.
Last year, Dr. Allen Frances, a world-renowned-psychiatrist who helped loosen the definition of autism for the DSM-IV, told the New York Post he regretted his decision: “More clinicians began labeling both normal diversity and a variety of other psychological problems as autistic.” Dr. Frances estimated that his changes would triple the rate of autism. According to the CDC, it has more than quadrupled since 2000.
It drives business.
Handles like a go-kart, flies like a heli: Flying car coming to the USA (Loz Blain, July 05, 2024, New Atlas)
Effectively, it’s a small, single-seat helicopter with automatic quick-fold rotor blades, with a bare-bones open-wheel vehicle chassis grafted on, using carbon fiber rods. It’s not precisely clear exactly where the electric part of the hybrid drive system comes in, but the combustion power appears to come from a lightweight, buzzy “Pegasus 800” two-stroke, making around 160 horsepower.
Energy-positive laser fusion approach heads toward commercialization (David Szondy, June 19, 2024, New Atlas)
Since 2022, the Denver-based company has been working to turn the laser fusion concept into a practical source of power. The goal is to produce a new krypton-fluoride laser installation that generates 10 times higher laser energy at 10 times higher efficiency and over 30 times lower cost per joule than the NIF.
Using technology first developed for the US Strategic Defense Initiative (nicknamed the Star Wars program) in the 1980s, the Xcimer installation will use a laser system producing over 10 megajoules of energy. This will be focused on larger deuterium/tritium pellets that are easier to make and handle, and produce more energy when ignited.
Producing energy is useless if it isn’t harnessed, so the fusion chamber has molten lithium salts flowing through it, not only to protect the wall from neutrons, which reduces maintenance, but to absorb the energy and carry it away to generate power.
The idea is that the lasers will stand at a distance of 164 ft (50 m) and focus their beams through two small holes to reach the target pellet. The system is designed to ignite only a small amount of the fuel, which produces the energy needed to ignite the remainder like a match set to paper. This is more efficient and economical.
“The benefits of fusion for humanity have never been more clear or more necessary,” said Mark Cupta, Xcimer board member. “Xcimer has developed a game-changing approach to inertial fusion and assembled a team of the brightest minds in the industry to execute on it. I’m confident that with Xcimer leading us on this path, the world will see this transformative source of energy finally deployed at commercial scale.”
Thanks, Gipper!
Electric Flying Taxis Are Quietly Sneaking Up on Us (STEVEN ASHLEY, 6/14/24, Scientific American)
When the electric air taxi revolution arrives, you probably won’t it hear coming. A remarkable feature of an electric vertical takeoff and landing (eVTOL) aircraft is how quietly it flies, scarcely noticeable amid typical city traffic sounds. Unlike a helicopter, there’s no pounding, 90-decibel “thwop, thwop, thwop.” In contrast, eVTOL aircraft use multiple small propellers that spin half as fast as a chopper’s rotor—avoiding the annoying, low-frequency sound pulses created by the big whirling blades.
Electric motors, which are quieter than helicopters’ turbine engines, also help keep any racket to a minimum. “The latest air taxi designs, such as those from leading builders like Joby and Archer, deliver a 20- to 25-decibel reduction in noise levels compared to helicopters,” says Mark Moore, the trailblazing engineer who led the development of NASA’s X-57 Maxwell electric airplane. That means that eVTOLs could be four or five times less noisy to nearby listeners. Beyond offering quieter flights, these new machines should also be significantly safer, greener and cheaper to fly than helicopters. Moore maintains that electric air taxis are uniquely suited for what the aviation industry calls urban air mobility (UAM) services, enabling normally gridlocked travelers to “take advantage of the third dimension to escape the ant trails on the ground.”
More than two dozen major eVTOL builders have been founded in the past decade, and a few are nearing commercial certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration or its European counterpart, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA).
The future always happens faster than you expect it to.
Giant batteries are transforming the way the US uses electricity (Leslie Sattler, June 10, 2024, The Cool Down)
Over the past three years, the number of these game-changing batteries connected to the electricity grid has grown by 10 times. And this year, that capacity is expected to nearly double again, with Texas, California, and Arizona leading the charge, per the Times.
Resembling giant shipping containers, the batteries work by soaking up excess solar and wind energy when it’s plentiful, like during sunny or windy days.
Then, they release that carbon-free electricity back to the grid in the evenings, when energy demand spikes but solar and wind power drop off.
The Right can’t stop the laws of economics by hating environmentalists.
New report reveals historic milestone as Portugal meets 95% of its electricity needs with clean energy (Ella Hutcherson, May 30, 2024, The Cool Down)
In April 2024, 95% of Portugal’s electricity came from renewable sources, making it a clean energy leader in Europe and for the rest of the world.
Per Euronews Green, this inspiring statistic is just one victory within an overall “continental shift” — in April, “fossil fuels provided less than a quarter of the EU’s energy for the first time ever.”
That was easy.
Heat battery system hits record efficiency for grid-scale energy storage (Michael Irving, May 27, 2024, New Atlas)
A new heat battery design has reached a record power conversion efficiency of 44%. This thermophotovoltaic cell is a major step on the way to sustainable grid-scale energy storage from renewable sources.
With renewable energy prices dropping fast, the barrier now is their intermittency – the first point any renewable energy skeptic will throw at you is “but what happens at night or when the wind isn’t blowing?” A little thing called “batteries” can help there, and there’s no shortage of grid-scale storage systems that can save energy for (literally) rainy days. […]
“We’re not yet at the efficiency limit of this technology,” said Stephen Forrest, contributing author of the study. “I am confident that we will get higher than 44% and be pushing 50% in the not-too-distant future.”
GERMANY NOW HAS SO MUCH SOLAR POWER THAT ITS ELECTRIC PRICES ARE GOING NEGATIVE (Futurism, 5/24/24)
Germany has so much energy coming from solar panels that it’s outpaced consumer demand and pushed energy prices into a steep nose dive — even going past zero into the negative, according to Business Insider, creating an Alice in Wonderland energy market in which consumers of electricity can be paid to use the extra power.
thanks, Vlad!