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)
The placebo effect unlocked: How the brain tricks itself into pain relief (Bronwyn Thompson, July 25, 2024, New Atlas)
The findings do more than just solve a puzzle for neuroscientists and put to bed any thought that the placebo effect was ‘all in your head’ (even though, quite literally, it is).
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.
Lab Leak Mania: Why did the New York Times publish an op-ed supporting the lab leak theory? (PAUL OFFIT, JUN 24, 2024, Beyond the Noise)
In a one-hour video, the TWiV team addressed each of the “Five Key Points” proffered by Chan. The group consisted of Vincent Racaniello (virologist), Alan Dove (microbiologist), Rich Condit (viral geneticist), Brianne Barker (immunologist), and Jolene Ramsey (microbiologist). The video was released on June 10, 2024, one week after Chan’s publication in the New York Times. This wasn’t the first time that the TWiV team had discussed the origin of SARS-CoV-2; it was the ninth. Previous guests have included evolutionary biologists who had directly investigated the events in Wuhan; specifically, Michael Worobey, Kristian Anderson, Eddie Holmes, Marion Koopmans, and Robert Garry, who had collectively published a paper in the journal Science in 2022 titled, “The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan Was the Early Epicenter of the COVID-19 Pandemic.” This paper showed that all the early cases of SARS-CoV-2 clustered around the southwestern section of a wet market in Wuhan where animals susceptible to coronavirus were illegally sold and inadequately housed. Worobey and his team had shown that 1) the early cases had direct or indirect contact with the market and 2) none of the early cases occurred around the Wuhan Institute of Virology. This single paper was devastating to Chan’s hypothesis.
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.
How Congestion Pricing Makes Cities More Livable: As New York puts its gridlock-busting plans on hold, the success of congestion pricing elsewhere proves it’s not just smart — it’s popular. (Eric Krebs, June 7, 2024, Reasons to be Cheerful)
In just a few short decades during the mid-twentieth century, cars conquered the 750-year-old city of Stockholm. As early as the 1980s, various schemes for reclaiming the city’s fourteen islands from gridlock had been proposed, but politics kept getting in the way and plans never materialized. In 2002, as part of political compromise, a divided Swedish parliament began to work toward a long-desired goal: a trial run of congestion pricing in Stockholm, with a public referendum on the policy to follow.On January 3, 2006, the trial began. Watching it unfold, Jonas Eliasson, a life-long transit researcher (and enthusiast) who has served as director of transport accessibility at the Swedish Transport Administration since 2019, was excited — and worried. Neither emotion was unwarranted.
Congestion pricing had succeeded before. In 1975, Singapore pioneered its Area Licensing Scheme, a precursor to its modern Electronic Road Pricing system in which drivers are tolled automatically based on their location, type of car, and the time of day. In 2003, London began charging drivers for entering its city-center — an idea first proposed in the 1950s. By 2006, there were 33 percent fewer car trips into central London than in 2002, 25 percent more bus trips and 49 percent more bicycle trips. Congestion, pollution and traffic accidents all fell in tow.
Eliasson was aware of these benefits, but he still feared that politics would squash Stockholm’s program before its results were realized. The trial (whose start-day had been delayed by, again, politics) was slated to last just seven months. “Having a congestion pricing trial meant building up all the technical stuff in the business district, the gantries and the cameras and everything, and just for a trial,” says Eliasson. “I thought that in order to make congestion pricing acceptable, we would have to spend the revenues in a really salient, tangible way. And at the time, we didn’t have that.”Eliasson was wrong, and happily so. Despite negative media coverage and public suspicion, the tide of approval turned on congestion pricing in Stockholm almost as soon as it was implemented. “I think that what surprised everyone was that the effects on traffic were just so visible. From day one, you could see the benefits with your naked eye,” says Eliasson.
Road traffic into Stockholm’s central district fell by 20 percent almost as soon as the program began, as drivers swapped their individual trips for carpooling and alternative means of transit. The streets grew quieter, and air pollution decreased by 12 percent — all from a maximum charge equivalent to just $2. In September of 2006, congestion pricing was made permanent by a majority vote, and by 2011, the policy saw nearly 70 percent public support.
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!