Oh fantastic! I am proud to have observed this exhibit of librarian “humor”, thank you and your children.
Oh fantastic! I am proud to have observed this exhibit of librarian “humor”, thank you and your children.
My friend is having some trouble too, could someone help me explain it to them?
These aren’t nuclear reactors. This isn’t a miniaturized Chernobyl in your pocket, a delicate balance between control rods and radioactive material maintaining the right proximity to critical mass. This is a rock that’s (metaphorically) kinda warm and takes some decades to become noticably “cooler” and we can use that temperature differential to power tiny devices (and we have used these devices continuously since the 70s)
The thing that nuclear reactors (and weapons) use is the chain reaction of certain radioactive materials whereby the decay of atoms can be triggered by the decay of a previous atom. That is not the mechanism nuclear batteries use and they in fact are incapable of that chain reaction; the radioactive materials that nuclear batteries are made of don’t work the same way as the special isotopes of uranium or plutonium.
Since turning 30 I’ve been thinking about the half-your-age-plus-seven rule a lot more. It would feel creepy as fuck to date a 22 year old. Is this all in my head? It feels predatory to swipe right on anyone younger than 25
Hang on, maybe I’m just particularly out-of-the-loop but; how long has the third book had a name?
Is there any “recent” (coupla years) news on the expected conclusion of this story??
EDIT: Cute kitty by the way OP!
(source for what I’m about to say: I vaguely remember basically a couple headlines)
I remember reading a statement from Lewinsky regarding that allegation. Something along the lines of her agreeing that, while she had for many years defended him and declared to anyone asking that their involvement was purely consensual, she didn’t really have the power to consent. I believe it was referenced how the enlightenment of the recent Me Too revelations had influenced her evolving understanding.
Thumbtack? For random odd jobs around the house, I don’t know if that one counts as similar. I’m not certain it’s an exploitative con
20 November 2023 ‘Electrocaloric’ heat pump could transform air conditioning Heat pumps are ubiquitous in the form of air conditioners. Scientists just invented one that avoids harmful refrigerant gases. Davide Castelvecchi
Congested air conditioning units on a building on May 21, 2012 in Mumbai, India. Air conditioners around the world compress and vaporize environmentally damaging gases to cool and heat air. But a new heat pump technology could change all that.Credit: Kuni Takahashi/Getty
The use of environmentally damaging gases in air conditioners and refrigerators could become redundant if a new kind of heat pump lives up to its promise. A prototype, described in a study published last week in Science1, uses electric fields and a special ceramic instead of alternately vaporizing a refrigerant fluid and condensing it with a compressor to warm or cool air.
The technology combines a number of existing techniques and has “superlative performance”, says Neil Mathur, a materials scientist at the University of Cambridge, UK.
Emmanuel Defay, a materials scientist at the Luxembourg Institute of Science and Technology in Belvaux, and his collaborators built their experimental device out of a ceramic with a strong electrocaloric effect. Materials that exhibit this effect heat up when exposed to electric fields.
In an electrocaloric material, the atoms have an electric polarization — a slight imbalance in their distribution of electrons, which gives these atoms a ‘plus’ and a ‘minus’ pole.
When the material is left alone, the polarization of these atoms continuously swivels around in random directions. But when the material is exposed to an electric field, all the electrostatic poles suddenly align, like hair combed in one direction. This transition from disorder to order means that the electrons’ entropy — physicists’ way of measuring disorder — suddenly drops, Defay explains.
But the laws of thermodynamics say that the total entropy of a system can never decline, so if it falls somewhere it must increase somewhere else. “The only possibility for the material to get rid of this extra mess is to pour it into the lattice” of its crystal structure, he says. That extra disorder means that the atoms themselves start vibrating faster, resulting in a rise in temperature.
Cooled by an electric pulse
The researchers then remove the heat by flowing a fluid between slabs of the electrocaloric material, while keeping the electric field on. The result is that the slab goes back to the original, ambient temperature, but has a lower polarization entropy. If the researchers then switch off the electric field, it produces the reverse effect: the polarizations become chaotic again, and entropy pours out of the atomic lattice of the ceramic, carrying heat away with it. The result is that the lattice becomes colder than the ambient temperature and it can cool fluid pumped between the slabs. The cycle then starts again.
In a refrigerator or air conditioner, heat from the warmed-up fluid would be dispersed in the environment, while the cooled fluid would serve to keep the interior or the room cold. For heating, the heat pump would cool down the external environment, extracting heat from it to be pumped into the building.
Defay says that although the technology is not yet ready to be commercialized, with further refinements, the efficiency of his team’s electrocaloric heat pump could be competitive with that of existing heat pumps. That’s a tough standard to meet, because heat pumps based on compressors are already very efficient: when used for heating buildings, for example, they can yield three or more times as much heat as space heaters do, for the same amount of electricity consumption. But unlike a standard heat pump, an electrocaloric heat pump would not need refrigerants such as hydrofluorocarbons or ammonia, which are potentially harmful to the environment. And because it removes the need for a compressor, it could potentially fit into a smaller, simpler device, Defay adds.
doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03595-1
References Li, J. et al. Science 382, 801–805 (2023).
I have been trying to decide between an aeropress or pourover. Maybe I’m ignorant of something, how is the pourover a larger hassle?
The article is fun and not long, but here is the link the article includes directly to the game. https://trustandsafety.fun/
Thank you for this recommendation!
Fuck that hurts, I don’t have any advice but I agree the space you describe sucks ass
But how are they treating the worm though?
Capitalism in its end state would prevent the creation of small businesses. In present-day United States capitalism, if a dozen PhDs who’ve been working for decades in their own time and with their own money to discover something magical like cheap insulin or a cure for cancer, it is not possible for them to start an independent business selling such a product.
I skimmed a bit of the article but my mental processes aren’t feeling flexible enough for quantum nonsense this morning… Are they saying it’s possible to make an observation window into the box of Schrodinger’s cat that allows for observation from an arbitrary distance without speed of light delay?