Cool Science thread

[Dantheman]

Someone tell these folks that "optical rectenna" is a highly misleading name: https://techxplore.com/news/2021-05-...rectennas.html

Rare earth-free electric motors expected to be in mass production in approximately two and a half years: https://techxplore.com/news/2021-05-...r-require.html

[Meathelmet]

Someone tell these folks that "optical rectenna" is a highly misleading name: https://techxplore.com/news/2021-05-...rectennas.html

Rare earth-free electric motors expected to be in mass production in approximately two and a half years: https://techxplore.com/news/2021-05-...r-require.html

""They go in like ghosts," said lead author Amina Belkadi"

I bet they do...

[crashtestdummy]

New battery technology.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltaylor/2021/05/13/ev-range-breakthrough-as-new-aluminum-ion-battery-charges-60-times-faster-than-lithium-ion/?sh=363407da6d28

[Dantheman]

New battery technology.

https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltaylor/2021/05/13/ev-range-breakthrough-as-new-aluminum-ion-battery-charges-60-times-faster-than-lithium-ion/?sh=363407da6d28

Holy shit, coin cells to market late this year or early next year and automotive pouch cells planned to roll out in early 2024. If that actually happens, and if the mass production estimate for those rare earth-free electric motors actually happens, you're talking about a seismic shift in electric vehicles by 2025.

[crashtestdummy]

Holy shit, coin cells to market late this year or early next year and automotive pouch cells planned to roll out in early 2024. If that actually happens, and if the mass production estimate for those rare earth-free electric motors actually happens, you're talking about a seismic shift in electric vehicles by 2025.

That was my thought. Also not using rare earth in the batteries and motors would hopefully help take China out of the process.

[PB]

Fingers crossed China doesn't buy it all up and bury it, or kidnap/poison/kill all the company personnel.

But yeah - truly seismic if true and allowed to proceed smoothly.

[Buster Highmen]

[SkiBall]

This was a cool 15 minutes to spend.
https://neal.fun/deep-sea/

[Norseman]

for Buster

[Buster Highmen]

A lot of that stuff got covered in our math 113 class at Reed circa 1975.
Zorn's lemma, the Axiom of Choice, Well Ordering, Tukeys' lemma, Godel incompleteness all got touched on while the course built, from basic axioms, the complex numbers.
Learning that sets have subsets and elements, but a set cannot be an element of another set and the notion of classes.

Turing's work was mentioned, but wasn't part of homework.

It blew my mind, I had never seen anything like it after tweezing around in "advanced" math during high school.

So I became a math major. It was an awesome program, but I still can't count.

[From_the_NEK]

for Buster

I think I got halfway through that before my brain melted.

[Dantheman]

I think I got halfway through that before my brain melted.

I loved it, the wife and kid did not. They didn't like it because they couldn't understand it; I liked it because I couldn't understand it.


Bill Gates and Warren Buffet are going to build an advanced nuclear reactor in Wyoming: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world...cid=uxbndlbing

[Norseman]

UCLA lab confirms the mechanism for electron acceleration in aurora. Surf's up on the Alfvén waves.

https://phys.org/news/2021-06-physic...ce-auroras.amp

[NBABUCKS1]

company i work for in utah is the leading stirling engine manufacture in the world (at least I think?). It's pretty cool tech

[gravitylover]

https://www.cnn.com/2021/06/07/weath...scn/index.html

edit: looks like the same thing that was posted above

[gravitylover]

And there's this, more self fertilizing food crops coming soon https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...G95h0FdBUsRoak

[Not DJSapp]

I think I got halfway through that before my brain melted.

It's a rough watch with what felt like a lot of holes in the explanations. What I basically got out of it was there is no way to accurately describe math with a hard and fast set of rules that cannot be undone with some kind of extreme case situation. This breaks mathematicians because they're looking for a perfect system description and pure logic, but they aren't there yet without some amount of self-reference and paradoxes. For just about all math us non-scholars do, math is just fine.

The description of the z= 0.xxxxxxxxxx and z1 = 0.xxxxxxxxx +.yyyyyyyyyy model creating and infinity that was larger than infinity seemed like a pedantic argument. Infinity by definition is limitless, as in it goes FOREVER WITHOUT STOPPING. They just didn't realize FOREVER WITHOUT STOPPING applies to both sides of the decimal point and it scared them into thinking they found something. Going back to a favorite quote “Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”

We might just not have the understanding of how math fully works. We may not have the words or system to describe it. That's ok, that's science. Prove what you can, theorize about the rest and continue to improve the proofs you can to expand the knowledge base.

[Dantheman]

And there's this, more self fertilizing food crops coming soon https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...G95h0FdBUsRoak

Whoa.

Prove what you can, theorize about the rest and continue to improve the proofs you can to expand the knowledge base.

Perhaps Buster can chime in here, but I believe the whole point is that you can't "improve the proofs" because it's proven that some aspects of mathematics cannot be proven.

[TBS]

Researchers find crayfish become more bold from the level of antidepressants currently in the water supply. They stay out 4x longer looking for food, which subjects them to increased predation
https://apple.news/A4meW5n96RM2fdXz2UFEoyQ
Not totally real world testing but pretty close

[Buster Highmen]

Perhaps Buster can chime in here, but I believe the whole point is that you can't "improve the proofs" because it's proven that some aspects of mathematics cannot be proven.

Yeah, Godel's basic point (incompleteness) is that in any logical system, there are true statements that can't be proved to be true.

But if there is a proof of something, great. They can be improved and lots of times they are, like Burnsides Theorem (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burnside%27s_theorem). That was given to us as a finals problem as sophomores when we didn't know what it was. I couldn't do it and nearly dropped out, I had no idea how hard the problem was. The professor was trawling for a prodigy.

But the issue is that for unproven things, there's no way of knowing whether they are provable or not. So any attempt at expanding what's known may be futile. Back in those days of study and consumption of psychedelics, I extracted some mad satisfaction out of thinking that 'futility is no excuse for not trying'. That still gets me through some dark times.

I liked Cantor's stuff and the idea of countability, the notion that there's lots of different kinds of infinity.

I wish I had been better at that stuff, but I was second rate, so I turned to programming for a living.

[::: :::]

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/22/s...-eat-land.html

A moray eel has a second set of jaws in its throat to capture & swallow prey

And they will leave water to get food

Nightmarish!

(With goofy subtitle: When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid From a Clamp, That’s a Moray)

[ötzi]

(With goofy subtitle: When an Eel Climbs a Ramp to Eat Squid From a Clamp, That’s a Moray)

Come on man, the eels are interesting but the subtitle (and the continuation of it through the article) is pretty great.

[ötzi]

And there's this, more self fertilizing food crops coming soon https://www.smithsonianmag.com/scien...G95h0FdBUsRoak

I wonder what happened - the article is from 2018 and said they might be bringing it to market in 2019. Somebody google that for me.

[wooley12]

I checked and it didn't happen Some are saying 2030 maybe when Ohio has an 8 month growing season.

[huckbucket]

This is going to be revolutionary. Not kidding

https://www.globenewswire.com/news-r...py-for-Tr.html

Clif Notes: Using a precision enzymatic approach called CRISPR, this new technology can be administered therapeutically and specifically to the liver to inactivate an aberrant gene called TTR which is the cause of Transthyretin Amyloidosis. The promise for the future is repair of gene defects associated with disease, starting with other monogenic disorders. In my line of work I've heard CEO's claim their technology will be revolutionary a billion times, yet this time feels very different. Big step forward.

“These are the first ever clinical data suggesting that we can precisely edit target cells within the body to treat genetic disease with a single intravenous infusion of CRISPR. The interim results support our belief that NTLA-2001 has the potential to halt and reverse the devastating complications of ATTR amyloidosis with a single dose,” said Intellia President and Chief Executive Officer John Leonard, M.D. “Solving the challenge of targeted delivery of CRISPR/Cas9 to the liver, as we have with NTLA-2001, also unlocks the door to treating a wide array of other genetic diseases with our modular platform, and we intend to move quickly to advance and expand our pipeline. With these data, we believe we are truly opening a new era of medicine.”