This was a interesting read. I didn’t even know that electrocaloric materials existed. :)

Having read the explanation of how it works, I think the biggest difficulty waiting for them on the curve is achieving considerable levels of power.

But they seem to firmly believe that they can get past an instrument cooler to a residential heat pump.

The news: they skipped the vanadium. It’s ferrocyanide / ferrogluconate based.

But whoever mentioned the 6000 cycle figure should kindly quote their source, because I can’t find it.

Herein, we propose a highly stable alkaline all-iron flow battery for LDES by pairing the [Fe(CN)6]3−/[Fe(CN)6]4− redox couple with the ferric/ferrous-gluconate (Gluc−) complexes redox couple, which exhibits high solubility (1.2 mol L−1), fast redox kinetics and high stability in alkaline media. The high stability of iron-gluconate complexes resulted from the stable six-coordinated iron species, enabling a stable alkaline all-iron flow battery, which can stably run for 950 cycles at a current density of 80 mA cm−2.

I have a few solar panels installed in 2008.

They are mounted in an extremely bad location: on a south facing wall, without proper airflow on the back side.

They continue to work, even if output is degraded. Newer planels installed in the same location overheated and their elements cracked, indicating inferior manufacturing quality, but the oldest batch is not showing this symptom.

This actually sounds great, if the solvents are widely available and have as low footprint as the material itself (bamboo).

Production involves two eco-friendly steps. Deep eutectic solvents break apart bamboo’s hydrogen-bond network into smaller cellulose molecules. Ethanol then triggers molecular reconstruction, reforming dense hydrogen bonds and creating a tough, uniform plastic. This ethanol-mediated restructuring produces a chemically modified cellulose network that delivers exceptional mechanical performance.

The material can be shaped through injection molding, compression molding, and machining, making it compatible with existing manufacturing systems. That versatility is crucial because new materials must fit into current industrial pipelines to be commercially viable. Tests show that the bamboo plastic outperforms commonly used engineering plastics such as ABS and polylactic acid, making it suitable for rigid applications requiring durability and heat resistance.

Sadly, they don’t mention the solvents, only the catalyst for hardening (ethanol - which would be OK).

I believe the original article is this:

High-strength, multi-mode processable bamboo molecular bioplastic enabled by solvent-shaping regulation

In this case, the solvents would be:

By employing a hydrated ZnCl₂/formic acid deep eutectic solvent (DES), we disassemble the native H-bond matrix of bamboo cellulose into a homogeneous molecular system. Subsequent ethanol stimulation triggers the rearrangement of cellulose chains, fostering dense, ordered H-bond interactions between hydroxyl and formate ester groups (Fig. 1b).

Now, formic acid is ecologically OK. Zinc chloride, not entirely so (zinc is not a substance to waste or throw around), but if it’s recovered in the process then it would be OK. Coincidentally, their process includes recovery of zinc chloride:

DES recycling

The spent calcium chloride solution and the ethanol used for washing the gel were collected and mixed. An equimolar amount of 48 wt% sulfuric acid was then added to precipitate the calcium ions. This mixture underwent vacuum filtration to remove the precipitated ions, followed by rotary evaporation of the residual liquid to eliminate the ethanol and recover the recycled DES.

Recycling and reuse process of BM-plastic The recycled DES solvent (ZnCl 2 /FA) was obtained by adding equimolar mass of sulfuric acid to precipitating CaCl 2 , and steaming out ethanol. The recycled BM-plastic was prepared from Re-DES and BM-plastic chips, through the molecular system and molecular gel preparation process mentioned above, as well as the ethanol stimulation process.

So, overall, this all sounds sensible to me. Whether it’s economical, I cannot tell so fast.

Opinion (shooting from the hip here, may be off the mark) - mycelium was used to replace glass fiber epoxy.

In the research paper, I see among other items a copper- or gold-plated antenna constructed on a sheet of mycelium, and it falling apart over time (11 days).

As a result, this seems to me like a technology to use if you must spew disposable ciruitcs in nature and want them to maximally degrade. Definitely not the tech to use for things that must work 20 years.

Regarding AI, some simple examples of likely computing expense:

• performing 1 + 1 in assembly language: 1 CPU cycle
• performing 1 + 1 in a high level interpreted language: maybe 10 CPU cycles
• performing 1 + 1 using an LLM: millions of CPU cycles
• asking “why was the rabbit an animal after 1 + 1”: probably priceless, maybe a billion cycles

Reuters (the second link) reports the news as “rogue communication devices”, but also mentions battery packs with “undocumented cellular radios”.

Are we talking offline devices that were stealthily loaded with a 5G simcard or a Lora device waiting for a bricking code?

To my understanding, they found undeclared communication interfaces. Something that shouldn’t have been there according to specs, but was.

Investigating how those could be used to brick a device would take a bit longer.

I guess that security researchers will be taking apart a lot of inverters in the near future.

Then we’ll know.

Considering previous incidents, e.g. the cyber-sabotage performed in Poland by a train repair company Newag to prevent third party repairs, this kind of matters should be taken seriously. Back doors and logic bombs have been done before, and will be regularly re-visited as soon as people forget about their risk.

I think they’re aiming for storing and transporting a large amount of energy (e.g. enough energy for the whole winter). Which you conventionally do as fuel.

It’s making syngas (mix of hydrogen and CO).

So it begs for a next step. Syngas on its own is not a practical fuel. Unlike methane, it can’t be liquefied (hydrogen does not liqefy under economically feasible conditions). Due to free hydrogen, it makes metals brittle. Due to CO, it’s poisonous. And like most fuels, it’s flammable - I think we can’t blame a fuel for that. :)

The next step is hydrogenation of carbon monoxide. I’ve browsed literature and read my fair share via Sci-Hub, and this step tends to have various issues: reactivity, selectivity, catalyst cost and catalyst lifetime.

Reactivity: often, you have to raise either the pressure or the temperature to levels which complicate industrial production. Directly reacting CO2 with H2 faces those issues, but the catalyst (Cu + ZnO) is cheap.

Selectivity: suppose you want to get methanol, the simplest alcohol. Unfortunately your catalyst gives you a mix of methane, methanol, ethane, ethanol and buthanol. To build an industrial process, you need an extra step to separate them. If you get too much byproducts, your fuel production plant could become considerably bigger and more costly. So you definitely want good selectivity.

Catalyst lifetime: suppose that 1 kg of catalyst manages to produce 100 kg of fuel. That’s nice in a lab, but clearly unaccepable in industry.

Catalyst cost: for example, you better not need appreciable quantities of rare metals (e.g. rhenium, nice catalyst, but 2500 euros per gram).

Recently, much has been written about hydrogenation of CO in its liquid phase (at high pressure, not low temprature). For example here. The catalyst is manganese (price OK) and the “total turnover number” (representing catalyst lifetime) is 12 000, which I’d describe as “good enough to go out of the lab, if cheap enough”. In the summary, I can’t find their batch time. In another study about CO + H2 via manganese, people used a batch time of 8-12 hours. So there is a reactivity issue present, but maybe it can be overcome.

Ah, sorry, I was careless with terminology.

Throughout my post, I was thinking of rigid-envelope airships, but at some point, referred to them as blimps. Apologies.

About the only role I would give to a non-rigid airship is “a tethered observation post”. :)

Hydrogen is a nuisance of a gas, though - it has a very wide combustible range of mixtures.

But an airship envelope containing multiple lifting units of hydrogen could be passivated by filling the envelope with a non-combustible gas like helium.

So, there’s a big sausage providing structure and that’s full of helium (or nitrogen, or CO2, or anything else which doesn’t react with hydrogen in normal conditions)… and it contains balloons full of hydrogen. If one of them springs a leak, the leak won’t be going into an environment that supports fire. And if the leak then proceeds into surrounding air, the hydrogen is hopefully diluted beyond its combustible range.

Considerably less expensive than using helium only. But considerably safer than using hydrogen among air.

Part of the safety focus is from sticking so many people in the same fuselage - which, being big, has no individual rescue equipment and cannot be brought down by parachute either - so nothing critical is allowed to fail.

Side note: that’s not the only possible model, however - one can also design heavier than air craft that are smaller, almost passively safe (falling controllably without power, at somewhat above parachute speed), and design small aircraft that have rescue systems (parachutes which can land the whole aircraft).

Size itself is then a function of economic realities (air travel has undergone explosive growth).

Blimps would have to somehow fit in. Having considerable air resistance, blimps cannot travel as fast. Being unable to travel as fast, they would fall behind at moving X people per hour - while a blimp makes one roundtrip, a jet aircraft would make multiple roundtrips.

If however a jet aircraft is deemed environmentally unsustainable on account of fuel use - then the milestone to compare a blimp against will be a propeller-electric aircraft. Which is more limited in speed, requires charging time, is more limited in range - and therefore makes less roundtrips in an unit of time.

From one viewpoint then, the success of airships thus depends on whether fast aircraft can reduce their environmental footprint. If they can, blimps will not be widespread. If they cannot, blimps might become widespread.

Overall, a fast airplane is effective at getting results (transporting people) but not necessarily efficient at doing that. There is perhaps only one aspect where a high-powered aircraft is more efficient… use of space. But space is not a scarce resource in the atmosphere. Only on the runway.

Out of the previous considerations, I come to the conclusion: blimps probably won’t replace airplanes. Especially for longer trips, having to wait less is what makes people prefer speedier travel. Blimps cannot provide that. However, airships might carve out a niche for servicing shorter routes and local traffic.

Looking at the installation, I would advise the experimenter to immediately remove the hub motor from its semi-submerged state (thermal variation of the environment will pull in water through seals and bearings) and use a shaft (or belt) of reasonable length to extract power.

Besides that, nice project.

In most cases, it is true, but it might depend on technologies used. If you let water flash into steam underground, that’s going to produce pressure waves and vibration.

Geothermal makese sense on high latitudes (see Iceland for example) where heat is desirable even if electricity can’t be extracted.

Where you cannot drill deep enough (a Finnish company tried a 5 kilometer borehole and didn’t hit good enough heat) - artificial geothermal (thermal storage in large underground caverns) still makes sense, but not for electricity production. Just storing heat extracted from the environment during summer.

If drilling should get cheaper (e.g. those MIT guys declaring that they have a practical and reliable maser drilling rig), accessing good enough heat may be possible in places where it’s not worthwhile currently.

In some locations, production of geothermal energy can be combined with extracting dissolved chemicals - e.g. some borehole may produce a lot of dissolved lithium salts. No point in letting lithium back underground, better to put it aside.

It looks neat and might help in emergencies or special conditions, but if one takes a look at the wattage, sadly… 50 kW is very limited power. Probably not good for widespread use.

The helium-filled S500 blimp ascended to 500 meters above ground in the city of Jingmen, generating power at a rate of over 50 kW, according to Beijing SAWES Energy Technology Co Ltd, one of the developers of the system.

It would not exclude clear differentiation, however. :)

Just like a chatbot posting on social media can add a message footer “this content was posted by a robot” to a fluent and human-like message, a humanoid robot, while having human form, can clearly identify itself as a robot.

Personally, I think such a design requirement is higly reasonable on social media (as a barrier or action threshold against automated mass manipulation) but probably also in real life, if a day comes when human-like robots are abundant.

Looking at the beatiful show, I cannot avoid thinking: “each of them a potential weapon”.

So in fair weather, when communication is smooth and all navigation systems are working, it’s entirely feasible to coordinate a swarm of 10 000. Wow. :)

Soon enough, they will be coordinating each other in the presence of electronic warfare, and swarms of 100+ fly already, so 1000 is the next step. Anyone doing air defense is probably designing energy weapons (lasers, masers, etc) at a pace approaching madness, besides making ever-cheaper drones.

As for the environmental footprint - if each drone withstands 10 performances, they will probably save resources. :)