> as usual, the PR is excessive
I think articles that over hype lab results make it to the top of HN because there is no downvote button and flagging them doesn't seem appropriate. I wish there was a "meh" option.
I think articles that over hype lab results make it to the top of HN because there is no downvote button and flagging them doesn't seem appropriate. I wish there was a "meh" option.
There are startups in this area. Here's HyperSolar. They have their own proprietary "nanoparticle" technology.[2] They announced success in 2012. No product yet.
That's why reports of "breakthroughs" in this area have to be viewed skeptically. There have been a lot of claimed breakthroughs that didn't pan out.
This problem looks more like a long, slow slog to something that works well enough to use. Silicon solar cells were like that. Efficiency has slowly improved since the 1950s. Manufacturing processes have slowly improved. There was no "breakthrough"; the curves of efficiency and cost per unit over time are smooth, not discontinuous.
[1] http://phys.org/news/2015-09-efficiency-solar-hydrogen-produ... [2] http://www.hypersolar.com/application.php
I do agree that the university press release isn't going to critically evaluate the work of its own researchers. That's too bad, perhaps, but it hardly renders the original result uninteresting.
Artificial photosynthesis may be old, but the advances in this work appear aimed at overcoming precisely the problems Animats raised, like catalyst preservation and efficiency.
Put another way, just because a university gushes about the work of its faculty doesn't mean the faculty's work is crap.
The number of solar cell 'breakthroughs' that you read about in a given year is >= 5 or so, but 3 years later nobody even remembers what they were about. Meanwhile, the real improvements are incremental and process cost related, and those improvements then get eaten up by tariffs.
Slashdot voting options!
The other simple, sad fact is that the big breakthroughs that have some initial traction issues stick around. Often people point to the very early history of SR/GR, but it's worth pointing out how that turned out. When a shocking breakthrough is actually a shocking breakthrough, it ends up producing results that speak for themselves.
Until then, when it comes to extreme claims, so many more are just "bullshit" than "breakthrough". Our lives are finite, so it's not wise to ignore the role of triage in those lives.