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Comment by Osiris30 | Hacker News Reader

Previous discussions on 'artificial leaves':

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=artificial+leaf

It should be noted that almost every previous article referencing "new leaf" ... "more efficient than natural photosynthesis", explains a process of slitting water to it's two atomic components.

The leaf in this article implies a completely different product. Alcohol... It's quite a different track, and promising if true.

A promising side effect would be the removal of CO2 from the atmosphere. Although burning the fuel probably returns it back, so it's only helpful inasmuch as it replaces other sources of fuel.

Better to recycle the existing co2 than remove oil from the ground and put that into the air.

You still end-up with a by-product that you need to do something with. In this case burning it...

Alcohol on the ground causes less problems than excessive CO2 in the air, and still better to recycle the problematic CO2 in the air than increase its volume by burning oil from the ground.

I just look at this as more proof that breakthroughs aren't nearly as "sudden" as it often seems.

People will probably continue working on this for years and years before something, if anything, comes of it.

There seems to be something about solar in particular that engenders overly optimistic claims. I've read several breathless stories over a span of decades about next-generation solar panels for instance, and yet we still have the same old ones, albeit manufactured more and more cheaply.

In a similar vein : urine into fuel

https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=urine+fuel

Usually with a platinum catalyst or something rare & expensive

"all we need to do is find a cheaper catalyst"

There has to be a science fiction story where the crew urinates on a platinum rich asteroid to generate enough fuel to get them out of some life threatening predicament.

This was actually how BMW created ultra-hardened combustion chambers. It was discovered that urinating on the engine block hardened the metal:

http://www.autoevolution.com/news/turbocharged-engines-in-fo...

Some of you might wonder how did the engine block resist to such immense detonation inside the combustion chamber. This may not be the answer you were looking for – and most of you might not believe it – but it seems BMW was in fact using seasoned inline 4 cylinder blocks – picked up from several junkyards – for their F1 operations. The interesting part about it was that the blocks were kept out in the cold and urinated upon in order to strengthen their composition.

Hilarious. Thank you for that.

See also: flying car, battery that lasts for years, and fusion power.

stross's "accelerando" had a great reference to that:

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Getting back to the history lesson, the prospects for the decade look mostly medical.

A few thousand elderly baby boomers are converging on Tehran for Woodstock Four. Europe is desperately trying to import eastern European nurses and home-care assistants; in Japan, whole agricultural villages lie vacant and decaying, ghost communities sucked dry as cities slurp people in like residential black holes.

A rumor is spreading throughout gated old-age communities in the American Midwest, leaving havoc and riots in its wake: Senescence is caused by a slow virus coded into the mammalian genome that evolution hasn't weeded out, and rich billionaires are sitting on the rights to a vaccine. As usual, Charles Darwin gets more than his fair share of the blame. (Less spectacular but more realistic treatments for old age - telomere reconstruction and hexose-denatured protein reduction - are available in private clinics for those who are willing to surrender their pensions.) Progress is expected to speed up shortly, as the fundamental patents in genomic engineering begin to expire; the Free Chromosome Foundation has already published a manifesto calling for the creation of an intellectual-property-free genome with improved replacements for all commonly defective exons.

Experiments in digitizing and running neural wetware under emulation are well established; some radical libertarians claim that, as the technology matures, death - with its draconian curtailment of property and voting rights - will become the biggest civil rights issue of all.

For a small extra fee, most veterinary insurance policies now cover cloning of pets in the event of their accidental and distressing death. Human cloning, for reasons nobody is very clear on anymore, is still illegal in most developed nations - but very few judiciaries push for mandatory abortion of identical twins.

Some commodities are expensive: the price of crude oil has broken eighty Euros a barrel and is edging inexorably up. Other commodities are cheap: computers, for example. Hobbyists print off weird new processor architectures on their home inkjets; middle-aged folks wipe their backsides with diagnostic paper that can tell how their cholesterol levels are tending.

The latest casualties of the march of technological progress are: the high-street clothes shop, the flushing water closet, the Main Battle Tank, and the first generation of quantum computers. New with the decade are cheap enhanced immune systems, brain implants that hook right into the Chomsky organ and talk to their owners through their own speech centers, and widespread public paranoia about limbic spam. Nanotechnology has shattered into a dozen disjoint disciplines, and skeptics are predicting that it will all peter out before long. Philosophers have ceded qualia to engineers, and the current difficult problem in AI is getting software to experience embarrassment.

Fusion power is still, of course, fifty years away.

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A wholly underappreciated book.

If only HN had the features of this external tool

It's in the footer...

Exactly. Like UNIX. One tool, one job.

Who puts a search box at the absolute bottom of the page? I had no idea that was there, and it took me a few seconds to see it when I was explicitly looking for it.

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