Dry Water
en.wikipedia.org
en.wikipedia.org
I'm not going to risk my blender to try it, so who's first?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pneumonoultramicroscopicsilico...
There has to be a prize for this.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
FWIW I've also seen the topic come up on the other side, when commenters have used non-traditional pronouns.
"Assume good faith" seems reasonable here, given that the root commenter was merely being very enthusiastic with their praise.
Listen, I have been on this site from the beginning and I appreciate the generally no bullshit tone. I left reddit back when it became clear that HN was the clear successor of the reddit I used to know but killjoy bullshit like parsing "sir" is not what I'm here for either.
Pointless quips add something else we have to scroll past to learn anything or find something interesting. The goal is more wheat not more chaff.
"this was interesting" can be accomplished by upvoting.
I'd like to see someone interact with it - is it possible to get "wet" from dry water? Can you get the water back out?
Very fascinating peek to behind the curtain of cosmetics industry. The "dry water" stuff is in the last pages. Apparently their advertised "powder to cream" cosmetics are popping up in the market. They have a demo video of the stuff, but in that it doesn't seem to work all that well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TmQTOU1KBkw
The commercial products using it (or similar stuff) seem to work fine though: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QURu28QTlMU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_Bcyo4GmrY
(and now youtubes algorithms will be confused why I'm suddenly looking at makeup videos at the middle of night)
Many are asking how to liquefy dry water. It is stated that you can liquefy dry water upon embrocation at the time of use. I assume this means applying the dry water to your skin and applying pressure and rubbing it.
As the patents expire there is a flurry of new research, everyone obtains new patents and it becomes impossible to create viable products again, until the patents expire and the cycle begins again.
To better uphold their original purpose, perhaps the patent rights period should be shortened to 6 years or thereabouts.
Technologies without successful application is the interesting case. With patents, like in this case, they are locked for a while, but at least someone can pick them up. The alternative is to become lost in the archive of some R&D department.
That said, that's difficult to say. We have patents, companies haven't had to find a way to live in a modern world where obfuscation, secrecy are the primordial part of their DNA. Would we have had OSS before, or not at all? I guess that NDA and anti-compete contract laws would be much stricter maybe at a stifling level, medieval guilds style.
Not unless the R&D cost includes all of the R&D into unsuccessful products that didn't get productized.
Also complicating the debate is pharmaceuticals, where you're also covering the cost of FDA approval, clinical trials, etc. Per https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cost_of_drug_development this cost comes out to several billion per successful drug among established players. (A single drug is several hundred million, but most drugs fail.)
In fact the returns are higher than the necessary costs, including the costs of the failures. That is one of the reasons that pharma is profitable.
However what this also means is that big pharma lobbies hard for long patent terms. And when they get them, then other fields, such as software, have to put up with them.
https://blog.p2pfoundation.net/the-constraining-role-of-ip-a...
It's been few years since I heard that talk and I now have seen a few examples of this around me.
Human life is so far a game of cross-purposes. If we wish a thing to be kept secret, it is sure to be transpire: if we wish it to be known, not a syllable is breathed about it. This is not meant; but it happens from mere simplicity and thoughtlessness. – Hazlitt, On Depth and Superficiality
That's not really the problem. The problem is that you have entrepreneurs at the early stages of looking into developing something who discover that it's patented. Just the overhead (paying attorneys) to negotiate a patent license can be thousands of dollars, more if you want to negotiate a good rate. Nobody wants to pay that at Stage 0 before you even do the legwork to determine if there is really a promising product there. But determining that can itself cost many thousands of dollars and nobody wants to do that before knowing they can secure a patent license at a reasonable rate, so you have a chicken and egg problem.
Meanwhile there are many promising alternative avenues of research that aren't already encumbered by patents, so people go there instead and come back when the patent is expired.
On the other hand oil companies notoriously bought up patents for the express purpose of keeping them from being used in commercial application.
There's now composites out there that are supposedly better though.
https://louisville.edu/micronano/files/documents/safety-data...
I'm not sure about any differences due to the grain size or the presence of the water. (And maybe something unusual would happen when the water inside each droplet boils due to proximity to the flame -- I don't know what would happen as the droplets rupture.)
https://repositories.lib.utexas.edu/handle/2152/28498
Reading the abstract, I don't know if he tested it as a fire retardant or suppressing agent, but that's obviously the idea. I think the challenge was more in making dry water on demand.
Also, the coating is gas permeable, so you could boil the liquid out.
But which is more expensive? 3x regular water, or 1x dry water?
TL;DR: if you compress CO2 to above 73 bar, it becomes supercritical fluid, which has a density almost like water and which does not mix with water. If we inject this fluid into underground saline aquifers, we can trap it indefinitely. Basically exactly the reverse of producing oil and gas. In this case you're transporting and injecting pure CO2, not water with 0.1% - 1% CO2.
It's been done at large scale since the mid-1990s, so we know it's viable. Lots of research and development on details/optimization still to be done, but we know it will work and we know we can scale it up.
In many cases, aquifers are so huge that injecting even a few million tonnes of CO2 makes only a small difference in pressure. And if the pressure did increase too much, we would drill a well deep at the aquifer bottom and take out some of the water.
Just because the CO2 concentration is so much higher in exhaust/flue gas, 10-40% versus 0.04% in the atmosphere, it's much more cost effective in the next 50-ish years.
"Moisture is the essence of wetness" - Derek Zoolander
https://chemistscorner.com/have-you-formulated-with-dry-wate...
Can anyone else throw anything else into the ring? Is a fish wet?
One could make an argument for why it might be acceptable to describe that cup as "wet", but in day-to-day parlance with normal people, it would be confounding to refer to a full cup as "wet". "Full" would be a much more salient description of the state of the cup. Describing it as "wet" would only cause people to go "huh?" and you'd have to explain your reasoning.
Save for mathematical terms like "isosceles triangle", words don't have inherent meaning. They're shortcuts for us to more conveniently refer to a swath of individual things or events that share some common characteristics.
This is easier to see with really abstract words. Imagine trying to define whether a specific action is or isn't "honorable", or "moral", or "meaningful". There are no axioms from which we can derive a universal litmus for whether an action fits under any of those categories. Different cultures have their own interpretations, and the peoples comprising those cultures would have differing interpretations, and even for the same person, their interpretations of a word may change from one moment to another.
With more physical terms like "wet", or "Scotsman", or "Ship of Theseus", it can be less obvious that words are abstractions for individual instances of things, and that abstractions fray at the edges. There never was such a thing as the Ship of Theseus; there were certain configurations of atoms that people thought of as "the ship" that bore a certain relationship with another configuration of atoms that people thought of as "Theseus", that was referred to as the "Ship of Theseus" for the sake of convenience, and most of the time, it sufficed.
Until someone can find a definition of "wet" from a respectable source that states an object cannot be fully submerged in a liquid, the guy sitting down has no argument. He seems to be trying to make the argument that to be wet means a liquid is clinging to you, rather that you occupying the liquid's space. Anyone?
Merriam-Webster: a : consisting of, containing, covered with, or soaked with liquid (such as water)
American Heritage: 1. Covered or soaked with a liquid, such as water: a wet towel.
OED: 1. Covered or saturated with water or another liquid.
Ironically, most dictionaries have fish and submarines easily wet, but don't do a great job of handling the situation where you just get a few drops of rain on you, when you're a little bit wet. They use "covered with," which to me suggests they're only talking about when you're thoroughly wet or submerged.
A fish is covered by water.
Anybody know how it's possible that adding an additional substance to a chemical compound could decrease it's weight? Or does it just mean that less volatility means it can be transported in lighter containers?
Kept at -20°C, methane hydrate stores about as much methane per liter at room pressure as LNG in a compressed cylinder.
So, instead of a heavy LNG cylinder, I guess you can do with a Dewar flask.
Also, it seems it requires less energy and less time to create methane hydrate using dry ice.
It likely also is advantageous that this gives you a ‘fluid’ that you can easily pump around.
That reminds me of how acetylene is stored for transport --- dissolved in acetone, which is then absorbed into a porous nonflammable substance.
The main property it has over traditional water is an increased water-gas interface which means it can absorb more gases and absorb them at a faster rate.
(The FDA limit is 2% by mass of product, but it's silica. Silica is _extremely_ chemically stable.)
Also, and here's what I suspect the real reason is; silica gel sold as a dessicant is hard (not quite as hard as silica glass, but hard), in relatively large particles, and indigestible. That's mechanically bad news for your intestines.
I imagine it's not much different that driving off the water from a hydrated mineral.
95% by mass, or by volume?
internet: not necessarily, ...
The link to the Daily Telegraph is broken ( https://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/science-news/7964109/Sci... instead of https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/796410... )
If it was rediscovered at a university in 2006, why are there no publications from that year?
At least the ACS is an authoratative source, perhaps that deserves a link?
https://www.acs.org/content/acs/en/pressroom/newsreleases/20...