How the world’s smelliest fruit could power your phone | Hacker News Reader

How the world’s smelliest fruit could power your phone

bbc.com

34 pointsPikkie39 comments

I dislike the style of writing. The name of the fruit, durian, is mentioned first ~60% into the article.

Same. I figured it was Durian, and expected it to get into details of what's new. Instead the first half just told me about li ion batteries, and didn't hold my attention.

This isn't because of the writing though. The whole article, start to finish, is about alternatives to lithium ion batteries, of which a derivative of durian is an option. Judging by the URL (https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200724-the-battery-made...), BBC tried several titles until they found the one that got the most clicks. I don't think the author would have picked the current title if they had the choice.

Agreed; It’s misleading if that’s not the topic of the article. Here is the relevant section…

Super fruit

One innovative group are not only trying to find new ways to power our devices, but also tackle the issue of food waste at the same time. Vincent Gomes, a chemical engineer at the University of Sydney, and his team, including Labna Shabnam, are turning waste from the world’s smelliest fruit, durian, and the world’s largest fruit, jackfruit, into a supercapacitor that can charge mobile phones, tablets and laptops within minutes. …

I doubt the title was chosen by the author; somewhere like BBC the editor will often throw out the original title because it's not 'intruiging' enough.

It's essentially long form journalism. Here's the format

Some question that has a 10 word answer?

Meandering table-setting descriptions. The hustle of the author landing early at the airport and what their driver looked like on their ride into town.

Irrelevant backstory about the location, maybe some aside about some eccentric character who lived there 100 years ago. Where the author went for lunch and why they picked that restaurant.

Central characters introduced with superfluous descriptions of how they were dressed that day, styled their hair and carry themselves when they walk. Also what they ordered and how much they ate of it.

Something adjacent to the 10 word question

More table setting meandering.

Background character introduction

Irrelevant details

Speculation

ANSWER TO QUESTION

Editorializing

Description of main character family

What their neighbors look like

How the character's family and neighbors feel about the work

...

It's disingenuous. Maybe they're trying to get the article to "perform well" and they're trying to maximize for something? I don't know. It's like back when local news gave sizzlers and then teased out their audience over 2 hours before sidecaring the answer in the closing credits.

As it turns out I don't care about the temperament of the office dog or what kind of fern was in the reception area. I especially don't want 4 paragraphs on each.

Hunter S Thompson did this and it was great. Most people are not Hunter S Thompson. In fact I'm pretty sure that number is all humans who ever existed - 1.

These days I will scroll for a bit and then just close it. If it's from the serial offenders like The Atlantic, I don't even click. I think it has that name because I'd have to be stranded in the middle of the Atlantic to actually have the patience to put up with it

It’s clearly just an outlet for people who wanted to become writers, but only had enough talent to manage becoming a journalist. I personally can’t stand it. The topic might be interesting, but the journalists prose isn’t.

I'm totally fine with story telling, but not in that context, it's not the place.

Or if you're going to, put the relevant stuff in the lede and then go into the narrative form. Just don't scatter and hide the meat and force the reader to go easter egg hunting.

Doing so might be good or bad story telling, I don't pretend to be an expert there, but it's certainly bad journalism.

That’s the point. If they had to market their creative writing on its own merit, nobody would read it. But here they’ve managed to bait several people ITT into reading it by lying about it being an article on a topic they were interested in.

The inverted pyramid is dead. Long live the advertizement industry.

Oh man, I can't stand it. It's almost a parody at this point, and indeed the Atlantic is the absolute worst. Nowadays I typically scroll the first second for the scroll-bar to pop-up, I then assess whether it's short or long-form. If the scrollbar indicates it's 20 pages I typically scroll down somewhere and read a paragraph, if I see them discussing some ostensible link between the soft fabric of the office's carpet and the management style of its CEO, I just move on.

That having been said, I thought this article was quite good. It explained the basics of battery tech, what we have now, what's being worked on, with the hook of the fruit. That may not have been entirely fair to the reader but I didn't feel tricked. The article (while quite basic) gives a decent introduction into batteries and never went into any of the issues you so aptly mentioned, like what central characters were dressed like and what they ate for lunch (which I've seen too many times to not be a joke at this point).

That's BBC for you: Its relevance lies in its irrelevance.

This isn't a challenge but just a request to be educated.

Can you show me an example? I had always considered the BBC (I'm in the US so I get the world service) to be pretty decent. Is there some terrible side I don't see?

I find BBC especially affected by this behaviour, and also choosing ambitious click bait headlines.

This is what happens when variants are tested and the conclusion is that clickbait is what works. Moreover, not only that clickbait works, but that is necessary.

I have been wondering about this for now close to a decade.

Why aren't there any news that are a list of bullet points?

Why do they not tell me a list of known unknowns in FAQ like section? If bullet point were the answer to everything we know about this news, then FAQ would list out things that you might ask but we dont know yet. I thought this was the most important section because first and foremost people dont ask questions. And even if they had questions their brains fill it out with assumptions which could easily be mislead by the bullet point. By explicitly telling them what we dont know ( yet ) helps to give a clearer picture.

Basically I want shit loads of signals and less noise.

Axios uses this format, where they have a short summary and bullet points. Here's an example: https://www.axios.com/tropical-storm-henri-slams-new-england...

Thanks!.

Ha, I thought the article was about durian fruit. When I worked recently in the Mid-West, I was in my favorite Asian grocery store and I randomly put some durian ice cream in the cart. The guy at the checkout register told me that I wouldn’t like it and called for someone to put it back in the freezer. I insisted, and he warned me it would smell bad. It did, but I ended up buying it frequently: I really liked it and I knew my wife would never eat it.

It is. From the article:

> Vincent Gomes, a chemical engineer at the University of Sydney, and his team, including Labna Shabnam, are turning waste from the world’s smelliest fruit, durian, and the world’s largest fruit, jackfruit, into a supercapacitor that can charge mobile phones, tablets and laptops within minutes.

> Supercapacitors are an alternative way of storing energy. They act like reservoirs, able to quickly charge and then discharge energy in bursts. They tend to be made out of expensive materials like graphene, but Gomes’ team has turned inedible parts of durian and jackfruit into carbon aerogels – porous super-light solids – with “exceptional” natural energy storage properties. They heated, freeze-dried and then baked the inedible spongey core of each fruit in an oven at temperatures of more than 1,500C (2732F). The black, highly porous, ultralight structures they were left with could then be fashioned into electrodes of a low-cost supercapacitor.

> The guy at the checkout register told me that I wouldn’t like it and called for someone to put it back in the freezer.

This would warrant a conversation with the manager. Service employees who claim to know what's best for me are a huge annoyance.

Another example: one time I was ordering tea at a restaurant and asked for sugar. The waitress had the nerve to tell me sugar is bad for me and I shouldn't have any.

Often times at small Asian grocers, the service employee is the manager

Oh come on, that clerk is probably just tired of people returning the durian thinking that it was spoiled. It really is something that a lot of people won't like but might pick based on looks.

Neat stuff. Last time I looked into aerogel, they required pretty fancy setups involving supercritical fluids, high pressures, etc. Why not start with something spongy to begin with?

Are the aerogels used in supercaps still highly insulating, or are they filled with another dialectric material that would conduct heat? The reason I ask, is that I'd imagine that capacitors could be made in plates (instead of rolling them up into cylinders), and used for wall materials. The metal conductive layers would block moisture and the dialectric aerogel layers would act as insulation to keep heat in the house.

Your walls could also store electricity.

structural batteries are a small trend now (even Musk/Tesla talked about it)

this idea could very well be interesting to pursue applied

Interestesting idea but i would think thrice about living inside walls which could discharge humongous amounts of energy in seconds. But i bet the visuals might be awesome. NSI (Not Snark Intended).

Please leave durian alone, it’s already super expensive as it is. Go build a batter out of bananas or something.

Hogweed supercapacitors are being explored, indeed: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1134/S1023193519020125

The are made from Durian and Ja kfruit waste.

Durian are very expensive.

In 2020, Duiran prices in Thailand fell dramatically. Covid-19 travel restrictions meant they could not sell them to the largest market - China - and so there was so much Durian going un-sold that some people were giving them away for free.

Covid completely screwed up the market this year as well. Paying less than $1/kg (full fruit) wasn’t rare while normally years it can be several times that.

What are you talking about? There’s no durian that goes for 30 baht/kg. Only in Phuket I see the local variety at 50 baht but monthong is still 100/120 now. In Bangkok it’s rare/impossible to find it for less than 140.

Probably that price is only found near the plantations and very likely not for monthong.

I know because I eat a durian a week and I’m stingy.

Where? Sure it bounced back. Durian goes for 160 baht/kg in Bangkok (April 2021), up from the 120 baht/kg I saw in April 2019.

That’s about US$5/kg.

Apple

how

Jackfruits are the world's largest fruit, but while they're a bit pungent, they're nowhere near as powerful as the actual smelliest fruit, the durian.

I've updated my comment as per your correction. I happened to misread the article

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