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Comment by wgd | Hacker News Reader

This is some blog's restatement of an MIT press release, neither of which appear to name or link to the actual paper or other useful writeup.

But judging by the researcher names and the date I believe the actual paper is titled "Extreme salt-resisting multistage solar distillation with thermohaline convection" which appears to be available as a PDF at https://www.cell.com/joule/pdf/S2542-4351(23)00360-4.pdf

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the first link in the sidebar of the MIT writeup is to the paper you linked. it'd be nice if they linked it in the the body copy as well but here we are.

the blog post in question is written by steve novella, who also produces _the skeptics guide to the universe_, a fairly popular science and skepticism podcast. it reads like more than just a "restatement of an MIT press release" to me. i don't love the entirety of the message but it's not just a summary of the paper or a summary of the summary of the paper.

I appreciate Novella’s bent towards realistic pragmatism in scientific skepticism (as opposed to idealism)

Ah, I stand corrected. I overlooked the PDF link over in the sidebar and am less disappointed by the MIT News writeup now (although I do still wish they could have copy-pasted the diagram from page 1 of the PDF into their photo carousel, reading those several paragraphs of text attempting to describe the device's construction was downright painful and the reason I gave up and went looking for the paper).

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