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Comment by littlestymaar | Hacker News Reader

> This discovery could have significant implications for the development of future technological devices

I whish science could stop having to make bullshit claims to get funding. This kind of research is cool because it explain the world we live in, it's doesn't have to be a pathway to technological devices to be legitimate.

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It's cool also because ice.

I could envision significant energy production for this technology near glaciers or ice sheets with lots of melt activity. Admittedly not really a market, but worth exploring for future applications (eg on icy moons)

The amount of electricity is tiny, probably less than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piezo_ignition and difficult to isolate because it will like to partially melt and the electricity will go in unexpected direction.

The idea to use this to explain some of the electricity generated in thunderstorms looks less impossible, but the new discovery is for temperatures below -113ºC (160K) (-171ºF), so probably too cold for Earth but may be there are some weird thunderstorms in Pluto.

I would think there's some amount you could capture inductively or magnetically, but perhaps it's too small to be useful. Still, feels like fundamental enough science to look into.

I agree that it's interesting. I used to tell people about giant magnetoresistence https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9908855 until the SSD people ruined the punch line.

I'm not sure if the IceCube team https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IceCube_Neutrino_Observatory may find it interesting.

Anyway, I don't expect it to be a useful method to harvest energy.

> Still, feels like fundamental enough science to look into.

That's exactly my point.

Science doesn't need to be applicable to be worth doing.

If it has applications I would guess they would be some form of geotechnical data, like measuring the stress within a glacier (if that's interesting for some reason).

Draft grant proposal - power a giant van de graaf generator by dropping asteroids onto the artic ice cap.

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