spqr0a1

Meanwhile in New York, the worst hit state in America, masks of all sorts have been illegal in public for the last 175 years. https://newyorkhistoryblog.org/2013/10/halloween-history-new... https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/240.35

Have yet to use the mobile apps, but kudos to the Craigslist team for making their website one of the best mobile experiences out there. Loads quickly, easy to navigate, and isn't missing features compared to desktop. Certainly doesn't have the look we expect from a modern website but there's a level of usability we can all aspire to.

Worth noting that both warm-bloodedness and some degree of feathers were almost certainly basal characteristics in dinosaurs. Would be interesting to know if these differences left them especially well suited to the changing climate.

Light bulbs are a bad example of the dangers of cartels. Incandescent filaments are much more efficient at higher temperature but burn out quicker. In the common case, savings from reduced electricity cost more than offset the increased replacement rate for bulbs in accessible fixtures.

Short-lived bulbs were good for the customers. In a market with perfect information people would have chosen them on their own. Unfortunately of 3 categories of information needed for an informed decision (lifetime, power usage, and light output) purchasers only had a good measure of how often they replaced bulbs. Usage patterns are too complex for improvements in a single bulb to be obvious on a power bill, and human brightness perception is roughly logarithmic so it’s not visually obvious how much brighter different bulbs are.

Whether it was motivated by greed or not, the Phoebus cartel is an example of big business successfully advocating for the interests of the general public in the presence of information asymmetry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incandescent_light_bulb#Light_...

The article mentions "composite material". From the pictures it is hard to say whether it is fiberglass/polyester, carbon fiber/epoxy or what; but either way these materials are much harder to recycle than steel.

Nor is it speedy on a local scale, the article even admits this route has been done faster in 1977.

At sufficient photon energy the initial absorption kicks off secondary electrons which blurs the feature edges/limits effective resolution. This problem already exists to some extent with EUV but gets much worse at X-ray energy.

By conservation of momentum you won't go much deeper than diving from tamer heights. Still plenty of other trouble to deal with.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_depth

You'll find a lot of sintered metal gears these days; Nearly universal in hand power tools for example. They have similar cost advantage as plastic in reduced manufacturing expense compared to machined gears but retain the improved strength and dimensional stability of metal.

Antibiotics are a small enough improvement that they could be phased out without much impact to consumers. If demand were there or externalities accounted for, it would be an easy transition. http://www.sandersonfarms.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/08/ABF...

The usual comparisons are easy to misinterpret since insect productivity is often quoted on a dry weight basis and the data is less robust. But it appears to be as efficient as chicken, or possibly slightly better.

In general I’m bullish on biotech but best case for tissue culture meat still leaves me sceptical. Most of the hype focuses around beef substitutes, beef cattle is about as inefficient as animal agriculture gets at ~3% efficient on an energy basis of edible parts.

Dairy jerseys and laying hens are both ~12%, with meat chickens ~15%. The best replicating eukaryotic cell culture I know are certain yeast at 50%. So a best case scenario is factor of 3 improvement, I'd welcome results from multicellular organisms that got anywhere close to that but I haven't seen it.

Supposing there are no improvements to be had on the cell metabolism side; dressing percentage for broiler chickens is 70% so getting rid of brain, digestive tract, immune system, etc. doesn’t improve things that much. Keep in mind that tissue cultures are a lot more picky about feedstock than whole animals. Good luck shovelling hay into that bioreactor. All of the processing that the feedstock takes will claw back your productivity gains and then some.

Margins are slim at the bottom. As capital intensive as modern farming is, biotech puts it to shame. Once you factor in amortizing all that equipment this is a non-starter.

The only appeal is from an animal welfare angle. Even there an argument could be made that humane husbandry is positive-utility rather than the neutral of lab-grown, while also coming out ahead environmentally.

Pumped storage has ~80% round-trip efficiency. It's as good as lithium batteries. The biggest limitation is that there's not much room for growth. Most good sites for pumped storage have already been built.

While other states enacted mask laws in response to the KKK, in New York it was an attempt to maintain one of the last feudal systems in the western world.

http://gothamist.com/2012/10/22/anti-mask_law_from_1845_used... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Rent_War

Soft wheat flour is easy to find. It is available as cake flour in any grocery store.

The purine bases are metabolized to uric acid which, in excess, can cause gout and kidney stones. Cooking does not modify them in a relevant way.

Speculating that they plan to use hydrogen-reducing bacteria: This will require substantial post-processing since bacteria have too much RNA and DNA to safely be a major dietary component for humans.

Since the website mentions a Mars play, it's relevant that this drawback has been known in the space habitation literature since at least the 1970s.

You're right that Liu's paper does use external electrodes. And as for Sakimoto's paper it's true that the cadmium should be reusable indefinitely, but if you read the second page it's clear than cysteine is consumed in stoichiometric amounts. I'd be excited to hear about more recent work which improves upon this and would be happy to be corrected.

This appears to be a based on a paper from last year. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/351/6268/74

While good and interesting work, there's a lot left to do. They're using cysteine as a reductant, so not all of the energy is coming from light. Furthermore while the system uses 90% of the cysteine and 80% of blue light, it is only 2% efficient with broad spectrum (sun-like) lighting. Even that well only under dim lighting.

Edit: Here's a group that's developed a system that's 5 times as efficient and only uses CO2 and water as feedstock rather than cysteine and cadmium. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/352/6290/1210

Expanding on this tangent, it was closer to $300 in goods (as well as indefinite food and lodging for anyone in the tribe and a tacit assumption of military aid). Assuming just the tangible assets were invested in the most obvious way at the time, (dutch east india company being the most notable publicly traded company.) the dividend rate averaged 18% until 1796. If you compound with 18% for the first 170 years then 5% after, it would be more than enough to buy back Manhattan at it's current property value!

In a high use setting like grid storage, the cost per charge cycle is a more important metric. Many lithium systems are only rated for ~1000 deep cycles. Since this redox-flow system is advertised at 10,000 cycles, it could end up being much cheaper overall.

Called an Alexanderson alternator for those curious. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexanderson_alternator

Many small business insurance policies only cover <$10,000 in cash on hand. So plenty of legit businesses get flagged for trying to maintain their coverage and minimize risk.

It's even worse than that, gas usage (tax revenue) scales linear with weight at low speed. Road damage scales as the fourth power of axle weight! Large trucks pay nowhere near the cost they impose on our infrastructure.

We already have the technology. Many cultures have traditions of collecting nut caches from squirrels. They can harvest as much as 5kg per cache this way.

The importance of handwashing can't be overstated, it is one of the keystones of sanitation and public health! Hospital transmitted infections would go way down if staff followed all checklists to a T.

It's a matter of defense-in-depth. When the traffic is heavy enough to have less than 5 minutes between contacts, how many more people would be infected after a week?

As for cost, it would be more expensive but less so than you might think. With how thin the plating layer is, even for heavy wear, the material cost is under $500 per square meter. For small objects like buttons, door knobs, and hand rails it's negligible compared to installation and other costs. By switching to a cheaper base material it could even be cheaper over all.

Unfortunately, just being metal isn't enough. Most metal surfaces in hospitals are stainless steel, which can hold viable pathogens for a week or more. Silver plating would sterilize some pathogens in as little as 5 minutes.

Humans absolutely can use ethanol for energy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_metabolism We net 7 kcal/g from ethanol, (compare to 9 kcal/g fat, or 4 kcal/g carbohydrate/protein.) There's several intermediate steps, but it's pretty efficient and a dense source of energy.

Much of lipid and protein catabolism also does not rely on glucose as an intermediate. Everything that doesn't get converted to glucose first will get converted to acetyl-CoA (glucose catabolites turn into this too) for use in the Krebs cycle.

It is possibly to filter gases of similar molecular weight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Membrane_gas_separation

This technique is routinely used to generate concentrated supplies of oxygen or nitrogen, but is wildly expensive compared to ventilation.

The northeast has quite a variety of mast crops: Shagbark hickory, black walnut, butternut, beech (my favorite roasted but very small) and to a lesser extent hazelnut. But in its time the chestnut was by far the most consistent and prolific producer.

And an honorable mention to black cherry, a tree of the region with edible fruit.