Faraday did a whole series of lectures about a single candle, essentially covering a surprising amount of physics and chemistry. Super simple and fascinating: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/14474
There's a level where institutions are separate from the people that make them move. If your boss can get replaced without destroying your department, then that institutional layer exists.
What I have been thinking a lot about lately is that the focus should not be on the work. The focus should be on the handoff. If you build something, the goal is to have someone else use it. The work should focus on easing that transition. If it's a technology, what do you need to characterize so that the product people can work with it? If it's a product, how do you make it easy for your customers to get it? If it's an internal tool, what context and familiarity does the user group have?
'Gift' vs 'give' also rustles my jimmies. The phrase 'he gifted it to her' doesn't mean anything different from 'he gave it to her'. As a Calvinite, my stance is that 'verbing weirds language'.
It does happen like that, lot's of departments within big companies have R&D focus with time dedicated to development/discovery. The problem is that the output is captured. If it doesn't end up in a product, the general public will never know
I grew up in the Fort Johnson neighborhood in Charleston, so I was surprised to see that it was listed as a martello. The magazine is definitely still there, a little brick building with very thick walls (especially for the size of the building). It looks like several forts were built and destroyed on the site (https://www.dnr.sc.gov/marine/mrri/ftjohnson.html) but the only trace I've ever seen are the earthwork battlements along the harbor side. The location is better known for the point (right by the magazine) where the first shot of the civil war was fired towards Fort Sumter.
'All light causes evaporation' is not really true. IR heating works because the wavelength resonates with the vibration modes of the intramolecular bonds. Water has low absorption of visible wavelengths, so you would not expect light absorption in the visible spectrum to provide enough energy to knock individual water molecules free.
Water is an interesting substance and a lot of the properties of water come from intermolecular hydrogen bonding and polarity. Even though it's a liquid, there are transient molecular structures that spontaneously occur in bulk due to hydrogen bonding between water molecules. The polarity of water causes interesting effect at interfaces (surface tension, electrical double layer, etc).
It's possible that the water in the hydrogel is forming some hydrogen bonded structure that interacts with green light. Where the individual water molecules won't strongly interact, the larger structure does. That could lead to the ejection of 'packets' of water molecules as discussed in the paper. Why and what these multi-molecular structures are? No idea. But this is a very interesting effect.
Their setup looks remarkably similar to my PhD work [0][1] (that included a PoC and simulation). We didn't do power generation, but there was significant electrical activity (nanoamps and millivolts per pore). If I remember right, even at the time there was ongoing research to use porous films to generate power from saltwater, but the ongoing issue was biofouling. Turns out it's really easy to clog a pore that is nanometer-scale.
Oh wow, this is really cool. I've seen the exact patterns under 'thin film buckling' (Ziebert et al., “Strongly buckled square micromachined membranes,” J MEMS 8 423-432, 1999) when fabricating ~25nm x50umx50um thick, edge-supported, square membranes of SiN. It always seemed a little crazy that something so delicate could distort that much and remain intact.
I am not a particle physicist, but the explanations of quantum mechanics and particle physics here have been sufficiently detailed to let me get past the hand-wavy, paradox laden pop-sci descriptions you see elsewhere.
Having worked at the largest synthetic DNA manufacturer (at least they were, I think they still are)... a lot of his information is just wrong. There is a huge incentive to lowering the cost of producing oligos and synthetic genes. This is actually a very interesting time in the space (shoutout AnsaBio).
I encourage him to continue explore new ways of making DNA, but understanding the market is very different from building off an expired patent.
I don't know your particular situation, so no judgement from me... but I've been out-lifted by a one handed guy and seen a one legged man run a half-marathon. Personally, I would have done more running if I was one-handed, and more lifting if I was one-legged, but different strokes...
The problem is lack of constraint. You can build anything, but where does it fit in the world? That transition from derisked, innovative technology to useful product is particularly difficult and typically involves a handoff between two separate groups of people. Does the receiving group need or want an innovation? How well did the innovation group prep the technology for handoff? Was the innovation pulled through development by demand or was it pushed by the inventors? These are not trivial problems and any innovation shop like X is necessarily going to carry a lot of risk. You really only see that kind of innovation focus in organizations that can handle the risk (cash flow sufficient to recover from continuous failure from the innovation department). My (biased) opinion is that it is worthwhile to have innovation focused groups in your company, but management needs to be realistic about risk.
[source]: several years leading a design engineering R&D group
60Hz is the 'flicker fusion rate', meaning if you were changing the frequency of a flashing, stationary LED, ~60Hz would be the frequency where perception transitions from visibly flickering to apparently continuous. It's a lower threshold for refresh rate in the human eye. When you have complex refreshing images (a 2d computer screen rather than a point-like LED, diverse motion, depth, etc), you are likely to notice flickering (or tearing, jittering, non-smooth motion) if the refresh rate is near this minimum.
It's also really interesting the effect of management to drive timelines and innovation. If you look at the Apollo program, there was a ton of innovation driven by a incredibly fast design/launch cycle. Well managed timelines and goals can have a focusing effect (point the innovators in the most effective direction and give them the tools). The issue is when meeting the timelines and goals BECOMES the measure, rather than measuring effect. At that point it's just teaching the test and micromanaging.
The other aspect is that the shelf life of DNA can be significantly longer than other mediums. I haven't personally done anything with DNA data storage, but the idea is that tape storage is good for 30-50 yrs, but we can recover intact DNA from mammoths (~10,000 yrs)