530 karma · joined July 7, 2021
In comparison to fossil fuels lithium is obviously way better but I think long term I would prefer to use sodium based batteries due to their abundance, ease of manufacture, and potential lower extraction-related pollution. Explosion related concerns are not the best counter argument.
Its also absolutely terrible for the local environment to mine it. That should be well known by now (e.g. effects in Bolivia / Chile).
I'm more interested to see where Catl and Faradion or others go with sodium ion technology. Zinc and potassium are also good candidates too. For now, the lithium show continues though unfortunately.
This one, the main relevance is that the author came up against bio and medical establishment that refused to accept even the scientific interest of studying the effect of small voltage profiles/current on tissue and bone growth. One reason was that the main source of info in the mid-20th century was a soviet scientist, but thats definitely not the whole reason as it comes back to debates about vitalism and the role of electricity in bodily functions/philosophy (etc). Theres a whole lot of similar work in studies on bioelectricity at the moment which if successful seems like it could become a dominant approach too lol. Pretty tricky to think about how that process works over decades or hundreds of years.
I highly recommend reading "The Body Electric" which details an excellent example, in both technical and social terms, of how structural effects like the above impede highly "random" or creative ideas in science.
Solidworks and Catia are often seen as unbeatable for industry but there are so many issues with them, particularly when used in smaller companies or startups. Need Mac support, never. Need multi-threading support, nope never going to implement it. Update the graphics so it doesn't look so ancient and clunky, never. Fusion/autocad are good but are full of bugs and the cloud service is annoying (e.g. I continuously have to delete log files to open the program). Being picky but this stuff shouldn't be hard by now given how long CAD has been around.
Are there any projects using something like rust or c++ to do a build and customise style cad program with versioning? I've tried cadquery, libfive etc. and none really fit the bill.
Libfive is quite good to check out too but yes openscad and cadquery are the most used.
http://dataphys.org/list/pattern-recognition-in-a-bucket/
There was a Science paper on RC recently too:
Development of the sodium-ion battery took place side-by-side with that of the lithium-ion battery in the 1970s and early 1980s. However, by the 1990s, it had become clear that lithium-ion batteries had more commercial promise, causing interest in sodium-ion batteries to decline.
https://biodesign.seas.harvard.edu/soft-exosuits
These things are not for the near term so really impressed by this story.
I guess its a little less accurate but the quick compute time makes as much difference too. E.g. research students can have multiple less costly mistakes before achieving what they want with the software.
MFCs (Microbial fuel cells) are waiting to feast on all manner of horrible stuff and produce energy. I'm not sure where economic incentives for peeing and pooing would go long term though.
Mock Georgian is an extreme imo (like below link) but I do like Georgian architecture in general if it is original or convincing: https://external-content.duckduckgo.com/iu/?u=https%3A%2F%2F...