I’d like to take this opportunity to highlight a recent discovery that I think should be shouted from every major news outlet. The implications are big, but they’re rather technical and non obvious.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B1PbNTYU0GQ
In short, it turns out water evaporates much faster from to light than heat. Green light with a certain polarization hitting the water surface at a 45 degree angle seems to do best. From the research slides, the effects of polarization and angle might be small. That means green LEDs (which are cheap and very efficient, but wouldn’t be polarized on their own) can evaporate lots of water. Something like 4 times the amount we would get from using the same amount of energy to heat it up. This is being called the photomolecular effect.
This fills in a big gap in our climate models. There have been measurements done on clouds that show water was evaporating much faster than theory would predict. I’m not clear on if it would make the results more pessimistic or not. My guess is that more clouds in the model increase the albedo of the Earth, thus reflecting more light back into space, and the resulting temperature should be lower. But I’ll hold off on strong opinions until the models get updated.
The other big thing is desalination. Most desalination plants don’t use thermal evaporation because it’s too energy intensive. They use reverse osmosis. The photomolecular effect brings up the possibility of an even more efficient solution to drinking water problems.
I haven’t seen academic research into this yet, but I also wonder about the implications for lithium extraction from sea water (and pretty much any other sources, really). Lithium is basically one of the salts you remove during the desalination process, so the photomolecular effect potentially makes sea water extraction cheaper. Lithium from sea water is an indefinite resource–there’s more there than we would know what to do with.
Edit: actually, scratch the desalination aspects.
- Multi-stage flash distillation takes 23-27 kWh to get 1 m3 of water
- RO desalination can get you 1 m3 of water with only 3 kWh
So thermal distillation is almost an order of magnitude behind, and the 4 fold improvement doesn’t fully close that gap. In fact, it’s worse than that. The multi-stage plant works by recovering heat when the distilled water is recondensed. Merely heating water to do this would take 626 kWh per m3. That’s more than two orders of magnitude, and since we can’t benefit from a multistage setup to recover heat when using the photomolecular effect, it’s going to be a 4 fold improvement over that very high number.
Still, very big news for improving our climate models.
You can accelerate evaporation 1000s of times by aerosilizing/spraying water.
No lazers needed.
Yeah, you can buy humidifiers that work by aerosolizing water, and they’re very energy efficient, but the problem is any bacteria that grows in it will just get spread all over your house if you don’t clean it frequently.
The ones that operate by boiling water are definitely a lot better for health reasons, but it’s a trade-off.
I agree with the point of the post…
But why did that person put a hash tag at the beginning of every sentence? Maybe the weirdest punctuation usage ever
When you make or reblog a post, you can add tags at the bottom. Ostensibly these are for searching/categorization, but people often use them to write out responses to posts so that their followers can reblog the it without bringing their comment along (Tumblr just puts all replies into a single extended post so it’s a bit cumbersome to have long comment chains). The tags are visible in the “notes” section of the post, so people can still see it.
When you see a screenshot like this, it likely means that the response was made by someone else and the OP self reblogged it because they thought it was important.
Thanks. Can the tags contain spaces? Either way, my understanding of tags is completely broken by this
Yep, though there’s certain punctuation that will break them. I think this practice is why even regular Tumblr posts tend to have strange grammar.
Ostensibly these are for searching/categorization, but people often use them to write out responses to posts so that their followers can reblog the it without bringing their comment along (Tumblr just puts all replies into a single extended post so it’s a bit cumbersome to have long comment chains). The tags are visible in the “notes” section of the post, so people can still see it.
wtf. and they say the fediverse is confusing…
Tumblr has made a lot of… questionable UX decisions, but the users have found ways around them.
Something I forgot to mention as a possible origin for putting text in tags: Tumblr used to allow you to edit other peoples’ posts when you reblogged them, leading to a fear of Danny Devito and, infamously, the John Green post.
@TrickDacy@lemmy.world important addendum
Ironically, most technology is the opposite. At least when you’re designing and developing things, it’s all individuals - you can have assistants or small teams, but institutions don’t invent new things, individuals do.
I don’t mean that pedantically, I mean one or two people were the driving force behind near every innovation. A company can sit those people in a room and fund them for a decade, but you have to keep them happy and leave them alone - if they leave or they’re meddled with too much, you’re back to square one
Big companies can’t innovate (except in monetization)… It’s all done by start ups now. Then they get acquired, and all progress halts
Just makes me think, in science (or academia at least) researchers are tied to their research to maintain their position, rather than their position deciding their research. It’s still a pretty broken system, but between that and the incentive for open collaboration it just makes me think. If every piece of technology was open sourced, if everyone from phone manufacturers to game designers existed in a world where designs could be improved upon, where would we be now?
All the science is connected… Except climate science. That’s voodoo witch talk and we should keep pumping millions of tons of CO2 into the atmosphere. WCGW?
You hear politicians question
I think what they meant to say was GOP.
