sparkyshocks

Exactly. Cutting out all net resource consumption is really difficult, but almost all of the difficulty tends to come in the second half. The first half is worth doing.

Somewhat counterintuitively, switching from a 15 mpg vehicle to a 20 mpg vehicle (and driving the same number of miles) represents a greater reduction in fuel consumption compared to switching from 20 mpg to 30 mpg. Side note, this is also why we probably should've always been talking about fuel consumption per unit distance rather than distance per unit fuel, but it's hard to change the conventions around this.

So there are a ton of examples of products that use far more or less energy than alternatives, or simple changes in time of day that can make a huge difference in fossil fuel demand.

You should read the article. The concern is metal oxides, specifically aluminum and titanium.

I recently learned that they can still be harmful.

Which makes sense. You can still set off a smoke detector with an electric toaster, oven, or stove. The act of applying high heat to food will cause some indoor pollution, because cooking is also chemical reactions.

Yup, very energy efficient buildings tend to be that way by restricting how much hot/cold air can escape and waste the energy used to heat/cool that air. On the flip side, the ventilation needs to be consciously designed to allow for makeup air for any exhaust systems, and to generally allow for the air inside the building to be replaced.

I have a heavy duty exhaust fan in well insulated house, and at maximum power it works best if I open a window as my "makeup" air. Not ideal to not have air conditioning or heat for that incoming air, but it's not like I'm cooking for hours a day.

It's a stupid idea, but it also won't make a difference. Mirrors aren't going to increase the total amount of radiation hitting the Earth, in an amount that can actually make any difference.

The surface area of the Earth is 510,000,000 square kilometers. How much surface area of mirrors can they even fit in a sun synchronous orbit at the edge of dusk or dawn, where the satellite is catching sunlight but not casting a shadow over a part of Earth? Even if they put up a million satellites with mirrors that are 324 square meters that's only 324 million square meters, or 324 square kilometers. In other words, their most optimistic projection involves increasing sunlight by about 0.00006%.

It's a disaster for astronomy, and for ecological balance for any affected wildlife, but won't actually heat up the Earth.

Looking around at some websites of companies that sell solar panels, the average expected amount from a stationary solar panel seems to be about 6 Wh per watt of solar panel capacity, per day. At 1.1 kW, that's about 6.6 kWh per day. And at 3.5 miles (5.6 km) per kWh, you're only looking at about 23 miles (37 km) per day, if you're also not driving in the middle of the day, and can actually offload the energy from the solar system battery to the actual car battery.

You're probably better off trying to charge a regular solar generator with about 6 kWh of storage and 1 kW of stationary solar panels, and just charging your car every night with that. Looking around at the leading brands of solar generators available in the US, that looks like it would cost about $3000-3500, significantly cheaper than this thing.

I just priced it out for a solar generator:

Generator with 2kWh of storage capacity: $899

200W solar panels: $379 each

As far as I can tell, that means I can get basically the same capacity for $2800, just over half the price of this gosun product. There are different pros and cons but I'm not seeing the value proposition here.

Sodium and water is... kind of spectacular:

But sodium ions and water are something we deal with on a daily basis, when we salt food. The characteristics of elemental sodium, as a metal, are basically irrelevant to discussing its safety as ions or bonded in molecules.

I'm referring to the overall style that uses vague introductions that effectively pad out what should be a short summary with an unnecessarily wordy general-to-specific funnel:

found that its composition was relatively rare and could change what we know about the dinosaurs' last days.

could offer more insights into the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Through their analysis, the team was able to narrow down the meteorite’s composition.

The article style also self interrupts with citations to sources, but doesn't actually synthesize multiple sources in any given sentence:

Chondrites are an abundant type of stony meteorite and get their name from chondrules, the nearly spherical particles in the meteorite, according to the Buseck Center for Meteorite Studies. Far less abundant, however, are carbonaceous chondrites. Carbonaceous chondrites are separated into further categories based on their composition, according to Britannica.

The other "according to" phrases in the article are similarly awkwardly constructed, like an undergrad student or an LLM being instructed to be careful to include their sources. And when one of the sources is Britannica, that style looks especially unnecessary.

The overall big picture organizational scheme doesn't flow logically, either. If I were the editor I would've told the author to go in order: punchy intro, background about the meteor, what was believed before, what the study changed in our understanding, what it means to the science.

As it stands now, the intro drags because it's intentionally vague instead of actually summarizing. The content I would consider to be background happens at the end, describing the meteorite that likely killed the dinosaurs and the approximate size and the location/size of the crater, all things we already knew before this "summarized" study. Then, when it describes the study itself, it's a mess. It doesn't define "Oranans-class" or "Ornans-class" and doesn't explain whether those are the same thing but spelled differently (either because of a typo or a difference in convention). The description of what a carbonaceous chondrite is, how it relates to chondrites, and how those relate to CO or Oranans/Ornans class carbonaceous chondrites, is not clearly stated or presented in a way that is easy to understand.

The article also doesn't explain how it changes the science. It vaguely alludes to an alternative sulfur-based explanation that might be weakened by these findings, but doesn't actually explain how.

The article is poorly written. I can't tell if it's AI or a bad writer, but the end result is not good.

There are some interesting applications where a radiative surface that is shielded from radiation coming back the other way can emit radiation to cool itself by a few degrees below ambient temperatures. There's one paper from a few years ago that describes being able to cool to 5°C below ambient temperature even in direct sunlight with some exotic materials.

Interesting stuff.

I'm hopeful it will be good for aviation. It's pretty hard to compete with kerosene's 46.2 MJ/kg. The best batteries today are around 300 Wh/kg in commercial use, and some labs have hit 700+ Wh/kg. But with a MJ being equal to 278 Wh, we're still talking 20-50x the energy density by weight. And that's before even talking about how chemical fuels that are burned off leave less weight behind for the remaining vehicle, whereas a discharged battery weighs pretty much the same as a fully charged battery.

Also, if we do move to storing energy in chemical bonds, pulling carbon out of the air, that basically turns into a carbon sequestration technique with whatever excess solar/wind energy we end up with, especially if we intentionally overbuild the capacity for non-peak production, and leave a method for using that energy during peak periods.

I don't think anyone claims that these synthetic fuels use less energy to produce than other storage mechanisms. This is just a way to store energy in a way that is very dense, measured by both mass and volume.