spinne

That Faith. Getting ready to set the world on fire with advisers who were not prepared.

What happens when you flip it around? Instead of needing a solar panel to power something, what could you do if you had a solar panel that had sensors, lights, or transmitters attached to it? None of those attachments cost anything additional to run and they don't decrease the panel's output. You just hook all the panels you want together into an array, and the damn thing could basically monitor itself and send error notifications to you when a problem needs fixing. That's a lot better than what we've had so far, either isolating, identifying, and solving problems without any guidance at all, or needing a monitoring system (computer) that soaks energy in order to keep tabs on your hardware. Some of the solar/battery systems you can buy now even rely on the extra power consumption of an AI agent to make sense of your error codes for you. It's crazy how many points of improvement this team made. I really hope it's practical on a large scale!

This is really cool news!

The article title focuses on the two different types of energy input, but as everybody's noticed, the rain provides such a tiny amount of output that it doesn't contribute more than a watt or two over a whole panel. Put that on hold for a minute and let's look at some other exciting parts of this:

Long-term solar panel durability has been a hurdle we've struggled to overcome. Part of this is due to the sensitivity of the materials to both water and the physical impacts of raindrops hitting them.
Protecting sensitive materials that collect light can be a challenge because most things you coat them with will decrease the amount of light they'll gather, and most of what's left is really expensive (in money, materials, or energy) to effectively and uniformly apply while maintaining its light collecting ability.

So this research group in Spain comes along and says, "Hey everybody, check this out! We got a twofer: we can make solar panels more durable and just as efficient by putting them in a box and spraying them with hot gas! Pretty great, right? Oh, but wait! There's more! The stuff we're coating the panels with can also give you a trickle of energy just when it rains! The raindrops bouncing off the panels, I'm serious. That's enough kinetic energy to drive a tiny potential. It's not a lot, but it's still better than two for one!"

Now let's go back to the tiny bit of electricity produced by rain. These panels might be able to generate enough power to trickle charge a small battery (like on a weather station that tracks data) when it rains. With the way we've been engineering things like LEDs and sensors to be smaller and more energy efficient, we'd be able to use these solar panels to keep them running without needing any other energy source. It's totally fucking free, doesn't take anything at all from the panel or its efficiency to drive something like a sensor on a train track that can immediately send a localized signal when there's a track failure or maintenance needs to be done. If you spread those sensors out over an entire rail system, you could offload an incredible amount of work without doing anything more than installing the new panels and getting it going. Improving rail safety (especially in a place like America where the rails are so bad and so inadequately maintained due to capitalist pressures that the trains are a gamble every time they run) with something as clean, simple, automated, and inexpensive as this is incredibly solarpunk stuff. I'm not a person of vision, so really I'm excited to see where they go next. Most of what I'm thinking about right now is municipal/government and industrial stuff, things that would give repair crews more information on the problems they're being sent out to fix instead of just "sensor offline" messages. Beyond improving industrial safety through greater automation of simple functions, disaster response/recovery times could also see some seismic changes. I'm fuzzier on the consumer side of things, but small things like solar roofing providing power to automated garden switches or illuminated house numbers and doorbells that don't need to be wired into the house are all steps towards us consuming less energy. I just think that's neat!

Sorry to hear about your fish loss. I'm digging your plant hospital, though. It'll look awesome with some substrate and moss.

Would $20/hr make it acceptable to you? $15? Minimum wage? When you find a point that's different but acceptable, that's a hangup, not a standard.

I'm sad to hear about your friend's death; that sounds really difficult. I listened to your EP and I liked it a lot. I hope you'll keep making music.

Everybody needs a hobby!

Literally true. You can reach inside a cannulated cow, but I definitely recommend the longest pair of rubber gloves you can find. The dishwashing kind will not cut it.

It may help to think of it as the authors invoking the idea of Maxwell's demon to illustrate the elegance of the enzymes involved instead of an actual Maxwell's demon that would literally decrease the entropy in the system over time.

Please tell me these are cocaine condoms and not actual stir bars like I thought when I first woke up and saw this

Let me preface this by saying I didn't do well in chemistry. I haven't gotten any better at it over the years, so I could be looking at this entirely wrong.

It sounds like these Maxwell's demon enzymes do the catalysis, which causes enough of a change in their shape that it changes their mobility until they return to their original shape. That's what pushes them away from the products of the reaction, preventing the enzymes from reversing it when things calm down.

When a system's at equilibrium, that reaction would reverse as often as it proceeds, so this is the big deal part. By moving the enzyme away from the products, Maxwell's demons ensure the system doesn't remain at equilibrium without needing to use any additional energy. They don't need to kick off a wall to swim away, they can float off (or something like it) just fine.

It's like how you're not supposed to wear the same bra two days in a row because it wears out the elastic. After having been stretched over your body all day, the elastic stays stretched for a little while and takes time to return to its original shape. It's not magic, it's just a property of the material.

This is a matter of personal preference, not something where a consensus opinion helps. Where you're at, it sounds like 1080p x265 isn't worth it. Would it become worthwhile to you if you were using it on a different device? With a different set of conditions (like lower battery drain)? If a small change can make it acceptable to you, it's a hangup, not a standard.

Hard to tell how close you are with a snout you can't feel maybe

I said it! I said the words!!

I have the same concerns over geothermal fracking right now. We're only willing to find out how much we can disrupt the underlying rock by going too far a few times, deliberating over the acceptable death and damage toll, and then deciding to stop doing that whenever ~40% of the country agrees it's time to stop.

Shared in a WhatsApp group of police, not to the general public. Even though it was clearly meant to be a call for other cops to intimidate the accuser, some contacted her to express their support.

Long COVID is now more prevalent than asthma in school aged children. The US botched its COVID response so badly that we basically continue to sacrifice our kids and their future well-being to it while pretending it's not a thing.

spinnetrouble

@ spinne @sh.itjust.works

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spinnetrouble

Dear Faith VI

Broad claims about gender and behavior fall apart when studies include ethnically diverse samples

What If a Solar Panel Could Make Power From Both Sun and Rain?

What If a Solar Panel Could Make Power From Both Sun and Rain?

Fish died, pivoting to Plant Box of Shame

That's How

i made a (therapeutic) ep

Cows are magnetic and it's about time we accepted that

Cows are magnetic and it's about time we accepted that

Enzymes work as 'Maxwell's demon' by using memory stored as motion

I LOVE EATING STIR BARS

Enzymes work as 'Maxwell's demon' by using memory stored as motion

720p x264 vs 1080p x265

Is this true?

Is this true?

Hail Nepekpectok!

What's geologic hydrogen? What to know about the clean energy source buried under Michigan.

a drawing I made

Woman whose rape complaint triggered Spanish police chief’s resignation is ‘devastated’ after her identity is shared on social media

Long Covid is still here. I know – my life came to a stop because of it

I made bookmarks for a spooky book club

I made stickers for my besties

Effective use of ink in learning 3d object design

Curse of the Dead Gods build suggestions?

Help finding Skywalker OG seeds

New journal, new sticker