• 0 Posts
  • 28 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
cake
Cake day: June 27th, 2023

help-circle







  • This is a neat project…and terrible reporting.

    Did they start out with any charge? How long to charge it fully via solar? How long it took them to do their trip? You could easily read this and think they did it by driving the full range (one of the few stats they give) out every day unless you’re knowledgeable enough to see what they’re not telling you. Is that range at 30mph? People are reading range figures and thinking, “well, gee, the EVs I can buy only do X and this does Y!”, which isn’t comparable at all without how that range is defined. If those figures shouldn’t be compared to regular cars, then say it in the article! This is a 20-30 mile a day charged-by-solar-in-the-desert-near-the-equator vehicle, which isn’t nothing, but not really as presented. Greenwashing (it’s probably not) or whatever this should be called doesn’t help the needed planetary shift away from fossil fuels.

    Looking for other reporting (where are other commenters finding the duration of the trip?):

    Guardian - no mention of time.

    bonus: “We hope this can be an inspiration to car manufacturers such as Land Rover and BMW to make it a more sustainable industry. The car was actually very comfortable in the off-road conditions as it is very light and does not get stuck.”

    Remind me how it was so lightweight again? Does it have LR & BMW level noise damping? It surely had AC and all that right? I don’t know because that info wasn’t provided. You don’t need to convince LR and BMW, you need to convince consumers to go without those.

    Daily Mail - no mention of time

    Designboom - no mention of time

    Jalopnik - no mention of time, which is disappointing for a car specific site

    This is a cool project and it’s cool university students did it, but why leave out such a misleading pieces of information? It’s bandied about as a “showing people it’s possible” thing as in, “you could have a solar car!”, but leave out all the bits that really make it possible, like forgoing AC or the daily miles driven. That none of the reporting on this has this information either means [puts on tinfoil hat] it’s a vast conspiracy to make green stuff look more palatable [tinfoil off], it’s all confluence of interest in making it look more palatable, or the information just wasn’t given out, or they’re all referencing the same source news-wire style. Frustrating.

    Where’s the real information? I feel like we’re in a race against time to move away from fossil fuels so things like this need to not be misleading.

    Edit - I’m stupid, it does say week and a half long…which only proves the point I think in not contextualizing range and such, because that’s a long time







  • BM planned to leverage its Watson technology as part of the acquisition, foreseeing its use for weather analytics and predictions. The deal, which closed the following January,[27] does not include the Weather Channel itself, which remained owned by the Bain/Blackstone/NBCUniversal consortium, and entered into a long-term licensing agreement with IBM for use of its weather data and “The Weather Channel” name and branding

    wikipedia page for The Weather Channel





  • This seems super cool. Like…too cool. I want to know how this electrogenetic interface works. They talk about using electrically stimulating acupuncture needles to activate human pancreatic cells in the test diabetic mice.

    They just zap it? They zap it with a certain frequency or pattern of direct current? How do they make it affect certain genes specifically and not some other gene or something else in the cells?

    Guess I’ll go to the article linked paper in the journal Nature:

    Here we provide the missing link by developing an electrogenetic interface that we call direct current (DC)-actuated regulation technology (DART), which enables electrode-mediated, time- and voltage-dependent transgene expression in human cells using DC from batteries. DART utilizes a DC supply to generate non-toxic levels of reactive oxygen species that act via a biosensor to reversibly fine-tune synthetic promoters.

    Ah. Of course, reactive oxygen species to fine-tune synthetic promoters. Obvious, really because I…uh, I totally understand this.


  • Currently, the owners are projected to pay $31 billion in capital and financing costs, Associated Press calculations show. Japan’s Toshiba Corp., which then owned Westinghouse, paid $3.7 billion to the Vogtle owners to walk away from a guarantee to build the reactors at a fixed price after overruns forced electric industry pioneer Westinghouse into bankruptcy in 2017. Add that to Vogtle’s price and the total nears $35 billion.

    Does this seem strange to include the 3.7 billion in here? I guess when you’re used to costs meaning what it cost the purchaser of said product or service it seems weird. Like, if I was the group paying for this I might even think to reduce the reported cost by 3.7 billion.

    That’s copied from the AP news article the post’s nbcnews article links to. Similar statement in the nbcnews one, but…they don’t let you highlight any text? Lame.