Tag: science

Prison Structure

in prison, marking another person as being of higher or lower status, and communicating those evaluations, can get you in a lot of trouble. You don’t want to seem subservient, and you also don’t want to diminish someone else. You want to maintain a level playing field. For that reason, to avoid conflict, a lot of emphasis is placed on respect. Showing someone respect is a way of recognizing his or her value as being similar to yours. It’s a way of honoring someone as a person, but not necessarily doing so because they’re better.

Batteries

This changes everything if it is not a mirage.

Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices. The new technology produces 10x the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for 2 hours could operate for 20 hours

2011-08-16: The progress in battery energy density has been very slow.

2019-04-25: 1000 Wh / kg? Though see their roadmap from a few years later that is more like 300 Wh / kg.

Innolith have the world’s first 1000 Wh/kg rechargeable battery. This would 3x the range of electric cars. The Innolith Energy Battery would radically reduce costs by not using exotic and expensive materials.


2020-10-14: AI battery research

In a paper published in Nature in February, Chueh and his colleagues described an experiment in which an AI was able to discover the optimal method for 10-minute fast-charging a lithium-ion battery. Finding optimal solutions in a huge search space is exactly the type of problem AI was built to solve. But until recently, battery-building AIs were hampered by a lack of data. “Historically, battery data has been very difficult to acquire because it’s not shared between researchers and companies”

2020-11-07: Structural batteries

While structural batteries for vehicles are highly rigid, the cell developed by Kotov’s team is meant to be pliable to cope with the movements of the robots. They’re also incredibly energy-dense. As Kotov and his team detailed in a paper published earlier this year, their structural batteries have 72 times the energy capacity of a conventional lithium-ion cell of the same volume. For now, their batteries are being used to power robotic toys and small drones as a proof of concept. He expects they’ll be used in midsize robots as well as larger hobby drones in the not-so-distant future. “Drones and medium-size robots need to have new solutions for energy storage. I can guarantee you that structural batteries will be a part of that.”

2022-04-15: Future battery technologies

On a longer time horizon, we consider Lithium-oxygen batteries an intriguing possibility. This class of battery derives energy by oxidizing pure lithium metal with a source of oxygen, traditionally in the form of ambient air. Reacting pure lithium with ambient oxygen can result in an electrochemical cell with the highest possible energy density of any metal, yielding theoretical capacities of 11k Wh/kg (not counting the weight of the reacted oxygen). This is noteworthy when Li-ion is today topping out at 250 Wh/kg, and Li-metal will theoretically top out around 3k Wh/kg. And especially interesting when you consider that liquid gasoline has a maximum energy density of 13k Wh/kg, with only 1.7k Wh/kg delivered to the wheels after losses. But a lithium-air battery in this basic configuration is not rechargeable. And significant technological challenges remain before any appreciable cycle-life is expected from batteries built with this technology. These lithium-air or lithium-oxygen batteries are at least 5–10 years away from commercialization, but could disrupt the market with a 10x step-change in energy density, rivaling liquid gasoline in terms of raw energy density.


2023-03-12: Li-S battery startup. Zeta’s cathode is based on a sulfurized carbon material that offers high stability and superior sulfur content, outperforming current metal-based cathode materials. Their sulfur-based cathodes are inherently inexpensive, have effective cost-per-energy use no cobalt and have 0 dependency on precious metal cost volatility or foreign nations.

Toward Social Science

But it is Facebook’s role as a petri dish for the social sciences — sociology, psychology and political science that particularly excites some scholars, because the site lets them examine how people, especially young people, are connected to one another, something few data sets offer, the scholars say. Social scientists at Indiana, Northwestern, Pennsylvania State, Tufts, the University of Texas and other institutions are mining Facebook to test traditional theories in their fields about relationships, identity, self-esteem, popularity, collective action, race and political engagement.

could “social science” actually become science one day?
2013-11-02:

The social sciences are undergoing a dramatic transformation from studying problems to solving them; from making do with a small number of sparse data sets to analyzing increasing quantities of diverse, highly informative data; from isolated scholars toiling away on their own to larger scale, collaborative, interdisciplinary, lab-style research teams; and from a purely academic pursuit to having a major impact on the world. To facilitate these important developments, universities, funding agencies, and governments need to shore up and adapt the infrastructure that supports social science research. We discuss some of these developments here, as well as a new type of organization we created at Harvard to help encourage them — the Institute for Quantitative Social Science. An increasing number of universities are beginning efforts to respond with similar institutions. This paper provides some suggestions for how individual universities might respond and how we might work together to advance social science more generally.

Microdosing

By examining these samples for the presence of radiocarbon, the developer of a particular drug can see whether the active ingredients are absorbed into the body and, if they are, how long they persist there. If they do get absorbed and then persist, the drug is probably worth developing further. If not, then it can be abandoned before any more expensive tests are conducted. And by using people rather than experimental animals for the tests, the researchers can be confident that the results are applicable to humans.

using spectrometers to track tiny doses of new compounds to find out if they can cross the blood / brain barrier, for instance. should speed up pharma r&d quite a bit.

DNA sample dry storage

The firm has simulated long-term storage equivalent to 13 years at room temperature, by applying higher temperatures than samples would normally endure. Such storage costs 33% as much as freezing the samples would. And when a sample is needed for analysis, you just add water, à la Sea Monkey. The market for this sort of thing is potentially huge. In contrast with the impression given by “CSI”, a popular crime series, DNA analysis is not something that takes a glamorous technician a few minutes in a moodily lit room. The FBI alone has a backlog of more than 200K unprocessed DNA samples from convicted criminals (85% of the samples it has collected during the past 6 years). This number has almost doubled in the past year, yet it may grow even faster in the future since what was once a procedure required only for sex offenders has now become obligatory for a range of felons from murderers to drug-addicts. Moreover, starting next year, both the federal authorities and a number of states will cast an even wider net by collecting DNA from everyone they arrest (as now happens in Britain). That will swell the haul of samples by at least 500K specimens a year.

a way to conserve biological material by drying. to revert, just add water.

100x faster human evolution?

On top you can see human population growth over time on a log scale, so the increase really is much sharper than what you see. Below is a chart which displays the number of selected variants which began to rise in frequency particular time in the past for 2 populations. There seems to be a concomitant rise in adaptive mutations which began to be selected along with increased population size.

has evolution sped up 100x for humanity? Up to 10% of the human genome appears to be evolving at the maximum rate, more quickly than ever before in human history.

Nutrition is Aging

I wanted to compare my body mass, strength, lipid and hormone profile to the 28 year old experienced weight trainers studied in the NJM article I discussed earlier this week. I want to show that the conventional wisdom that aging causes a decline in muscle mass, increased obesity, a fall in testosterone, and an unfavorable alteration of blood lipids is not true. Aging research is flawed; it is not the aging process but the poor eating and lack of exercise that is responsible for the general decline we often see with aging.

this is the most convincing yet for evolutionary fitness / diet: at 70, he kicks the ass of 28 year olds.