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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.
You’re not desalinating aerosilized water. All the salt comes with.
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.
It’s a bit more preferable to have a humidifier that doesn’t heat up the room in the summer months.
Thanks for taking the time to explain that so clearly! It’s really interesting.
Modern astrophysics exists because a house fell on a teenage orphan.
Who as a result got adopted by a prince.
He got access to a royal lab for glassmaking.
Then he tried fixing color aberration in his microscope lenses.
Then he noticed the rainbow had holes in it. Huh.
Then he died. Glassmaking and tuberculosis are fast friends.
Then Bunsen invented his burner, which made spectra that matched the rainbow holes. Huh.
Now we know what stars and planetary atmospheres are made of!
Fun fact, When Newton was first working on his book Opticks in the 1670s to 1704, he had a lab with prisms, magnifying glasses, and telescopes. He never once used the telescope or magnifying glass to look at the spectrum produced by the prisms he was playing with.
But his work was published and available, which let others learn and grow the field.
Newton also sort of coined the word Spectrum, or at least stole it and put it to better use.
If this type of basic science research interests you, in the US there is a federal agency dedicated to this pursuit; the National Science Foundation (www.nsf.gov)
95% of its annual budget goes out the door in the form of research grants to colleges, small businesses and individuals. Most of the research has no immediate application but has lead to some very exciting discoveries. The biggest in the recent past was that orange donut picture of a black hole that was everywhere. ( https://new.nsf.gov/blackholes/how-are-black-holes-studied#eht)
NSF pays my salary. They are goated with the sauce
Fun fact, the NSF was founded after WWII to fund basic science just in case it found something with applications.
Unfortunately, the driving force behind it was the DOD, whose idea was that if even 1% of the work funded eventually became relevant to weapons research, then it would be “worth it”. But hey, at least basic science got funded.
Now NSF funds all branches of science excluding defense and most medical. Those are DOD and NIH for the most part.
Yeah, and in the last couple decades the NIH and NSF have become more applications-focused. If you can’t show a commercial application for your basic research. It’s less likely to get funded. Now, the DOD is the easiest way to get true basic research funded, which isn’t ideal; only basic research which the DOD thinks is important will get funded.
“Well I think these strange scientists should stop wasting their time peering over microscopes when there’s more important things to do… you know… things that common folk like us can understand and relate to immediately” - any typical anti-reason anti-science (probably religious) dolt, ignorantly vulnerable to things like cholera because they draw their water from the same river where people piss, shit and litter upstream.
When somebody says something like that, I bring up ancient Greeks rubbing amber on cat fur to investigate static electricity. It would have been very easy 2500 years ago to complain about these idiots rubbing cats with rods while there were bigger issues to solve. It’s not like they could say “hold on bro there’s this sick thing called the internet and this is step 1 to invent it!”. But we’re all glad people like that persevered or we’d never have electricity. In fact our word for electricity comes from the greek word for amber, elektron. Learning something new about the world is always worthwhile, even if you don’t know why just yet
Also a ton of discoveries and inventions are on accident while looking for completely different things.
One of my favourite stories is the accidental discovery of synthetic purple dye. IIRC there was a chemist researching something completely unrelated and when he disposed some assorted chemicals down a sink he noticed they turned purple.
This is basically the reason we have artificial sweeteners, too.
Some dude was trying to make/do something, and labs were sort of “lol everything is safe” back then so he like… had a sandwich… and noticed it was sweet… so he just sort of tasted all the stuff he was working with and found aspartame. (I believe it was aspartame)
I believe the same is true for fabreeze, the underlying chemical mechanism was an accidental discovery because the researcher’s wife noticed he didn’t smell of cigarettes. It never caught on tho because it, naturally, has no smell, and you become blind to smells you are constantly exposed to, so until they added perfumes (fabreeze as we know it today), even tho it worked, nobody cared to use it. I wish I could actually find it unscented… the scented shit stinks and gives me headaches.
It’s Febreeze. I know I’m being a stupid spelling nazi but I swear everyone spells it wrong and for some reason it drives me crazy. I have similar feelings about Scünci from my youth, but that battle has long been lost.
I mean… No offense or anything but I really don’t care if I mis-spell a brand name. It’s super unimportant in the grand scheme of things. It’s… all just stupid marketing anyway, and if they cared, they would have used a smarter spelling.
What I am concerned about is calling oneself stupid and a nazi (of any sort at this point) while actually being neither. Even as a hyperbolic thing, it’s something I greatly dislike.
Please be kinder to yourself. It’s ok to be pedantic, but just say that instead :)
I also have things that make me unreasonably annoyed. It’s ok to have those things :)
Oh I fucking know it I was just being nice. I’m pretty awesome and I want all Nazis dead including the ones currently in government in the US and Europe. Just say it right motherfucker. Febreeze. Feh-breeze not Fab breeze doltish sod. (ノಠ益ಠ)ノ彡┻━┻. :)
Oh… umm… well have a good time with that, I guess… 👍
Where are Nazis in government in the US or EU? Even Donald Trump isn’t a card carrying Nazi, even though he isn’t a good person or politician. He also isn’t in office, and that’s the closest to an actual Nazi I can think of in either place.
Anyway, someone made space for you and then you decided to call them a doltish sod. After calling yourself awesome no less. The truth is you’re not “awesome” if you are going to behave like this. There is something wrong with you.
Also, I believe the rubber was discovered by a scientist accidentally dropping a mixture of a bunch of materials like resin onto a burner, which made it volcanize (man I hope I got the word right) into a layer of rubber in the middle
Vulcanize, haha. All good, though!
Those discoveries benefit all of us in turn. Microwave ovens, digital cameras, water filters, freeze drying, memory foam, and many other inventions we use daily were created by funding scientists to collaboratively solve problems unique to space.
And literally all of modern electronics works in no small part because of our understanding of calculus, which, in turn, wouldn’t exist if we didn’t ponder the concepts of infinities in mathematics. Which might seem like one of the most removed from reality ideas, but here we are
I cannot fucking stand the fact that we live in the year 2024 and we’re having raging debates about if science has value… ON THE FUCKING GODDAMN INTERNET.
This population deserves the hardships coming, and that’s a really, really terrible thing to say, because the coming hardships are going to be bad.
Thank you. As a layman, I don’t always see the bigger picture. I cannot recall the specifics right meow, but there was some sciency stuff I read about the other day and I was questioning why they would spend money on that, when there are other things to figure out. Maybe one day their results will help with something else.
I read this post and my first thought was “oh, it’s like how fans post videos of fun glitches in video games and then speedrunners sometimes end up finding a use for them in order to beat the game faster.”
Scientific progress is just glitch-hunting and speed/challenge-running.
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?
My best and coolest work projects were basically all done in a caffeine-induced mania and had nothing to do with what my boss thought they needed but wound up creating huge benefits.
I’ve made guides and cheat sheets for legal and medical concepts four my coworkers, I collected a database of over 500 printable pdf activities to entertain my patients and created a nice graphical interface for them on the facility intranet. I even designed board games that can be printed on cardstock so my patients can enjoy themselves but not make weapons or self-injury implements. I can make d6 dice completely out of origami-folded paper, no staples, tape, or even glue.
Now we have a boss that’s micromanaging our time and dictating where on the unit we need to be every moment of the night. I used to just jump in to help even with other people’s patients whenever it looked like they could use an extra hand. Now I just don’t have the energy. They’re having meetings monthly to ask why the place is failing while actively choking it to death.
Meta note, Tumblr etiquette sure is interesting. Abuse the tag feature, screenshot your own lengthy tags, reply to yourself and attach the screenshot.
those are most likely tags from someone without full reply permissions
Ohh thanks TIL!
Does that somehow make it better?
yes
For example, carbon dating took discoveries including counting tree rings to determine a tree’s age, the origins of all the radiation on Earth – spoiler: it was the Earth itself, but also cosmic rays which was the important bit, nuclear half-lives and creating a chart of specifically useful half-lives for historical dating, the discovery of a rare isotope of carbon which can only be made by cosmic rays (carbon-14) as a near perfect clock for human timescales, how to build a sensor that can read faint carbon-14 radioactivity while filtering out all the radioactive noise from the environment, making another chart of expected radioactive readings based on geographical location including the depths of the ocean, and of course not to mention all of the archeological data used to calibrate all of the charts and devices used in the process.
Then you’ve got the lazy scientists that discover things like penicillin and sucralose by pure accident and/or through some pretty shoddy practices.
Don’t forget quantum mechanics http://quantum-history.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/eLibrary/hq1_talks/crisis/12_friedrich
This is what the show Connections by James Burke was about. It’s available on YouTube.
I was looking to see if this had been posted! A fascinating and essential look at how our modern civilization came to be.
Such a cool show! I discovered it via another comment a year or two ago(maybe yours? If so, thanks!). Hopefully I can get my daughter to watch it eventually without resorting to some Ludovico-style shenanigans.
Connections 2 episodes are only 20 minutes instead of 45, which might be a bit easier to get your kid into. There’s also a Connections 3 but they’re back up to 50 minutes.
I mention it when it seems relevant, so it could have been me. If not, thanks to whoever is spreading the love of that wonderful series.
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.
And the reason for the questioning isn’t that they are worried about public funds but because they want all knowledge privately owned so they can sue competition instead of having to compete.
I think what you meant is the corporate elite and forgien governments that own all politicians.
