9 Comments
Jan 26·edited Jan 26Liked by Raj Menon

Elon Musk himself seems to be a sexual harasser, and how it was handled by his company is totally unacceptable to me. I won't buy anything that has anything to do with him. We can do better than electric cars, which in the end usually rely on fossil fuels indirectly or use wind/solar that has negative impacts on dolphins, humans and other wildlife. Free energy is the way to go! Check out air-gen

nanopores.

"A team of engineers has recently shown that nearly any material can be turned into a device that continuously harvests electricity from humidity in the air. Researchers describe the 'generic Air-gen effect'-- nearly any material can be engineered with nanopores to harvest, cost effective, scalable, interruption-free electricity. The secret lies in being able to pepper the material with nanopores less than 100 nanometers in diameter...

"This is very exciting," says Xiaomeng Liu, a graduate student in electrical and computer engineering in UMass Amherst's College of Engineering and the paper's lead author. "We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air."

"The air contains an enormous amount of electricity," says Jun Yao, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering in the College of Engineering at UMass Amherst, and the paper's senior author. "Think of a cloud, which is nothing more than a mass of water droplets. Each of those droplets contains a charge, and when conditions are right, the cloud can produce a lightning bolt -- but we don't know how to reliably capture electricity from lightning. What we've done is to create a human-built, small-scale cloud that produces electricity for us predictably and continuously so that we can harvest it."

The heart of the human-made cloud depends on what Yao and his colleagues call the "generic Air-gen effect," and it builds on work that Yao and co-author Derek Lovley, Distinguished Professor of Microbiology at UMass Amherst, had previously completed in 2020 showing that electricity could be continuously harvested from the air using a specialized material made of protein nanowires grown from the bacterium Geobacter sulfurreducens.

"What we realized after making the Geobacter discovery," says Yao, "is that the ability to generate electricity from the air -- what we then called the 'Air-gen effect' -- turns out to be generic: literally any kind of material can harvest electricity from air, as long as it has a certain property."

That property? "It needs to have holes smaller than 100 nanometers (nm), or less than a thousandth of the width of a human hair."

This is because of a parameter known as the "mean free path," the distance a single molecule of a substance, in this case water in the air, travels before it bumps into another single molecule of the same substance. When water molecules are suspended in the air, their mean free path is about 100 nm.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2023/05/230524181948.htm

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Jan 26·edited Jan 26Liked by Raj Menon

Free speech on twitter is an illusion. My understanding is that Elon is an elitist who fawns his PR job well. I am an advocate for a free exchange of ideas, including questioning science, elections and so on, while taking a firm view to remove anything that even might be child pornography and empowering users to fully ban abusive users from viewing or following or commenting, without removing them from the platform. If people choose not to be abused, then if it is empowered to fully remove them from an individuals experience, we need not argue about exactly what is abuse in ambiguous areas. Clear sexual harassment/stalking should also be banned, along with personal death threats. I believe genocidal speech should be banned, but "hate" is too broad...anything can be construed as hate if someone hates it.

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Jan 26Liked by Raj Menon

I love the power from the toilet seat bit.

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I don't think you're nearly skeptical enough about Elon Musk. I think he's far more self-serving than people wish to believe--and is tweeting everything you think, repercussions be damned, really that admirable? Stocks rise and fall with his tweets. It seems irresponsible (or self-serving) to me. Downright arrogant.

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Fooled us again. Elon Musk did another power play move and decided not to buy Twitter. Deception.

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