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Comment Re:Game changer for EV's (Score 1) 298

The article reports a specific energy for the Al cell as 150-160 Wh/kg.
The Tesla NCA cell is reported to have a specific energy of 248 Wh/kg.

“So far there are no temperature problems. Twenty percent of a lithium-ion battery pack (in a vehicle) is to do with cooling them. There is a very high chance that we won’t need that cooling or heating at all,” Nicol claimed. “It does not overheat and it nicely operates below zero so far in testing. “They don’t need circuits for cooling or heating, which currently accounts for about 80kg in a 100kWh pack.”

Comment Re:You know (Score 4, Interesting) 217

Because generating a native Excel format file is basically impossible for mortals.
You've got a grant to sequence and study a gene; are you going to spend that money writing custom Python code? What will you use to generate publication-quality charts and graphs from the datasets? Excel is ubiquitous, and basically free.
People have requested the ability to limit data conversion on CSV import for decades (why, for example, can I change the delimiters for importing data, but there is no 'Do Not Convert to a Date' option?). MS has a deeply entrenched hatred of third-party compatibility.
Excel was extended years ago to allow for 2^20 rows and columns, but still warns you if you try to plot more than 1,024 points of data that 'this could take a while'.

Comment Re:what could go wrong? (Score 1) 65

More people died from jumping out of the Hindenburg than from the gas explosion.
The thing about hydrogen is that when it is ignited, the fireball rises.
That happened in the case of LZ 129; the fireball was well above the passenger compartments.
The skin of the Hindenburg was highly flammable due to the doping used (see the wikipedia article referenced above (Incendiary paint hypothesis), and that was the burning material visible raining down from the airship.

Comment This is Metal Hydride, a technology from the 70's (Score 1) 65

The fuel cell is conventional design, all they've patented is a metal hydride storage system.
All hydrides work by flowing hydrogen through them hot; the hydrogen becomes bound to the metal lattice as it cools.
It is a safe way to store hydrogen, because it's typically only a few PSI above atmospheric pressure.
But you need to apply heat to dislodge the hydrogen as a gas from the lattice; that appears to be their actual invention, where they circulate hot liquid through tubes to heat the hydride. I assume they use waste heat from the fuel cell for that.
There's no real breakthrough here. Hydrides have been studied for decades, and there's been steady improvement in performance, capacity, and cost, but the technology hasn't changed.

Comment "Commercial Only" (Score 1) 231

"The Atom Switch is intended for the commercial and industrial market only, please do not submit requests for residential applications."
GTFO.
I've been looking for this so I can remotely turn off my water heater at my 2nd home.
(Yes, I know there's other ways to do it, but a controllable breaker is the easiest).

Comment VZ is dumping copper... (Score 2) 37

After Superstorm Sandy, Verizon refused to repair a lot of their damaged copper POTS lines, and required customers affected to use (4G) wireless connected via an adapter to their landline phones.

They're rolling out 5G to kill off copper completely, and to recover from the financial disaster of FiOS as a broadband strategy.

Comment Re:Three years, pathetic... (Score 1) 107

My (pristine condition) Nexus 5x started bootlooping almost exactly 2 years to the day from when I bought it. The most likely cause was mechanical stress causing BGA parts to separate from the motherboard. Google was offering me a reduced credit towards a new Pixel, because bootlooping == 'Does not boot'. I shipped it back anyway; it apparently healed in transit, because I received a full credit ($150, I think)

Comment Strangelovian.. (Score 1) 375

"Cobalt thorium G has a radioactive half-life of ninety three years. If you take, say, fifty H-bombs in the hundred megaton range and jacket them with cobalt thorium G, when they are exploded they will produce a doomsday shroud. A lethal cloud of radioactivity which will encircle the earth for ninety three years!"

"Mr. President, we must not allow a mine shaft gap!"

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