Racing Turtles

• hilariously wasteful of energy
• equipment is cheap
• you can turn them off and on easily

• Splitting water without good catalysts, just paying the overpotential. Why buy an expensive electrolyzer containing platinum or iridium as a catalyst, when the catalyst is expensive and power is cheap? Especially since you'll only be able to run the electrolyzer a minotrity of the time, when generation is especially high, so it's just going to be sitting idle most of the time. So I'm thinking we're going to start seeing inefficient green hydrogen production
• Desalination of water by distillation. Or if not that, "Mechanical-Vapor-Compression", which seems to be the method with the worst energy cost but advertised as having cheap units. Right now I think people usually use reverse osmosis, where you use pumps to push water through a membrane. It's the most energy efficient, but it's capital intensive... I think a lot of the cost is buying and maintaining the membranes? Idk. Whereas you can just boil it. The MVC method seems to use heat for evaporation somehow so maybe it's not that different.

Scientists finally succeed in growing dolomite in the lab by dissolving structural defects during growth

For 200 years, scientists have failed to grow a common mineral in the laboratory under the conditions believed to have formed it naturally.

phys.org

For 200 years, scientists have failed to grow a common mineral in the laboratory under the conditions believed to have formed it naturally. Now, a team of researchers from the University of Michigan and Hokkaido University in Sapporo, Japan have finally succeeded, thanks to a new theory developed from atomic simulations. Their success resolves a long-standing geology mystery called the "Dolomite Problem." Dolomite—a key mineral in the Dolomite mountains in Italy, Niagara Falls, the White Cliffs of Dover and Utah's Hoodoos—is very abundant in rocks older than 100 million years, but nearly absent in younger formations. "If we understand how dolomite grows in nature, we might learn new strategies to promote the crystal growth of modern technological materials," said Wenhao Sun, the Dow Early Career Professor of Materials Science and Engineering at U-M and the corresponding author of the paper published today in Science. The secret to finally growing dolomite in the lab was removing defects in the mineral structure as it grows. When minerals form in water, atoms usually deposit neatly onto an edge of the growing crystal surface. However, the growth edge of dolomite consists of alternating rows of calcium and magnesium.

“the [solar] industry could readily eliminate many of the damaging side effects that do exist. …Although the overall track record for the industry is good, the countries that produce the most photovoltaics today typically do the worst job of protecting the environment and their workers. To understand exactly what the problems are, and how they might be addressed, it’s helpful to know a little something about how photovoltaic panels are made. While solar energy can be generated using a variety of technologies, the vast majority of solar cells today start as quartz, the most common form of silica (silicon dioxide), which is refined into elemental silicon. …The quartz is extracted from mines, putting the miners at risk of the lung disease silicosis. Refining turns quartz into metallurgical-grade silicon, a substance used mostly to harden steel and other metals. That happens in giant furnaces, and keeping them hot takes a lot of energy, a subject we’ll return to later. Fortunately, the levels of the resulting emissions—mostly carbon dioxide and sulfur dioxide—can’t do much harm to the people working at silicon refineries or to the immediate environment. The next step, however—turning metallurgical-grade silicon into a purer form called polysilicon—creates the very toxic compound silicon tetrachloride. The refinement process involves combining hydrochloric acid with metallurgical-grade silicon to turn it into what are called trichlorosilanes. The trichlorosilanes then react with added hydrogen, producing polysilicon along with liquid silicon tetrachloride—three or four tons of silicon tetrachloride for every ton of polysilicon. Most manufacturers recycle this waste to make more polysilicon. Capturing silicon from silicon tetrachloride requires less energy than obtaining it from raw silica, so recycling this waste can save manufacturers money. But the reprocessing equipment can cost tens of millions of dollars. So some operations have just thrown away the by-product. If exposed to water—and that’s hard to prevent if it’s casually dumped—the silicon tetrachloride releases hydrochloric acid, acidifying the soil and emitting harAd”

Solar panels glimmering in the sun are an icon of all that is green. But while generating electricity through photovoltaics is indeed better for the environment than burning fossil fuels, several incidents have linked the manufacture of these shining symbols of environmental virtue to a trail of chemical pollution. And it turns out that the time it takes to compensate for the energy used and the greenhouse gases emitted in photovoltaic panel production varies substantially by technology and geography.

Physicists Have Found a Metal That Conducts Electricity but Not Heat

Defying one of the most fundamental laws of conductors.

www.sciencealert.com|Fiona MacDonald

Researchers have identified a metal that conducts electricity without conducting heat - an incredibly useful property that defies our current understanding of how conductors work.

The metal contradicts something called the Wiedemann-Franz Law, which basically states that good conductors of electricity will also be proportionally good conductors of heat, which is why things like motors and appliances get so hot when you use them regularly.

But a team in the US has shown that this isn’t the case for metallic vanadium dioxide (VO2) - a material that’s already well known for its strange ability to switch from a see-through insulator to a conductive metal at the temperature of 67 degrees Celsius (152 degrees Fahrenheit).

“This was a totally unexpected finding,” said lead researcher Junqiao Wu, from Berkeley Lab’s Materials Sciences Division.

“It shows a drastic breakdown of a textbook law that has been known to be robust for conventional conductors. This discovery is of fundamental importance for understanding the basic electronic behaviour of novel conductors.”

Interestingly, when the researchers mixed the vanadium dioxide with other materials, they could 'tune' the amount of both electricity and heat that it could conduct - which could be incredibly useful for future applications.

Vanadium dioxide also has the unique ability of being transparent to around 30 degrees Celsius (86 degrees Fahrenheit), but then reflects infrared light above 60 degrees Celsius (140 degrees Fahrenheit) while remaining transparent to visible light.

So that means it could even be used as a window coating that reduces the temperature without the need for air conditioning.