‘No way to charge this battery’: Tesla owner was left stranded when his Model S died in the cold.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-way-charge-battery-tesla-140000238.html
‘No way to charge this battery’: Tesla owner was left stranded when his Model S died in the cold.
As EV popularity skyrockets, here’s why some enthusiasts might get cold feet
By Jing Pan
March 16, 2023
Original video: “Tesla S will not charge in the cold. Stranded on Christmas Eve!”
https://www.tiktok.com/@domnatishow/video/7180839253562199338
“UPDATE: I received several calls today from @Tesla Motors . They have been very accommodating so far, and are towing my car 2 hours away to Richmond to the service center at their own expense. Also, they delivered a loaner in the meantime.”
https://www.tiktok.com/@domnatishow/video/7181594117112122666
“UPDATE: Shocking interaction with Tesla service! They sent an estimate of nearly $2,000 and said my battery heater is broken. The notification on my screen said the battery is heating which was not true and their response regarding this false notification was very disappointing.”
https://www.tiktok.com/@domnatishow/video/7182837104857140522
Domenick Nati from Virginia, for instance, tried to charge his Tesla Model S ahead of Christmas but encountered some problems.
“I tried to charge it at my house, it won’t let me. So there’s no way to charge this battery or let it warm up in the cold,” Nati said in a TikTok video.
He then took the car to a Tesla Supercharger station and plugged it in but it failed to charge again.
The vehicle showed a message that the battery was heating and the car had a range of 19 miles at 1:11 pm.
“3:03, almost two hours later — battery is heating, 19 miles,” Nati read from the vehicle display with frustration later that day.
The temperature was reportedly around 19°F, or -7°C, at the time.
Nati’s video — titled “Tesla S will not charge in the cold. Stranded on Christmas Eve!” — has now amassed roughly 113,000 likes on TikTok.
I asked ChatGPT: “Does the transporter on Star Trek kill every person who uses it, and then manufacture an exact duplicate?”
I asked ChatGPT: “Does the transporter on Star Trek kill every person who uses it, and then manufacture an exact duplicate?”
This is the answer that it gave:
“No, the transporter on Star Trek does not kill every person who uses it, and then manufacture an exact duplicate. The transporter is a device used to teleport people and objects from one location to another. It works by breaking down the molecular structure of the subject and then reassembling it at the destination. The goal of the transporter is to safely transport the subject from one place to another, not to kill them and create a duplicate.”
“In the Star Trek franchise, the transporter is generally considered a safe and reliable technology, and it is widely used for transportation purposes. While there have been instances in which the transporter has malfunctioned or been used in unusual ways, leading to strange and sometimes dangerous consequences, these instances are few and far between.”
“It is important to remember that the Star Trek franchise is a work of fiction, and the depiction of the transporter and its effects on people and objects is not meant to be taken as a scientific explanation of how teleportation would actually work in the real world. The transporter is a science fiction device that is used to drive the story and create exciting and imaginative scenarios for the characters.”
Tesla introduces the first robot politician
Tesla robot walks, waves, but doesn’t show off complex tasks
October 1, 2022
DETROIT (AP) — An early prototype of Tesla Inc.’s proposed Optimus humanoid robot slowly and awkwardly walked onto a stage, turned, and waved to a cheering crowd at the company’s artificial intelligence event Friday.
… the robots are “missing a brain” and don’t have the intelligence to navigate themselves
There’s a “smart” phone app that tells you when your jar of peanut butter is empty. How dumb can people be?
By Daniel Alman (aka Dan from Squirrel Hill)
August 29, 2022
I’ve never actually owned a “smart” phone. And I guess this is one reason why.
There is now an app that tells your “smart” phone when your jar of peanut better is empty.
This article from the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review is from four years ago, but I just found about it now. It says:
Even though no one can see you eating peanut butter off a spoon in the middle of the night, the jar’s label might soon be “watching.”
Adrich, a Pittsburgh company that designs smart labels that could alert customers when they’re running low on their favorite products, just signed its first major deal to slap their innovation on products bound for consumers’ homes.
The labels will be able to track when and how much of a product people use. Sensors embedded in the labels can detect movement and also determine how much of a product remains, Aji said. Adrich then uses a proprietary algorithm to make sense of the data.
For example, during tests in which labels were on jars of peanut butter, Adrich found that people snacked on peanut butter at all hours of the day.
Companies can send coupons or other promotions when they sense a customer is about to run out of a product. Customers can learn when they should restock.
The labels — “almost like a mini-computer,” Aji said — contain a battery and sensors but are nearly as thin as a regular label. The label connects to a user’s smartphone through Bluetooth.
I’m 51 years old. I’ve been eating peanut butter ever since I was a child. And I’ve never, ever had trouble figuring out if the jar was empty.
And even when the jar is empty, well, I plan in advance, so I always have an extra jar (or a few, actually) because I always stock up on all of the non-perishable foods that I eat on a regular basis. That’s why homes have kitchen cabinets, shelves, and pantry closets. I have actually never, ever run out of peanut butter, soap, or toothpaste, because I always know that I’m always going to be using those things, so I always keep extra in my home.
Is there anyone who is so dumb that they need an app to tell them when their jar of peanut butter is empty?
How 1,500 Nuclear-Powered Water Desalination Plants Could Save The World From Desertification
How 1,500 Nuclear-Powered Water Desalination Plants Could Save The World From Desertification
By James Conca
July 14, 2019
About 20% of the world’s population has no access to safe drinking water, and this number will increase as the population continues to grow and global freshwater sources continue to decline. The worst-affected areas are the arid and semiarid regions of Asia, the Middle East and North Africa.
UNESCO has reported that the freshwater shortfall worldwide will rise to 500 trillion gallons/yr by 2025. They expect water wars to break out in the near-future. The World Economic Forum says that shortage of fresh water may be the primary global threat in the next decade.
But 500 trillion gallons/year only requires about 1,500 seawater desalination plants like the ones being built in California and Saudi Arabia. At a billion dollars a pop, that’s a lot cheaper than war and starvation.
Unfortunately, we presently desalinate only 10 trillion gallons/year worldwide.
As reported in the Tri-City Herald and NYTimes, stock exchange mutual funds have even formed surrounding water scarcity and have done quite well, like the AllianzGI Global Water Fund. This fund has averaged almost 10% since 2010 compared to under 6% for its average peer fund. These companies mainly deliver, test and clean drinking water.
In California, the MegaDrought, that ended in 2017 ran for five years, severely straining water supplies, agricultural needs and wildlife. It clarified the need to build new desalination plants like every other modern arid population in the world. Most of Abu Dhabi’s gas-fired power plants provide electricity to their huge desalination plants that deliver over a billion gallons of drinking water a day, at about 40¢/gallon. And it tastes good, too, I’ve tried it.
California needs 30 large desalination plants to deal with future megadroughts. They did recently build one in Carlsbad, but it’s not nearly enough.
Desalination technologies are capable of treating water from a wide variety of sources, including brackish groundwater, surface water, seawater, and domestic and industrial wastewater. While the wastewater from desalination is itself problematic, MIT has developed a process to turn it into useful products.
The two main types of desalination are:
– thermal desalination (using heat energy to separate the distillate from high salinity water), represented by Multiple Effect Distillation (MED), Multi-Stage Flash distillation (MSF) and Mechanical Vapor Compression (MVC), the latter primarily used to desalinate highly salty waters and industrial wastewater for industrial use, not necessarily for drinking.
– reverse osmosis (RO) membrane separation, which uses a membrane barrier and pumping energy to separate salts from the water. These are common in homes and businesses.
Electrical energy is used for membrane-based systems and thermal energy is used for distillation systems. Some hybrid plants combine both membrane and distillation.
Most desalination plants in the world use fossil fuels to power them, but it’s even better to power them with nuclear energy. The new fleet of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors (SMRs) are ideal as they produce both thermal energy and electrical energy without producing greenhouse gases.
But only 15 out of the thousands of desalination plants operating today worldwide are powered by nuclear. A small one is at the Canyon Diablo Nuclear Plant in California, slated to be closed soon. The plant could power several huge desalination plants for decades that could desalinate its own cooling water, removing the most commonly stated problem with the plant.
In contrast, all nuclear-powered naval vessels routinely use nuclear energy to desalinate seawater.
SMRs, like NuScale’s, allow places with smaller electrical grids and limited infrastructure to add new electrical and water capacity in small increments and allow countries to site them as needed at many distributed locations. NuScale’s small power module is in its last stages of licensing by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and will be ready in only a few years.
NuScale’s small power modules are about 60 MW each and up to 12 of them can be put together to make a power plant up to 720 MW – a 12-pack. They use standard 17×17 PWR fuel assemblies, but only at half the height, with an average U235 enrichment of only 3.8%. A single NuScale nuclear power module is 76-feet tall and 15-feet in diameter, and sits in a plant covering 32 acres or only 0.05 square miles.
Refueling of any SMR does not require the nuclear plant to shut down. The small size and large surface area-to-volume ratio of the reactor core, that sits below ground in a super seismic-resistant heat sink, allows natural processes to cool it indefinitely in the case of complete power blackout, with no humans needed to intervene, no AC or DC power, no pumps, and no additional water for cooling.
This reactor cannot melt down.
Studies by Ingersoll and others show how nuclear power and desalination can be coupled, and how much it costs. They coupled a NuScale power plant with eight modules to each of the desalination technologies – Multiple Effect Distillation (MED) and Multi-Stage Flash distillation (MSF) with either high pressure (HP) steam taken before admission into the turbine, medium pressure (MP) steam taken from a controlled extraction of the turbine, and low pressure (LP) steam taken from the exhaust end of the turbine, and reverse osmosis (RO).
They sized the desalination plant to have a production capacity of 50 million gallons per day (190,000 m3/day) of drinking water, typical of a large municipal desalination plant like the Carlsbad Desalination Plant, and that can support a population of 300,000.
The table below summarizes their economic analysis. For drinking water, the NuScale-RO design is the cheapest and produces the most water per energy used, with LP-MED distillation a close second. Since a NuScale power plant will last at least 80 years, the payback is even better.
There are other technologies that have been, and are being, used as well, including the more economical water reuse. The City of Redlands in California is using a membrane bioreactor technology from GE that recycles over 6 million gallons/day of municipal wastewater.
Whatever technologies are selected, southern California needs to build the equivalent of 30 desalination plants the size of Carlsbad’s to produce over a billion gallons a day, solving most of the water problems of southern California. The Central Valley would need another 30 plants to deal with its agricultural needs as its groundwater is becoming increasingly salty.
Powered by SMRs, these plants would more than pay for themselves by their own revenue, although a small water tax would get them started faster.
California better get moving. It’s been a reasonable two years, but more MegaDroughts are on the way.
Amazon’s “smart” homes locked people out of their homes, and prevented their refrigerators from working
How Amazon Outage Left Smart Homes Not So Smart After All
By Isabella Steger
December 7, 2021
The outage at Amazon.com Inc.’s cloud-computing arm left thousands of people in the U.S. without working fridges, roombas and doorbells, highlighting just how reliant people have become on the company as the Internet of Things proliferates across homes.
The disruption, which began at about 10 a.m. Eastern time Tuesday, upended package deliveries, took down major streaming services, and prevented people from getting into Walt Disney Co.’s parks.
Affected Amazon services included the voice assistant Alexa and Ring smart-doorbell unit. Irate device users tweeted their frustrations to Ring’s official account, with many complaining that they spent time rebooting or reinstalling their apps and devices before finding out on Twitter that there was a general Amazon Web Services outage. Multiple Ring users even said they weren’t able to get into their homes without access to the phone app, which was down.
Others said they weren’t able to turn on their Christmas lights.
Smart lightbulbs stopped responding to voice commands, many people reported.
Basic household chores also become impossible for some.
The outage prompted people to reflect on the pitfalls of having a “smart” home that’s overly dependent on not only the internet, but one company in particular — while those with “dumb” homes gloated that their fridges and light switches were working just fine.
Several of the affected AWS operations were on the East Coast. AWS said about nine hours later that it had resolved the network device issues that led to the outage.
Germany’s phaseout of nuclear power is causing an increase in the use of fossil fuels, which is causing more than 1,100 additional deaths each year
This is a quote from a scientific paper on Germany’s phaseout of nuclear power:
“Put another way, the phase-out resulted in more than 1,100 additional deaths per year from increased concentrations of SO2, NOx, and PM. The increase in production from hard coal plants is again the key driver here, making up roughly 80% of the increase in mortality impacts.”
Source: Page 25 at this link https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w26598/w26598.pdf
Either the people who support this phaseout are extremely illiterate when it comes to science, or they are deliberately killing these people. I wonder which one it is.
R.I.P. Grant Imahara
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/grant-imahara-dead-mythbusters-host-was-49-1303101
Grant Imahara, Host of ‘MythBusters’ and ‘White Rabbit Project,’ Dies at 49
July 13, 2020
An electrical engineer and roboticist by training, he worked for a long time at Lucasfilm’s THX and Industrial Light and Magic divisions.
Grant Imahara, an electrical engineer and roboticist who hosted the popular science show MythBusters and Netflix’s White Rabbit Project, has died. He was 49.
Imahara died suddenly following a brain aneurysm, The Hollywood Reporter has learned. “We are heartbroken to hear this sad news about Grant. He was an important part of our Discovery family and a really wonderful man. Our thoughts and prayers go out to his family,” a representative for Discovery said in a statement on Monday.
An electrical engineer and roboticist by training, he joined Discovery’s MythBusters in its third season, replacing Scottie Chapman and was with the show until 2014 when he left with co-hosts Kari Byron and Tory Belleci. The trio would reunite in 2016 for Netflix’s White Rabbit Project which lasted for one season. On MythBusters, Imahara used his technical expertise to design and build robots for the show and also operated the computers and electronics needed to test myths.
While part of the Mythbusters team, he sky-dived and drove stunt cars, on film sets he came into contact with some of the most iconic characters in screen history, installing lights onto Star Wars’ R2-D2, creating the robot Geoff Peterson for The Late Late Show With Craig Ferguson and working on the Energizer Bunny.
On Monday evening, Imahara’s MythBusters and White Rabbit Project co-host Byron tweeted, “Sometimes I wish I had a time machine,” and included a picture with Imahara and Belleci.
Later on Monday, Mythbusters co-host Adam Savage also tweeted: “I’m at a loss. No words. I’ve been part of two big families with Grant Imahara over the last 22 years. Grant was a truly brilliant engineer, artist and performer, but also just such a generous, easygoing, and gentle PERSON. Working with Grant was so much fun. I’ll miss my friend.”
Born in Los Angeles, Imahara studied electrical engineering at the University of Southern California (though he briefly had doubts and wanted to become a screenwriter) before combining the two passions and landing a post-graduation gig at Lucasfilm-associated THX labs. In his nine years at Lucasfilm, he worked for the company’s THX and Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) divisions. In his years at ILM he became chief model maker specializing in animatronics and worked on George Lucas’ Star Wars prequels, as well as The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, Galaxy Quest, XXX: State of the Union, Van Helsing, The Lost World: Jurassic Park, A.I. Artificial Intelligence and Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines.
In 2000, Imahara also competed in Comedy Central’s BattleBots with a robot he built himself called “Deadblow” that won two Middleweight Rumbles, was the first season’s Middleweight runner-up and became the third season’s first-ranked robot.
As computer graphics began to supplant model-making in the aughts, former ILM colleague Tony Belleci suggested Imahara come aboard Mythbusters, the Discovery show Belleci co-hosted. As a co-host, he became a self-described “human guinea pig,” though if they determined a situation unfit for humans, they created machines to test them in their place.
Imahara also starred in several episodes of the fan-made web series Star Trek Continues. He played Hikaru Sulu, a lieutenant, helmsman and third officer on the USS Enterprise, in the show that was an unofficial continuation of Star Trek: The Original Series.
In a 2008 interview with Machine Design, Imahara told the publication that he wanted to be an engineer because “I liked the challenge of designing and building things, figuring out how something works and how to make it better or apply it in a different way. When I was a kid, I never wanted to be James Bond. I wanted to be Q, because he was the guy who made all the gadgets. I guess you could say that engineering came naturally.”
Save the World with Nuclear Power – Leslie Dewan – TEDxUniversityofRochester
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DoAcntoAVXE
TED Talk: Michael Shellenberger explains why he switched from being anti-nuclear power to pro-nuclear power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ciStnd9Y2ak
Something called the “Good Country Index” ranks the U.S. at #38 in “Science and Technology,” while the #1 country in that category is the Ukraine
This is the link to wikipedia’s article on something called the “Good Country Index.”
For the year 2017 (the most recent year available), in the category called “Science and Technology,” the U.S. is ranked all the way down at #38.
Meanwhile, the #1 country in that same category is the Ukraine.
Those two facts are enough to tell me that the “Good Country Index” has no credibility whatsoever.
If you’re interested in other indexes that do have a lot of credibility, I recommend these three:
Video: Getting revenge on package thieves with a glitter bomb and fart spray
After someone stole a package from this guy’s porch, the owner created a booby trap for the thief. It contains a glitter bomb, fart spray, multiple cameras, a microphone, and a GPS tracking device.
I watched and enjoyed the entire 11 minute video, but if you only want to see the multiple times the booby trap goes off on the different thieves, skip to 5:40
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xoxhDk-hwuo
Video: Living off grid with solar panels and batteries
The woman in this video talks about what it’s like for her and her family to live off grid with solar panels and batteries. She and her family are real environmentalist who practice what they preach. She says there are some inconveniences, but that they have manged to get used to them. She also says their daily electric usage fell from 60 kwh to between 4 and 6, not counting their limited use of air conditioning, which brings their daily usage up to 10.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLhlm-iZFVI
Uber should release its camera footage of its fatal crash to the public
Two days ago, a self driving Uber car crashed into and killed a woman in Arizona. The car had a backup human driver behind the wheel who had the ability to take control at any time. The woman who got killed was walking in the street but was not in a crosswalk.
In my opinion, the government should get a warrant from a judge to require Uber to release its camera footage of the collision to the public. As long as we don’t get to see the footage, we can only speculate as to who was at fault.
If it was in fact Uber’s fault, then the public has a right to know, and Uber should be required to pay $10 million to the family of the victim. (I also believe that anyone who fakes such an accident in order to commit insurance fraud should get 10 years in jail for insurance fraud, in addition to whatever punishment they get for killing someone.)
If it’s the pedestrian’s fault, then knowing this information would prevent people form mistakenly thinking that self driving cars are more dangerous than they actually are.
So far, Uber’s self driving cars have a death rate of one death per approximately 2 million miles. By comparison, human driven cars have one death for approximately every 100 million miles. These are just rough numbers – they are not exact. And the sample size for Uber’s self driving cars is too small. However, from what we know, so far, Uber’s self driving cars have a death rate per mile which is approximately 50 times that of human driven cars. If this death was the fault of the pedestrian, then it doesn’t give any reason to be afraid of self driving cars. But if the death is Uber’s fault, then it’s a sign that something is seriously wrong with Uber’s self driving cars, even though the sample size is small. In cases of life and death, even one death is too many when only 2 million miles have been driven. The sample size is small, but that doesn’t change the fact that a person is dead.
Miami bridge that collapsed lifted into place without suspension cables, support tower
Miami bridge that collapsed lifted into place without suspension cables, support tower
March 16, 2018
The pedestrian bridge that collapsed in Miami was designed as a suspension bridge, but the central tower typical of such a structure wasn’t in place when the main span was lifted into place Saturday.
Florida International University posted pictures of the bridge as envisioned, with a tall central column and cables stretching down to hold the bridge, shaped like a sailboat. The design is called a cable-stayed bridge, which is a type of suspension bridge.
Cable-stayed bridges have cables attached directly from the column to the span, while suspension bridges string cables between towers and have other cables descend to the span.
#DidYouKnow the new pedestrian bridge that will connect our FIU and the @CitySweetwater is the first in the world to be constructed entirely of self-cleaning concrete? #WorldsAheadpic.twitter.com/lQVJh09Pv2
— FIU News (@FIUnews) March 10, 2018
Amjad Aref, a professor at University of Buffalo’s Department of Civil, Structural and Environmental Engineering, said a suspended bridge is typically built gradually, with the center tower or towers erected early.
Pictures from the scene of the collapse don’t show a central tower.
“Whoever is going to investigate, they will ask the fundamental question: shouldn’t the tower be there, and the cables ready to connect to the structure, when you lift it?” Aref said. “That’s a question for them to answer.”
Andrew Hermann, past president of the American Society of Civil Engineers, said cable-stayed bridges are built in stages, with pieces of roadbed placed on piers before the cables are attached. At each phase in the project, the supports such as piers are designed to hold the entire weight placed on them, he said.
“When you’re doing staged construction like this, what you have to make sure is that at each stage that the structure is strong enough for the loads that are on the bridge,” Hermann said. “The engineering, both design and the construction engineering, should have taken that into account with the bridge in that condition.”
National Transportation Safety Board chairman Robert Sumwalt led a team of investigators Thursday to determine what went wrong and what could prevent similar collapses in the future.
“That’s part of our investigation,” Sumwalt said of the lack of central column.
Suspension bridges are popular across the country — from the George Washington Bridge in New York to the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco— because the way they are built allows for construction across rivers.
The Kosciuszko Bridge, which carries Interstate 278 called the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway over Newtown Creek in New York City is a cable-stayed bridge. So is the John James Audubon Bridge across the Mississippi River in Louisiana and the Sunshine Skyway Bridge in Tampa.
Those bridges are much longer and heavier than the bridge at Florida International University, which was built to only handle pedestrians, not cars and trucks.
“I wish I would be on that kind of investigation, to be honest with you, because in this country we build so many cable-stay bridges for carrying trucks, not pedestrians, and all of them work fine,” Aref said. “The spans, from one end to the other, is much larger than that.”
Typically on such bridges, the central tower or towers are erected first, Aref said. Then slabs of pavement are lifted into place, alternated from each end and connected to the shortest cables closest to the span connected to the main tower, he said.
“When they cross rivers, you don’t have the luxury of having a big bridge in one piece and moving it in place like this,” Aref said.
Robert Bea, a professor of engineering and construction management at the University of California, Berkeley, told the Associated Press that without knowing precisely what happened, the “innovative installation” was risky because the bridge spanned a heavily traveled thoroughfare.
“Innovations take a design firm into an area where they don’t have applicable experience, and then we have another unexpected failure on our hands,” Bea said after reviewing the bridge’s design and photos of the collapse.
The $14.2 million FIU bridge was designed under a process called “accelerated bridge construction” that allowed for larger sections to be built and then lifted into place. A 174-foot section weighing 950 tons was hoisted and rotated into place across the six-lane road Saturday. When finished, the bridge would have been 289 feet long and 109 feet tall.
Aref said he was unaware of such a large section of bridge being put in place without supporting cables.
“I don’t want to speculate. From a structural-engineering point of view, the forensic engineers won’t take long to figure out what happened,” Aref said. “I think it is not a long investigation. There are glaring things.”
Munilla Construction Management, a Miami-based construction management firm, won the bridge contract with FIGG Bridge Engineers of Tallahassee. Munilla said it would cooperate with the investigation. FIGG said in a statement “in our 40-year history, nothing like this has ever happened before.”
But FIGG was fined in 2012 after a 90-ton section of bridge collapsed on railroad tracks in Virginia. Munilla was accused of substandard work in a lawsuit filed this month after a makeshift bridge collapsed at Fort Lauderdale International Airport.
Occupational Safety Health Administration records show fines totaling more than $50,000 against Munilla for 11 safety violations in the past five years for complaints about unsafe trenches, cement dust and other problems.
These drones with super bright lights could easily be mistaken for UFOs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QhOeky8yEow
Slaughterbots: a weapon of the future
This fictional video was created as a warning about what may be real in the near future: tiny little drones with artificial intelligence, facial recognition, and enough explosive to destroy a person’s head. One drone can kill one specific person. A big group of drones can kill a large number of specific people, or an entire city for that matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9CO6M2HsoIA
Italian court bans Uber because it’s BETTER than traditional taxis
Well this takes the cake. In Italy, a court has banned Uber.
Not because it’s dangerous.
And not because its customers were complaining about it.
Instead, the court banned Uber because – get this – it is BETTER than traditional taxis.
The legal term for this is “unfair competition.”
The complaint against Uber was filed by taxi driver unions.
I support unions when they do things that actually make sense, such as protecting the safety of coal miners.
I oppose unions when they do ridiculous things, such as trying to ban “unfair competition.”
If “unfair competition” was never allowed to exist, we would all be cavemen.
The robotic brain surgeon will see you now: drill can perform complex procedures 50 times faster
The robotic brain surgeon will see you now: drill can perform complex procedures 50 times faster
May 1, 2017
Scientists have revealed a robotic drill that can cut the most sensitive brain surgery down from two hours to two and a half minutes.
The machine, developed at the University of Utah, is being hailed as a potential breakthrough in survival for brain patients as the reduced time they spend in surgery will drastically cut the chances of infection.
Researchers say can make one type of complex cranial surgery 50 times faster than standard procedures.
They say the drill produces fast, clean, and safe cuts, reducing the time the wound is open and the patient anaesthetized, which also decreases the chances of human error, as well as the cost of surgery.
In complex surgeries, especially cranial surgeries, surgeons typically use hand drills to make intricate openings, adding hours to a procedure.
Dr William Couldwell, neurosurgeon at University of Utah, she said: “It was like doing archaeology. We had to slowly take away the bone to avoid sensitive structures.
“We knew the technology was already available in the machine world, but no one ever applied it to medical applications.”
Under the new system, patients will undergo CT scans to establish the exact location of sensitive structures such as nerves, major veins and arteries that must be avoided.
Surgeons use this information to program the cutting path of the drill and the surgeon can program safety barriers along the cutting path within 1 mm of sensitive structures.
Dr A.K. Balaji, who also worked on the drill, said: “The software lets the surgeon choose the optimum path from point A to point B, like Google Maps.
“Think of the barriers like a construction zone. You slow down to navigate it safely.”
The drill does the heavy lifting by removing most of the bone, similar to a mill, accurately and rapidly.
It has so far not been tested on a human patient.
The research was published in the journal Neurosurgical Focus.
These fourth grade black and Latino students’ reaction to racism is far more mature than the behavior of college aged social justice warriors
My blog has a category called “social justice warriors,” which includes a huge number of examples – many with videos – of the immature, irrational, and absurd behavior of college aged social justice warriors, who oftentimes act like spoiled, crybaby toddlers throwing temper tantrums.
By comparison, take a look at the mature, dignified, and psychologically healthy way that these fourth grade black and Latino students, whose “Panther Bots” robotics team had just won a competition, reacted to the racist taunts that were hurled at them. After these fourth grade students from Indianapolis’ Pleasant Run Elementary School had racial slurs thrown at them, they responded by saying
“I feel like what they say doesn’t affect us.”
and
“When you are a good team, people are going to hate you for being good and I think what people say can make you greater.”
I hope the social justice warriors on college campuses will learn a lesson from these fourth graders.
Here’s a picture of the happy champions (image taken form here, used under fair use):
The world needs more black women studying STEM subjects like Jasmine Burton!
With so many college students, and especially so many blacks and women, majoring in fake, useless, worthless subjects that will leave them with nothing but huge amounts of debt that they will never be able to pay back from the low wages they will get from working at coffee shops and fast food restaurants after they graduate from college, here’s a wonderful story about someone who chose to study something that is actually useful in the real world. More people should follow Jasmine Burton’s lead and study STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) subjects:
http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/22/smallbusiness/safichoo-toilet-jasmine-burton/
This plastic toilet could save lives
Jasmine Burton helped design an inexpensive, portable plastic toilet to address the lack of basic sanitation around the world.
January 22, 2016
Everybody poops. But not everyone has access to a toilet.
“It’s shocking that this basic necessity is unavailable to nearly half of the world,” said Jasmine Burton, founder and president of Atlanta-based Wish for WASH.
Burton, 23, was a freshman at Georgia Institute of Technology when she learned that as many as 2.5 billion people don’t have access to a toilet.
It bothered her even more that this sanitation problem disproportionately affects women and young girls.
“Young girls in the developing world frequently drop out of school because there isn’t a toilet,” she said. “It angered me as a woman in higher education and as a product designer.”
Just 18 at the time, Burton channeled her feelings into a mission: She would design a toilet.
While at Georgia Tech, she collaborated with three other students to invent an inexpensive, eco-friendly mobile toilet that could convert waste into renewable energy. They called their sanitation system SafiChoo Toilet.
Made of plastic, the toilet is designed for sitting or squatting, which is a common practice in some countries. It can be placed directly on the ground, or it can be elevated by adding an attachable base. It can also function with or without water.
The system features a waste collection unit (that can go above or below ground), which separates the waste into liquids and solids. There’s also a manually-operated bidet that can be attached.
Burton said these features are intended to help curb contamination and the spread of diseases.
The SafiChoo toilet costs about $50. “That’s the highest price point we want it to be,” she said.
In 2014, Burton and her team won first place and $25,000 at the Georgia Tech InVention competition, the nation’s largest undergraduate invention competition.
“We didn’t think we’d win because products at the contest were always high-tech with super sexy designs,” she said. “Ours was a simple toilet.”
The win enabled Burton to pilot SafiChoo (which means clean toilet in Kiswahili) at a Kenyan refugee camp. She also launched Wish for WASH, the parent company of SafiChoo.
John Zegers, director at Georgia Center of Innovation for Manufacturing, contacted Burton after her InVention competition win. “We thought it was a great product that needed a little bit more development,” he said.
The Center gave a grant to Georgia Tech to develop a SafiChoo prototype and helped Burton’s team find an Atlanta-based manufacturer.
Zegers said he hopes that Wish for WASH is able to keep the toilet a Made in America product.
Burton is currently living in Lusaka, Zambia, as she tests the toilet there. The company is also running an Indiegogo campaign to support the Zambia pilot.
She hopes to begin selling the toilet to U.S.-based customers and to NGOs in 2017.
“It’s amazing when you see how many people have never used a toilet before and what [the SafiChoo Toilet] could mean for them,” she said.
Plastic-munching bacteria can make trash biodegradable
If this is true and it can be used on a large scale, it’s fantastic news.
http://www.livescience.com/54016-plastic-eating-bacteria-could-reduce-trash.html
Plastic-Munching Bacteria Can Make Trash Biodegradable
March 10, 2016
A durable plastic called PET is considered a major environmental hazard because it’s highly resistant to breakdown. But researchers have found a potential new match for this hardy plastic: a newly discovered microbe that is astonishingly good at eating it.
An estimated 342 million tons (311 metric tons) of plastic are produced annually worldwide, and currently, only about 14 percent is collected for recycling, according to the World Economic Forum.
Most plastic degrades extraordinarily slowly, but PET — short for poly(ethylene terephthalate) — is especially durable, and about 61 million tons (56 metric tons) of the colorless plastic was produced worldwide in 2013 alone, according to the researchers.
Previously, the only species found to break down PET were rare fungi. Now, scientists in Japan have discovered bacteria that can biodegrade this hardy plastic.
“The bacterium is the first strain having a potential to degrade PET completely into carbon dioxide and water,” said study co-author Kohei Oda, an applied microbiologist at the Kyoto Institute of Technology in Japan.
The researchers collected 250 samples of PET debris from soil and wastewater from a plastic-bottle-recycling site. They scanned these samples for bacteria that could eat PET.
The scientists identified a new species of bacteria, which they named Ideonella sakaiensis 201-F6, that could almost completely break down a thin film of PET after six weeks at a temperature of 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius). Appendages from the cells might have secreted compounds that helped to dissolve the plastic, the researchers said.
Genetic and biochemical analyses identified two key enzymes involved in the breakdown of PET. One enzyme worked with water to break down the plastic into an intermediate substance, which the other enzyme broke down into PET’s basic building blocks, the scientists said.
These findings could have a wide range of real-world applications, because bacteria should be easier to incorporate into devices to break down PET than fungi is. “We hope that we can develop a technology to handle such a lot of wasted PET,” Oda said.
In the future, the researchers would like to “improve the ability of the microorganisms to degrade,” Oda said.
It’s not known how these enzymes evolved, Oda said, and both enzymes bear little resemblance to the enzymes most closely related to them.
The scientists detailed their findings online today (March 10) in the journal Science.
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