You’re grossly underestimating the skill and coordination required by human hands. Granted that we don’t notice it. But our body has complex neural pathways that do this without constant attention from our conscious mind.
No numbers in the article, so I'm going to assume that a modern smartphone would chew through several hundred of these per day and an EV would need a battery the size of a house.
Now, that I think of it: we haven’t had our 2-3 weekly battery revolutions yet, and now it’s Friday already. I mean, what is wrong with all you battery researchers?
Took me a little bit this is the article that’s being referenced. It’s late so I’ll look at this tomorrow. First impression is 2.6uW/cm2 is surprisingly high given that a human body doesn’t produce that much energy at rest.
The headline’s a bit misleading. The drive is a plasma thruster, and the company found that by adding Boronated water to the exhaust the plasma would fuse with some of the boron creating a kind of afterburner effect, not a sustained fusion reaction. It’s kind of interesting as a way to boost the performance of the plasma thruster, but not “OMG it’s a Fusion Drive!!!” interesting.
Yeah, that’s the fault of the article author. The actual press release uses “fusion-enhanced” which is a lot more honest.
To be fair, they’re quoting a 50% increase in thrust so it’s not completely clickbait to say “fusion powered” but it definitely does give the wrong picture.
Wasn’t there an rocket concept like that from the 70’s, using the freed electrons for containement or something? I saw it once on Wikipedia and then never found it again.
There has been some fusor research going on for decades. The issue that killed that direction of fusion research was ultimately that the electrons do not behave as the initial simple models suggested and in the real world the power loss from the fast electrons is just too big for any reasonably sized device to allow for self sustaining fusion.
Basically this. Look at all the big fusion reactor projects - they’ve been going for decades and JUST NOW hit a very miniscule amount of net output within the past several months.
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