I mean, yeah. I Did A Thing did a video on exactly this a year or so back. His setup was a complete shitshow as they had to change robo-dogs at the last second (because Michael Reeves and OfflineTV didn’t want to get sued by Boston Dynamics) but the principle was sound.
But also? You are never going to replace a well trained soldier with this. Even with a proper gimbal mount, you aren’t doing rapid precise shots.
But also… you don’t need to. The advantage to this is to have a relatively low cost platform to handle suppressive fire or fire an anti-tank shot or whatever. Something where you would otherwise be risking a human being.
I mean… that is another I Did A Thing video (the knife missile is Backyard/Backdoor Scientist). Well, I Did A Thing, Michael Reeves, random ass kids, etc.
Gun+Computer Vision = Autonomous Sentry Turret. Reeves and Aleks made things “harder” by trying to specifically identify faces. But it doesn’t take much to realize that shooting at anything identified as a human approaching on an active battlefield is a LOT easier. And will likely be necessary as more and more “C4 duct taped to a drone” attacks are used against airfields and the like.
Israel is already assassinating Iranian nuclear scientists with autonomous/remote-controlled gun platforms. The last one I’ve heard of apparently was able to use facial recognition and shoot the scientist in his car sparing the other passengers.
Next to that, putting the platform on a Spot seems almost trivial. Maybe one day they’ll be able to airdrop a bot, have it walk kilometers across a forest, and place itself in a position to snipe someone marked for death by one State or another.
As an autistic person this technology could actually allow me to access the community without being overwhelmed. This is revolutionary and would change my life.
I’m very much here for this in theory, but it also does seem like something that might boomerang back on us, like the bacteria evolve to consume not only plastic but other substances and end up destroying the oceans more than we have. We need to be cautious about unleashing our inventions on nature
We don’t need to be worried about them evolving to eat something else. We need to be worried that the bacteria spread. Rivers, lakes, and streams have tons of monitoring, anti-erosion, and safety infrastructure that involves plastics. Vinyl siding on houses is plastic. Window casements are plastic. Just imagine what housing anywhere near ocean breezes is going to go through. Or road ways. Or hospitals.
Obviously this is just in initial research phase, very far from being unleashed on nature. It would be interesting to see how this research progresses.
It’s more like a generator that uses ambient heat as the “battery”. With previous systems you could only extract useful work from heat if you had a heat gradient (e.g. one area that’s hotter than another). With this invention the innovation is that graphene’s unique combination of thinness and conductivity basically let you convert the brownian “heat” of the substance itself (not the environment) into electricity.
This is genuinely incredible though. Because it means you can cool things even when there's nowhere to dump the heat into, for example, space.
EDIT: Though in space you lose heat as infra-red, but only in limited amounts. Scaled up this technology would allow far better control letting you run more powerful equipment while also improving efficiency.
And you’re limited to approaching 2.7K, the background temperature and limit for radiative cooling, which is higher than you would want for some sensors. Being able to either extract power and charge a battery to be either used as power, to heat other parts of the craft, or to concentrate for more efficient radiation would be quite useful.
I couldnt access the full text, but that was my impression, too, based on the summary. It appears to work on some analog of hysteresis where the technical balance of energy is maintained but the time scale of restitution is long enough that power can be “siphoned off”. Again - since conservation of energy must be preserved and no matter is created or destroyed, this would serve to reduce the temperature of the graphene. There doesn’t appear to be a scale for their experimental work and whether they’re extracting pico amps or microamps across the (I guessing form the publicly available graphs) 0-0.4 volt potential.
It’s not clear if they’re looking at nominally uniform temperature material which has fluctuations in temperature due to the surroundings, or if they are inducing temperature gradients in the material intentionally to produce the signal. I’m an engineer, not a theoretical physicist, so anyone claiming to end-run the second law of thermodynamics is going to be treated with a bit of skepticism as to the practicality or scalability of this “cheat”.
Wouldn’t this just slowly cool the ambient temp around the material. I’m guessing there would be practical limits on how quickly this could create power but it doesn’t seem to be claiming to create free energy just extract it from ambient Temps no?
Graphene is above 0K -> the atoms have some thermal energy -> harvest some of that energy as electrical potential -> graphene cools down.
The most interesting application to me is that this could be use to remove heat at an interface without needing a thermal gradient to transport the heat.
I mean that depends on how quickly it actually cools down the ambient Temps no? Plus we still can’t make massive sheets of graphene if I am not mistaken so wouldn’t the scale of this make that impossible at this stage? I’d see the benefit for powering micro sensors via ambient Temps though.
That’s actually a big deal, thermodynamically. They are claiming that they can reduce entropy essentially without an input or pump - their diode aray appears to be a Maxwell’s demon.
I mean isn’t the graphenes physical vibrations the input/pump in this situation powered by the ambient thermal energy radiating into the graphene? I’m only a software engineer so I apologize if some of this is just going over my head lol.
Hey, I’m just an aero/structural engineer - this microscopic and quantum level stuff is well outside of my daily practice, too. The theory (of which I am innocent of all detail) says that this shouldn’t be possible - using Brownian motion as a source (directly or as a pump). If this is an end-run around classic physics, that’s okay, as long as the overall energy balance can be shown to be maintained.
Edit: Usually in threads like this I hope to say something wrong, or apply the wrong principle, and then someone who is an expert comes in and corrects me. Then I go look up whatever it is they say and I get to learn something new for the day. Either that or someone who knows more than I do agrees with me and expands on the description in a really insightful way, and I get to learn something more in depth that day.
I guess in addition isn’t the thermal gradient they are claiming is nonexistent just extremely small throughout the graphene molecules? They aren’t gonna be a perfectly uniform temperature and thermals don’t transfer instantly meaning a gradient would be present. I guess couldn’t you prove they aren’t reducing entropy by comparing how quickly the sheet of graphene cools when this system is active vs a regular sheet of graphene in the same conditions. I’d guess we would see their system losing heat more quickly than the plain old sheet of graphene thus showing this isn’t a maxwell demon?
If you’re extracting energy from ambient heat without a temperature differential, then is that not a perpetual motion machine? Once you use that energy, 100% of it goes right back into the system as waste heat, ready to be harvested again. You can run this indefinitely and it will never reach absolute zero, so…what am I missing?
Sounds like from the properties of graphene they are able to turn its thermal energy to electrical so long as the material isn’t at absolute zero (obviously or then it would be a perpetual motion like machine), plus i dont see anything that says this process is lossless just high efficiency. It’s definitely not perpetual motion eventually the system would lose all thermal energy and no longer output any electrical energy. If producing waste heat meant perpetual motion, geothermal would also be classified as perpetual motion, but it isn’t lossless. It seems like it’s essentially a heat pump at a much smaller scale where the ambient temp of the room keeps the graphene’s thermal energy charged in a way. Idk nothing on this seems unintuitive unless they start trying to claim it has massive outputs. I’m guessing this is something that could help power some micro sensors by using heat in the environment but not for anything larger as you’d probably need massive sheets of graphene and they havent really said anything about scaling. Although word of caution I’m only a software engineer not a theoretical physicist, so take my ramblings with a grain of salt and defer to any actual physicists in the comments here haha
You can’t destroy energy though. Where is it going?
Consider a closed system. That energy has to go somewhere. In the geothermal example, it is going into waste heat — heat which cannot be re-harvested because it requires a temperature differential.
If you don’t require a temperature differential, where’s the loss occurring here? How is the “waste” heat non-harvestable? I don’t see how a closed system could ever reach absolute zero.
Well if this works as they say I’d guess this isn’t working without a temperature gradient, just a very small one that is found throughout the molecules in the graphene sheet itself, hence why this needs to be above zero Kelvin and why I’d guess they are only targeting micro/nano sensors to power as they can’t ever scale this beyond the inherent gradient present in graphene. I’m not a physicist so don’t take my word as the gospel but at the same time I don’t see why this is ruffling so many feathers when it clearly can’t scale past these smaller voltages that they are targeting, which seems to hint at this just being a way to take advantage of the natural heat loss on graphene for small powered devices.
I think this is it exactly, and in fact I found a Science Daily article that explains the cleverness of it (your assumption about the time scale is correct, and they have a clever arrangement of diodes that let you kind of “pump” the charge out). They specifically mention not violating the 2nd Law too :)
I recall watching a video about this a few months ago. Their explanation of how this doesn’t violate the law of increasing entropy was not satisfactory:
They ran a computer simulation of their model that showed 0 entropy at the beginning then a huge spike and then an asymptotic approach to a steady state value. Since the steady state value wasn’t zero they said “look entropy increased (from zero to some value) we don’t violate the law of entropy”.
The initial entropy value of zero was because of fixed starting conditions ie at fixed starting conditions entropy is zero because you’ve defined the state everything is in. Once I figured out this have waving I lost interest.
A law is only effective if the majority is following it. But we will never escape this system if we follow the rules of the system itself. I’m calling for scientists to finally just break the laws of thermodynamics!
If you’ll allow me to be pedantic, they already applied heat to the sample as it was above absolute zero. For this device to not violate the laws of thermodynamics it has to cool down when the power is extracted so, in an otherwise adiabatic system, a perpetual use would eventually require the addition of heat to continue to produce power.
Like the recent claim of a room temperature superconductor, the ability to produce this effect at a macro scale would be revolutionary. Example: 99% efficient solar panels. Combination refrigerator/water heater appliances which use no outside energy. Home heating and cooling which requires not only no energy but produces surplus power in the cooling months. Your home dehumidifier could charge your car or your laptop. You could drop this generator into the ocean and simply pipe unlimited energy to the shore, using the water as a sink. Practically, though, it sounds like microamps (at best) is the result, so - as they said - semi-autonomous, very lower power electronics is the real target application, leaching thermal energy from the environment in such small amounts as to be negligible. A bit like using harvesting energy from radio waves (a myth that was explored on Mythbusters and, while possible, was highly impractical)
Yeah I often drive over 1000 miles in a day, sometimes as much as 1600+ so this is the only way I’d consider electric. Although it sounds like at a high speed supercharger it would be more expensive than regular gasoline. At least there’s progress.
If you average 60 miles per hour, then 1000 miles would take you 16 hours. There is not way you are regularly doing that. It’s not taking into account gassing up, breaks to get food.
This is totally possible. Maybe not for 1600 miles but 1000 for sure. I do this for 500-800 miles regularly. Sometimes 1000+. Speed limit is 70mph on most US highways and the unspoken agreement is you can go 8 or 9 over and not get pulled over. In metropolitan areas you can typically go even faster on the beltway, almost everyone does. You train yourself not to need to piss as often, so you piss while you gas up. You don’t eat until your drive is done.
Do the math with 90 mph, although to be fair, I only average 80 to 85 probably. I only do 1600 with multiple drivers. I live in Ohio but I take people to the mountains out west all of the time. Sometimes I drive to Colorado by myself though without stopping other than gas. Also, I’ve done a thousand miles on a motorcycle in one day. Now that is a feat.
These aren’t in a lab. They’re being manufactured right now.
There’s a toxic positivity in battery tech news. So many things only end up being practical in a lab, but the news headlines sensationalizes every single one. Its led people to believe that no advancements are coming. But the truth is that batteries improve 5-8% in kwh/kg per year, and that compounds over time to some real gains.
So long as its not 2,3,4 times the price of current cars. Otherwise put them in busses and trains. Cost is strangly missing, I’m guessing because it is prohibitive.
The stuff about the range appears to be simply applying that percentage to common EV ranges, which is nonsense. It’s probably more likely that an increase in energy density would be used to decrease battery size, leading to cheaper and lighter EVs
The title says “1000 miles”, the the subtitle right below says “moving closer to 1000 kilometers” which is only 621 miles and pretty close to what we already could do with a ridiculously big battery in a Lucid Air or Tesla (if they didn’t bother with the plaid speed bullshit and just build for single motor range).
Knowing the Chinese tendency to lie massage the truth this thing is probably only radar transparent in one frequency and lit up like a beacon in all other frequencies.
Well yeah, that was my first thought. They coat a part of the plane with a radioactive isotope. It would have to be a lot of the stuff to ionize enough air around the part to hide it from radar. Considering that the plane is flying, and the air around it doesn’t sit still I would guess that in certain frequencies it would be bright as the sun. If this thing works as stated I wouldn’t get close to that thing without a decent amount of concrete between us.
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