And much of the US Southeast in general. And probably the Northeast as well. But many people in the US can evacuate inland. Countries around the Caribbean Sea… not so much
Low-income households in the US are also disproportionately affected; cause it’s hard to evacuate your family without a car, or to rebuild your life after it’s been hurricaned away.
I mean; that’s a sure fire way to have it all backfire isn’t it? When someone else tries to replicate it and it doesn’t work? And they all get called out for it being utter bullshit?
What is this absolute garbage take that scientists just making extraordinary claims for “prestige” or whatever? They’ll be laughed out of the profession if they’re intentionally lying in a paper.
Now, it could be that they think they’re on to something only to have it proven false for one reason or another (flawed experiment, incorrect hypothesis, unaccounted factors etc) but that’s more in line with how peer review works - it’s not the claim that makes you famous it’s the proof.
No, obviously not, it clearly states in the Official Rules of Science that only some forms of media are acceptable.
If they’re wrong they’ll be laughing stocks forever like the idiots who tried to have FTL neutrinos.
Let people read this stuff, it’s better than trying to hide it and having every redneck believe we have secret technology the government doesn’t share with you.
This is a preprint published on arXiv.org, which is as reputable as it gets before peer review (so no red flag but standard practice). But I agree that people shouldn’t place hopes in this before it’s been peer reviewed and replicated by independent researchers.
My comment was directed specifically at the parent’s comment about publishing (in general not in a reputable peer reviewed journal which arxiv isnt) being how peer review happens. Arxiv is a preprint server. There is no peer review and while many of the papers there have survived the peer review process, a paper being on that server doesnt really say anything about the quality of that paper. It could be a great paper, it could be garbage or somewhere in between the two extremes. In any case, the hype around this paper is concerning because it has not, as of yet, survived the scrutiny that is demanded by the claims it is making.
I think the question was “what’s the purpose of posting this on Lemmy?” (not arXiv) because that does nothing for peer review but a lot for stirring laypeople’s wild imagination.
I was having a really terrible day yesterday, the overblown hype about this was a bright spot for me. I don’t watch arxiv myself so I am happy to see this stuff.
This is a human extinction issue. Everyone is involved and at stake. The rapid warming of earth and everything bad that comes with that is caused by human interactions in the environment. We’ve known about that for years and have done little to prevent it.
Whichever political party has a plan to help address it should be leading or most of us are going to die and have our lives impacted to the point of life being unrecognizable much sooner than expected. Full stop.
So far, only the Democratic and progressive parties in America seems to be willing to try and address this somehow. The other political parties have been on record saying/pretending that what’s happening in front of all of our eyes, isn’t real.
So that’s the best option we’ve got. Even if it’s not perfect.
But don’t pretend that it doesn’t matter who people elect. It shouldn’t, all parties should be working together to address global climate change. But that’s not the reality we live in unfortunately.
We did. Florida decided Bush would be a better president than Gore. Also, ironically, several states had just enough environmentally conscience voters to go Nader over Gore to cost Gore the EC votes in those states.
The 2000 US Presidential election was probably the last chance we had to stop this freight train and we pissed it away with butterfly-ballot shenanigans, a SCOTUS case, and just enough people who voted Nader because they couldn’t hold their nose and vote Gore (though that’s more a failing of our first-past-the-post system as opposed to some sort of ranked-choice voting).
You’re not even that clever of a troll. Seriously, how do you hope to troll anyone with the retort abilities of a 2nd grader that was held back ten years.
Because we have used it all our lives, that’s really it. We know water freezes at 32f and our body temp is around 98.6. The weather channel says it’s 70,80,90 every day and we know what that feels like. In a day to day contact we don’t have to covert to Kelvin or anything so the standard Fahrenheit scale works fine
I have been and lived in both the FREEDOM land and the rest of the world for a significant period of time 10y+, the “it has more marks on the thermometer” isn’t really a good argument, turns out there is no “71° time for a slightly warmer jacket” in reality.
It doesn’t “make sense” in a day to day sense. It made sense to researchers first investigating the properties of heat and temperature. 0F is a benchmark temperature that can be reliably produced with a mixture of water, ice and salt. The mixture will moderate itself by melting the ice such that the temperature stays at exactly 0F until the ice all melts. Why 1/180 the interval between freezing and boiling was chosen for the value of one degree, I dunno, but it’s probably similar to the reasons we use 360 degrees.
Celsius is the same, except with just water and ice - you don’t need to get some salt concentration right to reliably reproduce the zero, eliminating that as a variable. “Moderating itself until ice melts” is just something water does, no salt required.
Yeah, I’ve always wondered why they didn’t want to just use a frigorific slush without salt. I’m guessing that the salt version is more robust about maintaining its temperature, or it lasts longer, or something like that.
You can’t have water reliably below freezing without something like salt to keep it liquid? 0F is not serving the same purpose as 0C is. Not making an argument, just pointing out that they’re specifically after a liquid mixture that is below freezing for cooling things down to below freezing in times before refrigeration.
It’s about as equally arbitrary as describing Celsius in terms of 101325 Pa (“standard pressure” boiling point).
Americans are more used to switching units and scales as they relate to the topic at hand. Describing distance between cities in inches is dumb. Using Celsius for the weather is equally unwieldy as the units are not fine grained and despite the headline, we’re not even halfway to the boiling point of water on the Celsius scale. And likewise, if you live in a cold climate, even 0C isn’t super relevant as a floor. Things don’t even get uncomfortable until -10C anyway.
Speaking of Pascals, I feel “conversational” in Celsius and it kinda works but Pascals are even more irrelevant to daily tasks. Things don’t even get interesting until you get to 200 kPa and jumps of less than 100kPa aren’t very noteworthy. It’s like currency after massive inflation.
I don’t care about the price, It just sucks that there is ONE MORE thing I have to remember to do before traveling. It’s not like going international isn’t stressful enough.
You have to realize that every other country has been dealing with this forever, so think of it as Americans joining the rest of the world. It really isn’t that bad.
The article and their website explicitly say that for the majority of people, the application is processed within minutes, unless you’re on an interpol/europole watchlist and/or have a lengthy criminal record. The fee is $8/person, and if you can afford a plane ticket to Europe, $32 for a family of 4 is a drop in the bucket. And with the exception of business travellers, most people should be planning their trip well in advance.
How is that cynical? I see it as now Americans have to deal with what everyone else has had to deal with for decades, and the added requirement really isn’t a huge burden. For a country like America that has a hardon for immigration and the like, it seems a bit hypocritical that we’d get upset the EU would like added protections at their borders. Kind of a leopards at my face situation.
Reposting my comment from another thread to add a bit of context in case anyone’s curious.
So I read the paper, and here’s a tldr about how their material apparently gains its properties.
It is hypothesized that superconductivity properties emerge from very specific strains induced in the material. Hence why most of the discovered superconductors require either to be cooled down to very low temperatures, or to be under high pressures. Both shrink the material.
What this paper claims is that they have achieved a similar effect chemically by replacing some lead ions with copper ions, which are a bit smaller (87 pm for Cu vs 133 pm for Pb). This shrinks the material by 0.48%, and that added strain induces superconductivity. This is why it apparently works at room temperature — you no longer need high pressures or extreme cold to create the needed deformation.
Can’t really comment on how actually feasible or long-lasting this effect is, but it looks surprisingly promising. At least as a starting point for future experiments. Can’t wait for other labs’ reproduction attempts. If it turns out to be true, this is an extremely important and world-changing discovery.
I’m most excited for fusion power generation. Currently we can ignite a fusion reaction but it takes more energy to control and contain it than you get back because it takes a huge amount of electricity to generate a magnetic field strong enough to contain the plasma. The strength of the magnetic field is proportional to the current flow, which is limited by how much cooling is required to maintain superconductivity. Without cooling taking a huge chunk of the power created by the fusion reaction we could net positive energy from the reaction and finally have a clean source of scalable nuclear power.
Long-distance energy transfer without energy loss will make it possible to connect more energy grids and sources together, so stuff like the saharan desert providing solar power to Europe, for example, suddenly becomes feasible. Maglev trains will no longer require lots of power to run, since they could utilize superconductor magnetic levitation. You could make super-efficient processors that wouldn’t really heat up at all. Superconductors are also key to quantum computers, so expect lots of advancements in that field as well. They will also make it much easier to build and run fusion power experiments.
Lots of tech in general would benefit from this discovery, stuff like MRIs, electric vehicles, space telescopes or particle accelerators would become way more efficient, cheaper and easier to produce.
Edit: also, check out this video by Isaac Arthur for some more sci-fi examples of what this tech can be used for in the future (discussed in the second half). It’s more space-colonization-focused and kinda like a thought experiment, but interesting nonetheless.
Not really. If that turns out to be true (nothing is guaranteed yet), the processes described are pretty straightforward and don’t require any super-advanced tech to be reproduced. Full-scale production could be rolled out in mere years. That would become beneficial for stuff like MRIs or electric cars as soon as production starts.
After that, my guess would be that some large-scale energy infrastructure projects, for example, could be completed in about a decade.
Does this get us hovering without rails? Could we theoretically generate a magnetic field strong enough to repulse the earth? Or is that still Science Fiction?
You still need a magnet-superconductor pair for quantum locking and magnetic levitation. This is called the Meissner effect and it seems like it has been confirmed for this material. Here’s a video showing an example of such a system.
Before, the best way to scale this up might’ve been to make permanent magnet rails and run a superconductor train along those rails, but that would have been totally infeasible and inapplicable in real life, since building rails out of permanent magnets is expensive and dangerous, and the train would need to house a really large superconductor chilled to liquid nitrogen temperatures. You couldn’t have built a track out of superconductors irl because good luck keeping those at the temperatures required for superconductivity to kick in.
If this material turns out to actually work as claimed and to be producible at scale, you can switch those and make an electromagnetic train that travels along superconductor tracks. Which is way easier, cheaper and much more doable in general.
But the earth’s magnetic field is extremely weak, and even the tiniest pieces of superconductors are unable to lock with it. So no, it does not allow for trackless levitation.
But a cool new train system design becomes possible though!
You're right, haven't heard about that one. They actually do use superconducting magnets on a train that runs along a magnetic track.
But I feel like my feasibility comment still stands. It seems like all they had built is a 18km test track, and there's some info about extending it to 48 km, but it doesn't seem like the extended part uses superconducting tech yet, it only mentions regular maglev. The Tokyo — Osaka line is planned for 2037. So yeah, its technically possible, but it's not like you can cover Europe or the US with this type of track for any sensible amount of money.
That's the cool part about room temperature superconductors, they make this type of tech possible on much larger scales.
It sounds like the full line will eventually go across most of Japan and operate in the same way as the test track, however it is expected to be very expensive, and room temperature superconductors would likely lower the cost.
Superconducting materials will expel an induced magnetic field as it creates internal fields that exactly cancel out the induced one. You’d still need some sort of “rails” to created the induced field and to move it to generate forward motion.
That is for the Meissner effect I think. I guess what I was thinking is to use the SC to create an incrediblely strong electromagnet to repel the Earth’s magnetic field. But it looks like we are orders of magnitude away from that
If they can be made into wires (or close to them) you can create things like lossless electricity transmission, lossless batteries, electronics without heat generation (or very low), etc. Transmission lines would likely still need some sort of cooling but at room temp it would be a lot less than for the current superconductors that require at least liquid nitrogen.
What kind of magnetic fields would be induced with superconducting wires/rails carrying an AC current? Or is there even any reason to use AC with superconductive transmission?
Those ultra fast and efficient trains required superconducting rails IIRC (which I think indicates strong magnetic field because they used magnets to levitate so that the only friction involved came from air). I wonder if we could combine the trains with transmission and basically have trains that use the power mains to get from A to B.
If we had a practical room temperature/pressure superconductor its kind of hard to overstate how amazing that would be. Its the kind of thing that normally gets put in the same category as faster than light travel in terms of all the amazing stuff you could do with it.
Not thrilled that it is a lead alloy. Just when we are starting to get rid of all the lead in our communities, this would put it back as part of critical infrastructure everywhere…
The transition to lead free solder (and lack of experience using it) led to the XBox 360 red ring of death issues, Playstation 3 yellow light of death, and nVidia 8000 series no video failures.
And indeed the transition happened a long time ago.
As others have mentioned lead is still everywhere. All our combustion car batteries are still lead/acid batteries, but if what /u/[email protected] mentioned the paper claims is true, the method for inducing superconductivity in the metal could possibly be used to create other lead free ones.
Interesting and it wouldn’t be a ceramic. Downside is that it is lead based. Not exactly good for the environment or very flexible without breaking. Lead doesn’t make good wire.
The year is 2057. The Climate Wars have been going on for over a decade. Food and water are scarce. Hardly any babies are born any more. The ones that do make it to see the light of day are either dead within days or eaten for survival. Everything is in shambles. The only thing anyone will remember about the before time was that Desantis owned the libs. 🙄 /s
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