Expert prognosis for the planet

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by blsfrs

For those of us living on a 1/3 acre lot, ground based solar panel is obviously impractical. My 2.5 car garage and accompanying driveway take up a chunk of our lot. Plus, the HOA would probably have a cow.

An overlooked advantage to rooftop is the amount of heat it "removes" from the attic and 2nd floor.

Our 2 story house was build with a single zone HVAC. We always had trouble keeping the kids' upstairs rooms cool. It's much cooler up there now that we have the panels on the roof.

But now that's almost a moot point since my guys are grown and moved out a couple of years ago and my wife and I are enjoying being emptynesters.

For clarification, I was referring to what Dadhawk was referring to, which was larger, utility/grid-based, ground installations for solar panels, but this would also apply to solar water heaters too. There are utility companies supplying warm water this way.

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by soundman98

lol. california questions.

the reality is that a major part of the country lives with this stuff called "FREEZING TEMPERATURES"

for that to work in the midwest, i'd really only get about 3-4 months max out of the system, and then i'd need to entirely drain, blow out, and winterize the system for the remainder of the year... every. single. year.

and then when a little bit of water pools up in the bottom from condensate and freezes, cracking parts of the pipe, i'll be patching and repairing the system every single year afterwards as well.

basically, this is a solution that only works in california or hawaii's temperate tropical climate regions.

Coolant maybe? Does it snow in Germany? Its latitude is north of Canada. I think Denmark gets cold, right?



There are different types of systems, but in an evacuated tube solar collector, which is what I have been showing, the vertical tubes don't contain water. They are vacuum tubes containing dry, thermal units that warm and conduct the heat to a collector above where the water is circulating.

https://www.iea-shc.org/Data/Sites/1...dwide-2022.pdf

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by Lantanafrs2

https://m.youtube.com/shorts/-Mz6lgA...vfzaJfuVt6-zhF

This is the best solution that will likely be the standard until something better comes along. Ford, Tesla, China are all getting on board. Cheap materials, safer and better performance in extreme weather, and now, capable of fast charging and better energy density.

Ford will spend $3.5 billion to build lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery plant
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2023/02...d-in-michigan/

CATL Debuts Fast-Charging LFP Battery That Adds 248 Miles In 10 Mins
https://insideevs.com/news/682066/ca...%20of%20charge.

CATL, the world's largest EV battery maker and a major Tesla supplier, has launched a new fast charging lithium iron phosphate (LFP) battery capable of adding 248 miles of range after just 10 minutes of charge.

Dubbed Shenxing (an ancient Chinese phrase praising speed), the new battery, which is described by CATL as a "battery for everyone," will enable up to 434 miles of range on China's CLTC cycle...

According to the company, the Shenxing LFP battery can achieve fast-charging over a wide temperature range, being able to charge from zero to 80 percent in 30 minutes even in temperatures as low as 14℉.

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by Lantanafrs2

Originally Posted by Lantanafrs2

I think there's a world of shit on its way as far as safety and insurance are concerned regarding things like solar batteries and home charging stations

Something seemed off or suspicious about this story, so I did some quick research...

https://www.solar-fl.com/post/florid...lar-pv-systems

Many insurance companies are unfamiliar with this requirement, and confusion can arise when asking your insurance agent to, "insure my solar panels for $1 million." When communicating with your insurance agent, be sure to communicate clearly that you need a Personal Liability Policy - or PLP - of $1 million...

That said, PLP’s generally cost around $500/year for a low-risk policyholder.

[Irace86.2.0]

[MyHybridBurnsGasAndTires]

womp womp

The room-temperature superconductor that wasn’t

The summer of room-temperature superconductivity was short-lived. It started with some manuscripts placed on the arXiv toward the end of July, which purportedly described how to synthesize a compound called LK-99, which would act as a superconductor at temperatures above the boiling point of water. High enough that, if its synthesis and material properties worked out, it could allow us to replace metals with superconductors in a huge range of applications.

Confusion quickly followed, as the nature of the chemical involved made it difficult to know when you were looking at the behavior of LK-99 and when you were looking at related chemicals or even impurities.

But the materials science community responded remarkably quickly. By the end of August, pure samples had been prepared, the role of impurities explored, and a strong consensus had developed: LK-99 was not a superconductor. Best yet, the work nicely provided explanations for why it had behaved a bit like one in a number of situations.

A complex chemical
As we discussed in detail in our story linked above, LK-99 is a complicated chemical. It's largely a lead-phosphate crystal, but some of the lead atoms are displaced by copper. How many copper atoms are present may not only vary from preparation to preparation; they can potentially vary between different areas of the same crystal. Its chemical formula is technically Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O, with the x representing the unknown number of replacements.

It's also what's called a polycrystalline material, meaning that a single chunk of it may be a composite of multiple crystals with different orientations. So, for any properties that depend on the orientation of the crystal, it's easy to end up examining a composite of behaviors from multiple individual crystals.

Finally, the preparation of LK-99 described in the initial report produced it via a chemical reaction, leaving open the possibility that there were contaminants or byproducts affecting the measurements of its properties.

This last possibility turned out to be a key to explaining one of the reported properties of LK-99: a sharp transition in its ability to conduct current that occurred just above the boiling point of water.

Prashant Jain is a professor in the Chemistry Department at the University of Illinois, and he's had funding to work on copper sulfide since 2011. He noticed two critical things about the initial reports of LK-99. One is that the reactions used to produce it could potentially produce copper sulfide as an additional product. The second is that the temperature where LK-99 supposedly started superconducting (104° C) is also the temperature where copper sulfide undergoes a phase transition.

Changing phase and conductivity
In a manuscript deposited on the arXiv, Jain describes this complicated phase transition in detail. Above 104° C, copper sulfide remains a solid but becomes more disordered, which allows its constituent ions to move more readily, increasing its conductivity somewhat. But Jain notes that things get more complicated when the material is exposed to air, as oxygen can react with some of the copper and pull it out of the copper sulfide structure.

This creates charged "holes" in the structure of the copper sulfide, which can also conduct electricity. And they do so far more effectively in the ordered stage of the crystal that forms below 104° C. While these two effects can offset each other, the holes are far more effective at conducting current, so this effect dominates, leading to much higher conductivity below 104° C—an effect similar to that ascribed to the onset of superconductivity.



Jain quite reasonably concludes that "LK-99 must be synthesized without any copper sulfide to allow unambiguous validation of the superconducting properties." And, fortunately, a group at the Max Planck Institute for Solid State Research has done just that.

Their method of producing LK-99 is significantly different from the original report, and its starting materials contain no sulfur whatsoever. It contains a number of additional cycles of grinding and heating to thoroughly mix its materials and then goes through a final step that promotes the growth of single, uniform crystals. As a result, the group was able to characterize LK-99 without the complications from a polycrystalline form, and potentially with far less (and different) contamination from reaction byproducts.

It turns out it's an insulator. In fact, instead of having freely conducting electrons that can absorb light at a variety of wavelengths, their LK-99 crystals were semi-transparent. Which suggests that any changes in conductivity are coming from something else, like the contaminant highlighted by Jain.

About the levitation
But changes in conductivity aren't the only aspects of superconductivity that were originally reported for LK-99. Superconductors don't allow magnetic field lines to pass through them; if you place a magnet near superconducting material, it will levitate to keep this from happening. A number of early reports on LK-99 were accompanied by images of crystals partly levitating, as if a small part of the complex crystal were expelling the magnetic field.

Jain provided a potential explanation for some of this, noting that the copper sulfide contaminant is diamagnetic, meaning it shows a specific set of magnetic properties when placed in a magnetic field. But the group in Germany, using its single crystal, shows that LK-99 itself is diamagnetic and, so, would be expected to react to the presence of a magnetic field.

Complicating matters further, they showed that the substitution of copper isn't even across even a single crystal. Some areas of the crystal will still contain lead that has not been substituted at all; other areas will see multiple lead atoms in a single crystal unit swapped out for copper. Overall, they found that the x of the Pb10-xCux(PO4)6O formula averaged 1.2 in their preps but varied considerably depending on where in the crystal you looked.

When the local copper concentration was high enough, the material behaved like a standard magnet. This provides an additional opportunity for some portions of the material to be repelled by having a magnet placed near it. A separate study, done by a Chinese collaboration, showed that both levitating and non-levitating LK-99 samples had localized patches that displayed some combination of standard magnetism and diamagnetism, essentially replicating this result.

With both the magnetic and conductive behaviors seemingly explained without superconductivity, LK-99 appears to be a fairly run-of-the-mill insulator when prepared in a pure form. Considering all the complexities involved, this consensus was arrived at remarkably quickly. The only remaining drama is likely to be whether the people who originally described it will continue to argue in favor of their initial reports in the face of all this evidence.

[Dadhawk]

Originally Posted by MyHybridBurnsGasAndTires

womp womp...

Considering all the complexities involved, this consensus was arrived at remarkably quickly. The only remaining drama is likely to be whether the people who originally described it will continue to argue in favor of their initial reports in the face of all this evidence.

Looks like the team hasn't given up.

[soundman98]

Originally Posted by Dadhawk

Looks like the team hasn't given up.

check your link

[Dadhawk]

Originally Posted by soundman98

check your link

Hmm, I blame the aliens.

[Unplugem]

Originally Posted by Irace86.2.0

So you are a flat earther. That explains a lot.



Once again, you clearly are inept at understand what you are reading, especially in the context for which you find it. What they are doing is simplifying the system. A stationary atmosphere? Clearly there is no such thing as an atmosphere with a wind speed at all altitudes of zero, but they set that to zero to focus on certain variables in their equations and eliminate others. An object flying around the globe/earth at a given altitudes behaves the same as an object flying over a flat surface.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/qu...rotating-earth

The Wikipedia flat earth "fact check" disclaimer should tell you all you need to know... Why do you think they would put that there? Are they really that scared of the information getting out? Why would they feel so threatened by a video that has "flat earth" in the title, if it was a false hoax?

[blsfrs]

"How Many Moons Are There in the Solar System? The "traditional" moon count most people are familiar with stands at 290: One moon for Earth; two for Mars; 95 at Jupiter; 146 at Saturn; 27 at Uranus; 14 at Neptune; and five for dwarf planet Pluto."

8 (+1) planets and 290 moons. For hundreds of years, all have been observed to spheres. Except earth? Aren't we special.

[MyHybridBurnsGasAndTires]

Originally Posted by Unplugem

The Wikipedia flat earth "fact check" disclaimer should tell you all you need to know... Why do you think they would put that there? Are they really that scared of the information getting out? Why would they feel so threatened by a video that has "flat earth" in the title, if it was a false hoax?

[Irace86.2.0]

Originally Posted by Unplugem

The Wikipedia flat earth "fact check" disclaimer should tell you all you need to know... Why do you think they would put that there? Are they really that scared of the information getting out? Why would they feel so threatened by a video that has "flat earth" in the title, if it was a false hoax?

Because misinformation can be effective against feeble minds, clearly. Plus, there is all types of well made misinformation with deepfakes, photoshopped pictures, stitched together videos, and blatant misconceptions of facts, etc. that would fool anyone who didn't do fact checking. This was the case of the misinformation you posted of the "laser beam" hitting Maui, which was a time lapse of a rocket launch from California, or the "video evidence" of the moon landing being faked, which was a well-made video stitching pieces of movie clips edited with real images to look authentic, or the "video evidence" of the YouTuber trying to pick apart the moon landing from India, falsely saying that a picture of the earth from the perspective orbiting the moon was a picture on the lunar surface.

Fact checking is there because misinformation causes harm.

[Unplugem]

Originally Posted by blsfrs

"How Many Moons Are There in the Solar System? The "traditional" moon count most people are familiar with stands at 290: One moon for Earth; two for Mars; 95 at Jupiter; 146 at Saturn; 27 at Uranus; 14 at Neptune; and five for dwarf planet Pluto."

8 (+1) planets and 290 moons. For hundreds of years, all have been observed to spheres. Except earth? Aren't we special.

It would be impossible for more than two "gravity generating spheres" to exist in the same system. It's the three body problem, research it. As soon as a third "gravity generating object" is added to the system, the whole system becomes unpredictable and devolves into absolute chaos. The three body problem is proof in itself, that the earth, sun, and moon cannot coexist in a predictable system; once you add in other "planets," it only becomes more impossible.