In other news today...
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@Mason_Wheeler Indeed. The MRI is just the most common example that needs superconductivity so badly that it accepts dealing with liquid helium to be able to work at all, but anything electrical would benefit to various degrees.
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Thanks to everyone who chipped in.
On the recent news (assuming it holds), I'm still dubious on how much it would change things, because "room temperature" isn't the only property required of a material to be industrially usable at large scale. @boomzilla's link highlights some of the known weaknesses of the new material, and that's without going into a discussion of whether it can be produced at industrial scales. Even if that discovery opens the door to finding other materials with similar properties, there is still no guarantee a "workable" one will be amongst them.
If we want to e.g. replace electrical wires, the material needs to be easy and cheap to mass produce, reasonably mechanically strong, reliably working in very different atmospheric conditions (temperature/humidity swings, light, salt, dust...), stable across years if not decades, fairly easy to repair/patch... Some applications can relax some of those criterion, of course, but that's still a lot more than just "being supraconductor at room temperature."
The same link has a link (!) to this wiki page which shows a previous example of a major breakthrough (with a Nobel Prize!) that everyone at the time thought would revolutionise things and that in the end... didn't really. Sure, it made MRI and probably a couple of other things possible, but that still remains niche applications. This is not to diminish the accomplishment nor the scientific knowledge gained, but the gap between the lab and real life is quite huge.
Still, hugely exciting scientifically (if it's true) (and if you care about supraconductor which as you can guess from my initial post isn't really my case...).
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EU officially opens antitrust investigation against Microsoft over Teams
The EU's regulatory group, the European Commission, is looking into if Microsoft's bundling of Teams into Microsoft 365 may have prevented other similar products from competing.
If Microsoft is found to be in violation of EU antitrust rules, it could face a major fine
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@boomzilla said in In other news today...:
@dkf said in In other news today...:
@topspin said in In other news today...:
Expect the next one soon:
'The First Room-Temperature Ambient-Pressure Superconductor' - Slashdot
A team of Korean scientists claims to have created a room-temperature superconductor that also works at standard, ambient pressure. The work, however, is yet to be peer-reviewed. You can read their paper on Arxiv. Its abstract: For the first time in the world, we succeeded in synthesizing the room...
I was reading the paper; it appears to be a relatively simple material to make in the lab (if you have a temperature-controlled furnace and a decent vacuum system) as it's starting materials aren't very exotic. Expect either a reproduction of the experiment or a bunch of denials that it could possibly be true soon.
It's definitely not an AI-written paper. The language use is slightly too awkward in places.
Yeah, here's everyone's favorite chemist's take:
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/breaking-superconductor-news
It may not be anything - we’ll know soon. But it could also signal a transition point in human history. Place your bets, folks, place your bets.
I'm betting against it. But I'd be more than happy to lose.
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Google attempts to defend Web Environment Integrity proposal
'The solution to the surveillance economy seems to be more surveillance' Vivaldi boss tells El Reg
Or it might be used by a content publisher to check whether ads are being displayed to real visitors or fraudulent bots.
Or?
The result of this, he argues, is that websites – determined to fight fraud – have responded by increasing their usage of sign-in gates, invasive fingerprinting techniques, and intrusive challenges like CAPTCHAs and SMS verification. Wiser argues these defenses make the web experience worse.
sms verification would be a step up. I usually don’t bother with websites if they throw captchas at me. A support drone on the stationary site I used to use is asking me to reply but I can’t be bothered with the captcha so I’ll never know what they’re asking for.
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
A support drone on the stationary site
Maybe the support broke and the site started moving around.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@DogsB said in In other news today...:
A support drone on the stationary site
Maybe the support broke and the site started moving around.
I have to admit, you’re killing it lately with out of context quotes. Keep it up.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
Yes, but why? (apart from )
MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) = NMR (nuclear magnetic resonance).
IIRC: Basically, grab big honking magnetic field. Put stuff into big magnetic field. This aligns spins (at least in a flavour of NMR) of stuff. Generate smaller magnetic pulse to change the state of some stuff. Because it's now in a higher energy state, it'll eventually fall back into its original state. When it does, it'll emit a photon. You measure those photons and when they occur (relaxation time). Out of this you can tell what stuff is in the stuff. The photons will sometimes do multiple interactions, so they'll come out at different times. This tells you something about the distance between same atoms in a structure.
More bigger honking magnetic field means there's more energy involved, so I guess that improves the signal quality? I don't think you can really achieve those field strengths without superconductors.
If things go wrong, they can lose superconductivity in the magnets. The magnets contain a lot of energy -- essentially there's a constant high current going in circles. No superconductivity = suddenly resistance. Resistance + big ass current = lots of heating. I'm told the result is rather spectacular (all of the cryogenic stuff -Helium and Nitrogen- evaporates). Not good for the instruments, but they apparently mostly survive that these days.
fusion
Basically, same problem. Magnetically confined fusion (the thing that you do in a tokamak or stellarator) needs strong magnets to keep the plasma (hydrogen + isotopes) in place. It's so hot that there is no material that can really survive contact with the plasma, so you keep it away from the walls of the device with a (many) magnetic field(s).
There are a lot of engineering problems with this, but one of them is that you have some really bloody hot stuff (eventually burning plasma) and the thing that is currently keeping where it should be is really bloody cold (cryogenic). You can see how that would make the guy who has to build it doubt their life choices. Magnetic field strength is larger the closer and smaller you make things, so getting the two really close together would be great. (There are some other issues, though, too. Essentially you want to get the energy from the fusion reaction out of the reactor somehow, and doing that by heating your supercooled magnets isn't great.)
The other issue is that anything inside the reactor (at the minimum) will be bombarded by neutrons (aside from being close to something really bloody hot). Not great for the materials involved. Chances are you'll want to do maintenance on the stuff. Having everything wrapped into a huge supercooled set of magnets makes opening up the thing quite a bit more difficult.
I don't think a room temperature superconductor would solve fusion, but it would probably make a lot of the engineering involved a lot simpler.
There's one more thing I heard somewhere. You can saturate (some types of) superconductors with magnetic fields, after which they will no longer be superconductive. IIRC 'high-temperature' ones are more prone to that.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
There are a lot of engineering problems with [fusion], but one of them is that you have some really bloody hot stuff (eventually burning plasma) and the thing that is currently keeping where it should be is really bloody cold (cryogenic). You can see how that would make the guy who has to build it doubt their life choices.
...
I don't think a room temperature superconductor would solve fusion, but it would probably make a lot of the engineering involved a lot simpler.This.
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@Mason_Wheeler said in In other news today...:
The way your phone heats up when you try to do anything interesting on it? Electrical resistivity.
Not sure about that. The interesting parts of chips are made from semiconductor materials. A semiconductor is not a superconductor, pretty much by definition. So having a room-temperature superconductor probably wouldn't solve that problem. (That said, there are some parts that you could probably optimize, mostly outside of the chips.)
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
There's one more thing I heard somewhere. You can saturate (some types of) superconductors with magnetic fields, after which they will no longer be superconductive. IIRC 'high-temperature' ones are more prone to that.
I don't follow the research closely, but I'm not aware of any that don't lose their superconductivity at high magnetic fields, for varying values of "high".
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@DogsB said in In other news today...:
'The solution to the surveillance economy seems to be more surveillance' Vivaldi boss tells El Reg
Or it might be used by a content publisher to check whether ads are being displayed to real visitors or fraudulent bots.
Or?
The result of this, he argues, is that websites – determined to fight fraud – have responded by increasing their usage of sign-in gates, invasive fingerprinting techniques, and intrusive challenges like CAPTCHAs and SMS verification. Wiser argues these defenses make the web experience worse.
sms verification would be a step up. I usually don’t bother with websites if they throw captchas at me. A support drone on the stationary site I used to use is asking me to reply but I can’t be bothered with the captcha so I’ll never know what they’re asking for.
Thing is, this approach isn’t going to fix that situation. It’ll just make it all worse because you can guarantee if the client is involved at any step with claiming everything is above board, the miscreants will absolutely make sure they have this down ASAP.
Or they’ll just use older browsers that won’t get cut off due to still being in use. Faking that you’re Safari is no big deal ;)
After all, if Google’s CAPTCHAs actually worked the way they claim, there wouldn’t be a cottage industry in places like India for solving 1000 CAPTCHAs for a few bucks… because all of the “detection” they claim to have should catch that.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
@Mason_Wheeler said in In other news today...:
The way your phone heats up when you try to do anything interesting on it? Electrical resistivity.
Not sure about that. The interesting parts of chips are made from semiconductor materials. A semiconductor is not a superconductor, pretty much by definition. So having a room-temperature superconductor probably wouldn't solve that problem. (That said, there are some parts that you could probably optimize, mostly outside of the chips.)
No, not at all. It's merely an example of electrical heating due to resistance. Others include electric space heaters, electric tea kettles, and incandescent light bulbs.
There are many things you definitely can, and do, optimize, mostly inside the chips. Consider the honking big heat sinks and fans on CPUs and GPUs. And that's with optimizing the heck out of the chips themselves. (They're not necessarily optimizing primarily for power dissipation. It depends on the use. For phones and tablets, it's generally the primary optimization goal. For gaming desktops and graphics workstations, it's definitely secondary. But in all cases, it's one of the optimization goals, where it doesn't overly compromise a more important goal.)
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This post is deleted!
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@HardwareGeek but the main industrial application of supraconductors is big magnets, no? (MRI)
So I have to assume that the magnetic fields have got to be even higher than those used in MRI for the supraconductors to lose their supraconductivity? Meaning, apart from applications that require even bigger magnets (fusion seems to be the one?), this shouldn't really be an issue for, well, all other possible uses of a supraconductor?
But if the magnetic field sufficient to break the supraconductivity is sufficiently small for this new (hypothetical) room-temperature material, that might be a killer to its actual applicability. Like I said, there's a lot between the lab and real life...
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@remi said in In other news today...:
@HardwareGeek but the main industrial application of supraconductors is big magnets, no? (MRI)
I think you'd like to use superconductors in a lot of other places, it's just that currently you can't. Making power transmission lines out of a superconductor like @Mason_Wheeler says would be great -- cut down transmission losses.
But doing that ATM isn't feasible. There's no way you're going to keep 100s of km of powerlines (close to) cryogenic (and doing that would offset any gains).
Having supercooled superconductors in huge ass magnets for MRI isn't ideal either, but it's worth the effort right now.
Edit: Or maybe something like electric motors. They also rely on strong magnets, and these actually get hot due to resistivity .. ?
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
you can guarantee if the client is involved at any step with claiming everything is above board, the miscreants will absolutely make sure they have this down ASAP.
I wondered the same. Unless you can force the browser to include some sort of secret blob (i.e. force users to only use a closed-source browser), I don't see what would prevent a browser from pretending they're something they're not by faking the code.
Then again, an actor might start saying "our website only works with our approved closed-source browser" (i.e. Chrome) and if they're big enough both in the website and in the browser side (hint: ), that might actually work (i.e. they might manage to twist enough users' arms to make it technically viable). They could probably even manage it by locking more and more features behind that check to reel users in.
I suspect some competition authorities (hint:
) would be quick to look at it as anti-competitive behaviour (remember the bundled-IE thing?). But that hasn't really stopped anyone until now, so 
?
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@remi I think (like I said, I don't follow the research closely) that both higher temperatures and higher magnetic fields have been major foci of research, but for whatever reason, higher temperatures gets more publicity.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
@HardwareGeek but the main industrial application of supraconductors is big magnets, no? (MRI)
Sorry, I meant to say "main current industrial application."
I think you'd like to use superconductors in a lot of other places, it's just that currently you can't. Making power transmission lines out of a superconductor like @Mason_Wheeler says would be great -- cut down transmission losses.
Yes, I get that. But while this is a use-case where the gain would be potentially huge (does anyone have an estimate of the overall waste of energy in power lines over the whole world?), I suspect this is the most difficult use-case to achieve technically. Basically all the constraints I mentioned (and more) apply. Must be cheap, easy to mass produce and from common materials because you need literally millions of km of the stuff. Must be robust, both mechanically and frost/heat/sunlight/... resistant (you can compensate for some of that by e.g. using a core/wrapping of something else but that's more cost/work). Must be easy to repair (because it will break). Must be stable across years or decades. Etc.
I suspect other, less demanding, applications would be the first to come up. Probably smaller devices where you can more easily work around some of those engineering issues.
But doing that ATM isn't feasible. There's no way you're going to keep 100s of km of powerlines (close to) cryogenic (and doing that would offset any gains).
As an amusing anecdote, I remember walking along a canal in, uh, I think it was London and coming across a sign on the wall explaining that there were high voltage lines running below the sidewalk. The amusing part is that the sign said that this was designed so that the cables were submerged in water, for cooling. You look a bit differently at the sidewalk afterwards...
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@remi I think (like I said, I don't follow the research closely) that both higher temperatures and higher magnetic fields have been major foci of research, but for whatever reason, higher temperatures gets more publicity.
I guess everyone understand temperature (the climate
thread is in 
), but "magnets, how do they work?" 
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@remi said in In other news today...:
does anyone have an estimate of the overall waste of energy in power lines over the whole world?
Not sure about the world, but according to this guy the USA figure is 100 billion kWh/per year, roughly equivalent to "3 of our largest nuclear reactors running 24/7."
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@Mason_Wheeler and a quick search says the US produces about 4 000 TWh/yr, out of a world total of 30 000 TWh/yr. So that means the waste is about 1/40 (let's say 2%) for the US, and 750 TWh/year over the whole world, i.e. about the same as the production of the 6th largest producing country in the world.
Yeah, definitely not insignificant (though of course we'd probably never manage to avoid all of that, but still).
(assuming everything scales properly but this is just Fermi-estimating things)
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@remi If I had to guess, I'd guess the USA is a bit worse than average due to our large size and heavier reliance on long-distance power lines. More distance = more wires = more power loss to resistance. But that's just a guess.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
Consider the honking big heat sinks and fans on CPUs and GPUs.
You're not looking for electrical conductivity in those things, but they may be a candidate for thermal superconductors. Yes, that's also a thing, and (at least mostly) the same thing.
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@remi Wikipedia says total losses in the US are about 5%. That includes other stuff, though. Still I'd guess your figure is in the right ballpark.
Speaking of other losses. I'm assuming you could make transformers out of superconductors too. I'd guess they are another non-insignificant source of losses.
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@PleegWat said in In other news today...:
You're not looking for electrical conductivity in those things
No, but it's electrical resistance that generates the heat they're dissipating.
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
No, but it's electrical resistance that generates the heat they're dissipating.
Having a material that you can easily switch between superconducting/zero resistance and non-conducting would officially be amazeballs.
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@cvi Yeah, silicon isn't really great at either the conduction (much less superconducting) or insulation part of that — good enough to be very, very useful, but not great.
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@cvi said in In other news today...:
@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
No, but it's electrical resistance that generates the heat they're dissipating.
Having a material that you can easily switch between superconducting/zero resistance and non-conducting would officially be amazeballs.
Superconductor relays! Let’s make this happen.
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@remi said in In other news today...:
@boomzilla's link highlights some of the known weaknesses of the new material, and that's without going into a discussion of whether it can be produced at industrial scales. Even if that discovery opens the door to finding other materials with similar properties, there is still no guarantee a "workable" one will be amongst them.
If it turns out that the material is as the claim says, then that gives us a guide for whole class of compounds. That's how this works. Maybe one will be industrially practical. (Maybe this one will be when cooled by ordinary cryogenics.)
The exciting thing is that it would open up new applications, things we can't do right now. We certainly aren't going to be aware of all of them; support for strong magnetic fields and currents are not the only interesting features of superconductivity. For example, this will make room temperature SQUIDs possible.
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@Zecc said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
some of those criterion
õ_õ
At least it wasn’t “criterions”?
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@Arantor said in In other news today...:
@Zecc said in In other news today...:
@remi said in In other news today...:
some of those criterion
õ_õ
At least it wasn’t “criterions”?
Criterionixes.
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@BernieTheBernie Have some floof.
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Ford F-150 pickups recalled because parking brakes can turn on unexpectedly
Damaged wiring can turn on the parking brake without action from the driver, increasing the risk of a crash.
lol 870,000 of them
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A chapter on hair on your head. Do you have a bold head, straight hair, or curled hair? That has an important influence on radiation heating up your head or dehydrating your body.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2301760120
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@HardwareGeek said in In other news today...:
@DogsB The "Things That Remind You of
" thread is
.Excuse me, I am not a pussy!
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@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
Apropos of nothing, I can never read that organisation's initialism without trying to pronounce it as a word.
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@Watson Yup. Pee-nas.
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@Watson Those sexist old white men will soon have to find a new name for their journal. Cancel them!
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Taylor Swift Seattle concert generates seismic activity
The activity equivalent to a 2.3 magnitude quake beats a previous record set by fans celebrating a touchdown.
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@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
A chapter on hair on your head. Do you have a bold head, straight hair, or curled hair? That has an important influence on radiation heating up your head or dehydrating your body.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2301760120" the development of scalp hair to minimize heat gain from solar radiation, particularly in hominins with large brains. " TIL. I had always figured the purpose of head hair was to help prevent heat loss from the brain.
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This lady had over 100 Amazon packages delivered to her door that she never ordered, and she is not the only one.
Imagine coming home and finding your doorway covered by Amazon packages: hundreds of boxes you never ordered, and they all have your address but someone else's name on them.
It turns out that with the current cost of International shipping, it's cheaper for a Chinese company to take a loss and dump old merchandise en masse on a random American consumer than have it shipped back to China.
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@loopback0 said in In other news today...:
The activity equivalent to a 2.3 magnitude quake beats a previous record set by fans celebrating a touchdown.
Maybe she makes the earth move for some people, but not for me.
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@jinpa said in In other news today...:
@BernieTheBernie said in In other news today...:
A chapter on hair on your head. Do you have a bold head, straight hair, or curled hair? That has an important influence on radiation heating up your head or dehydrating your body.
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2301760120" the development of scalp hair to minimize heat gain from solar radiation, particularly in hominins with large brains. " TIL. I had always figured the purpose of head hair was to help prevent heat loss from the brain.
It actually works both ways, depending on the ambient conditions, as insulation tends to do.
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@Benjamin-Hall And, as the article implies, the type of hair of the native inhabitants depends on how hot the climate is so as to direct whether it retains or sheds heat.
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@remi this:
The transportation industry, for example, has long dreamt of building magnetic levitation (MagLev) trains that can reach astounding speeds with minimal energy consumption. With Schucrutz's low-cost superconductors, large-scale infrastructure investments are now more economically viable, as we anticipate drastic reductions in energy consumption and impressive gains in efficiency. Moreover, the aviation and automotive sectors could also experience revolutionary improvements in their performance and sustainability.
Futuristic MagLev train using superconductors
In the realm of energy production, storage, and transmission, the impact of Schucrutz's discovery is nothing short of phenomenal. Affordable superconductors can significantly lower energy loss in power lines, thereby improving the efficiency of electrical grids and enabling more sustainable energy production. The development of practical superconducting energy storage systems will contribute to even more efficient usage of renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind, paving the way for a cleaner, greener future.
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@remi 💪 🧲 fields are created putting a lot of ⚡ in a conductor. a superconductor would be able to support more ⚡ without 💥
