Yet another "renewables and batteries are looking good" story

From Science, a report about a Harvard team that has come up with a cheaper, safer, set of chemicals to use in a "flow battery" which could have domestic application for storing roof top solar power.   The big question - whether it will end up cheaper to run than Tesla's lithium home storage - is not answered, and it sounds like the system could take up more space, but still:

The Harvard team realized that a possible bromine replacement was a charge-carrying molecule called ferrocyanide, which sounds dangerous but is actually used as a food additive. Ferrocyanide, however, dissolves in alkaline solutions, not acidic ones. So Aziz and his colleagues tweaked the chemical structure of their quinone—ripping off a couple of sulfur groups and replacing them with pairs of hydrogen and oxygen atoms—in the end converting the compound into one that readily dissolves in an alkaline solution.

The scheme worked, and as the researchers report today in Science, the battery readily stores power with only components that are cheap, abundant, and nontoxic.

For now, Aziz notes the alkaline quinone battery stores only about two-thirds of the energy per volume as the previous acid-based version. But because it doesn’t require expensive materials to deal with bromine, it’s likely to be far cheaper to produce and friendlier to use. “This is chemistry I’d be happy to put in my basement,” Aziz says. And that may not be far off. A flow battery using the new quinones and ferrocyanide would likely only have to be the size of a couple of hot water tanks to store the energy produced by a conventional home rooftop solar array.

Moonquakes

I knew there were moonquakes, and that they had left seismographs there during the Apollo missions.   But I didn't know some of the details in this neat article:

The first thing to know about moonquakes is this: They last forever. While most earthquakes are over in under a minute, moonquakes can last for an afternoon. In the 1970s, at least one 5.5-magnitude moonquake shook the lunar surface at full force for more than 10 minutes straight, then tapered off gradually over the course of several hours.

“The moon was ringing like a bell,” Clive Neal, a geological sciences professor at Notre Dame, told NASA about the Apollo-era lunar seismic data he and his colleagues examined. A strong moonquake would be enough to devastate a hypothetical human settlement—breaching a moon base’s seal and causing a catastrophic loss of oxygen—which is part of why scientists became interested in studying the phenomenon in the first place.

You don't have to be nutty about Obama - just completely hyperbolic is fine

The National Review's Kevin Williamson suggests that some conservatives may be going over the top in their complaints about this Pope, but look at how he talks about Obama (my emphasis):

Joe Scarborough has been castigated by conservatives for affirming his belief that President Obama, for all his flaws, is a man who loves his country. Barack Obama is a failed president, a practitioner of a deeply destructive, distorted, self-interested, and vanity-driven brand of politics, and every instinct he exhibits tends toward detriment, privation, and chaos. But the fever-swamp version of his presidency — that he is a foreigner, a closet Islamist, a man singularly bent upon the destruction of the United States of America — is wrong. President Obama is himself certainly no exemplar of treating political disagreements with charity of spirit — he is quite the opposite — but his failings need not be our failings.

As my post heading suggests - the Right in America has been completely hyperbolic and over the top in its assessment of Obama over his presidency, and now they have the hide to complain about those who have followed the hyperbole into crazy land, and support Trump.

They only have themselves to blame...

Peta considered

There are two detailed commentary pieces by female journalists out today about Peta Credlin.

The first, by Michelle Grattan, seems to me to be by far the best.   It's a straight forward dismissal of  Credlin's self serving claim that her power wielding in the PM's office was only a problem for others because she was a woman.   No, says Michelle, the way in which she alienated MPs would have caused exactly the same resentment regardless of her gender, and she has to take a substantial part of the blame for her boss losing his job.

Over at The Guardian, Katherine Murphy takes a more feminist analysis, waffling on somewhat about power as wielded by women.  Some of the paragraphs are a bit over the top:

The tall willowy woman was always conspicuous, wagging a disapproving finger, growling like a combatant in the advisers’ box, standing a full head higher than the men.

That disconcerting height, always looming, regally. Shoulders back. Vaguely horsey, absurdly healthy, meticulous, glamorous, glowing – millinery and heels. No stooping. Certainly no shirking.

As someone says in the comment thread:

Thank you, Mills And Boon.

And many others in the thread note that this strangely sympathetic (for a Guardian writer) take on a right wing warrior overlooks the fact that she was working for Abbott when he was making some distinctly sexist comments about Gillard.  (Of course, it might be that she didn't like all of her boss's quips, but the way she would get involved in making derogatory comments at Labor while sitting in an advisers box in Parliament makes me think otherwise.)

I think the fair assessment is just that she was, like her boss, an opportunistic political warrior who still doesn't understand her own inadequacies.

Renewables and the grid

Energy: Reimagine fuel cells : Nature News & Comment

Here's a good, detailed explanation of the different approaches to maintaining grid stability when you have large amounts of power coming from intermittent renewable sources, such as solar cells. Of the three solutions: gas turbines, batteries and fuel cells, the writer argues the potential for a new type of fuel cell.

My impression, once again, is that the overall mood is one of much greater optimism for renewables than there was a few years ago. 

Tax reform suggestions

Hmm.  Much intrigue, and quite a bit of unhappiness from industry groups that have spent money on making submissions, in the news this morning that PM Turnbull seems to have scrapped the Tax White paper process.

As the SMH notes, this is not the first time Turnbull has entered the tax debate with big ideas of his own.

Could this be a sign of Turnbull "I know best" hubris has re-emerged?  Could it herald a breath of reasonable fresh air around tax?   I like Turnbull, but I suspect it may play out as more the former than the latter.

Anyway, I think I once posted what I thought was some pretty obvious ways to raise more tax which ought to be sell-able to the Australian public:

1.  a modest increase in the GST rate to 12.5%.   This is low enough to not really be noticed, but I'm pretty sure it still raises quite a lot.  As for its expansion - I would be inclined to leave it off fresh food, but wonder whether a reduced rate could be added to education services - say 5%?  OK, that would be a hard sell to Liberal constituents, but it might be something Labor could live with;

2.  superannuation tax concessions at the high end wound back harder;

3.  a staged reduction in negative gearing.  Not too staged.  And didn't I suggest once that it be time limited, to like for the first 5 years?   Increased turnaround in investment property sales would be good for stamp duty revenue too, as well as placing properties back on the market for potential owner/occupiers.   Someone needs to point out to me the downside, as there almost certainly would be one.  

Of course, we should have a carbon tax of some description too, but I don't think even Turnbull is up for that.

Update:    How quickly I forget.  Didn't I also once suggest the obvious solution to our revenue problems - a 300% GST on tattoos and piercings?   The budget will be fixed in no time at all....

The complicated evolution of American public housing

Public Housing Can Work - The Atlantic

Here's an article that handily summarises the history of public housing in the US.  (Makes me feel rather old to read about Lyndon B Johnson promoting public housing in 1937.  I recall - vaguely - his coming to Brisbane in 1966.)

A watery apocalypse for Tokyo?

I didn't even realise, until I saw a special (and fascinating) report on Catalyst last year that parts of Tokyo were at high risk of flooding, and huge engineering projects underground have been built to protect the city.

Well, the recent floods just north of the city have led to some dire warnings about how much worse things will be when the same amount of rainfall hits closer to the metropolis.  It sounds very serious indeed:

With the effects of global warming becoming increasingly obvious, the climatic conditions that triggered torrential rain in Ibaraki and Tochigi prefectures two weeks ago is no longer a rarity, and the odds are “100 percent” that similar downpours will hit Tokyo, says Nobuyuki Tsuchiya, a civil engineering expert and author of the 2014 book “Shuto Suibotsu” (“The Capital Submerged”)....

“It so happened that the rain zone moved (northeast) after striking Tokyo and stayed over the Kinugawa River. But think what a disaster it may have been if the band of rain had moved about 50 km westward and struck the Tone and Arakawa rivers instead....

The rupture of the Tone and Arakawa rivers would cause “far more severe devastation” than that of the Kinugawa deluge, he said.

With the Arakawa, for example, boasting one of the densest populations in its surrounding areas of any river in Japan, extensive flooding would lead to unprecedented fatalities and an economic catastrophe that would send shock waves around the world, Tsuchiya said.

Well, this guy has a book to sell, but it is  not as if he is alone:

Indeed, a 2010 government report released by a panel of outside disaster-prevention experts calculated several possible death tolls in the event that the Tone and Arakawa rivers rupture. The deadliest scenario was if the Tone River broke its banks near the cities of Koga and Bando in western Ibaraki, in which case the death toll could rise to as many as 6,300, the report said.

Tsuchiya said, however, that Tokyo should brace for an even more apocalyptic scenario, noting the amount of rain that entered the Kinugawa River was far larger than that anticipated by the report.

“If Tokyo is struck by the same level of downpours that hit the Kinugawa, I’d say the damage would be far more disastrous.”

It therefore seems that if an earthquake doesn't kill thousands there in the coming years, floods probably will....

A "doctor caused epidemic"

It's always interesting to look at how and why particular drug abuse problems start, and the resurgence of heroin in midwest America gets this explanation in The Economist:

The heroin epidemic in the Midwest is closely linked to the rampant opiate epidemic. As doctors prescribed opioid painkillers such as OxyContin more and more liberally, their abuse grew. Sales of prescription opioid painkillers have increased 300% since 1999, according to the federal Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), even though the amount of pain Americans report to their physicians has not changed.

 Three-quarters of heroin addicts used to take prescription drugs and switched to heroin, which is cheaper and more easily available on the black market. A gram of pure heroin costs less than half what it did in the 1980s, in real terms. “This is a doctor-caused epidemic,” says Tom Frieden, boss of the CDC. In states with higher prescription rate of opioid painkillers, such as Michigan, Ohio and Indiana, the number of heroin addicts is higher too.

In depressed areas in the Rust Belt, where poverty and unemployment rates shot up as factories shut down and jobs disappeared, the drug epidemic is ravaging once-idyllic communities. Indiana had a brutal wake-up call earlier this year when Austin, a small rural community just off the interstate between Indianapolis and Louisville, was the epicentre of the largest outbreak of HIV infections ever seen in the state. Nearly 200 people were infected in a population of just 4,200 because addicts injecting Opana, a prescription painkiller that delivers a potent high, shared needles, which is the fastest way for an infection to spread. “We have never documented anything like it,” says Mr Frieden.

The importance of Chinese box office, again

China Box Office: Tom Cruise's 'Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation' Crosses $100M - Forbes

That's in 10 days of release.  In America, it is approaching $200 million but slowing down.

An earlier prediction I posted said some think it might reach $250 million in China.

One might say that it pays to panda to the Chinese market.  (Ha.)

About time

Doctor Who exterminated by X Factor in 10-year low for season opener | Media | The Guardian

I had been wondering whether the now completely unwatchable Dr Who would be suffering in the ratings, and it appears it certainly is.    As I have been saying for at least a couple of years now, it needs to be rested for a decade or so, and then revived (if at all) under a completely new team. 

And the Guardian can stop being Dr Who Nerd Central, too.

A different type of Troll

For those who are using the Australian streaming service Stan,  can I suggest you watch the 2011 Norwegian film Trollhunter.

It's not that it's what I would exactly call a great movie - it's just that it's an eccentric idea for a "found footage" mockumentary that is very well executed and enjoyable.  And you get to see lots of Norway, which looks wet, cold, pretty empty, and (for the most part) pretty spectacular.  I want to go there.

(It also shows how monster special effects look so much better when incorporated into a real background, rather than the Lord of the Rings/later Star Wars problem of the entire landscape looking digitally fake.)

Just being practical, I guess...

Czech pub installs vomitorium for patrons | barfblog

Here's the photo that seems to prove it:

Yet more renewables optimism

The recent (and relatively abrupt) rise in optimism about renewable energy being able to pretty quickly make a big difference to CO2 production continues with stories like these.

I think I had seen some mention of this before, but strangely enough, Texas is leading America in the production of wind power.   This story last week at Slate noted that its peculiar electricity marketing system means that wind farm owners at times offer their electricity at "negative prices", but an article from earlier this year talks more generally about the Texan story:

In 2014, wind generated 10.6 percent of Texas electricity, up from 9.9 percent the previous year and 6.2 percent in 2009, according to the U.S Energy Information Administration. Wind energy generation that falls under the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT), which manages the grid for 24 million Texans, nearly doubled from 2009 to 2014. Currently, Texas has more than 12 gigawatts of wind power capacity installed across the state — equivalent to six Hoover Dams. That figure could jump to 20 gigawatts in a few years with upgrades to the current transmission system, according to Ross Baldick, an engineering professor at University of Texas at Austin.

And the explanation:

So how has the Lone Star state done it? Strong government incentives, sizeable investments in infrastructure, and innovative policies have played an important role. So has the backing of governors of all political persuasions, from liberal Democrat Ann Richards to conservative Republican Rick Perry. But at heart the profit motive has driven the state’s wind energy boom, with ranchers and landowners seeing gold in the spinning turbines on the Texas plains.

I wonder why Texas isn't also the centre of infrasound complaint, then?  I think David Leyonhjelm should be sent over there on a 3 year mission to find out.

In other optimistic assessments about how much you can achieve (and how quickly), I spotted this story Greening the Electric Grid with Gas about a study out of Harvard:

Much of the nation's energy policy is premised on the assumption that clean renewable sources like wind and solar will require huge quantities of storage before they can make a significant dent in the greenhouse gas emissions from electricity generation. A new Harvard study pokes holes in that conventional wisdom. The analysis published today in the journal Energy & Environmental Science finds that the supply of wind and solar power could be increased tenfold without additional storage....

"We're trying to knock out a salient policy meme that says that you can't grow variable renewables without a proportionate increase in storage," Keith said. "We could cut electric-sector carbon emissions to less than a third their current levels using variable renewables with natural gas to manage the intermittency, but this will requires us to keep growing the electricity transmission infrastructure." Keith added, "There is a saw-off between transmission and storage, if siting battles stop new transmission then we must increase storage."

Story prompt that probably isn't original

I occasionally look at Reddit and see "story prompt" postings.  Given last week's story of a physics experiment that will attempt to put a microbe in "two places at once" in a quantum experiment, I thought of my own, but I wouldn't be surprised if it hasn't already been the subject of at least a short story.  Here goes:

Future teleporting won't be about destroying one version of yourself and recreating it elsewhere (as used to be speculated in Star Trek) - it will be about quantum splitting of yourself into two places, with one of you branching off into the (very similar) multiverse, never to be met again.   Quantum computers will make this cheap and simple - so much so that nearly everyone in a country with a modern economy will teleport daily to get to work, the shops, etc.   It'll replace public transport, cars, airlines, etc.  The biggest problem will be limiting the numbers wanting to get to popular destinations.   You just have a home portal, and all major buildings will have there's at the entrance.

One day, however, the Google controlled Universal Teleporting System breaks down (possibly via interference from another universe.)   The quantum duplicates and the original stay in the same universe, every time a person teleports.   Given that (say) a quarter of the world's population teleports at least once daily (many several times a day), within the space of a few hours, the world's population has doubled, with some people finding multiple copies of themselves turning up at their front door, not expecting to find themselves already home.

How does the world deal with this? 

Update:   here's a thread that talks about how "teleportation ethics" has been raised in both Star Trek and other science fiction stories and novels.  But it's based on the problem being that the original person being destroyed or disassembled in the process of being re-constituted somewhere else.  

My prompt isn't worried about that - as the explanation for teleporting will be that the other "you" has gone on to live in another universe - one nearly identical to your own, and the universe if quantum branching all the time anyway, so what's the harm in that?

Monday Wormholes

I've been forgetting to browse the arXiv abstracts for odd physics lately, but here are a few recent ones that have caught my attention:

1.  Can extra dimensional effects allow wormholes without exotic matter?

We explore the existence of Lorentzian wormholes in the context of an effective on-brane, scalar-tensor theory of gravity. In such theories, the timelike convergence condition, which is always violated for wormholes, has contributions, via the field equations,from on-brane matter as well as from an effective geometric stress energy generated by a bulk-induced radion field. It is shown that, for a class of wormholes, the required on-brane matter, as seen by an on-brane observer in the Jordan frame, is not exotic and does not violate the Weak Energy Condition. The presence of the effective geometric stress energy in addition to on-brane matter, is largely responsible for creating this intriguing possibility. Thus, if such wormholes are ever found to exist in the Universe, they would clearly provide pointers towards the existence of a warped extra dimension as proposed in the two-brane model of Randall and Sundrum.

2. Possible existence of wormholes in the central regions of halos 

An earlier study [Rahaman et al. (2014) & Kuhfittig (2014)] has demonstrated the possible existence of wormholes in the outer regions of the galactic halo, based on the Navarro-Frenk-White (NFW) density profile. This paper uses the Universal Rotation Curve (URC) dark matter model to obtain analogous results for the central parts of the halo. This result is an important compliment to the earlier result, thereby confirming the possible existence of wormholes in most of the spiral galaxies. 

3. Analytic self-gravitating Skyrmions, cosmological bounces and wormholes 

We present a self-gravitating Skyrmion, an analytic and globally regular solution of the Einstein- Skyrme system in presence of a cosmological constant with winding number w = 1. The static spacetime metric is the direct product R x S3 and the Skyrmion is the self-gravitating generalization of the static hedgehog solution of Manton and Ruback with unit topological charge. This solution can be promoted to a dynamical one in which the spacetime is a cosmology of the Bianchi type-IX with time-dependent scale and squashing coefficients. Remarkably, the Skyrme equations are still identically satisfied for all values of these parameters. Thus, the complete set of field equations for the Einstein-Skyrme-Lambda system in the topological sector reduces to a pair of coupled, autonomous, nonlinear differential equations for the scale factor and a squashing coefficient. These equations admit analytic bouncing cosmological solutions in which the universe contracts to a mini- mum non-vanishing size, and then expands. A non-trivial byproduct of this solution is that a minor modification of the construction gives rise to a family of stationary, regular configurations in General Relativity with negative cosmological constant supported by an SU(2) nonlinear sigma model. These solutions represent traversable wormholes with NUT parameter in which the only "exotic matter" required for their construction is a negative cosmological constant. 

 Thinking about wormholes seems to be very big in theoretic physics at the moment.

The Leyonhjelm Effect?

Gee, I dunno.  Perhaps the Senator for Guns, Tobacco, Infrasound and Things That Annoy Him But Are Not Within Commonwealth Control Anyway (David Leyonhjelm) should ease up on the frequent media appearances and attention seeking tactics.

Because it doesn't seem to be helping his party's candidates, if this weekend's Canning by-election is any guide. Despite being number two on the ballot paper, at the time of writing, the LDP has polled about 5 times less than the Palmer United Party or Australian Christians;  under half of the votes of the Animal Justice Party; about 10 times less than the Greens; and even less than the Pirate Party.

Maybe the more he's exposed, the less his party's vote?   Embarrassing.

Microbes to the rescue

Feeding the world with plant microbiomes | The Saturday Paper

A short but quite interesting report here on how research into newly discovered plant microbiomes may help increase agricultural output.  For example:

Meanwhile, other bacteria can boost agricultural output. Pseudomonas,
which live in the soil around a plant, make hormones goading roots to
grow. In one trial, inoculating wheat with a cocktail of these bugs over
two years increased yields by more than 30 per cent. Another bacteria, Burkholderia,
has been shown to ramp up rice production. O’Sullivan wants to use
these plant steroids to inspire crops to grow during drought. “There is a
lot of potential here,” she says.

Is it too much to hope for the start of an anti-pandering movement?

Donald Trump doesn’t correct birthers, but how is that any worse than the GOP’s standard climate change pandering?

Yes, this is exactly what I want the the sensible Right in Australia (hopefully, in the form of Malcolm Turnbull) to do - to start telling those on their side the truth about how wrong they are (and how stupid, in most cases) on matters such as climate change, and certain economic tropes (such as "reducing taxes always works"; "Keynesian economics is a crock".)

Update:  here's Krugman's acerbic take on the second GOP debate. 

Awesome hyprocrisy of the Abbott mourners

I was expecting one eyed amnesia to some extent from the Right wing commentariat  (a word, incidentally, that I've just realised I've been misspelling frequently - probably because even the correct spelling is not in my brower's dictionary), but the completely hypocritical "a good man undone by the media and the rabid hatred of the Left" mourning of Abbott from the likes of Bolt and his dunderhead followers is still a stunning example of how ridiculous they have become.  Especially in light of the white hot hatred and rumour mongering they encouraged over Gillard - up to and including cheering a royal commission and police investigation looking into whether she got some free work done on her house 22 years ago.

There simply has been no media treatment of a Prime Minister as openly disrespectful and bitterly personal as that by the Right wing schlock jocks and Murdoch tabloid press towards Gillard. 

It's as absurd to argue otherwise as it is to deny climate change is real and deserves a strong political response.  [You can take the "Oh, wait a minute..."  joke as too easy.]