Newsworthy Science

Depending on your favourite scifi, google has invented a Star Wars moisture farm or a Dune windtrap:

Global potential for harvesting drinking water from air using solar energy

Solar-driven atmospheric water harvesting (AWH) devices with continuous cycling may accelerate progress by enabling decentralized extraction of water from air.

Here we show that AWH could provide safely managed drinking water (SMDW) for a billion people. Our assessment—using Google Earth Engine—introduces a hypothetical 1-metre-square device with a SY profile of 0.2 to 2.5 litres per kilowatt-hour (0.1 to 1.25 litres per kilowatt-hour for a 2-metre-square device) at 30% to 90% RH, respectively. Such a device could meet a target average daily drinking water requirement of 5 litres per day per person.
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Geographic distribution of world population without SMDW
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Upper bounds water output of solar-driven AWH in relation to global user base

Writeup Paper
 
Should we get really good at that, I wonder what the unintended effects are from large scale atmospheric harvesting of moisture. There's always something.
 
Farm Boy said:
Should we get really good at that, I wonder what the unintended effects are from large scale atmospheric harvesting of moisture. There's always something.
Click to expand...
There is this from the comments:

If the water being removed from the atmosphere -actually- was being removed from the system, say, by being put into a pipe and sent a hundred kilometres away, then it could be a problem, but pulling it out of the air and feeding it through a human is but a temporary detour on the grand adventure that is a water molecules existence.​
 
Samson said:
If the water being removed from the atmosphere -actually- was being removed from the system, say, by being put into a pipe and sent a hundred kilometres away, then it could be a problem, but pulling it out of the air and feeding it through a human is but a temporary detour on the grand adventure that is a water molecules existence.
Click to expand...

In theory. Lets hope the practise bares it out.
 
Samson said:
There is this from the comments:

If the water being removed from the atmosphere -actually- was being removed from the system, say, by being put into a pipe and sent a hundred kilometres away, then it could be a problem, but pulling it out of the air and feeding it through a human is but a temporary detour on the grand adventure that is a water molecules existence.​
Click to expand...

If the percentage capture becomes significant, then detours of water are what we're taking about, not chemical reactions that reformulate water. Even the speed at which rain runs off can destroy environments when the order is upset. Detours are an upset? One would assume that some human usages of water divert and sequester the resource?
 
Either way, it's cool if it can be made efficient enough to be useful. Calling it now, we're just going to pump dry major groundwater reservoirs, and then wind up sorting out if people will then flee, or fight, or both.
 
Samson said:
There is this from the comments:

If the water being removed from the atmosphere -actually- was being removed from the system, say, by being put into a pipe and sent a hundred kilometres away, then it could be a problem, but pulling it out of the air and feeding it through a human is but a temporary detour on the grand adventure that is a water molecules existence.​
Click to expand...

If the water molecules get into a different river system, they could easily end up 1000 km from where they would have ended up as rainfall. You would not use these devices where it was regularly raining, so the whole point of this would be about large detours.

This isn't necessarily bad, because one place might need the water while the other would be flooded, but you would need to be very careful with this one a large scale. There is potential for conflict here if you take away the rainfall someone else depends on.
 
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dont take water out of the air, do the dew

some desert down in Chile (I think) gets most of its moisture from morning dew

ah hell, it dont matter much... the air moves around and global warming should increase water vapor

when I lived in Arizona long ago people told me the local humidity had increased because of all the swimming pools, they were slowly losing their dry heat.

on another subject, I cant imagine factory farms are good for us. Yes, they can feed more people. But I doubt making animals live in stressed conditions can be good for us. We're eating the pathologies they accumulate.
 
who will be first to mine asteroids?

nation, individual, corporation, or combination of the 3

you gotta know the power hungry are licking their chops at the sight of Psyche
 
You'll need to colonize Mars and set up a transfer station in order to mine the asteroid belt.
 
yup, we're decades away from ever setting up on Mars

a century sounds close

I kinda like comparing Star Trek tech to our time to see if we're keeping pace, aint looking good.
 
https://www.accuweather.com/en/spac...nsible-for-glass-atacama-desert-chile/1044002

12,000 years ago something blew up over the Atacama desert in Chile scattering sand-fused glass over a 50 mile area and a comet is the likely suspect based on chemical analysis of cometary dust captured in space and material entombed within the associated meteorites. The timing is of interest because megafauna in the region was going extinct about 12kya.
 
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Silk + nanotech = coolest clothes ever

A fabric made of engineered silk keeps skin about 12.5°C cooler than cotton clothing and provides relief from hot weather.

Jia Zhu at Nanjing University in China and Shanhui Fan at Stanford University and their colleagues were inspired by silk, which feels cool against the skin because it reflects most of the sunlight that strikes it – mainly the infrared and visible wavelengths – and also readily radiates heat.
They were able to engineer silk to block even more sunlight – about 95 per cent – by embedding the fibres with aluminium oxide nanoparticles that reflect the ultraviolet wavelengths of sunlight.
When the researchers bathed this engineered silk in sunlight, they found that it stayed 3.5°C cooler than the surrounding air because of its ability to reflect most sunlight and radiate heat.
The researchers also found that when they draped the engineered silk over a surface designed to simulate skin, it kept the skin 8°C cooler under direct sunlight than natural silk did – and it kept the skin 12.5°C cooler than cotton did. The simulated skin was made of silicone rubber that was wrapped around a heater to mimic body warmth.
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Paper (paywalled) Writeup
 
Order one today!

A Motorcycle That’s Above it All

The Speeder is a futuristic-looking flying motorcycle created by Ventura, Calif.-based Jetpack Aviation. Though some elements are still in development, the vertical take-off-and-landing aircraft will have jet turbine engines that provide vertical thrust. Once in the air, the engines would tilt backward and the aircraft would fly on small wings powered by net-zero-carbon fuel. Two recreational models, priced starting at $385,000 each, are available for preorder. One reaches speeds of over 150 mph,

and flies for nearly an hour at more than 15,000 feet; an ultralight version that doesn’t require a pilot’s license to operate is limited to 60 mph by federal regulations and flies for 15 minutes. The company hopes to make them available in 2023. A faster, heavy-duty model intended for military and rescue missions is also in development. Within 10 years, the recreational Speeder could be automated and used for public transportation in cities, with rooftops repurposed for parking, says CEO David Mayman.


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Magic Mushrooms look promising for depression

Hopeful news from the largest gold-standard trial yet of psilocybin, the psychedelic compound in magic mushrooms, to treat serious depression. US health-care company COMPASS Pathways made the announcement in a press release, and the results have not yet been peer reviewed. The randomized, controlled, double-blind study looked at 233 people with treatment-resistant depression, who were given psilocybin along with psychological support from specially trained therapists. Almost 30% of people who received the highest dose in the study, 25 milligrams, were in remission 3 weeks after treatment, compared with around 8% of those who received 1 milligram, which is such a low dose it functions as a placebo. More than one-quarter of the people in the 25-milligram arm were still in remission 3 months after treatment.

Those who received the highest dose also experienced an average reduction on a measure of clinical depression (the Montgomery-Asberg Depression Rating Scale) that was 6.6 points greater than those who took 1 milligram. Other patients were given a 10-milligram dose, but there was not a statistically significant impact for those patients compared with the 1-milligram arm.

“Everyone agrees such a result hasn’t been seen before in depression research, so we’re incredibly happy with that result,” said Lars Christian Wilde, co-founder and president of Compass.

The results released by the company, which have not been published in a medical journal or peer-reviewed, included side effects data showing a small number of serious adverse events. Overall, 12 patients reported treatment-emergent serious adverse events, five of whom were in the 25-milligram group and six in the 10-milligram group; these included suicidal behavior and self-injury. Just one patient in the 1-milligram group experienced a serious adverse event.
The numbers are small enough for the difference between treatment arms not to be statistically significant, said Wilde, noting that suicidal behaviors and ideation are common among depressed patients.
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Writeup Company press release
 
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