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New device converts plastic waste into fuel using catalyst-free pyrolysis

As tons of plastic waste continue to build up in landfills every day, Yale researchers have developed a way to convert this waste into fuels and other valuable products efficiently and cheaply. The results are published in Nature Chemical Engineering. Specifically, the researchers are using a method known as pyrolysis, a process of using heat in the absence of oxygen to molecularly break materials down. In this case, it's used to break plastics down to the components that produce fuels and other products. The study was led by Yale Engineering professors Liangbing Hu and Shu Hu, both members of the Center for Materials Innovation and Yale Energy Sciences Institute. Conventional methods of pyrolysis often use a catalyst to speed up the chemical reactions and achieve a high yield, but it's a method that comes with significant limitations.

Read more.

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Addressing a major roadblock in next-generation photonic computing and signal processing systems, researchers in the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have created a device that can bridge digital electronic signals and analog light signals in one fluid step.

Built on chips made out of lithium niobate, the workhorse material of optoelectronics, the new device offers a potential replacement for the ubiquitous but energy-intensive digital-to-analog conversion and electro-optic modulation systems used all over today’s high-speed data networks.

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Tale as old as time.

Person A: "WE NEED TO ABOLISH/REPLACE THING!"

Person B: "And what would you replace it with?"

Person A: "DON'T WORRY ABOUT THAT RIGHT NOW. JUST, DESTROY AND REPLACE IT!"

It's the rallying cry of people that want to destroy an existing power structure and then claim real estate in the void and chaos left behind. And THEN become the unmovable fundament.

The other reason I'm generally annoyed with the "Abolish X" crowd who actually DO mean "abolish X" and not a watered-down version is that ime they very rarely have fully thought out the implications of what they're demanding and then get angry when other people ask about it.

"Family abolition means completely removing legal ties for family units and allowing all children the choice of where they live" okay. So if I see a three-year-old throwing a fit because she doesn't want to leave the park, and I go over and tell her if she comes home with me she can stay as long as she likes and then we'll get McDonald's on the way home, that three-year-old should have the ability to make that decision? The parent or guardian has no legal recourse to stop me from taking her? Cause if the answer's no, that's not abolition, that's reform baby!

"I'm done talking about what we'll do with rapists and murderers after we abolish prisons, it's all anybody ever wants to talk about!" Well yeah man! 98% of people just interpreted your words as "we're going to let murderers roam around killing people at will"! You need to explain very clearly what plans you have that will stop them that aren't incarceration or you're not going to make any headway! And if your answer involves any form of "well of course SOME people can't be allowed total freedom" - that's not abolition, that's reform baby!

I'm not even gonna touch the number of people who think we should abolish the police and replace them with what are essentially roaming squads of vigilantes dispensing "community justice", whatever the fuck that means.

Like these aren't "gotcha" questions, they're legitimate problems you're going to have to contend with. And if you wave away all these questions with "you're just making up ridiculous scenarios" and "we'll think of something to fix that once we destroy the current system", then yeah actually, I DO think you care more about sounding radical than about making any kind of change.

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The cool thing about reading comic books by their era;

Lets say you wanted to read Marvel comics, starting at 1985.

If you're reading them from 2025, you could conceivably hunt down every single title there was in Marvel from that era, put them in a timeline and separate them by title, and catalogue and follow every story that takes place over the course of that decade.

For you, it may just be an afternoon of reading to know everything happen the half-month that the story updates and takes you to the end. For those that lived it, it was following along month by month, collecting, what.. possibly 720 issues? Twenty four comics per title per year, maybe 12 if it's a slow comic like Pitt, times thirty titles.

You get to see a story run in its entirity with no lag between updates, and finally terminate. Every little pop culture joke, every little movie reference.

..

Well I think it's neat.

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In the quest for energy independence, researchers have studied solar thermoelectric generators (STEGs) as a promising source of solar electricity generation. Unlike the photovoltaics currently used in most solar panels, STEGs can harness all kinds of thermal energy in addition to sunlight. The simple devices have hot and cold sides with semiconductor materials in between, and the difference in temperature between the sides generates electricity through a physical phenomenon known as the Seebeck effect.

Continue Reading.

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Nature-inspired process makes wood tougher than steel for structural use

A research team led by the University of the Basque Country (EHU), together with Wuhan University and the Chinese Academy of Sciences (China), was inspired by naturally occurring processes that give rise to fossilized wood (known as ancient buried wood), to develop a wood material that offers remarkable structural performance (termed as "BioStrong Wood" by the authors). Using the adequate combination of mechanical, chemical and biological treatments, it has been possible to modify the internal structure of the wood, achieving a level of mechanical resistance that exceeds that of stainless steel. The research team has shown that the process developed can be applied to multiple wood types. That way, the results obtained provide the basis for developing biological materials with very high performance and which could, in the near future, replace materials of fossil origin (such as thermosetting resins, or high-performance thermoplastics) that are proving to be so problematic in environmental and social terms.

Read more.

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He was an old man in a profession where men die young. He was broken in a way that allowed him to thrive like a dandelion in concrete where normal people would've been shattered or poisoned.

I've never played the game, just know people that gush about it. And from what I've heard, Adam was a desire to murder everybody tempered only by self-restraint. Far as I know, if you have that funny body mod that allows you to gauge a person's mood and hostility, Adam is always set to 100% fucking-kill-you and because of his cyber senses, absolutely knows where you are even if you're stealthed. You're never tricking him, he knows where you are if you decide to get rowdy.

Adam's gimmick is he's a psychopath just stable enough to want you dead at first sight but inhibited enough to wait until he can kill you in the line of his job. He's a mad dog, but he'll humor the leash, whereas other dogs just as aggressive will break it or just be a stone hearted killer. It's a cocktail of conflicting desires and behaviors unique to the character.

There will be other cyborgs, they may even be similar to Adam. They won't have Adam's exact damage or advantage without it being exceptionally obvious.

Even Cain from Robocop is distinct from that.

So my 14 year old has an idea that he's calling the "Million Adam Smashers" argument. The reference is from Cyperpunk 2077, where there is a character, Adam Smasher, who has turned himself into a living tank, a complete cyborg in which the only thing still human is his literal brain. My son's argument is this: as a creator--a writer, game designer, manga artist, whatever--you need to ask yourself, why is this guy unique? Why are there not a million Adam Smashers? All you need is money, connections, and a specific mindset that allows you to cope with or disregard your supposed lack of "humanity", and you too can be Adam Smasher. And he's right; there should be dozens, hundreds of rich assholes who might otherwise get into racing or yachts or something but if you can become a terrifying cyborg capable of stopping a car with one hand, at least some people, out of the billions in the universe, would choose that. Why don't Arasaka and Militech just have twenty Adam Smashers apiece?

More broadly, he's making a point about fictional characters, usually main characters--is what makes them special, you know....actually special? Are they the main character because these things happened to them, or did these things happen because they're the main character? Why are they Adam Smasher, and not someone else? It's a test; a check to make sure you're not favoring the character because you're enamored with that character.

I think it's an interesting mental exercise. Take a good look at your universe and your characters and make sure that if there's only one Adam Smasher, only one Captain America, only one Rock Lee, only one Joker, there's a good reason.

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In theory, maybe I get the “we’re all just playing with barbies, they’re fictional characters, no interpretation is incorrect because it’s an interpretation” argument. But actually no, not all takes are equally valid. Framing something as an interpretation doesn’t mean it inherently has merit. Some takes are completely incorrect and betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the source material. They just aren’t a reason to harass people or send death threats

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Until now, the early phase of drug discovery for the development of new therapeutics has been both cost- and time-intensive. Researchers at KIT (Karlsruhe Institute of Technology) have now developed a platform on which extremely miniaturized nanodroplets with a volume of only 200 nanoliters per droplet – comparable to a grain of sand – and containing only 300 cells per test can be arranged. This platform enables the researchers to synthesize, characterize, and test thousands of therapeutic agents on the same chip, saving time and resources. The researchers report on their findings in the journal “Angewandte Chemie.”

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They are consistent with it, if you understand the absurdity of their belief. It just requires bending your brain into a knot and accepting some things that are verifiably false, as true.

The Feminist point of view hinges on absolutes. The absolute idea that if you aren't the demographic in charge, you're the demographic being oppressed by the one in charge. They declare women are the oppressed demographic. They declare this is the nature of how things work as if it's a scientific law, parade it about as science, pretend it is absolute truth and refuse to allow anyone to challenge it, and demand everybody else treat their little blorbo-concept as if it's operating logic of the universe. The same way a religious person will try to browbeat you into affirming their specific religious view is the dominant truth in any given conversation or situation.

Once you understand that, anything that is logically inconsistent because twisted to conform to their worldview. Men throwing themselves to war in defense of their wives, mothers, sisters, cousins, neices and daughters? "Oh, that's just our patriarchal SOCIETY harming men, too! It's The Patriarchy backfiring!"

A society that has a big social safety net, exclusively for women? "Oh but we're SUPPOSED to have a big social safety net for women! That's justice, because we're the oppressed sex! Society is SUPPOSED to take care of you, and if not everybody, women and children most of all, under the pretense that we're oppressed by men!"

Their worldview is that anything that isn't feminist, and at the root of that is Marxist principles and views, is simply selfish, greedy, materialistic and male chauvinist, and lacks compassion or any redeeming qualities beyond being slightly better than feudalism. To where they mentally deny any other social system the same humanity that a racist denies to members of groups outside their chosen ingroup. So, they will believe everything that is rude or mean is all under the umbrella of Fascism, while absolutely nothing can be wrong if it's socialist, it must just be another flavor of Fascism pretending to be goodguy socialism or communism. Fascism has no gradient, it's just bad and everything bad is fascism, while they CAN'T be bad, because otherwise they'd be gyno-fascists.

And that's kind of the secret. Fascists are just another form of socialism, operating with the same dour and conceptually totalitarian culture derived from the Enlightenment. They operate the same way, using the same mean girl social tactics, bad faith arguments, and manipulative practices that try to strongarm people into cooperating with their beliefs. To them, Hitler burning the books was only bad because it was done under the name of protecting the public in the name of fascism. While THEY would burn the books in the name of their-side; good think.

They get so lost ideologically in the sauce behind these mental gymnastics and excuses and deflections and omissions and deferring from having any conversation where a critical eye but not a Critical Lens(Marxist interpretation) are used, because they have a vested interest in the romance of their worldview being unchallenged and the truth. They will readily sacrifice everything else to protect it and treat them like ablative plates to ensure it.

It's pride, it's desperation, it's ego, it's delusion.

I really liked your post about why belief systems are wrong (they are based on incorrect things) instead of just evil. It lines up with a lot of ideas I have that I hadn't thought of in those terms before.

But it did remind me of a formative experience I had in freshman year of college in one of those unfortunately mandated feminism courses. I asked a girl how she could say such horrible things about men, when I could swap "men" for "jews" and get almost exact quotes from Mein Kampf.

She said to me, "The difference is Hitler was wrong." That really stuck with me. She thought that Hitler was wrong about the jews controlling the world and being evil, but Feminism was right about the same thing for men, so if they made concentration camps and carried out a genocide it would be moral. I think about that girl and that conversation frequently.

She didn't get that the reason Hitler was wrong wasn't "actually Jewish people are good and it's a different group in charge." Hitler was wrong because he couldn't possibly have been right -- his worldview falls apart at any scrutiny.

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New biodegradable plastic shines in vibrant colors without dyes or pigments

Plastics are one of the largest sources of pollution on Earth, lasting for years on land or in water. But a new type of brilliantly colored cellulose-based plastic detailed in ACS Nano could change that. By adding citric acid and squid ink to a cellulose-based polymer, researchers created a variety of structurally colored plastics that were comparable in strength to traditional plastics, but made from natural biodegradable ingredients and easily recycled using water. Many plastics are dyed using specialized colorants, which can make these materials hard to recycle using typical processes. Over time, dyes can fade or leach into the environment, posing risks to wildlife. One way to make these colorants largely unnecessary could be a phenomenon called structural color. This occurs when tiny structures in a material reflect certain wavelengths of light rather than a dye or pigment molecule. Structural color gives peacock feathers and butterfly wings their vibrant hues and dazzling shine, but certain synthetic polymers display structural color as well.

Read more.

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that post that's going around about wikipedia being banned in the UK is driving me insane because of this one stupid line

the fuck do they have to do with this lmfao. like: