tingilinde

horizontal heat pumps

xkcd rules

ev news

A price war in China

and a ship burns

a new passive cooling paint

Radiative cooling and evaporation.  The piece in Science may be paywalled.

There are several approaches to the problem - the trick is one that cheap enough and has an acceptable appearance.

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Editor’s summary

The top and exterior of buildings can be used to passively cool, but this requires materials with the right properties to do so effectively. Fei et al. designed a paint that cools both radiatively and through evaporation and that appears to keep buildings relatively cool even in humid environments. Although radiative cooling is effective at reducing temperature, it requires the material to be sky-facing. Designing a paint that also cools through evaporation allows the material to be effective when applied to the sides of the buildings as well. —Brent Grocholski
Abstract

Integrating radiative and evaporative cooling shows promise for enhancing passive cooling, but durable self-curing integrated cooling paints remain underdeveloped. We designed a modified cementitious structure with advanced thermal-optical and mass transfer properties, boosting cooling power while ensuring durability, mechanical strength, and broad adhesion. The paint achieves 88 to 92% solar reflectance (depending on wetting), 95% atmospheric window emittance, ~30% water retention, and self-replenishing properties, maintaining stable optical performance even when wet. Field tests in tropical Singapore demonstrated superior cooling performance compared with commercial white paints. Pilot-scale demonstrations highlighted consistent electricity savings under varying weather conditions, supported by theoretical modeling. By leveraging sustainable water evaporation and thermal radiation, this paint offers a practical and long-term solution for mitigating the urban heat island effect.

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a native plants finder

Type in your zip code and find out what grows natively in your area. 

Just the trick for natural, low maintenance yards.

 

how much power does it take to think?

About a watt ... your brain runs around twenty watts and only five percent goes to what we might call mental effort.  A neat piece in Quanta

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Measuring ATP directly in the human brain is highly invasive. So, for their paper, Jamadar’s lab reviewed studies (opens a new tab), including their own findings, that used other estimates of energy use — glucose consumption, measured by positron-emission tomography (PET), and blood flow, measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) — to track differences in how the brain uses energy during active tasks and rest. When performed simultaneously, PET and fMRI can provide complementary information on how glucose is being consumed by the brain, Jamadar said. It’s not a complete measure of the brain’s energy use because neural tissues can also convert some amino acids (opens a new tab) into ATP, but the vast majority of the brain’s ATP is produced by glucose metabolism.

Jamadar’s analysis showed that a brain performing active tasks consumes just 5% more energy compared to a resting brain. When we are engaged in an effortful, goal-directed task, such as studying a bus schedule in a new city, neuronal firing rates increase in the relevant brain regions or networks — in that example, visual and language processing regions. This accounts for that extra 5%; the remaining 95% goes to the brain’s base metabolic load.

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trump is a tariff TWERP

Greg suggested this bit of brillance

Taking a lead from TACO, call him the “The Trump Tariff TWERP”, for "Taxes We Really Pay”.

Trump is a TWERP

 

stacey abrams and jim acosta

On the Trump/Musk fight and much more. the first 20 minutes or so

 

 

america is giving up

From Science

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A world where the United States is no longer leading the scientific enterprise will still benefit from science. Human creativity flourishes everywhere, after all, and other countries and cultures will have greater opportunities to shape the future in new ways. The global enterprise will adapt to the lack of American leadership, but the steep loss for the country itself is unambiguous. The United States will no longer have the same window into the technologies of the future that will allow it to shape and anticipate commercial and societal advances. This will eventually reduce the market successes and global leadership that the United States has boasted since World War II.

At a US Senate hearing in April on the importance of biomedical research, bipartisan support was expressed for continued investment, although whether senators in the Republican party will defy the president and rectify the cuts remains unknown. In his testimony, Sudip Parikh, the chief executive officer of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS, the publisher of Science), noted that the language of chemistry used to be German and that only in the past 50 years did the German language stop being a requirement for chemistry degrees in the United States. “Twenty years from now,” he said, “what is going to be the language of science? Is it going to be English? I don’t know that for certain.” It is a sobering thought. Scientific knowledge is, fortunately, a public good, and as such, its benefits transcend international boundaries. But relinquishing its prominence in creating the future is nothing short of devastating for the United States.

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vikings on the silk road

A nice article by Neil Price on a history of which I only have scattered knowledge.

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In his office, he is compiling a report as part of his duties. As his job title implies, he oversees communications and security in the Jibāl region, reporting to officials in Baghdad. What he provides is an intelligence service: in essence, Ibn Khurradādhbih is what we would call a station chief, like those CIA officials who manage clandestine operations abroad. The report he’s working on is part of a much larger document that will one day be known as Kitāb al-Masālik wa l-mamālik (the ‘Book of Itineraries and Kingdoms’), a summary of exactly the kind of thing that governments usually want to know: who was visiting their territory, where they came from, where they were going, and why. This is what he says about a group of people known as the Rus’:

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a tip of the hat to Jeri

 

 

 

slightly wonkish piece on smartphone ui

For those who are interested in the design and usability aspects of such things. The section on a possible direction for iOS is interesting.