perestroika

Nothing special, nothing perfect - just a PinePhone.

Sounds like a useful recipe, if the components are widespread. However, I notice that the press release does not disclose more - probably because of the patent application.

• it seems likely that it's still a silicate, but what silicates have an (eutectic) melting point of 300-400C?
• it seems sure that they dropped limestone, but what did they add to replace it?
• if they get a patent and license it on fair terms, it might see widespread adoption
• if they get a patent and won't license it on fair terms, bah

Counterpoint: an electric vehicle does most of its braking by regenerating power into the battery. Brake pads are replaced super rarely.

Going by mass and comparing with fuel use on an IC vehicle - a set of tyres every 4 years weighs about 40 kilograms. What amount of rubber is destroyed? Maybe 10%, so maybe 4 kg of tyre-based pollutants escape into the environment as fine dust.

To compare, the amount of fuel is huge - at 5 l / 100 km, driving 1000 km/month: 600 liters per year, 2400 liters per 4 years. Clearly fuel is the dominant pollutant by mass. Tyre materials would have to be 600 times more toxic to be an equal health risk.

For communication. :)

The source is a scientific article from 2022...

"P. Bombelli et al. Powering a microprocessor by photosynthesis. Energy & Environmental Science, 2022."

...so there is zero chance of random folks using it practically, if the information was added to the state of the art during last year. The article even hasn't made it to Sci-Hub. It can be found here however. The journal currently wants to extort 42 pounds from the reader and I'm not from a research institution so I haven't got an account to read journals, so I shall remain in the dark. :( One could always request an author's copy from one of the authors (or maybe someone here is from a place which already has an account?)...

...until then, I will use a clue they have given: the chip was ARM Cortex M0. That is the tiniest of the tiny, the most energy efficient. Not much computing can be done with them, mostly just data acquisition (sensors). They require milliwatts or microwatts of power. The chip wasn't run continously, it slept for most of time.

The article's public abstract doesn't describe the growing protocol of the algae. Most likely, the same algae in the same container cannot be grown for a year. An ecosystem needs a biodegrader (bacteria that decompose dead algae) and efficiency likely won't be great when the primary producer and biodegrader form a mixed culture (instead of nice green algae there will be bacterial films and brown goo, limiting the sunlight available to algae). So the "cell" will probably need to be emptied, cleaned and refilled - but that's just a guess.

Useful trick, worth knowing. :)

A ram pump is to water what a switching mode power supply is to electricity. You can use inertia (inductivity) to raise pressure (voltage).

I think it assumes spyware that is capable of defeating / deceiving the operating system. This requires either manufacturer support or undisclosed vulnerabilities, which spyware makers always try to buy and keep secret.

Given the complexity of mobile operating systems these days, I'm pretty sure they cannot be secure - but answering the question of "which one is easiest to break" is beyond my competence.

Invididually - my laptop's camera is taped over from the beginning. My activist phone doesn't have a camera, and the battery comes out easily. My ordinary phone is obsolete in every way, but the replacement will have switches for enabling / disabling the camera, microphone, cellular modem, bluetooth and wifi.

One of the basic laws of ecosystems is: the biomass of a herbivore must be 10 x smaller than the biomass of the plant they eat, and likewise 10 x between predator and prey.

In a city, the biomass of humans is huge. Unless the city is a literal space ship powered by its own fusion reactors and utilizing direct chemical synthesis to create feedstock for edible yeasts and bacteria (skipping nearly all plants and skipping absolutely all animals)... without that, we can pretty much forget about a city feeding itself, or it will be an extremely large and flat city which some would call "countryside" (or an energy-intensive city with multi-storey artificially lit greenhouses and very expensive food).

The space ship scenario - skipping all animals, skipping most plants and getting the goods from the simplest possible food chain - of course assumes a rather uninteresting menu driven by necessity. People wouldn't be satisfied with such a menu, if they have the possibility of eating more diversely.

I would supprt pre-emptively defederating Facebook / Meta.

Directly relevant history: they allowed their users to talk to third-party XMPP servers as long as it suited their business. With size comes arrogance, so while doing that, they introduced compatibility issues which caused other people much avoidable work. Finally they blocked their users from interacting with third-party messenger apps.

Indirectly relevant history: Facebook has caused damage to society by allowing better manipulation (targeted advertising) and helped fuel conflict (preference for content that makes people click).

A company with their history and ownership model can be expected to behave selfishly to the detriment of others.

I agree, that comparison is about as useful apples vs. lamp bulbs.

As a construction material, wood is almost certainly less taxing on the environment.

A lot of paper gets discarded sooner than a year after printing / writing, consumer goods may last a decade, but houses are built to last 50 years.

While a wooden house still stands, the land where its material grew may easily become re-forested, and the service life of houses can be prolonged - with maintenance, a house can last a century and there exist wooden houses many centuries old.

Yep, forgot about iron, and about flow batteries.

The nice thing about flow batteries is that storage capacity and reactive cell size can be scaled independently. :)

Batteries have a very important role in transitioning off fossil fuels.

They do not inherently lead to disaster, but to make the transition, lithium batteries in their current form are insufficient. Fortunately most people aren't intending to do stationary energy storage for the electric grid with lithium. For that, sulfur-aluminum or lead-antimony (liquid metal) batteries are better, alongside pumped hydro, thermal storage, liquefied air, power-to-gas, etc, etc.

As the number of battery-powered vehicles grows, recycling of lithium becomes important, and sodium ion batteries (already manufactured, but not en masse) will be needed because sodium is much more abundant.

The electric grid will have to adapt. On some days, vehicles might not draw power from the grid, but return it - to balance out a power plant that dropped offline, or help during peak demand.

Traveling less will help and optimizing life to be convenient with less travel will help - but I think one can safely discard the possibility that everything can be altered. Unless economic shortage prevents them, people will travel, but the environmental impact of this can be very different depending on how they do it. :)

So - it's a puzzle with many bottlenecks and many ways to circumvent them.