Behold: a carbon-nanotube catalyst that’s over six hundred times more effective than platinum.
[Update a few minutes later]
Sorry, that was sloppy. More cost-effective (that is, cheaper) than platinum, not six hundred times better as a catalyst.
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Faster, Please
A new way to prevent or minimize thrombosis?
After Earth
Why, when and how may we have to find another home?
How Washington Ruined Your Washing Machine
Not to mention your toilet. And lighting. Sadly, it’s one of the more innocuous things they’ve ruined.
The Founders weep.
A Disaster-Proof Nuclear Plant
How to build one.
Don’t call them “fool proof,” though. Von Braun used to say that you can’t build something to be fool proof, because fools are too ingenious.
New Reactor Designs
Nuclear Disaster In Japan
Thoughts from Ron Bailey.
I Wish Congress Wouldn’t Make NASA Waste So Much Money
So they could afford to do things more like this.
It’s always a little unnerving to me to see them fly through the ring plane. It makes you realize that as striking they are in appearance, the mass density is very slight, and there’s plenty of open space in there. Not that they couldn’t have had a collision, but they haven’t.
OK, I know, even if they weren’t being forced to waste money, they’d still have trouble getting more funding for more planetary missions.
Nuclear Triage?
This is pretty grim news, if true.
Even still, in the context of the major catastrophe there, it’s small potatoes. It’s going to cost billions to reclaim much of the land just from the seawater inundation (perhaps including dikes, with some advice from the Dutch). This just may mean that there will be a small part of it that will never be reclaimable in the foreseeable future.
On the other hand, they can console themselves with the thought that this probably won’t happen again for a few hundred years.
Meltdown Coverage
Brave New Climate seems to be doing a good job.