subnaught

NBER is not a governmental organization.

You must live in the late 20th or early 21st century. Your claim doesn't hold true for most of human history.

Just a nit: beer never had loads of NO2. So-called "nitro" pours are pushed with nitrogen gas (N2), not NO2. This is a good thing, since NO2 is rather toxic: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_dioxide

I think it's pretty clear that the article intends "rapidly expanding niche" to refer to all of "third-wave specialty coffee," not just Blue Bottle.

That's an apples-and-oranges comparison. The system you cite differs from the one under discussion in several ways; the most important of which are:

1. The cited system does not include a light-harvesting component. It merely postulates that the required energy could be generated from photovoltaics. This would introduce additional cost and complexity along with an efficiency hit.

2. The cited system comprises a bacterium in conjuction with an electrode-supported catalyst, whereas the system under discussion is solely an engineered bacterium.

Finally, it is not correct to refer to cadmium and cysteine as feedstocks. They are components of the catalyst, and they are not consumed during catalysis. The only feedstocks for both systems are CO2 and water.

That said, relying on a fuel source that requires CO2 as input seems just as potentially destabilizing to the global carbon cycle as relying on a fuel source that produces CO2 as byproduct.

Not really. Using CO2 to generate a fuel which then liberates CO2 when it is consumed ends up being CO2-neutral, which is exactly the way to go.

You've got a lot of it right, but you're missing the key advance described here, which--if true--is pretty wild.

Taking a step back, in 2016, this group did cover a bacterium with tiny semiconductor nanoparticles (specifically CdS) just as you say. That work is described here: http://www.pnas.org/content/113/42/11750.full In short, the semiconductors act as mini-solar cells, converting light into electrical current. The bacteria then use that electricity to convert CO2 into acetic acid. That already is pretty cool.

However, what they claim now is that they don't even need to make the semiconductor nanoparticles. They can simply grow the bacteria in an environment containing cadmium and sulfur sources and the bacterium will synthesize it's own cadmium sulfide coat, and use it for photosensitization.

This is really pretty wild. Bacteria will often incorporate various elements from their host medium, but the generally use them to make biomolecules, not semiconductors. Right now, this is just being presented at a conference, but it will be very interesting to see the details when the full paper comes out.

That may be the origin of this particular phrasing, but the idea is much older:

In 1973, the artist Richard Serra made a film called Television Delivers People which declares "You are the product of TV" [0]

Key to Noam Chomsky's _Manufacturing Consent_ (1988) is the idea that advertising-supported media caters to the desires of the advertiser, not the media consumer [1]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Television_Delivers_People [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manufacturing_Consent

A descendent of pluto is still in use: http://www.cryst.chem.uu.nl/spek/platon/pl010000.html

See also: http://www.chilton-computing.org.uk/ccd/graphics/p012.htm

I won't pass judgement on whether 410 micrograms/kg is an "unbelievable" amount, but I will just mention that it is 410 parts per billion, or less than 1 ppm.

This is fascinating and, like you say, counter-intuitive. Can you expand on this or provide some links?

Some background and context from someone tangentially related to the field:

1. The overall idea here is to take an intermittent energy source (e.g. solar power) and "store" it as chemical fuel, in this case hydrogen and oxygen. This is what plants do, and we can also view fossil fuels as resulting from the "storage" of millions of years of solar energy. Note also that you get the water back when you burn the hydrogen, so there is no net consumption of water, it's just a carrier.

2. While you can split water without a catalyst, most of the energy gets wasted as heat, so this is not a great way to go if you're trying to do energy storage.

3. Efficient catalysts exist for this reaction, but they are based on rare and expensive metals, typically Pd, Pt, and Ir. As a result, there has been a search for catalysts involving "first-row" metals such as Fe, Co, Ni, etc.

4. There are variety of metrics for an electrocatalyst (efficiency, stability, cost, etc), but it's a fair bet that if this were significantly better than state-of-the-art, it would be in Science or Nature rather than PNAS.

I am interested as to why you chose to focus on reaction prediction. As you acknowledge in the introduction, the acquistion of this skill is a routine part of graduate education in synthetic chemistry.

On the other hand, the key difficulty in synthetic chemistry, and the one that occupies the majority of a chemist's time is the identification of the correct reagent(s), the correct solvent, and the correct time, temperature, and concentration such that the desired reaction proceeds in a convenient amount of time and with the correct chemo- and regio-selectivity, that the reaction conditions are tolerated by the rest of the molecule, and that the product can be easily isolated from the reaction byproducts.

In my opinion, as long as these problems remain, then being able to turn retrosynthetic analysis over to a machine appears to me to provide little benefit.

In the mid 90's, Caltech's David Goodstein predicted an impending "Big Crunch" in science, writing: "We must find a radically different social structure to organize research and education in science after The Big Crunch."

The essay is long but well worth reading: https://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg/crunch_art.html

Peltier cooling does not require a fan, which is why it is often used in precision optics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermoelectric_cooling

A rather skeptical perspective on this article: http://www.math.columbia.edu/~woit/wordpress/?p=8778

quote: "Even WADA can't tell you what substances not to use when you are cycling/running/doing-whatever on your own free time."

This is incorrect. In both track-and-field and cycling there are extensive out-of-competition tests, the purpose of which is exactly that. This is because performance-enhancing drugs are often more beneficial in training than in competition.

http://www.faqs.org/sports-science/Mo-Pl/Out-of-Competition-...

Can you fundraise if you openly say that you have a time-intensive hobby that you will under no circumstances give up for working on your company?

You mean like reading HN?

Sure, but pretty much every Uber driver I've encountered also drives for Lyft and there doesn't appear to be any mechanism by which Uber can prevent that.

Griffiths is really great.

Rest assured that the designers of SuperCollider considered this use case when deciding to use OSC: http://doc.sccode.org/Guides/ServerTiming.html

When a friend was in med school, she was told by an ear doctor that a Q-tip removes only material that would have fallen out naturally, while at the same time pushing everything else in further. The doctor also said that Q-tips are what keep them in business.

Another vote for rumps.

This seems to be heavily influenced by (if not outright plagiarized from) this[0], which, needless to say, does a much more thorough job of explaining things.

[0] http://colah.github.io/posts/2015-09-NN-Types-FP/

Thank you for taking the time to do that, that was great.

Would you mind listing some specific features you're interested in? I ask because I've recently switched from WordPress to Pelican, and I'm quite happy, so far at least.

This is absolutely incorrect. The best thing you can do to enhance your tea-drinking experience is to buy good tea, and good tea is invariably brewed off the boil, usually somewhere between 170-200F, depending on the tea.[0] Higher temperatures will extract too much tannin at the expense of aromatics. The British generally drink shit tea and then add milk to it, which is why they can get away with brewing it at 212F.

Remember that the British experience with tea dates back only to the 17th century, whereas the Chinese and Japanese have had much longer to refine the growing, processing, and drinking of tea.

[0] http://www.itoen.com/preparing-tea

The same things go on in America, just under slightly different guises, I would say. This is a not-uncommon pattern:

0) There is a problem that needs to be fixed.

1) Boss recommends A

2) Engineer knows A won't work, but they try it anyway

3) A doesn't work, so they stay up late implementing B. (Of course, they wouldn't have had to stay up late had they just been allowed to implement B first...)

4) B works

5) Boss takes the credit

6) After years of making the boss look good, engineer gets promoted

This looks great. There is also rumps[0] if you just need to create a status bar app from Python code.

[0] https://github.com/jaredks/rumps

It's really a shame that they've chosen not to open source their algorithm. They use data from the 4km (hi-res) NAM model, which can be found here[0]. The GRIB files can be read and exported to CSV using Panopoly [1]. They mention using RH at different heights along with low, medium, and high cloud cover (LCDC, MCDC, HCDC). I wanted to make a simple model and train it on Instagram data for #sunset tag frequency for a given location, but Instagram just closed access to their global data. If someone else has access and wants to run with this, it could be fun...

[0] http://nomads.ncep.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/filter_hiresconus.pl

[1] http://www.giss.nasa.gov/tools/panoply/