March 24th, 2023:
- Interesting item about drilling holes deep enough to allow geothermal energy harvesting anywhere, and not simply where magma happens to live close to the surface. It’s still a hard problem, but geothermal energy offers most of the upsides of nuclear power, and fewer of the (admittedly mostly bogus) downsides.
- What most people don’t know about EVs is that it’s very difficult (and sometimes impossible) to replace the battery pack in an EV. And even minor collisions can cause enough damage to the battery to raise the risk of fire unacceptably. Insurers often must junk the whole vehicle if the battery is damaged only slightly.
- We had an incident in Scottsdale not long ago where a Tesla was in an accident and caught fire. After putting out the blaze with tens of thousands of gallons of water, the damned thing caught fire again when they tried to tow it away. Why are lithium-ion batteries so dangerous to extinguish when they catch fire? This video lays it all out.
- Vitamin D-3 (cholecalcipherol) supplementation appears to reduce the risk of Alzheimer’s Disease. The study cited isn’t the best, but it’s as good as I’ve found so far. Carol and I have been taking D-3 for years. Here’s hoping…
- A couple of years ago there was some buzz about Viagra and Cialis reducing the incidence of Alzheimer’s, but a more recent study from the NIH shows that this isn’t the case. Bummer; talk about a serious twofer!
- Heh. I’ve had this suspicion for some time, but it appears to be true: Tech companies overhired for “vanity” reasons, and to keep talent from being hired by competitors. Once cash gets expensive due to rising interest rates, carrying unneeded talent becomes untenable.
- The world’s last Meccano factory has closed. Meccano is the British metal construction system, much like the 1950s US Erector sets, but with better parts. It was my favorite toy from the time I was 7 until is was 12 or 13, and I have used it in various projects since then, especially The Head of R&D.
- Speaking of construction sets: MIT has designed a sort of Erector/Meccano set to build different human-scale robots for lunar exploration. Rather than trying to ship specialized robots to the Moon, researchers could snap together legs and other components to create robots to match specific challenges.
- I’d never heard of quercetin until the spring of 1990, when my doc told me that partnered with bioavailable zinc, quercetin could prevent viral relication, via much the same mechanism as the much-maligned HCQ. Here’s a long-form piece on how quercetin works and why it may be a better flu treatment than Tamiflu.
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