Heliogen Achieves Breakthrough Temperatures from Concentrated Sunlight for Industrial Processes
November 19th, 2019The Heliogen website says, “Can be scaled from sizes as low as 1 MW to several gigawatts.”
Several gigawatts???
“I see broken heliostats. Lots of broken heliostats.”
Anyway, if there is some “secret sauce” here, I can’t tell what it is. Although this gets above 1000C, you have all of the problems with concentrated solar, which has been around for decades and not taken off.
Via: Heliogen – Press Release:
Heliogen, the clean energy company that is transforming sunlight to create and replace fuels, today announced its launch and that it has – for the first time commercially – concentrated solar energy to exceed temperatures greater than 1,000 degrees Celsius. At that temperature, Heliogen can replace the use of fossil fuels in critical industrial processes, including the production of cement, steel, and petrochemicals, dramatically reducing greenhouse gas emissions from these activities. This singular scientific achievement was accomplished at Heliogen’s commercial facility in Lancaster, California.
Heliogen’s mission is to create the world’s first technology that can commercially replace fossil fuels with carbon-free, ultra-high temperature heat from the sun and to transform sunlight into fuels at scale – taking a major step towards solving climate change. Its heat technology represents a key technical breakthrough for concentrated solar thermal. Previous commercial concentrating solar thermal systems have been designed to reach temperatures of up to only 565 degrees Celsius – useful for power generation, but insufficient for many industrial processes. Many of these processes require much higher temperatures, which have traditionally been reached through the burning of fossil fuels.
Japan: Wind and Solar Power Plants Will Be Built on Fukushima Farmland Polluted by Fallout from 2011 Disaster
November 18th, 2019Via: Daily Mail:
Farmland in Fukushima that was rendered unusable after the disastrous 2011 nuclear meltdown is getting a second chance at productivity.
A group of Japanese investors has created a new plan to use the abandoned land to build wind and solar power plants, to be used to send electricity to Tokyo.
The plan calls for the construction of eleven solar power plants and ten wind power plants, at an estimated cost of $2.75 billion.
The project is expected to be completed in March of 2024 and is backed by a group of investors, including Development Bank of Japan and Mizuho Bank.
…
The planners expect the 21 total plants will generate 600 megawatts of electricity, or about two-thirds what a nuclear power plant would generate, according to a report from Nikkei.
Scientists ‘May Have Crossed Ethical Line’ in Growing Human Brains
November 17th, 2019Oh, really? What could possibly go wrong? *sigh*
Anyway, I designate, “Sentient lumps of brain,” as Cryptogon’s Phrase Of The Year.
Have a nice day.
Via: Guardian:
Neuroscientists may have crossed an “ethical rubicon” by growing lumps of human brain in the lab, and in some cases transplanting the tissue into animals, researchers warn.
The creation of mini-brains or brain “organoids” has become one of the hottest fields in modern neuroscience. The blobs of tissue are made from stem cells and, while they are only the size of a pea, some have developed spontaneous brain waves, similar to those seen in premature babies.
Many scientists believe that organoids have the potential to transform medicine by allowing them to probe the living brain like never before. But the work is controversial because it is unclear where it may cross the line into human experimentation.
On Monday, researchers will tell the world’s largest annual meeting of neuroscientists that some scientists working on organoids are “perilously close” to crossing the ethical line, while others may already have done so by creating sentient lumps of brain in the lab.
“If there’s even a possibility of the organoid being sentient, we could be crossing that line,” said Elan Ohayon, the director of the Green Neuroscience Laboratory in San Diego, California. “We don’t want people doing research where there is potential for something to suffer.”
Prince ‘I-Didn’t-Party-Or-Do-PDAs’ Andrew
November 17th, 2019Maybe this is an attempt to portray him as being interested in adult women and not children???
Via: Daily Mail:
Never-before-seen video footage showing a sweaty Prince Andrew being openly affectionate with a bevy of young women while partying in the late 2000s has been unearthed – just hours after his ‘car crash’ interview with the BBC.
The Prince insisted in his sit-down with Emily Maitlis that he did not sweat or indulge in public displays of affection with women while defending himself against claims he slept with Jeffrey Epstein’s sex slave Virginia Roberts.
He seemed to cast doubts on the authenticity of a photo which shows him with his arm around Miss Roberts’ waist.
However, the newly-discovered footage, published exclusively by the MailOnline, shows Andrew looking dishevelled and sweaty as he wanders around several raucous parties on the French Riviera.
Photos also show him embracing a string of beautiful women publicly, appearing not to care about the cameras tracking his every move.
Prince Andrew’s Pizza Party Alibi: A Theory
November 17th, 2019Via: Reddit User stop4me_its_the_claw:
Prince Andrew has now denied ever meeting 17 year old Virginia Roberts, as well as denying having sex with her, despite the photograph of him with Virginia with his arm around her bare midrif while Ghislaine Maxell lurks in the background. Prince Andrew bizarrely claims he was at a “pizza party” with his daughter that night as his alibi for why he could not have met or raped Virignia Roberts.
we all know about Pizzagate, and we all know that Epstein is basically considered to be the living proof that Pizzagate is real. so why would Prince Andrew pour gasoline onto the fire by mentioning “pizza” at all in reference to his own involvement with Epstein’s underage rape blackmail ring? obviously Prince Andrew is guilty as sin and is lying, but why did he have to slap us in the face by mentioning “pizza”?
i think i know why.
remember from a few months ago when Boris Johnson gave a bizarre statement about his hobby being making model buses. Boris’ statement made no sense, but it has been claimed that Boris was intentionally “Google Blasting” himself, knowing his statement about making model buses would dominate the ranks in search engine results, and push down the search results about Boris Johnson’s older embarassing gaff from 2016 where he had a campaign bus painted with a slogan claiming the money saved from Brexit should go to fund the National Health Service.
https://www.wired.co.uk/article/boris-johnson-model-google-news
https://gizmodo.com/did-boris-johnson-ramble-about-model-buses-to-manipulat-1835903361
could Prince Andrew be doing the same thing and Google Blasting himself by claiming he was at a pizza party? now when Normies search for “prince andrew pizza”, they won’t see hundreds of links to pages and forums and blogs about Pizzagate, but instead those pages will be pushed down in rank, and the “more credible” and “official” news sites and tabloids about Prince Andrew’s pizza party alibi will be ranked at the top.
is Prince Andrew attempting to game Google searches to divert renewed public interest in him from discovering search results such as “Pizzagate Dig Thread, Start Here”? there is no way Prince Andrew is smart enough to come up with this idea on his own. Surely someone in the Royal Propaganda office came up with the idea instead. they know they can’t stop obsessive Conspiracists like us from talking about Prince Andrew being the #2 man in Pizzagate, but they can stop the millions of curious Normies who are hearing about this for the first time from discovering Pizzagate and digging into it and then falling down the rabbit hole to break the conditioning and join our ranks.
TPTB know they can’t (yet) win an absolute victory online by silencing all dissent from the Official Narrative, so instead they work to marginalize us onto “containment boards”, and then have their “official” media TV bobbleheads discredit our boards as “crazy racist conspiracy theory nutters”, to discourage Normies from taking us seriously. we saw this tactic in action last week when Trevor Noah point blank asked Hillary Clinton whether she had ordered Epstein to be killed, and everyone had a good laugh at the “joke.” that joke forever framed the very real phemenon of the Clinton Body Count as a punchline for Liberal audiences to ignore as illegitimate.
adding Google Blasting to game the search engine rankings to further marginalize counter narratives is just another step along the way to Mind Kontrol and Thought Crime and 1984.
Prince Andrew Interview: “It’s Like Watching a Man in Quicksand”
November 17th, 2019Via: Daily Mail:
A public relations expert said the Duke of York’s interview over his links with paedophile Jeffrey Epstein was ‘like watching a man in quicksand’.
PR and crisis consultant Mark Borkowski said Prince Andrew’s appearance on BBC Newsnight was a lesson on ‘how not to do’ public relations.
The duke’s long-awaited appearance on the show saw him tell presenter Emily Maitlis that he had no regrets about his friendship with Epstein, but admitted it was wrong to visit the convicted sex offender for a final time.
Speaking about the interview, Mr Borkowski said: ‘I have never seen anything so disastrous. For any students of PR, that is how not to do it.
‘It was like watching a man in quicksand and unfortunately, I don’t think anyone would have thrown him a line to get him out.’
U.S. Restaurants Remove Dining Rooms as More People Use Food Delivery Apps
November 16th, 2019Via: Reuters:
Restaurants are doing away with dining rooms as consumers increasingly order food deliveries through apps such as Uber Technologies Inc’s Uber Eats and GrubHub Inc.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch: Automation Could Replace 800 Million Jobs by 2035
November 15th, 2019Via: Yahoo Finance:
Some half of all jobs worldwide — or up to 800 million total jobs — could be at risk of becoming obsolete by 2035 due to the rise of automation.
That’s the assessment from a new report written by Bank of America Merrill Lynch (BAC) analysts highlighting 10 themes to watch for the next decade — and artificial intelligence is one of them.
To make matters worse, robots are getting cheaper, the analysts said, with industrial robotic costs falling 27% from 2005 to 2014. Those costs could decline another 22% by 2025.
While the analysts acknowledge that automation isn’t a new phenomenon and has been used across the economy for decades, they predict “the next generation of robotics and automation could be even more transformative.”
Plus, it’s not just factory jobs that robots can replace.
“Increasingly office and service sector tasks are being automated due to improvements in computing and software,” the analysts wrote.
Now Daimler Is Dialing Back Expectations for Self-Driving Taxis
November 15th, 2019Via: Ars Technica:
Daimler is planning to “rightsize” its spending on self-driving taxis, Chairman Ola Källenius said on Thursday. Getting self-driving cars to operate safely in complex urban environments has proved more challenging than people expected a few years ago, he admitted.
“There has been a reality check setting in here,” Källenius said, according to Reuters.
He is just the latest executive to acknowledge that work on self-driving taxi technology is not progressing as fast as optimists expected two or three years ago. Earlier this year, Ford CEO Jim Hackett sought to dampen expectations for Ford’s own self-driving vehicles. Industry leaders Waymo and GM’s Cruise missed self-imposed deadlines to launch driverless commercial taxi services in 2018 and 2019, respectively.
Related: Automakers Are Rethinking the Timetable for Fully Autonomous Cars
NASA Report Finds Boeing Seat Prices Are 60% Higher Than SpaceX
November 15th, 2019Via: Ars Technica:
On Thursday, NASA’s inspector general released a report on the space agency’s commercial crew program, which seeks to pay Boeing and SpaceX to develop vehicles to transport astronauts to the International Space Station.
Although the report cites the usual technical issues that the companies are having with the development of their respective Starliner and Dragon spacecraft, far more illuminating is its discussion of costs. Notably, the report publishes estimated seat prices for the first time, and it also delves into the extent that Boeing has gone to extract more money from NASA above and beyond its fixed-price award.
Boeing’s per-seat price already seemed like it would cost more than SpaceX. The company has received a total of $4.82 billion from NASA over the lifetime of the commercial crew program, compared to $3.14 billion for SpaceX. However, for the first time the government has published a per-seat price: $90 million for Starliner and $55 million for Dragon. Each capsule is expected to carry four astronauts to the space station during a nominal mission.
