Fuck Science for paywalling research. May they rot in hell.
The article implies they are using electric charge to bring the ions into and out of solution to trigger melting and recrystalization. Does anyone have actual details about the process?
Also, is this paper saying it has a COP of 0.3? That's terrible compared to typical evaporative refrigeration.
Putting salt on roads to prevent ice from forming is a common example of this in action.
A better example: lots of people use salt to force the ice to melt, to chill their beer faster. It’s the exact same principle as in the article.
The main issue is entropy - it’s hard to remove the salt off the liquid, to make it a solid again, if you want a continuous process. But perhaps if you use a “brine” vs. pure liquid, reverse osmosis could do the trick?
The second issue is that you need to work with a rather specific range of temperatures; make it too high and the liquid won’t become solid again, make it too low and it won’t melt even if you add the salt. This could be also solved by “bootstrapping” the process with the older HFC-based one, you’re still reducing HFC usage this way albeit not completely.
I doubt you could use an RO-like process for that. Aside from the filters needing servicing, you don't really have closed loop RO. You'd have to plumb your appliance.
My reading of this write-up is that they can push the ions in with an electric charge and they'll leave the solution when the charge is removed. The paper says they are able to trigger melting and recrystallization.
The melting and freezing point of various materials is fixed. This is something that may work great at 90F but not so great at 100F.
Unless I’m reading this wrong, this requires the transport of solids or salty liquids. That’s going to be a challenge. Salty liquids tend to be corrosive and solids aren’t easily pumped places.
Beyond that, the article assumes that all refrigerants have high gwp. The industry is currently in the process of moving to either CO2 or propane. Both of which have fairly small gwp. They do have their own problems, CO2 needs high pressure and propane is explosive. However, they are workable and already in use.
The key reason we use gas is it can cold (or heat) at pretty wide temperature ranges.
“The team now wants to figure out what role these shared genes play in cryptobiosis, and whether there is an upper limit to how long nematodes can remain in this mysterious state.”
Chuck 'em in the freezer and check back in 50,000 years, boys
This is basically what's thought to have happened with proto-Earth and Theia in one of the main Moon-creation hypotheses.
Main planet forms, creating a gravity well. Smaller clump forms at a Lagrange point of that gravity well. Then it gathers too much material or something else causes a destabilisation of the Lagrange point, causing the smaller, possibly now well-formed clump, to fall towards the Lagrange centre, i.e. the main planet.
In Earth's case, the clump was Theia and the resulting collision exchanged material and ultimately spat out the Earth and the Moon.
Maybe the same will happen in this burgeoning system, but we might be waiting a while to see.
It's at the L5 point and currently forming, I don't know if it's possible but I really hope they can guess at the likely end mass of each proto planet in the system.
Will this planet exceed the mass ratio for stability at L5? What happens to the the orbits when the two gas giants form?
This is a major problem in probably all high profile labs. The PI is super busy because he is such a top dog in his field, he has dozens of postdocs and phd students who are all lucky if they get to see him 10 minutes every few weeks. No supervision or control but all the academic pressure to produce something. And not just anything, but something great and interesting. Of course this can result in people doctoring (heh) results.
I think what’s surprising about it, is that this isn’t a laundry list of shitty journals. High quality journals have a fairly rigorous review process meant to surface and deal with exactly this kind of thing. The bigger journals are quite good at spotting simple techniques like omitting data or p-hacking, but it appears that at least historically they were less resistant to image manipulation. Although I’ve never been a prolific researcher going through the submitter process with a place with the amount of prestige that Science and Nature brings and it’s very possible that they lax the process for high profile people or those who submit regularly. Either way, I’m sure many journals are watching this unfold quite closely as there will be much to learn to make processes more resilient to issues like this.
quite good at spotting simple techniques like omitting data or p-hacking
I don’t know about that. Spotting omitted data would only work if a key experiment is missing or if a reviewer suggests a control experiment that was actually done but not shown, or what do you mean?
And how to spot p-hacking? That would only work if you’d be able to see all underlying raw data. Otherwise especially in high impact journals the p-values are always excellent when they need to be.
Not to mention these peer review processes rely on unpaid labor from professionals who are heavily incentivized to use their time for basically anything else. They skim.
The replication crisis does not at all exclude highly regarded journals, unfortunately.
That would only work if you’d be able to see all underlying raw data.
A paper without the underlying raw data, is like a bicycle without wheels: you know it might’ve been useful at some point, but it isn’t anymore.
Very few papers publish both the raw data, and the analysis tools used on it, for everyone to verify their results.
The rest, are no different than a 4th grader writing down an answer, then when a teacher asks them to “show your work”, they come back with “no, trust me, my peers agree I’m right, you do your own work”.
It’s extra sad when you contact a researcher directly for the data, and you get any of “it got lost in the last lab move”, “I’m only giving it if you show me how you going to process it first”, or some clearly spotty data backfilled from the paper’s conclusions.
In light of Baker's reporting, Stanford University opened its own internal inquiry into the matter. A panel of scientists concluded that Tessier-Lavigne's work contained image manipulations in 2001, the early 2010s, 2015-2016, and 2021.
But the panel dismissed any allegations of fraud or misconduct on the part of Tessier-Lavigne himself. Instead, they conclude that the "unusual frequency of manipulation of research data" in the neuroscientist's lab "suggests that there may have been opportunities to improve laboratory oversight and management".
If I understand many of my colleagues gripes about their days in graduate school, the PI basically told them to make it work, so they did. Either by manipulating procedures, using the one study out of 5 that worked, or by photoshopping images. I’d say manipulation is absolutely rampant in his lab, this is just one way they were doing it and they got caught.
Sure, but that doesn’t mean the grad students that did the actual manipulation are blameless, or some kind of victim. A big part of science is integrity, and by the time you get to grad school, you know this and you know better.
It’s a planet and a planet forming disc, but super interesting nevertheless. I wonder how stable a Trojan configuration would be with planets and not just a bunch of asteroids.
I found the abstract of the (mostly paywalled) nature paper more helpful.
This seems interesting, though so early days it’s hard to tell how practical it’ll end up being, especially since it sounds like it relies on the stressed state of the metal. If I understand right, they’re causing more cracks and in the process that’s cold welding other parts of the metal back together at the same time. And cold welding needs a vacuum, so it could be impractical in that sense too, I’d think.
Bearing in mind also this is a single study, so it remains to be seen whether the findings are replicable.
I didn’t check the associated paper, only the article itself.
For now this sounds a lot like a curiosity, but this might be useful in the future - if the healing happens under less than ideal conditions, faster, and for wider cracks, it could increase long-term resistance for key applications. I wonder if some vibration (including gentle heating) couldn’t also help.
A potential issue is however air. The experiments were performed with platinum (that doesn’t give a damn) in vacuum, but in real life you got oxygen and even nitrogen potentially leaking into the fractures, binding themselves into the metal, and saying “NOPE, IT’LL STAY LIKE THIS”. So your best bet would be perhaps alloys that are harder to oxide, or even crystalline structures that already have oxygen.
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