> This method achieved an energy conversion efficiency of about 130%, exceeding the traditional 100% limit
I am extraordinarily confident that it did not.
> In practical terms, this means about 1.3 molybdenum-based metal complexes were activated for every photon absorbed, surpassing the conventional limit and demonstrating that more energy carriers were generated than incoming photons.
... Which is not the same thing as a >100% energy conversion efficiency (which would imply an infinite-energy-generating pump)
The theoretical maximum efficiency for solar panels is ~33% total energy conversion. So I assume what they mean here is that they achieved 130% of 33% =~43% total energy conversion, which doesn't break any laws of physics.
That said, I read the article and it's very unclear. They talk about 130% quantum efficiency but I have no idea what that might mean.
The infrastructure in question is DC fast chargers. Yes, you can charge at home if you have a house, with a parking space reachable with an EVSE, and your commute is short enough that you can fully recharge by the next commute, and nobody needs the car after hours when you'd otherwise be charging it, and you never take road trips or longer-than-usual drives.
Everyone else is, to a greater or lesser extent, at the mercy of the DCFC infrastructure, and it is sorely lacking in many places - even ones you'd expect it to be pretty good.
Your picture is not an accurate picture of what it's like for most people - you frame the exceptions as if it's the normal case.
Most people who have a driveway or garage where they can install an EVSE (or an apartment complex where the parking has chargers) don't even need to charge every day. Depending on the commute it could even be just two or three times a week. It would usually only be when your only option is trickle charging out of a standard wall outlet that you are in the 'might not be able to charge in time for the next drive' territory, not with EVSE where you can get 7 kW single phase or 11 kW three-phase with most cars (some cars can do up to 22 kW with three phase but that's rare for them to support that on AC charging and it would be rare to have an EVSE that could do that power at home).
I'm not making any representation of how common this is - just saying that unless all those conditions apply to you, you will eventually have cause to care about the quality, availability, and reliability of public DC charging infrastructure.
Anecdotally, I have 5+ friends with EVs, and every single one of them charges theirs from a standard 15A wall outlet. (I have an EV, but I also have a real charger.) Sure, most of the time it's fine - but when it's not, then you have to really care about whether that nearby EVgo pedestal is working today.
But furthermore: most apartment dwellers, many renters, people in multifamily homes/complexes where their parking spaces are not near their personally-metered power, those who have to street park - many more people than you may think have difficulty charging at home. I wish it weren't the case, and I'd love to see better solutions here.
A 2kW socket for ten hours over night will give you a hundred kilometers of range or so. A regular 11kW wall box can fully charge your car over night. How long is the typical commute you're thinking about? Fast charging is pretty much irrelevant day-to-day for people who can plug in at home or at work. The only time these people need fast chargers is during road trips.
I'm in the privileged position that I have solar panels and can charge in the garage. I only just had a conversation with someone who was considering an EV, but their 'housing configuration' doesn't support it, it just wasn't feasible purely from a charging perspective in their situation.
More public infrastructure, and knowledge of the presence of said infrastructure would open up EVs to a wider set of use cases. It's almost the 'confidence' in the suitability of EVs that needs to be worked on.
This is absolutely true, but IMO also a much smaller problem than some people are making it out to be.
Without any special car-charging equipment, just with a regular outlet, I'm able to get over 100 miles of range every night (charging only from 11pm to 7am).
This is enough for a pretty long daily commute and it doesn't block car use during normal hours.
Big disclaimer - I'm from Europe, which helps my case because of shorter commutes and faster home charging with 220 volts.
But at the end of the day I think the solution lies in equipping all parking spaces at home and at work with power outlets. DCFC is definitely needed, but should be viewed as a solution for exceptional cases (i.e. roadtrip that exceeds your range), not a gas station for EVs.
It’s hilarious that the greenies who live in dense urban areas have a harder time charging their EV than folks who live in the burbs. I’m thinking of putting in a second EV charger so I can charge two cars at once.
The lesser-known instance of this is RV power. When you're running off small batteries and solar, you want to make the best use of the watt-hours you have, and that means avoiding the DC-to-AC-to-DC loop wherever possible. So you run 12V (or in newer models, higher voltage) versions of everything, upconverting as necessary.
I am really skeptical that 12VDC power distribution in RVs actually saves power compared to a high-quality (hah!) higher voltage AC or DC system. 12V is absurdly low and you can’t easily lose quite a few percent in resistive losses even with fairly large cables, and those large cables are quite unpleasant to work with and rather dangerous.
The vast majority of what you're running from RV DC are things like lights, fans, phone chargers, and other cigarette-plug-adapter type devices. My RV has a 12V DC fridge. For anything more - particularly air conditioning - you need AC for sure.
My inverter-charger is connected to my batteries with 4/0 cable. That wasn't fun to run.
You might be surprised. Various games have come with both. One iteration (the 3DS remake of Gold/Silver) even came with a pedometer that allowed you to level up by walking around: https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pok%C3%A9walker
Philips Hue, and Zigbee direct-binding in general, can achieve this if you're willing to use their wall switches. Still works if the hub is offline.
Depends on your definition of "regular switches," I suppose -- but anyone with 3-way wiring (i.e. multiple light switches for a single socket) has given up on "up=on" for their switch.
I have almost everything in my house HA-automated, but anything touching the water supply is all on dumb physical valves and electrical timers. If my light switches don't work, that's annoying. If a robot vacuum doesn't run, that's frustrating. If a water valve is stuck open, that's catastrophic.
A RAM chip takes several months to make, starting from an empty silicon wafer. Each chip takes 8-10 weeks to go through the process of lithography, deposition, etching, cleaning, etc. It then must be tested, which can take another couple of weeks, then packaged, before it can be sold to manufacturers. Thus, even if fab capacity were available today (it isn't), you'd still see a multi-month lag before new supply hit the market.
(This is an extraordinarily sensitive process, and disrupting it can cause you to lose the entire batch. You might have heard of cases where "wafer starts" had to be discarded due to a tsunami or power disruption - this is why.)
The actual reasons are monopolies, tariffs and sanctions - the unstable trade environment coupled with monopoly lobbying keep the market uncertain and unattractive for new players, at the same time, the old monopolies don't have any reason to invest in new production - their profits grow when the price on the strangled market keeps going up while they keep doing nothing at all.
One of the few cases where they actively ruin the first book, to the extent you take them as true sequels. Clarke basically licensed his name and plot to Gentry Lee, who proceeded to ruin the sense of wonder by explaining everything, often in deeply unsatisfactory ways. They would have been reasonable scifi books (for their time) if they hadn't attempted to follow up the classics.
I'm glad someone else said this because I was right about to.
One of the things I love about Rama 1 is how it squashes the idea of a human centric universe where everything has to occur for reasons knowable by us. Rama is truly alien, inscrutable and fulfilling a purpose we don't get to understand. As soon as it enters our solar system, its gone for good, leaving a lot unanswered.
> They would have been reasonable scifi books (for their time) if they hadn't attempted to follow up the classics.
I agree with everything except this. The sequels are by far the worst books I've read this decade. The memories of reading them actively causes me psychic damage. I wish I could Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind myself just to extract the distaste from my brain
It's been a long time now, but from what I remember, you're not wrong. It's often a mistake to try to explain too much in sequels, which they certainly do.
Also they seemed to have a weird obsession about who was going to have sex with who to minimise inbreeding in the next generation. Maybe I'm doing them a disservice by not remembering so well, but I recall that seeming pretty weirdly prominent.
The sequels are pulpy and quite sleazy to be honest. I read them some decades ago but there are ex-beauty-queens in a tiny human colony who must have sex with everyone else to keep the population going or some such stuff. You moved from top-grade cosmic level thought to whether X or Y is sleeping with Z. It's not that the subject is not meaningful. It's just like if you were reading about WW2 in some book and the first part talks about Hitler's invasion of Poland in a strategic sense and then everything else is about the affairs among the officers' wives or something.
Are you talking about the same Rama sequels by Gentry Lee?
I admit it's been a long time since I read them (maybe 20 years), but I certainly don't remember anything quite like this. I remember it more like the other poster here said: they basically said everyone was corrupt. In a nutshell, Rama comes back to Earth with instructions that a bunch of humans need to come aboard to live out their lives there. But instead of sending their best, some parts of Earth send their worst: criminals and such. So pretty quickly there's several different "cities", with one of them basically run by some crime boss. One of the main characters' daughters gets involved with the crime boss somehow and murders him before killing herself, as payback for killing her father. Later, the human habitat goes to war with the aliens in one of the other habitats, because the humans had broken through to their side and invaded them for some reason I forget. There was even one plot point that the father had hacked into the ship's environmental controls because the humans insisted on having wood-burning fireplaces, even though this messed with the environmental control systems. Instead of just not burning fires, the basically forced him to change the system to accommodate their fireplaces.
But I don't remember any sex slaves. Maybe I forgot that part.
Perhaps you mixed plots together. "Rama II" takes on expedition to the second ship which ends with 3 people being trapped inside and put on a journey outside solar system. Then "The Garden of Rama" describes how these three had to adapt to life on the alien ship. There happens the plot where the main character Nicole has 5 kids, 3 girls with one man and 2 boys with another. First part is written as her journal, then book continues normal narration and focuses on second ship reaching the destination and reasons why they were bought there in the first place. Then, plot with return to the solar system happens where other people were boarded in secrecy on third ship. And it at some point revolves around Nicole's daughter who lives a destructive life.
Unlike others in this comments tree, I liked the other books. These go against the typical space exploration journey where you have humans on their ship surrounded by technology they're familiar with and on which they can fully rely. Here, characters are uncertain of their future - they don't know where they're going, have to adapt to the surroundings, discover the unknown and face downsides of human beings. There's none of that familiar splendor of "going boldly where no man has gone before" or heroic actions, great fights in the outer space. Lee's contribution shows us as small, even unsuited to live among others - here and there.
On the other hand, I'm not fond of his other books where he tried to continue this universe: "Bright Messengers" and "Double Full Moon Night". These felt like distilled, fast-tracked version of "Rama" with more religious overtones because of two characters included.
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Clarke's own books and these which he co-wrote with other authors have potential for adaptations for the big and small screen. "Rama" series taken by good writers and directors could become a new hit comparable to "Lost" show - which if you stretch some things, feels somehow similar.
> “the first part talks about Hitler's invasion of Poland in a strategic sense and then everything else is about the affairs among the officers' wives or something”
Yeah, the sequels really were very different and in hindsight not very good. Not to mention kinda too forcefully trying to show how almost everyone is a a corrupt asshole - both humans and large ass well as those almightly aliens sending the Rama craft so they can basically keep samples of sentient population as pets. :P
Yeah, really the original Rama book was it - just image how sequels to the Matrix movie would look like, those could have been even worse!
They have something like 2 stars on Goodreads. Imagine that as a fairly accurate product review score - if they were Amazon products, they'd be somewhere between "obviously counterfeit" and "burned my house down."
Lucky for me I didn't read the sequels. I had my own theories about the purpose of Rama. Some theories are best left as theories in your heads to fuel ideas and imagination.
It's kind of strange to me that the classic scifi books I read in my youth had few if any follow-ons, and in this case had to resort to other writers to happen.
Meanwhile, many books I read nowadays on kindle routinely have 8 books in a series.
I wonder what makes this happen? Is it that self-publishing that just spits things out with less friction? Less editing and/or second guessing? AI helping? Expectations?
I didn’t even know they existed until this article mentioned them.
I felt similar about the recent authorized sequel to Andromeda Strain.
It didn’t feel like the same universe to me. More like someone was told the book flap description of the first book and a few character names and just wrote from there.
Or do read them, but expect something different than the first book. Gentry Lee has a wilder imagination that Clarke, and once you realize it isn't Clarke, it's enjoyable in its own way.
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