As I said in my biopic, The Sleeper Has Awakened!

It's advantageous because of the reduced weight of wiring.

The real advantage comes from using electrically-driven valves in IC engines. You can eliminate the camshaft, camshaft bearings and associated holes that penetrate the head, the lifters, rockers, timing gears/chain/belt, etc, and more importantly have infinite variable-valve timing, which is a holy grail of efficiency.

You can also have a much smaller starter motor, as well as smaller alternator (higher voltage but smaller windings due to lower current for the same power output). If you're very clever, you could combine the two into a motor around the perimeter of the flywheel.

In addition, electrically-driven AC starts looking do-able, as well as electrically-driven power steering pumps (already exist - my Mini has it) and water pumps (with this you can eliminate the thermostat - just vary the speed of the pump).

Will all that you could end up with a completely beltless engine with no crank pulley on the front of the motor - the only holes would be for spark plugs and either fuel/air (non direct-injection) or air + direct injection in the heads and the power output shaft out the rear of the block.

Yeah, but "Myanmar Shave" sounds silly, doesn't it?

The article calls the cells 'artificial' and the blood 'synthetic' - I would argue that the cells are not artificial but merely exogenous since they arise from the same stem cells 'normal' blood comes from and are simply grown external to the body (and are indistinguishable from 'real' RBCs, presumably). An artificial cell would be: 1) a cell-like nano-machine manufactured to carry O2, or 2) a living cell derived from other types of cells that has been coaxed into carrying O2 but was not grown from RBC-producing stem cells.

If the non-RBC components of the blood are not similarly derived or do not come from actual fractionated whole blood or plasma, then I agree that the blood is synthetic.

See Morgellon's Disease. At least mainstream medicine calls it what it is - Delusional Parasitosis.

Alex Gray ...

Wasn't that the smart parrot?

I used to put a drop of water at the point where the needle touched the record. It really did help with the static pops. The needle would drag the drop around as the record played.

Let's be real here. Radio waves _can_ be harmful. They may seem magical but they really can be damaging if they deposit too much energy into living tissue. For 2450 MHz into a 9 dBi antenna, the 'safe' distance for a controlled environment is 0.518 meters (1.700 feet) - that's an environment where everyone is aware of the radiation and the public is not allowed. In an uncontrolled environment (where the public may be exposed) the 'safe' distance is 1.140 meters (3.739 feet). I put safe in quotes because the existing FCC rules are very conservative.

If you're not familiar with MPE, there are interesting docs available:

http://www.arrl.org/fcc-rf-exp...
https://www.fcc.gov/encycloped...

Interestingly, the max power you can be exposed to is very frequency-dependent. Freqs that are closer to body-sized parts are more likely to couple to the RF and absorb more power so the max permissible power is lower.

Nah, the greenies and crystal-suckers already claim that WiFi causes all sorts of diseases and conditions - do you think they'll endorse even higher power Wifi transmitters? It might start interfering with their 'aura'.

Agree. I've personally read 900MHz backscatter tags at more than 10m. I _think_ we used a 1W transmitter with a legal-limit (6 dBi) antenna, but it might've been a lower-power transmitter with a higher gain (narrower beamwidth) antenna. These were GEN-I tags from 10 years ago.

Title 47 Part 15 15.247(b)(3) and (4)

How very cool - they're using an Ettus Research software-defined radio! I'm not sure if they'll be using the GNURadio stack to interface to the radio or not, but it's nice to see such an Amateur Radio friendly company get some cred.

From their application, they're looking to use 10.95-11.05 GHz downlinks with an transmitter power of 4 W, an EIRP of 1.1 kW (which implies at least a 24.4 dBi antenna), a bandwidth of 85.8 MHz, and a modulation scheme that uses a single channel with amplitude and phase modulation (QAM, likely) and a mix of content - video, phone, etc.

They also have 8GHz low-power downlinks at 11.6 GHz bandwidth.

8027.50000000-8087.50000000 MHz MO 20.000000 W 19.300000 W P 0.00100000 % 11M6G1D

The dryer, stove, AC, hot water heater, and other appliances do not pull full continuous load for several hours at a time.

After a shower or clothes washing, the water heater does. The clothes dryer certainly does. Typical electric water heaters have dual 4500W coils. If you run very low on hot water, both of those coils run at the same time - that's 37.5A / 9kW right there. A typical clothes dryer pulls 30A at 240V, so that's another 7.2kW. If you're like us, you come home, start the washing machine (which kicks off the water heater), start dinner (there goes the stove and/or cooktop), switch the washed clothes to the dryer, start another wash load, rinse and repeat. This usage pattern continues for at least a few hours.

I am talking about the power distribution grid and not power generation.

Then my points are just as valid. I assume you mean distribution and not transmission - the fact that the distribution grid can handle peak load for an area that shares essentially the same load curve at all means the distribution grid can handle it for longer periods - they're not running the distribution grid up against time/thermal limits on the transformers. If you look at the graphs in the document I linked to, you can see that the grid runs at less than 50% capacity for more than 75% of the hours in a year.

If you meant the transmission grid, they you're closer to correct. The transmission grid depends on the load moving across load areas and timezones, but off-peak generation is more than capable of handling the additional local capacity, so there's no need to move the off-peak load over transmission grid interties.

You can't have a large proportion of houses in the neighborhood pulling 40 amps at 240VAC continuously for four to six hours every night at the same time.

I disagree. Homes currently pull quite a bit of load during the afternoon and evening - AC running, stove running, clothes dryer running, etc. That's when all of the generation capacity is running full-tilt. 40A at 240V is just under 10kW - not a whole lot of power, really. There's no real reason (other than cost) that the peak demand curve can't be extended out over additional hours, as long as the peak demand GW figure doesn't increase.

From this page:

From this, it looks like the peak-to-average demand ratio was lower in the past and has been increasing lately, making the additional capacity needed to hit peak load run less often (the peak curve is much sharper/taller than it used to be). "As the peak-to-average ratio rises, generators called on to meet peak-hour demand are running fewer hours and/or at lower output levels the rest of the year." This is very costly, so I bet the generators would welcome additional load at off-peak times to recoup the cost of the additional capacity.

... they [Microsoft] also plan to contribute back to the OpenSSH project as well.

NO THANK YOU. Please keep your embrace-and-extend, security-is-a-joke grimy grippers out of the OpenSSH codebase.

Not sure if you include all things 'micro' in your general derision, but MEMS devices have revolutionized some areas of electronics, particularly sensors. I bet you've got a MEMS-based accelerometer in your phone right now, and possibly a MEMS-based programmable oscillator.

If you have sleep apnea or asthma, your therapy device might contain a MEMS-based flow sensor.