The most common stars, red dwarfs, have been a bit problematic for those hoping to find other Earths out there, because of their tendency to flare. Binary red dwarfs are theorized to be a lot calmer because they would tidally lock to each other, and this would tame their magnetic fields.

Republicans lie to ingratiate themselves to their big donors, *AND* to pass loyalty tests to authoritarian leaders and demographics.

It's a recipe for disaster in governance, of which the Bush wars and the botched response to Covid will not be the last or worst if this continues.

The undertone some people have here is that China must have released a biological weapon. This is ridiculous for many reasons:

1) Multiple independent international agencies have analyzed Covid-19 and found that the evidence points to a natural evolution from known coronavirus strains.
2) China's own response to the outbreak in its own Wuhan province was clearly disjointed and ineffective for the first few weeks until they got highly organized, reflecting early error and official fears of egg on their face, rather than planning. Similarly, China hasn't been dramatically faster to the punch with a fully tested vaccine. They simply got their measures to prevent spread in order far faster than most.
3) Any biological weapon is highly haphazard in targeting; the ability to immediately infect friendlies or have it evolve into something that can is why we've had a cold war over nuclear weapons, not biological ones.
4) If one was to be engineered and released for malicious purposes, a coronavirus is quite simply a mild option.

Most of the reasons China is less impacted is because they did what you're supposed to do to contain a contagious disease: test and quarantine rigorously, and respect everyone's right to be healthy and alive as opposed to going recklessly maskless and spewing entitled, anti-science BS.

So don't just assume that these are just bogeymen out to do evil, just for the hell of it. That's comic book mustache-twirling villain material. Try and think of the Other as a rational actor, and see if it doesn't make sense.

There are so many things that the cost of charging highway lanes should be evaluated. If it works, it solves:

1) The weight, cost, and impact of many people requiring batteries with 200+ miles of range. The lighter the car, the less battery to move it, and the cheaper the car. EVs should be affordable for everyone who needs them.
2) The charging capacity of keeping all those larger batteries topped off. Save the energy consumption for where it's needed!
3) The time cost of even fast-charging stations, though supercapacitors would solve this if they achieve higher energy densities too.
4) The people the article notes as having switched back to gas from EV.

There would be other ways to tunnel through the cost barrier. Renewable energy, without a lot of battery backup, could power these roads. Stopping for the fast charge unfavorable weather isn't a huge price to pay for this upgrade being affordable and usable when the wind blows OR the sun shines.

Let's evaluate ways to change how energy is consumed from end to end. This idea, if it matures, has serious potential.

I drive a Chevy Volt. It's got 53 miles of battery-only range, a fully electric drivetrain, and the gas engine which can engage the transmission when needed is effectively a range-extender - it's more Extended Range EV (EREV) than plug-in hybrid. I rarely use gas unless I'm on a roadtrip; I filled up the gas tank *three* times in all of 2020. Its cost on the used car market has been driven way down by pure EVs, and nobody would need to switch back to a regular gas car from it.

If these highways became a reality, cheap Volts and Leafs could be the ticket for a lot of people, and then they'd find out what that silent ride, amazing torque, and low maintenance costs are all about.

I'll be a believer and a fan when a salad of regexes and hacks gets translated into something a sane person wrote for the same purpose. :)

Lithium batteries are highly valuable and highly recyclable. Just that alone means that in the long term, they're a vastly better choice than fossil fuel combustion.

However, right on the same page as the article's display was mention of sodium-ion batteries. Remember John Goodenough's solid-state battery? https://hardware.slashdot.org/... After some hitches, it seems to be progressing towards commercialization. https://hardware.slashdot.org/...

There are also some heavy hitters lining up behind solid-state batteries: https://investorplace.com/2020...

Don't discount graphene ultracapacitors. They're already indispensable in fast-charging electric cars, and research is well underway towards battery-like energy densities. https://newatlas.com/energy/su...

That's just for transport. We need energy storage for a renewable grid. For fixed installations, the alternatives get as diverse as heat storage in phase-changing materials or basalt, flywheels, compressed air, pumped water, stacked concrete blocks, or plain old nickel-iron batteries.

Lithium is simply not going to be a bottleneck for electric cards or a next-generation renewable grid.

Texas' grid crashed because their de-regulated privatized system allowed for cutting corners on winterization. Every sort of energy source - wind, solar, natural gas - was built as if deep freezes couldn't happen. It would have run installation costs up just a few percentiles to build to the same standards as northern climates, and skipping that cost lives.

KeepassXC is quite solid. I'd be just fine using NextCloud or some other way to share its database, but it has a optional private key you can keep off of services like Dropbox, just to be sure.

Will be? It's already been done. https://makerhacks.com/mister-...

What about Venus' atmosphere, which is 96.5% carbon dioxide? At what point does that break down? Why hasn't it begun already?

Distribution is a very serious bottleneck for developing countries, and with a highly contagious disease, that's our problem too. A large infected population is an opportunity for variants to arise that could evade the current round of vaccines. So really, we're not out of the woods on this until all of us are.

But this isn't so excusable. Texas' deregulation isn't driven by independence as it is by profiteering. Wind turbines only cost 5% more to be winterized to function in places like Canada, Denmark, or Iowa. ERCOT and the privatizing industries chose to pocket the money instead, expecting to charge insane rates when demand would rise. Partial failure was incentivized.

So now people are needlessly dying, Texas is in worse misery than many places in developing countries, and the CEO of ERCOT for one makes an $800,000+ yearly salary to deliver results like this.

And even when the weather warms, we are going to find that a lot of waterlines and equipment will have been damaged by the extent of the freeze and mismanagement. So no, this is outside the bounds of acceptable, and companies thinking of relocating to Texas may want to think twice before they entrust their own reliability to such unaccountable, creaky, profiteering infrastructure.

Thank you so much for that recommendation! Cool Worlds is really one of the brightest gems of transmitted science I've seen, not just because of eye candy, but because of the rigor and labor to expand our horizons. What a great channel! It made my day.

Quoth the technologyreview article: "The new signal would suggest it’s the size of Neptune. That means we’re not talking about an Earth-like world but a warm gas planet five to seven times larger than Earth."

A gas giant in a habitable zone? What if it has moons? I think the reason we don't hear so much talk about exomoons is that they'd be so hard to distinguish with our current technology, not that they don't offer interesting possibilities.

Pros: you automatically get a reprieve from tidal locking to the star, though the day/night cycle would the length of the orbit, with a huge gap for the gas giant eclipsing the sun. At a certain sweet spot, comparable to Callisto's orbit around Jupiter, the gas giant's magnetic field might shield the moon without itself irradiating it.

Cons: The tidal forces could be rough on habitability. Plus, being close to a large gravity well might draw additional meteor bombardment.

This is layman's speculation; I don't have the mans at hand to run the calculations. I can't wait for the scientific community to have some hard evidence to work on though!

Magnesium oxide makes a magnificent cement! It's what they used for the Taj Mahal.