"Concerns were raised regarding... the resulting conclusions of the article"

Of course concerns were raised. Any scientific reasoning inconsistent with fossil fuel profiteering must be cancelled.

Those pesky facts were getting in the way of the green agenda to save the world from carbon dioxide emissions by shutting down nuclear, so the article was retracted.

Germany powers its economy by tearing up the earth to mine highly polluting coal and by destroying thousands or acres of woodlands annually to fuel their forest-burning power plants. Building out expensive, weak and intermittent sources like wind and solar while relying on fossil fuels to power the economy is the green agenda.

Who funded the green lobby in Europe to shut down nuclear? Russia, because blocking nuclear created a market in Europe for Russian gas.

Europe did a 180 on nuclear buildout immediately after Russian funding of green European political operatives was halted with the advent their idiotic Ukraine war.

Coal kills. Support the environment by ending the green movement.

Thorium molten salt is the future. It's not only Copenhagen Atomics. Several experimental molten salt reactors will be firing up within the next few years. China just certified theirs for initial trials.

   

See:
Lasting effects of general anesthetics on the brain in the young and elderly: “mixed picture” of neurotoxicity, neuroprotection and cognitive impairment

from Conclusions (emphasis added):

âoe Microsoft said it never pursued this strategy.â

This is particularly rich in the middle of a lawsuit about a $68B acquisition which includes on of the worlds most popular franchises. If they arenâ(TM)t pursuing this strategy, then what is this acquisition about?

For days the use of carbon fiber in that application has seemed nonsensical to me for that very reason. But now, after further consideration, it must be that the carbon fiber composite tube was mechanically coupled to the rigid titanium end caps. In that case, negative and positive internal pressures place equal tensile loads on the fiber.

That raises hard questions about how to design the mechanical coupling between the tube and end caps because that joint must withstand the same tensile load as the carbon fiber itself.

The submersible passengers would have done well to follow your Slashdot signature advice.

Also:

For a carbon fiber composite vessel pressurized from the inside, such as high-pressure hydrogen tank, the resin component bonding the fiber transfers force from interior pressure as tension to the fiber, which is extremely strong under under tension.

For a carbon fiber composite vessel pressurized by the outside, such as the submersible, the fiber transfers and distributes compressive force across the resin, which is comparatively poor at resisting crushing force.

       

Something puzzling is that I keep reading that the sub was made from a carbon fiber tube with titanium end caps.

"Carbon fiber" means a plastic resin with carbon fiber embedded. For weight that material is extremely strong under tension, such as when pressurizing the inside of an airplane hull or under the lift force on a helicopter rotor blade. But compression? Why would a carbon fiber composite be any stronger under compression than is the plastic resin in which the carbon fiber is embedded?

Imagine trying to deform a cable by pulling on it; That would take tremendous strength. Now imagine trying to deform a cable by pushing on it; that would require minuscule force. Are carbon fibers in the submersible hull pushed together by compression of the hull, not pulled by tension?

Well, both, it depends on the direction of force and the orientation of the fiber. A radial compressive point load on a cylinder, under which the circumferential fibers are under compression, is also an axial load, under which the longitudinal fibers are under tension. However, depending on the combinations of fiber orientations, a carbon fiber cylinder could demonstrate compressive deformations along axes in which no fibers are under tension. For example, with only those two combinations of fiber orientations, a carbon fiber cylinder would buckle under force applied inward, perpendicular to a line from its base to top. Now, a carbon fiber cylinder should also have cross-oriented fibers to resist that particular force under tension. But was load analysis performed with the understanding that ONLY the cross-oriented fibers would resist longitudinal buckling under compression?

Maybe what happened is that the sub designer thought to himself, "Carbon fiber is very strong, I'll use that" and it was rated for some load that exceed pressure at depth. But there was no mechanical analysis or testing of compressive deformation that would have caught the difference between evaluating compression and tension.

On the other hand, the failure could be anything, the entire effort sounds like ad-hoc, off-the-shelf, lets-try-it-and-see-if-it-works methodology. Which is all fine and awesome because it's cheap and fast and effective. Build early, test often. You just do not put people in it.

According to the BBC:

Au contraire, carbon fiber has been used in aircraft for about half a century and extensively in recent decades. The Boeing 787 Dreamliner is about 50% carbon fiber by weight and as of last November 865 were in service. Point is, the number of aircraft with carbon fiber components is many and total flight hours is ginormous. The FAA mandates thorough testing and review of new designs and requires routine inspection by validated and certified processes.

Compared to that sub, which appears to be a one-off, not subject to design reviews or testing and inspection requirements, and operating in entirely different conditions than an airframe. It is subject to compressive, not tensile loads. There is risk of undetected salt water infiltration. A titanium enclosed hull surrounding a carbon fiber frame presents issues with differential rates of expansion. While small cracks in airframes are routinely identified and repaired during overhauls, a small crack in that sub hull would be immediately fatal.

Like most of the public, you seem to believe that engineering decisions were a matter of assigning an emotional valence to particular materials; this material is "good" and that one "bad". As opposed to determining operating limits and longevity of materials for particular applications in particular designs, by methods of rigorous testing, inspection and use over extended periods.

So yes, what you say, except the opposite.

from the Oceangate website:

I would not trust my life to an innovative composite structure, unproven in a new design and application, subject to repeated use. Especially with maintenance and inspection procedures almost certainly derived from theoretical limits and not from experience and extensive destructive testing at scale.

"Carbon Fiber" means carbon-fiber bound in plastic resin. Sounds like maybe a rigid carbon fiber interior hull clad in titanium. All kinds of things to go wrong there that could be undetected; delimitation, corrosive resin breakdown, metal fatigue.

Anything could have gone wrong, but a good hunch is that the thing that failed is the complex, innovative and unproven design. Hull failure. That also explains why nobody has heard from the sub. In most other scenarios they jettison ballast, surface, and radio for help.

from the /. summary:

"pummeled by the same forces" means run by Democrats.

They could set those subs back to public, but do you think the moderators would like that and continue their moderation efforts ?

Reddit depends on tens of thousands of volunteer moderators, they canâ(TM)t replace them. Without moderators Reddit will turn into a cesspool. No company will want their brandname next to an endless stream of spam, porn and other shady content.

Woops yeah sorry. Been so long I posted on slashdot the thread UI got me confused.

You're assuming all foreign universities can't tech properly and just issue degrees without any knowledge of the field the degree is in, that it's a sham. Having gotten degrees in the US and abroad, I can tell you that your notion is pretty fucked up. China has an incredibly high tech knowledge being taught. So does India. Or Europe. The "top 10" university rankings in any one field are usually biased by the metric used to suit the national narrative of superiority. So screw your biases towards foreign universities. The real issue is the school treats before university, where the rest of the world has a fundamental advantage: their education programs don't underfund them, and have national government exams and curriculums to guarantee a graduate from one tiny out of the way town knows the same as someone from the capital. It's a gap that universities cannot bridge. You (presumably) with in IT, so you sounds be familiar with the concept of crap-in-crap-out. So suck on that thought for a while, as it applies to universities too, not just your IT systems.

Phone cameras are optimized for two objectives: 1) ease of use 2) realism.

Yet there is now a resurgence of vintage lenses which are particularly poor in those respects. Prices of old camera lenses are surging and modern manufacturers such as 7Artisans and TTAritisans are copying old manual-focus designs.

After more than a century of striving to engineer out artifacts and improve resolution and fidelity, now that we have easy and good realism, tastes are reversing. Those defects are now regarded as desirable. The reason is that those "defects" contribute artistic qualities to images. Lenses that produce, painterly blur, swirl, bright bubble bokeh and good central subject isolation with blurred peripheral and blurred background focus are now highly sought after. No element coatings, or inferior coatings, produce dramatic flare effects and dreamy color rendition. One of the most popular lenses is the inexpensive and janky old Soviet Helios 44-2, notorious for its poor build quality.

Inexpensive lens adapters to modern digital mirrorless digital SLR cameras are readily available. Part of what drives the resurgence is also that the cost of artistic experimentation is $0 because the marginal cost of taking a photo on a digital camera is nothing. Also, digital cameras are far easier to use, more forgiving and more versatile than are the film cameras for which those old lenses were originally designed.

Living in the Seattle area, and having met and hung out with some former Boeing Engineers, they all have pretty much echoed your statements.