Here was I thinking they'd released a Minecraft clone.

I had a house-mate once who was a (non-UK) law enforcement officer, and he talked about "moving surveillance" (i.e. trailing suspects in a car.) They'd typically have three cars in such an operation, so that they could take turns being close to the suspect without arousing suspicion.

He said that according to the law, officers fully obeyed road laws during such an operation, but unofficially, it was impossible to do so. Once he got pulled over by a traffic cop, who, seeing his radio, maps etc. and badge, profusely apologized and sent him back on his way.

I imagine that moving surveillance is what they are envisioning 'spies' using this power for, rather than using an Aston Martin to chase an assassin motorcyclist through a built-in-middle-ages town on market day.

I do think it is better to recognize the reality of the situation, then you can put regulations and guidelines around what is and is not acceptable. You can't issue guidelines on how to handle a situation you pretend doesn't exist.

Actually there is a 'cathode reactant' tank and an 'anode reactant' tank. Within each tank, charged and discharged versions of the reactant are mixed. (This is shown in figure 1a of the paper: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v505/n7482/full/nature12909.html but that link will be pay-walled for most people.)

In the galvanic direction, peak power densities were 0.246Wcm2 and 0.600W cm2 at these same SOCs, respectively (Fig. 1c). To avoid significant water splitting in the electrolytic direction, we used a cut-off voltage of 1.5V, at which point the current densities observed at 10% and 90% SOCs were 2.25 A cm2 and 0.95Acm2, respectively, with corresponding power densities of 3.342Wcm2 and 1.414Wcm2. ...

The galvanic discharge capacity retention (that is, the number of coulombs extracted in one cycle divided by the number of coulombs extracted in the previous cycle) is above 99%, indicating the battery is capable of operating with minimal capacity fade and suggesting that current efficiencies are actually closer to 99%. ...

AQDS has an aqueous solubility greater than 1M at pH 0, and the quinone solution can thus be stored at relatively high energy density—volumetric and gravimetric energy densities exceed 50Whl1 and 50Whkg1, respectively. ...

As shown in Fig. 2, current efficiency starts at about 92% and climbs to about 95% over ~15 standard cycles. Note that these measurements are done near viable operating current densities for a battery of this kind. Because of this, we believe this number places an upper bound on the irreversible losses in the cell. In any case, 95% is comparable to values seen for other battery systems.

I'm not an expert in any applicable field, but as I have institutional access to the original paper, I scanned it to find what looked to me like relevant numbers. As I interpret the above:

It generates about 0.5W cm^-2 of membrane, so you'd need 2m^2 to get 1 kW output. (But presumably this can be in some compact folded/layered configuration.)
It can charge much faster than it discharges: that 2m^2 of membrane would let you charge at about 4kW.
The storage capacity of the battery fades at less than 1% per charge/discharge cycle.
One litre of reactants lets you store 50Wh of energy (i.e. 20kg for a kilowatt hour)
I think the last paragraph is saying that, neglecting pumping costs, it returns about 95% of the energy you put into it.

Note that we can expect these numbers to improve with further research, but whether there are big improvements to come or only minor ones I couldn't say.

Also: They use a two-reactant-tank set up rather than four tanks, so each tank holds a mixture of the 'charged' and 'discharged' forms of its reactants (e.g. one tank holds a mixture of Br2 and HBr.) I'd naively expected a four tank set up.

While I've not heard of a Thorne-Zytkow object before, I can apply my general astronomical knowledge to explain a bit further.

The idea of an internally inert condensed object at the centre of a star is very standard: red giants have a white dwarf at their core, indeed this is how white dwarfs are formed. The weirdness is in having a neutron star instead of a white dwarf core.

The condensed object is supported by degeneracy pressure (electron degeneracy pressure for a white dwarf, neutron degeneracy pressure for a neutron star.) (Degeneracy pressure is a quantum mechanical effect. It is only appreciable at very high densities, and is not dependent on temperature.) The surface of the condensed object will be very hot, because nuclear burning is going on nearby and it is insulated from the coldness of space by the envelope of the star (i.e. the bits of star which are not the condensed object.) The density of gas just above the surface of the core will also be large, due to the high surface gravity plus the pressure of the weight of the envelope.

High temperature and high density leads to nuclear burning (combining light nuclei into heavier ones, releasing energy.) The nuclear reactions are generally very strongly dependent on temperature (e.g. one important reaction has a rate approximately proportional to temperature to the 17th power) so the burning happens in a thin layer. The 'burnt' material settles on the core, slowly enlarging it.

The gravitational attraction of the core pulling the envelope inward is largely balanced by gas pressure and radiation pressure. While stars like our sun are dominated by gas pressure, in this case radiation pressure will dominate. As the radiation escapes outward, mass is able to migrate inwards, to the thin burning layer. An equilibrium is reached between the burning/energy production rate and the mass inflow rate.

Because they are dominated by radiation pressure, it doesn't take much extra push for something at the surface of a red giant star to escape, so these stars have strong stellar winds and high mass loss rate to winds. So the envelope gets eaten from the bottom by burning and deposition onto the growing white dwarf, and from the top by mass loss. Eventually there is no envelope left and a bare white dwarf is exposed. (The final transition is quite spectacular and is called a planetary nebula.)

Heat transport in red giants is dominated by convection rather than radiation. (I think this is a general property of being dominated by radiation pressure, but I may be mistaken.) This allows material which has been close to the burning zone to mix through the star. Various secondary nuclear reactions occur there (e.g. s-process nucleosynthesis), so the products of this are mixed to the surface, where they can be observed in the spectrum. (I'm not sure whether partly-burnt material from the main burning shell can get mixed out or not.)

Evidently (according to the article) in Thorne-Zytkow objects these reactions are different from in a normal red giant and so mix different products to the surface. The star of the article has a spectrum rich in predicted reaction products of a Thorne-Zytkow object.

While white dwarf naturally grow inside stars, the process that generates neutron stars (supernovae) removes the stellar envelope, so finding a neutron star inside an envelope requires some rare post-supernova event to supply the neutron star with stellar-mass quantities of fresh gas.

You are so fast to assume I didn't make it up myself.

In fact, your assumption is correct. It came, via one intermediary, from famous-UK-evolutionary-scientist-whose-name-escapes-me-at-the-moment-but-I'd-recognize-it-if-I-heard-it-but-not-Richard-Dawkins. In the tale as told to me, two staff members were arguing in the tea room when Famous Scientist comes in and says "If this is an argument about the world, I'm interested. If this is an argument about a word, I'm not." The arguers retreat, deflated.

Whether it was original to Famous Scientist, I don't know. (I think the scene of this tale is Cambridge, but I'm not sure. The time could have been up to a few decades ago.)

An argument about the world is interesting. An argument about a word is not.

This is an argument about a word. What is "a disease" versus "a spectrum of diseases"?

Cancers have some common features, and some very important differences. This is the "world", and you agree on it. Stop arguing about the word.

I'm grant-wishing myself. The grant I'm currently wishing for relates to mitochondrial paternal leakage in birds. It is comforting to know that gods/sky faeries are in the same boat.

True, well argued.

For there to be an energy flow, the life needs to be in a temperature range intermediate between the source and the sink. I'm still a bit worried that if there is a sufficient energy source (most likely a star or geothermal) it will raise the entire environment of the planet significantly above the ambient universal 270K.

However, it really isn't a significant issue. If 270K cosmic temperature is too high for life on planets for whatever reason, it will be comfortable a few million years later. The basic argument of 'a few million years friendly for life everywhere' still holds.

To locally decrease entropy (as life must) you need both an energy source and an energy sink (i.e. somewhere to send your waste heat.) I think this era of the universe would have problems with the energy sink bit. If the coldest available sink is 270K, life would need to be much hotter to be able to use it, which is likely too hot for complex organic reactions.

Having said that, a little bit after (say when the microwave background was at 200K) might have been pretty good for life. Now you only need a little help from a star and planetary atmosphere to get liquid water, so a star's Goldilocks zone should be much larger than at present.

Interesting. As I understand it, typically during refuelling only a portion of the fuel rods are removed and replaced, and during this process the core and the waste fuel pool are one continuous body of water. So the person inspecting the core is a diver? And the water provides sufficient shielding from the remaining fuel rods? (Or am I just wrong about some fuel rods being left in at this point?)

The thing that has me really worried about LFTR is the removal of fission products.

In a conventional nuclear reactor, the fission products are confined within the fuel cell cladding. The only place rendered long-term insanely radioactive is the reactor core, which is mechanically pretty simple.

In a LFTR, there is a facility for removing fresh fission products from the liquid fuel. This is a combination of multiple processing steps, high temperatures, corrosive chemicals, and way too much radiation to let humans anywhere near for running or maintaining the equipment. Then the removed products either need short term storage, or to be rendered into a form suitable for long term storage - requiring still more processing.

I'll grant you that the core of a LFTR isn't going to cause an accident, but removing and dealing with those fission products on a regular basis with such a huge price on failure sounds like an engineering nightmare.

I do not think it means what you think it means.

Psychology is a huge field. Perception, experimental analysis of animal behaviour, clinical psychology, cognitive biases etc. etc. (Note that only one of those involves psychiatrists.) Some bits allow for harder science than other bits.

I personally don't know enough about psychiatry to form a judgement on how scientific they are, but unlike you, at least I know what a psychologist is (or something of the range that they could be.) Your trite dismissal says much about your ignorance and nothing about psychology.