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Biotech

Want To Fight Climate Change? Stop Cows From Burping 299

sciencehabit writes: A simple supplement to a cow's feed could substantially decrease a major source of methane, a planet-warming greenhouse gas, a new study suggests. Each year worldwide, the methane produced by cud-chewing livestock warms Earth's climate by the same amount as 2.1 billion tons of carbon dioxide, a little more than 4% of the greenhouse gas emissions related to human activity. That makes cows tempting targets for methane reduction efforts. In a new study, researchers added the chemical 3-nitrooxypropanol, also known as 3NOP, to the corn-and-alfalfa-based feed of 84 milk-producing Holsteins and monitored their methane production for 12 weeks—the largest and longest such trial of its type in lactating cows, the scientists say. For cows whose feed included 3NOP, methane emissions dropped, on average, by 30%.

Comment Re:Interesting argument (Score 1) 124

Congress decided by giving the FCC the authority. In a nation of over 300 million people no legislative assembly could ever hope to directly deal with every possible permutation of policy decision or interpretation. I doubt there has been a legislaturw since the rise of the nation state that could.

Comment Directional arrows aren't as silly as you'd think (Score 1, Insightful) 391

These can not be very good cables because they lack the direction arrow that the Belden audiophile Ethernet cables have (had?). This was so you would know which way to plug them in. Packets flow from hub/switch to the device.

And if you believe this, I have a bridge to sell you. It is orange and you will make your money back in picture postcard royalties.

It's in the caption of the very first picture:

Audiophile-grade "Vodka" Ethernet cables, from AudioQuest. They even have directional indicators!

But, surprisingly for Ars, they missed the point of those directional indicators. The article on electrical testing hints at it:

Finally, the braided shield inside the cable drew some comments. "There is no continuity from the body of the one connector to the body of the other, indicating that the shield has not been terminated to one or both of the connector," noted Denke. "Our 6A uses an absorptive shield—that is, the cable is shielded but the shield is not terminated at either end. Alien crosstalk is the crosstalk which occurs between cables, as opposed to the internal crosstalk which occurs between the pairs in a cable. This may also be why there are unterminated shields on the Audioquest cable—I’m not really sure what the reason is there, though I had thought that the shields on Cat 7 were required to be tied to ground. It is also possible—I have no handy way to test—that they've tied the shield to one end only, though this would be highly nonstandard for network cabling." (emphasis added)

It's highly nonstandard for network cabling, but highly standard for audio cabling - it's called a telescoping shield and is used to prevent ground loops and audible (60 Hz) hum. Typically, you leave the shield connected at the low-impedance source, and disconnect it at the high-impedance load... as a result, the cable actually does have a directionality, but on the shield, rather than the signal lines. I can guarantee that's the intent with these cables and why they're marked with directional arrows, and it's pretty surprising that Ars and Denke missed it. Maybe they were stuck thinking "network" cable rather than "audio" cable.

That said, because these are network cables, that telescoping shield is irrelevant. You're not going to get ground hum into your amplifier from your network card, the way you would with a shield on an analog audio cable. They're simply not connected, and if they were, you'd have much bigger issues - like that hum causing all sorts of problems on your PCI bus. This is why network cable shields are typically connected at both ends: ground loops are irrelevant.

Comment Re:quickly to be followed by self-driving cars (Score 1) 904

All true, and it stands with my point well; I'll point out that your argument distinctly is not a counter-point. There is no way you can buy yourself into a house to the point that you can't scrounge $20 more to make on the payment each month and expect to actually make your payment every month in the first place; it is almost guaranteed that your ability to easily afford your payment every month doesn't imply any ability to find an extra $600 every month to add to it. Buying into a slightly-cheaper house (location, size) would magnify the effects I describe in high-interest-rate markets; it is, in fact, the strategy I took even with 2.875% interest rates, hence my 3-year mortgage.

Comment Re:Truck Stops, Gas Stations, etc (Score 1) 904

Seriously, you can't be this daft. The operator, of course, with the price rolled into the service cost.

You claimed that you're unlikely to have more than a dud or two in a truck, dismissing the idea that failure rate *per* *battery* would be the same as anything else, when I pointed out that the operator would have to manage the cost of rotating out end-of-life batteries.

Your answer to "how will the operator handle disposal costs of bad batteries?" was "Oh, that's not a real consideration." Then you call me daft for pointing out that it *is* a real thing.

No, they're not. Even your laptop battery estimates its capacity, and that's about as simple as li-ion battery packs get.

I said estimating capacity is easy, but estimating integrity is hard. Will the fucking battery EXPLODE UNDER YOUR TRUCK? A simple capacity measure won't tell you if it's dangerously damaged.

No, it's the manufacturer's issue to ensure that the product meets its stated usage specs - in this case, the specs including safe handling of damage and X number of swap cycles.

Unfortunately, the manufacturer doesn't have control of the batteries once they've been placed into a truck.

Just like gas stations check their gas for impurities that can cause damage to an engine?

No you miserable fucking idiot, more like how Blue Rhino inspects and tests every tank for safety defects at every exchange. The gas station doesn't swap your god damned fuel tank, so they don't have to inspect it for dangerous leaks and rust spots.

You may as well have said "they'll inspect the electricity they charge it with to make sure it's clean power" if you wanted to make a show of being that stupid.

Tesla's battery packs have an 8 year, unlimited-mile warranty

You still don't know how many 72-pound pieces of iron road debris have smashed into the battery, if the driver used a defective charger to charge the battery at extremely high voltages, if the battery's been damaged by *other*, less scrupulous stations mishandling it, if it's experienced flood damage somehow, and so forth. Determining the actual physical condition of the battery requires labor-intensive inspection, unless you want to just tell everyone those swapped-out batteries carry no warranty and may explode on them and it's not your fault if they do.

In the parallel world where EVs are always catching on fire, and petroleum-fueled vehicles aren't - quite unlike our actual world.

More like in the current world, where the crisis of a vehicle on fire either means the driver is getting roasted or his cargo is getting roasted. If it happens 1 in 10 million times, there's still about 150 million trucks on the road. 200 fatal hazmat incidents occur per year in the US, meaning fuel tanker trucks and (notably) oxygen tankers blowing up. Managing to keep defective, poorly-inspected, "Wull it dun held a chawj, Jeb" batteries from killing your driver is an important risk consideration.

Comment Re:IE all over again (Score 5, Informative) 371

When I upgraded to Windows 10 yesterday, there was a screen that came up that asked me if I wanted to reset the default apps. I said no for my browser and media player, and when it completed, Chrome and VLC were still the default applications. I think it's a little underhanded, but not as underhanded as the article suggests.

Comment Re:Truck Stops, Gas Stations, etc (Score 1) 904

When it comes to a truck which will have a sizeable number of large batteries, you're pretty much statistically guaranteed to never have more than a dud or two so long as the battery management process is sound.

In one truck, yes. The frequency of dead batteries, however, will be the same as passenger vehicles; who will dispose of those? The swap-off center will occasionally find a dud battery it can't reinstall in a customer's vehicle, which it then must replace with a new battery it purchases.

By, for example, any of the dozen or so methods already used for this purpose?

All of which are relatively involved. Testing a battery for charge capacity is one thing; testing and inspecting a battery for damage and danger conditions so you don't install it into someone's vehicle and get a lawsuit for "vehicle exploded in a giant flaming blaze" (or drive all your customers away with "we don't test our batteries for anything but charge, and damaged batteries may set your truck on fire") is wholly different. The amount of human labor required will make these inspections labor-intensive.

By rolling that into the swapping cost?

That may result in diesel being the cheaper fuel by far. You could take even odds on the batteries and lure people into your high-margin restaurant while the swap occurs, or try to tack on high-margin value-add services like general mechanical inspections and maintenance.

Battery swap in the much harder case of cars can be done in less than a tenth that time.

There are a lot more batteries on a truck.

You already have, today, stuff mounted to the underside of trailers. It's right where the structural strength is already located and you have tons of open space underneath for easy access and standard form factors.

Fortunately, if you mount batteries under there without a bunch of armored doors and other shit to hold it all together, the cargo container catches fire when the batteries become damaged.

It's also fortunate that most of the air and electronic braking lines are out of the way, instead of bolted all over the bottom of the truck. That doesn't mean mounting won't be a problem--especially mounting in some sane manner, with armored plating to protect the batteries--but it does mean you at least don't have to deal with drive shafts, exhaust systems, and all kinds of other shit, some of which fortunately doesn't even exist in electric cars.

Comment Re:SD Card? (Score 1) 154

I said their premium model is +$50. You said it's not a premium phone. You just reiterated that it's not a premium phone. The fact of the matter is it's their premium offering.

Oh what a terrible problem! They sell two options, how awful!

The problem isn't with what they sell; the problem is with your argument. Your argument is they don't have a premium phone; the problem with your argument is they sell two options: the basic 16GB option and the premium 64GB option. The fact that their PREMIUM OPTION is cheaper than some Rolls Royce bullshit doesn't mean it's not a premium option.

Of course you can try to dance around words like a politician trying desperately not to let on that he thinks the audience is filled with retards, but I won't let you.

Yes it's all a big conspiracy that all the phone makers - who are also competitors - are colluding on

Ant theory. I've already explained that it's not lucrative to offer SD cards slots on mainline-model phones.

On some models they prefer not to have an exposed, mechanical and relatively bulky (if you're looking at the thinness of modern devices) mechanism for storage and instead use soldered memory to avoid these problems

"Some" being all modern mainline phones, which largely have exposed SIM card slots, exposed USB readers, exposed speakers, and exposed headphone jacks (not even the self-sealing type of jack that repels water).

The reader for my MicroSIM card is at least as large as a MicroSD reader. The MicroSIM is at least 70% thicker than a MicroSD, and itself sits in a plastic carriage that makes it even thicker; this may or may not mean the MicroSIM reader is thicker than a MicroSD reader, since you could certainly make a thick reader to hold a thin card if you really wanted to. You could also make an extremely thin reader, which most are.

None of your arguments actually have any merit.

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