TFA says: "Using a light beam to charge a smartphone could be as quick as many wired chargers, the researchers found, depending on the size of the PV panel."

Efficiency is going to depend on the efficiency of the PV panel in the phone, but at 20% it's a long way off from the efficiency of a wired charger.

The lengths to which people will go to avoid plugging in a wire still amaze me.

The point of an open system was not to dump the hydraulic fluid overboard after use, but to not need a pump that can return and reuse the fluid (and a system to power the pump, and fuel for that etc).

The main hydraulic system on the F9 (for gimbaling the engine nozzles) uses RP-1 (i.e. rocket fuel) as its hydraulic fluid. Spent fluid from that system goes into the fuel tank.
The fins are driven by a separate system at the top of the stage, if they pumped the spent RP-1 overboard you'd have flammable liquids running down the stage, I'm pretty sure they don't want to do that. Returning the RP-1 to the fuel tank is unlikely (needs an insulated pipe around the outside, next to the cold LOX tank). So probably a separate waste tank near the fins.

The word 'afford' is key here. If all you can afford is the lowest-rent housing, then that's where you end up. That's how many large European cities ended up with immigrant ghettos.

Dictionary entry or not, lede is a recent 'invention' by people who should know better than to make up new words when the old one was clear and unambiguous. See also "when it bleeds, it leads".

It's lead, not lede.

(this post brought to you by the committee against the degeneration of language)

You're confusing technology with "currently in production". Several companies in the US posess all of the technology needed to put humans in space. They just haven't produced and flown spacecraft yet.
It is a political issue, pure and simple. The transition between the Shuttle and new manned systems was planned badly, allowing a several-year capability gap.

The main reason they can build so quickly is that the Chinese government routinely kicks huge numbers of its citizens out of the areas where they want to build their infrastructure. That's not something to envy.

Not just eventually, all at once. We just have no way to extract all that superimposed information.

I half expect the author to eventually come out and say he just made it all up to find out how much nonsense he could get away with by labeling it art.

No. I looked up l/100 km and converted that to American gallons.

The iQ at 37 mpg? Then there's something seriously screwy going on with those numbers, because RW it gets closer to 55. You'd have to drive it like a buffoon to get anywhere near 37 mpg.
The Mirage RW numbers you quote have sample sizes of 2 and 5 respectively so yes, they are suspect. The numbers I quoted have much larger sample sizes so they're bound to be more accurate.

I chose examples that exclude legislation as the reason lightweight cars aren't built any more. So the reason lightweight cars aren't built any more must be something else. The American fondness for huge cars may have something to do with it.

In Europe, there's an entire class of cars smaller than the Mirage and Fiesta. The VW Up (47 mpg), Suzuki Alto (54 mpg), Toyota Aygo (56 mpg) to name a few (and that's real-world fuel consumption, not a theoretical rating).
This site has RW usage of the Metro at closer to 40 than 47.

The XL1 is in production, by the way. Expensive, but definitely not a concept any more.

Stricter safety regulations mean some weight gain has been inevitable. As for the rest, I remember how austere those lightweight cars used to be. Everything manually-operated, no air con, no soundproofing, minimal dashboard (no cupholders). The reason almost nobody builds cars like that anymore is almost nobody buys cars like that anymore.

Lightweight cars are still possible. Lotus and Smart for example. VW XL1. Austere cars are still available too (in Europe at least, IDK about the States) (a recent Citroen, Dacia).

No they haven't. The US is perfectly capable technology-wise of designing and building manned rockets. They've just chosen to accept (for political, not technological reasons) a gap of a couple of years between the retirement of the Shuttle and the inaugural manned commercial flight.

Last year I came across an old phone, with a button pad, that was switchable between DTMF and pulse dial. The switch was still set to pulse. Better: it could still make calls!
I did switch it to DTMF though :)