Automotive grade lithium batteries are slowly falling in price but currently cost about $500 per kWh and can last perhaps 3000 charge-discharge cycles, so the cost to store and release one kWhr is about 16 cents, more than the total price of electricity in most of the US even at peak periods, but a good bit less than the retail price of electricity in Japan, about 32 cents. So in Japan it might actually make sense, depending of what the peak/off-peak differential is. But as suggested in the initial post, yes, is would make just as much sense to simply put some batteries in the basement and forget the cars. For that matter, you don't need lithium, lead batteries - cheaper but less durable - work out to about the same cost per kWh stored and released. But as lithium battery prices continue to fall, the day is not that far off when storing electricity from intermittent solar and wind sources in very large batteries will be economically feasible.

"[it] can run at an 80 percent efficiency when used to provide both heat and power." This makes no sense. If you count the heat produced, any combustible material can easily yield much better than 80 percent efficiency just by burning it. Condensing natural gas boilers, for example, routinely run at >95% efficiency. Of course, they're producing all heat and no electricity, but by the specified criteria, that's more efficient than the Cube. Straight % efficiency in producing electricity only, would be a much more useful number. I doubt that they're only counting electricity in the 80%, but it's ambiguous as written.

We are in fact increasing longevity and slowing down the aging process, but that only means an ever-longer period of helplessness preceding death. The most frightening statistic I've heard is that for every year of increased longevity that modern medicine has provided, only seven months is an increase in the time one is in good health. The other five months is an increase in the time during which you're still alive but have lost the ability to care for yourself. What's really needed is to minimize that period of dependence, in other words, delay the aging process while at the same time making it more sudden. Slowing it down is the worst thing you can do.

I've often taken notes on laptop at seminars and scientific meetings, and I've found it helps me concentrate on the talks. Taking notes on paper is distracting primarily because it requires constant glancing down at the paper. Further, I can type much faster than I can write. Rather than transcribing exactly what the speaker is saying, though, I find myself putting things in my own words, which keeps my attention from straying. But it's essential to be typing by touch and not looking down at the keyboard or the screen, which is as distracting as writing on paper. Typing errors, sometimes approaching one per word, can be corrected later, and in fact provide a convenient opportunity to review the material. If the study excluded surfers and included only touch-typists, I'm confident the laptop note-takers would do better.

I'm thoroughly confident that if I ever had to actually (or virtually) see myself as others see me interacting in a social situation, I'd never go to a party again.

Their strategy with GoogleDocs/GoogleDrive is truly incomprehensible. Seven years after its launch, it is still pathetically primitive, lacks even the most essential functions like detailed formatting of figures and legends. DOS WordPerfect was more sophisticated. MS-Word is a terrible program, still crash-prone, expensive, frustrating and distracting. It cries out for a replacement, even though almost every enterprise and public sector institution is dependent on it. Google engineers can make a self-driving car, you'd think they could program a decent word processor in an afternoon. It's clear they're not even trying. Why??

Just one more step on the gradual transformation of traffic laws from deterrent to revenue source.

If the states really wanted to collect all that sales tax, all they would have to do is enforce current law (requiring residents to pay the tax themselves) and increase the penalties for evasion. Random audits would reveal massive infraction - supposedly less than 1% of taxpayers in states requiring it report any internet or other purchases where the vendor did not charge tax. But they won't do this, they're too scared of the backlash from voters. In short, they want somebody else to do the dirty work for them.

I don't see how their system makes anything more affordable, and it's outrageously inefficient. When I'm writing a grant or a research article, I might easily look at 20 or 30 articles in a single day. So, that's $120-$180 if I just look at them temporarily or up to $330 if I want to keep them permanently. So I could spend thousands per month just on access to references. Plus, I'll be spending an inordinate amount of time and mental energy on constant decisions of whether to rent, buy or pass up every article I encounter. Usually, I don't know whether an article will be relevant to the specific question I'm trying to answer until I actually look at its data. This system really will be a major impediment to scientific progress, if investigators are regularly ignoring articles that might contain a critical piece of information, just because they wouldn't risk the $6 - not a huge risk of course, but multiply it by hundreds of articles and it adds up quickly. The people particularly hard-hit would be those who for example have just lost their funding, and so have to write grants more or less nonstop but at the same time have no grant support to pay for article access. The best solution in principle is the author-pays model (with allowances for those who truly can't afford to pay). At least with that system you eliminate the infrastructure needed to charge users and maintain the security of paywalls, which is a big part of the expense of electronic publishing. The problem with author-pays is that currently it's just too expensive, a few to several thousand dollars per article, and that has to be brought down. Perhaps with better software and better-informed authors, you wouldn't need all the layout techs and copy editors that put articles into a standard journal format - the authors could do that themselves - at least for low-impact journals that seem to present the biggest problem.

Right, so, absolute worst-case scenario, an electric run on pure coal power will match a fairly fuel-efficient ICE car. But coal plants are rather rapidly being abandoned in favor of natural gas, with half the carbon emissions, or solar and wind with almost none. Plus, a quite substantial fraction of electric car owners become motivated to install their own solar panels to power it. As far as carbon emissions in manufacture, making an ICE compact creates about 12,000 lbs CO2, or about a year's worth of driving, so even doubling it can't make a difference of more than 10%, assuming a 10-year lifespan. And who discards any car after 100,000 km (60,000 mi)? With proper care, even today's lithium batteries should last at least 100,000 miles, and if they go bad, they can be replaced - the other components, like the motor and electronics, ought to last much longer. But the real advantage is energy independence. Every year we send $200 billion to Saudi Arabia, Venezuela and the like, and eventually it ends up added to our national debt. Keeping that money in the US would be as stimulatory as a $200 billion tax cut,

I'd agree, actual fraud is still pretty rare despite all the pressures, if only because the consequences of getting caught are so unspeakable. The more common problem is that in an age of scarcity, everything has become more politicized, with personal connections and salesmanship becoming much more important than they once were. Everyone is more obsessed with claiming the maximum possible credit for their contributions to a project, simply because they have no choice, and that has taken a toll on the traditional collegiality of scientists.

Sounds like a lot of lame excuses for cheap tasteless food. Why is it that, whenever I take my own sandwich onboard, it tastes just fine?

No amount of tinkering and obfuscation is going to fix an obsolete business model, which is what Target et al. now have. Just when the need for low-margin big-box stores is evaporating, they are proliferating everywhere: Wal-mart, Target, Costco, Best Buy, I've probably got twenty of them within 10 miles of my house, and 90% of the time, I choose none of the above. No "sales associate" can possibly compete with the detailed customer reviews you find at amazon and elsewhere online. And in the end, no physical store can possibly be as efficient as an amazon warehouse. Display shelves and all the infrastructure that they require are enormously expensive, and have been rendered entirely unnecessary. In the end, Target et al. simply can't match online prices and still make a profit. There will always be some holdouts who like going to physical stores and being coddled and complimented by salespersons, but they will be paying dearly for that socializing.