If we look past the maximalist approach to squeeze every last kWh/kg, sodium batteries are already there. They're even selling sodium starter batteries, going beyond their use in cars. Better low temp performance, comparable capacity, and having the stellar distinction of not being rolling bombs. Why are we still so focused on the rare earths and patents needed for lithium ion? The logic of "lithium batteries have been in development for a fraction of the time ICE have been, so give it a little more time and they'll be comparable to ICE" should now be applied to sodium ion batteries.

EVs pollute the land and water much more than ICE. You can clean tailpipe emissions, but you can clean the EV detritus.

https://www.popsci.com/environ...

I had assumed HarmonyOS was based on Linux, in the sense Android and Tizen are. But looks like they've gone and made their own OS from the ground up. With even a variant analogous to WearOS, and their own programming language too. Bold move...

Do we still need constellations of satellites for networking when we have drones that can take off and land on their own, be serviced, and go back up and stay there for a year?

The title and summary confused me and made me want to read the article, breaking the Slashdot tradition. Is the discovery that black holes are merging generally, per how the summary starts off "now we have evidence that hundreds of thousands of them are merging". Or is it that black hole pairs are merging, and the summary says shortly thereafter "the population of massive black hole pairs that are merging"?

Or is it that the way that the general merging is happening is one pair at a time, such as with Sagittarius and Andromeda, which just happen to the the two that are merging the closest to us, and which will result in a binary system forming? will the binary system then merge with another supermassive black hole? Or does it have to then merge with another binary system? Or is is a one level merge event, and once every supermassive black hole has participated in one merge event, then it's all done?

I got confused enough and got so any terms thrown at me in the summary hinting that something got grossly oversimplified in the title.

Don't they know the right forum for posting stuff that they want to later blame on AI or bitter chicken?

There are oil & gas fields releasing over 25000 kg of methane all over the world. That's per hour, by the way. Good to see that after all the diversions into subsidies that gives us at best incremental benefit in cutting greenhouse gases, the US is doing something that can have immediate and substantial impact and not just greenie points.

Indeed. This paper says you can produce crude at $43/barrel, comfortably below the current spot price.https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S2211926421000072/

"All these athletes" implies some huge percentage. But seems like the rate is consistent with tests that aren't 100% accurate, and so sme athletes or support staff unknowingly spreading it.

Sure, that could happen. But given that host nations with strong sporting cultures do well in Olympics, is China's performance unusually good?
Also, do we know that no Chinese athletes tested positive?

A whole parallel world of cognition that interacts with ours. Ordinary and spooky simultaneously.

Exactly! They made it narrower than the tablets that pass for phones these days. But too tall. So it isn't pocketable. its just different for the sake of being different. Won't appeal t to the "media consumption" crowd, nor to those who want to carry something that isn't noticeable until you need it.

Do one off the bat, right?

OK, I thought the document you posted had that info, not the document summarized by the document you posted.

As for deterrent effect, you can't know directly, but they have numbers for crime before cameras and crime after. Some of the reduction could reasonably be attributed to cameras.

Hmmm... that is data for private security cameras, which is a more general category that doorbell cameras. And it doesn't say anything about how effective they were - if they played any role in solving crime.

I'm interested in the trade-off between giving them access to data from a private device and the reduction in crime. Or deterrence in crime.