GENE EDITING - CRISPR

around the world we are now living in the time of the early stages of gene editing for disease therapy called CRISPR... which is a gene editing technique and it is being used not just to prevent certain diseases but now.. now to treat diseases including cancer...groundbreaking medical history is happening RIGHT NOW in our lifetimes....the technique is sort of like cut and paste using molecular tools.
watch for stories about successes.....it may sometimes start with science fiction...sometimes become science friction......but now a disease ending part of science diction.

Posted by dino27 on 4/15/2019 12:55:00 AM (view original):

Posted by dahsdebater on 4/15/2019 12:06:00 AM (view original):
Intermittent power sources are a false hope given our current energy storage capabilities. The only reason wind and solar power feel useful to people who own them is because the power they produce is such an insignificant portion of the power on the total grid that the changes to available power when they're at max capacity or 0% capacity is functionally meaningless.

also..i dont understand what you are trying to say.

The point is that wind turbines are irrelevant. We're nowhere near any of the popular "renewable" power sources being viable because A) they're intermittent, and we're not nearly good enough at storing power and B) they generally are impractical.

In the case of wind and hydroelectric power, wide open spaces for wind farms and waterfalls are generally not close enough to large urban centers to be an efficient source of power. Go look up the percentage of power on the US grid that's wasted just moving power from plants to end users. Then come back and tell me you think the right way to address the power supply is to build wind farms miles and miles from cities.

As a fairly irrelevant aside, the problem with solar panels is that they're horribly inefficient. This is a problem because of where the inefficiency comes into play. Solar panels are generally black. They are very efficient at absorbing light. What they aren't efficient at doing is actually converting that energy into electricity. They're generally under 12%. I don't consider myself a materials chemist, but I do work in a group that has a significant emphasis on developing materials for next-gen solar cells. State-of-the-art, expensive, news-worthy technology is like 16%. So what happens to the other 85+%? It turns into heat. Right now, with the number of solar panels we have, this isn't a problem. But if you start doing the math on what happens if we converted, say, 50% of the US electrical grid to solar, it's a massive contributor to global warming. Far worse than the carbon dioxide emission from burning fossil fuels. Carbon dioxide is a crappy greenhouse gas anyway. Water is actually much worse, but whistle-blowers can't sound a bunch of alarms about water in the atmosphere without sounding ridiculous.

The point is, right now the most realistic option for clean power is probably still nuclear. In the future maybe the technology will make something else reasonable. But right now, in spite of what popular science writing might want you to believe, that's simply not the case.

Maybe that doesn't clarify what you were asking about, in retrospect.

The point about intermittent power sources is that right now they do work reasonably well for people who have, say, solar panels. Joe can have giant batteries in his basement that hold enough power for 12 hours, or 24 hours, or whatever. We can make batteries that big. When Joe has a rainy week, he draws power from the regular grid and he lives with paying the electric company a little bit for that period of time. This is all fine.

The argument I was making is that this system is high dependent on the fact that people like Joe are a tiny minority of the power use on the overlying grid system. If Joe and all his environmentally-conscious friends all get solar panels, and all of a sudden 15% of the power use on the grid is solar, the whole system breaks. Because now, when there's a rainy week and the solar panels aren't cranking out any power to speak of and the batteries run dry, demand on the electrical grid increases by 15/85 = 17.6%. Most power plants can't necessarily handle an extra 17.6% demand. Now you have rolling brownouts. Everyone suffers. All because Joe and his buddies wanted to do the right thing.

The point is that until we're much, much, much better at storing electrical energy efficiently, converting more than an insignificant portion of consumption over to intermittent power sources puts too much strain on the system.

wind energy and solar energy are not the be all end all but are in a limited way part of the solution...they are productive in certain scenerios.
they are helpful with efficiency and environment when used in the right situations.
they should not be minimized because they are not perfect in all situations.

i hope you comment here often.

"Most Dependent" meaning what? By % of State's Budget, Total $, or something else?

PORKENSTEIN

scientists have taken pig brains dead for 4 hours and regenerated cellular activity...it did not bring back consciousness but it has been described as a partially alive brain.........future application for possibly restoring consciousness.
every day there are amazing stories and breakthroughs.
we live in the times of a pace of geometric progress where complex advances are sprung from complex information.
miracles coming faster and faster.