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Aerogel from fruit biowaste produces ultracapacitors with high energy density and stability
• High performance supercapacitors synthesized from durian and jackfruit biowaste. • Outstanding performance due to large surface area, mesoporous structure and intrinsic nitrogen. • Pyridinic and graphitic n and facile ionic diffusion enable high performance supercapacitance. • Excellent stability, long-term cycling, energy density with pseudo-capacitance.
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German late capitalist masters forbid their slaves to wear protective masks
The employees of the Duty Free-Shops at the Berliner Airport wanted to wear face masks due to the corona virus infection risk. Their employer said it was forbidden to wear masks. So the employees had to go to court and sue for their right to protect themself, which was granted by the employer just hours before the court date. A great story illustrating the madness of late capitalism in rapidly collapsing western societies, characterised by the combination of extreme arrogance with systemic stupidity.
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Bullshit Alert: Citroën rolls out accessible-to-all Ami car that works "just like a smartphone"
#Comment: Electric or Gasoline, Tiny or Big - A car is a car is a car. Compared with public transport (trams etc. which they compete against), the passenger density of a car is horrendous. The incredibly high accident/death ratio of cars won't change due to such new form-factors either (maybe on the contrary), the same is true for traffic congestion. Plus such "cheap tiny throwaway elector cars" will clearly have a substantial environmental impact, just at a different position in the supply chain then gasoline cars. The designers, engineers and managers of such "innovations" clearly suffer from a radical lack of imagination and compassion.
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CookGAN Generates Realistic Meal Images From an Ingredients List (paper)
CookGAN uses an attention-based ingredients-image association model to condition a generative neural network tasked with synthesizing meal images. The framework enables the model to generate realistic meal images corresponding to an ingredients list alone.
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Big Tech Is Testing You (newyorker)
Large-scale social experiments are now ubiquitous, and conducted without public scrutiny. [...] There’s untold good that can be done by experimentation in the digital age. It can help us to identify ways of promoting healthier life styles. But where these experiments are being done away from public scrutiny, the ethos of science is compromised. The Big Tech companies can tell us their findings. I’m just not sure it’s enough to take their word for it.
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Capillary-driven desalination in a synthetic mangrove
We demonstrate a synthetic mangrove that mimics the main features of the natural mangrove: capillary pumping (leaves), stable water conduction in highly metastable states (stem), and membrane desalination (root). Our findings create possibilities for engineered membrane separations using large, passively generated capillary pressures.
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Protein discovered inside a meteorite
Model of the 2320 hemolithin molecule after MMFF energy minimization In prior research, scientists have found organic materials, sugars and some other molecules considered to be precursors to amino acids in both meteorites and comets—and fully formed amino acids have been found in comets and meteorites, as well. But until now, no proteins had been found inside of an extraterrestrial object. In this new effort, the researchers have discovered a protein called hemolithin inside of a meteorite that was found in Algeria back in 1990.
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Situated on the outskirts of the city of Osogbo along the banks of Osun River, the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove is a dense forest famous for being the home of the goddess of fertility in Yoruba land. The forest houses shrines, sculpture, art works and the sacred river. There is a festival celebrated in the month of August every year. (See this overview video)
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Music of the week: Anything by King Sunny Adé
Chief Sunday Adeniyi Adegeye MFR (born 1946), is a Nigerian jùjú singer, songwriter and multi-instrumentalist. He is regarded as one of the first African pop musicians to gain international success, and has been called one of the most influential musicians of all time.
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Almost half of the world’s 513,244 people worth more than $30m live in the US
"Ranks of those worth over $30m swell to 513,000 despite global growth slowdown." #Comment: Land of the free, home of the brave - where human culture mutated into a malignant cancer of epic proportions - metastasizing globally, destroying all nature and sanity in its way.
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Tasmania sets world-leading target of 200 per cent renewables by 2040
Tasmania’s Liberal government has just announced a possible world-first: A renewable energy target of 200 per cent by 2040, powered by a doubling of the tiny island state’s hydro, wind and solar energy production.
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Recent Machine Learning Papers with Videos (2020)
Image2StyleGAN++: How to Edit the Embedded Images? (CVPR 2020)
D3S - A Discriminative Single Shot Segmentation Tracker (CVPR 2020)
Zooming Slow-Mo: Fast and Accurate One-Stage Space-Time Video Super-Resolution (CVPR-2020) (code)
IGNOR: Image-guided Neural Object Rendering (ICLR 2020)
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“No one knows everything, everyone knows something, all knowledge resides in humanity.” - Pierre Levy
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#Qi Gong Patterns
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AI powered Solar Panels Inspection
The Solar industry is booming and emerging as the fastest growing source of renewable energy. Like most other industries, efficiency plays a crucial role for the sustenance of a company in this field. A time taking and labour intensive process which consumes a significant chunk of operating costs are the Solar Plant inspections. Regular inspections ensure that potential defects that could reduce power yield are caught early and repaired.
AI powered Wind Turbine Inspection
Given the safety hazards and time taken to carry out wind turbine inspections, it is not surprising that the use of drones for this purpose is on the rise. Not only do they help carry out regular inspections but also help identify and gather data to support warranty claims. The conventional manual inspections using ropes and platforms can at best inspect 2-3 wind turbines a day while a semi-automatic drone could inspect 12-15 turbines in the same time.
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Qihoo 360 discovered and revealed cyber-attacks by the CIA hacking group (APT-C-39) which lasts for eleven years against China. Several industry sectors have been targeted including aviation organizations, scientific research institutions, petroleum industry, Internet companies, and government agencies.
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Marian Chertow Talks About Industrial Ecology and Symbiosis in the Developing World
Marian Chertow, Professor of Industrial Environmental Management, talks about industrial ecology and symbiosis in the developing world. Professor Chertow’s research and teaching focus on industrial ecology, circular economy, waste management, and urban sustainability. Her work has championed the study of industrial symbiosis involving geographically based exchanges of materials, energy, water, and wastes within networks of businesses globally. She also has carried out many studies of industrial ecology in China, India, and other emerging market countries as a way to value environmental benefits alongside economic ones.
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Susanne Wenger from Austria came to Nigeria in 1950. She dedicated her life to Nigeria's Yoruba culture and kept working till she passed away in 2009.
