Whether it’s cars on the road or the beat of a heart, any movement can be converted into a safe, renewable electric current.
First discovered by Pierre Curie, the husband of Marie Curie, and his older brother Jacques in 1880, piezoelectricity works by taking an electrically neutral substance such as particular crystals, ceramics, and even biological materials and applying enough pressure to create an imbalance of positively and negatively charged atoms on opposite sides. Under normal conditions, the arrangement of the atoms balances out the electric charge, but under pressure, an electric field can be created because the neutral arrangement has been disfigured, leaving a higher concentration of positively charged atoms on one side and negatively charged atoms on the other.
Bitcoin has gotten a lot of hate recently because of its energy consumption and carbon footprint, but-quite counterintuitively-it might be the missing piece to a cleaner future.
In early 2021, some prominent people have spoken out against Bitcoin stoking fears and causing crypto markets to tumble. In February, Bill Gates said in an interview with Andrew Sorkin that “Bitcoin uses more electricity per transaction than any other method known to mankind, and so it’s not a great climate thing.” And Elon Musk said in May “We are concerned about rapidly increasing use of fossil fuels for Bitcoin mining and transactions, especially coal, which has the worst emissions of any fuel.”
Not only are both statements misleading (upwards of 75% of Bitcoin mining is fueled by renewable energy…
Like bacteria in a Petri dish, humans might be on the road to a population collapse due to dwindling resources, overpopulation, and an increasingly contaminated environment.
In 1944, as the Pacific Theater of World War 2 was still raging and the threat of post-war Soviet hostility was becoming obvious, the US Coast Guard introduced 29 reindeer to St. Matthew Island, a remote island in the Bering Sea, to create a strategic food reserve for military personnel operating in the area. In the following years, the reindeer population exploded to 6,000. By 1968, only 42 remained. Such a drastic collapse was caused by exponential population growth outpacing the environment’s ability to regenerate its food supply. …
A comprehensive study from the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) found that the worst pandemic in 100 years is twice as deadly as we’ve been told.
Official COVID-19 death counts are problematic for a lot of reasons. At the top of this list is the fact that many lower-income countries don’t have the necessary testing capacity to determine if the deceased carried the virus. WHO testing guidelines call for costly equipment like RNA extraction kits and real-time PCR machines, as well as trained staff to use them. However, countries like Nepal had only 1 adequate testing facility at the beginning of the pandemic to service nearly 30 million people. This means Nepal’s 4,466 deaths (at the time of writing) is likely much higher.
The United States has become the land of conspiracy theorists. From QAnon followers to those who believe the moon landing was filmed by Stanley Kubrick on a soundstage, these people are growing in numbers, and they’re becoming increasingly resistant to logic.
On December 4th, 2016, 28-year-old Edgar Welch drove from his home in North Carolina to Washington D.C. to rescue children being held in basement cages. With his AR-15 style rifle, he broke into Comet Ping Pong, a pizzeria and concert venue. His plan was to free victims of a satanic, international pedophilia ring run by high-powered Democrats, a conspiracy theory known as Pizzagate. After firing 3 shots, he gave himself up to police and explained that he had found no evidence of children or cages. The building didn’t even have a basement.
Beginning in 2009, the ongoing NutriNet-Santé study has collected data on nearly 200,000 participants, leading researchers to important conclusions about our diets.
The goal of the study is to collect as much data as possible on participants’ diets, lifestyles, genetics, medical backgrounds, living conditions, culture, etc. and find connections to increased rates of mortality. Participants submit most of this information online, but researchers also collect plasma, urine, and serum. Medical and insurance records are used for cross-reference.
Using this vast trove of data, researchers have uncovered results that should make us think twice about what we consume.
Processed Foods Are Much Worse Than We Thought
We’ve known for decades that processed foods generally have less nutrition and are associated with increased rates of obesity, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, among several other…
More than 300,000 low-IQ soldiers were sent to the front lines of Vietnam in a sick experiment dreamed up by Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara
It was October 1966. The United States military was sinking into the quagmire of the Vietnam War, Lyndon Johnson occupied the presidency, and Defense Secretary Robert McNamara paced the halls of the Pentagon.
On McNamara’s mind was a disturbing development: the Soviet Union had just confirmed what they already expected. In an article published on October 2nd in Red Star, a Soviet military newspaper, they admitted to providing military and economic support for the North Vietnamese. Although the war was already escalating out of control after events like the Gulf of Tonkin incident, this revelation changed everything. It was now…
It’s true that artificial intelligence is self-learning, but it still heavily relies on human interaction. So of course it’s now as horrible as we are.
In March 2016, DeepMind’s AlphaGo, a computer program built on a neural network, did the unthinkable. It beat Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players of all time, in a 5 game match. Before this, the ancient and still popular game was considered far too complex for a computer to master because, with 10^360 possible moves in a game, even our greatest supercomputers couldn’t get anywhere close to performing the necessary calculations.
DeepMind got around this problem by creating a sophisticated artificial neural network loosely modeled after biological neural networks that can learn and adapt to new information. DeepMind…
It may seem silly to wonder why it’s dark at night, but with so many stars in the universe, the night sky should be completely illuminated, a conundrum today known as Olbers’ paradox.
Although it’s now attributed to Heinrich Wilhelm Olbers, a 19th century German astronomer and physician, this paradox has perplexed people for centuries. Numerous well-known people have tried to unravel it, including Kepler, Lord Kelvin, and even Edgar Allan Poe, but it wasn’t until the advent of modern cosmology that we figured it out.
And the solution is deeply connected to the age and size of the universe, as well as our place in it.
Olbers’ Paradox: the Problem
It’s not hard to understand why a great thinker like Aristotle thought the universe was finite, static, timeless, and homogenous. Like us, when he looked at…
Data confirms that stricter environmental regulation doesn’t hurt the economy. In fact, it leads to increased capital accumulation, worker productivity, and innovation, proving the Porter hypothesis true.
It seems like common knowledge that government regulations are burdensome for companies. In many cases, this is true, as regulations create obstacles for businesses, which limits their output and requires more resources to overcome. Many free-market advocates echo this sentiment when they talk about “reducing government red tape” and wanting “smaller government.” They see it as a tug-o-war between private industry and government.
This is especially true with environmental regulations. Laws like the Clean Water Act and the Clean Air Act put strict limits on dumping and emissions, both of which are seen by some as hindering the economy. In…
