Ik vind het jammer dat Azarkan vertrekt. Hij heeft geen kleine rol gehad in de hele toeslagaffaire, en dat wil wel eens vergeten worden.
Simons wens ik vooral veel sterkte. De hoeveelheid online troep die zij de afgelopen jaren over zich heen heeft gekregen zal niet mals zijn.
There already is a youtube video of the purported Meissner effect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtVjGWpbE7k
Yeah, huge grain of salt required.
But would be absolutely huge if true, and the recipe in the materials and methods is trivial. Both in equipment and materials. So someone else will try this soon, if people aren't already trying.
This is just completely out of my frame of reference. Why not? Who are opposed to this?
Indeed, I live in The Hague, just a short hop from the Westland (where all the tomatoes, cucumbers and bell peppers are from). At least I can say I can get very local produce if I go the supermarket 😅.
Even the "water bombs" (as we call them here) situation is improving. There are some really interesting new producers that actually focus on flavor instead of yield. The price naturally is high, but I'm enjoying Dutch tomatoes for the first time ever.
I live in one of the most light-polluted areas in the world. Even Orion is hard to pick out, and even lunar eclipses visibly more muted than elsewhere.
The main source of the worst pollution is not street lights. Instead, it's industrial pollution coming from one of the largest collections of greenhouses worldwide a couple km. Many of them have growlights on all night long. On an overcast night, the sky is orange and purple - orange is the older technology with modern leds being purple.
That said, i am hopeful for the future here. Between 2012 and 2018 the brightest areas have already become a little less bright. Let's hope that trend continues.
Yes, writing this from Western Europe Americans not being able to wire each other money instantly is so confusing.
Oh God, no. This can only go wrong.
Milieuschade?
As an X Japan fan, this is all very confusing.
While these are very cool, they're not exactly accessible to the average citizen. These are close a million euros per house.
That said, living right next to water is indeed very common. My building in an urban renewal project is too, and we're getting a pier to moor boats in a while.
For those asking: floods, rising water levels due to climate change etc, isn't this dangerous? Yes, that is a concern. But probably for other reasons than you might think. Building in river beds is a big no no (unlike in some neighboring countries), and river beds have actually been expanded significantly in recent decades. Sea dikes and levees have acceptable failure risk of 1 in 10,000 to 1 in 100,000 years (and yeah this can be tomorrow). At current sea levels and storm rates of course. The main new risks are flash flooding due to heavy rainfall (see 2021 European floods), and, in the longer term, sea water seeping underneath dikes and levees. We can probably handle another meter of sea water rise with current technology. After that, levees would have to be made so high that the pressure on the seabed is high enough to force water underneath. Rivers would also start flowing backwards at some point (this already happens at smaller scale during dry spells. It's usually managed by having drainage pumps run in reverse). We'll probably have to give up parts of the country in 22nd century. It is what it is.
Also interesting: where insurers are leaving Florida due to climate-changed induced risk, Dutch insurers are actually increasing flood coverage. Previously only floods due to rainwater would be covered by most insurances. With the government being responsible for floods caused by dike/levee failure. After the 2021 European floods it became obvious that that is not always a clear distinction. While we were far less affected than our neighboring countries, some creeks did turn into violent rivers, especially damaging the old town of Valkenburg. While technically no levees were breached (because it was a creek), and technically it was caused by rainwater, it did behave like a levee failure. Ultimately both insurers and the government paid part of the damages. But figuring out who to get money from was a mess for victims. Thus, the union of insurers is actually expanding coverage from 2025 onwards, so that levee failure is also (partly) covered by most home insurers. Hopefully that reduces insecurity for the next flash flooding event.
What's very cool is that the recipe in the paper is trivial. It's just lead, phosphorus, and copper, fired in a kiln under a vacuum. With a couple hundred dollars of equipment, one could even attempt to make this at home (wouldn't recommend with the powdered lead tho).
So if the claim holds up true, mass producing it should be quick.
That said, the lead makes this material not fit for use for a lot of applications due to its toxicity.