Back at university I dreamt of creating bacteria to do desalination, powered by the sun. All the necessary components exist–in fact, a seemingly endless number of genes code for channels and transports that selectively target the charged ions (Na^2+, Cl- mostly, but also Potassium and Magnesium). It's partially the legacy of life having arisen in saltwater, and many biological processes are controlled with ion concentration gradients. Signal transmission along a nerve? -> Ions. Want to get all this water out of here? -> Transport the salt across the membrane, and the water follows voluntarily.
This is interesting to think about. As I'm sure you've considered, bacteria and other living cells exist in a state of highly regulated homeostasis. In bacteria, things like charged ion concentrations are maintained internally by various physiological mechanisms (chiefly the membrane-bound transport channels you describe) at specific concentrations with little variation. Salinity concentrations are generally the same as the surrounding seawater (marine bacteria are usually osmoconformers, as opposed to more sophisticated osmoregulators like fish), and the transport mechanisms exist as adaptations to maintain this state.
So while some aquatic bacteria can exist at a wide range of external salt concentrations (they are "euryhaline"), I don't know of any bacteria that have adaptated to actively concentrate salt internally above the salinity of typical seawater. Beyond a certain not-very-useful threshold, this would disrupt too many metabolic pathways and kill the bacterium. So I don't see how a concentrate-in-the-bacteria-then-filter-them-out approach to industrial desalination would work.
You might be thinking about brine pool extremophile bacteria / archaea, but again, they are just well-adapted when it comes to expelling salt or resisting salt intake, not actively concentrating it internally.
However, if you could embed euryhaline bacteria into some kind of impermeable membrane in a controlled orientation, and engineer them to express the right kind of one-way channels on opposite sides of the cell... there are some big bioengineering obstacles to doing this, but it's an interesting idea. It would basically be a sped-up version of the double reverse osmosis desalination approach already widely used, potentially more efficient and available to be powered more easily by sustainable / free energy sources.
I'm just typing as I think there, so maybe there's been work in this area already.
The layering approach has much potential. In this case, graphene oxide layered with epoxy resin stabilizes the membrane and lets them control pore size.
The next step, problems with contaminants (seawater) fouling the membrane, might be mitigated with more layers? Say a Teflon layer to aid in cleaning. Or an ionized layer to repel many particulates.
I wish they'd said more about how they control pore size. How does the epoxy layer avoid covering the pores? Is it laid down before pores are etched or something? Fascinating subject.
The paper is quite short and very readable (especially if you are just skimming and can skim over some of the details/jargon) but here [0] is a diagram (from the paper) that perhaps will help you understand what is going on.
To summarise, they prepared graphene oxide laminates using vacuum filtration, and then stored them at different relative humidities by changing the salt concentration of the storage liquid. The different relative humidities cause different layer spacing, which they measure with X-ray diffraction, and choose whichever layer spacing they want before adding the epoxy.
The relevant quote from the paper:
Thick (≈100 µm) GO laminates were prepared by vacuum filtration of aqueous GO solutions, as reported previously. The laminates were cut into rectangular strips (4 mm × 10 mm) and stored for one to two weeks at different relative humidities (RH), achieved using saturated salt solutions. The resulting interlayer spacing was measured by X-ray diffraction as
shown in Fig. 1e and varied from ≈ 6.4 to 9.8 Å with RH changing from zero to 100%. GO laminates soaked in liquid water showed d ≈ 13.7 ± 0.3 Å. All these values agree with previous reports, where the changes in d were attributed to successive incorporation of water molecules into various sites between GO sheets. Individual GO strips with desirable d were then encapsulated and stacked together using Stycast epoxy as shown in Figs. 1b,c to increase the available cross-section for filtration to 1 mm (see Methods and supplementary Fig. S1).
The stacked GO laminates, now embedded in the epoxy (Fig. 1c), are referred to as physically confined GO (PCGO) membranes because the epoxy mechanically restricts the laminate’s swelling upon exposure to RH or liquid water (Methods). The stacks were glued into a slot made in either metal or plastic plate (Fig. 1b). Two sides of these stacked PCGO membranes were then trimmed off to make sure that all the nanochannels are open (Fig. 1d) before carrying out permeation experiments, in which ions and water molecules permeates along the lamination direction as shown in Fig. 1a.
Reverse osmosis has been around for a long time and is used on boats everywhere for desalination. This sounds like a new membrane that requires less pressure and thus energy? I guess sieve sounded better?
Sieve not only sounds better, it's also more informative to the general public - gets across not only what it structurally looks like, but also gives a general idea of how it functions.
In terms of what's new about this - yeah, less pressure and less energy. On boats the prospect of lugging around your own fresh water makes even relatively heavy and power-hungry desalination plants worthwhile, but land-based installations are very much limited by capital costs and energy usage.
RO membranes are notoriously finicky and non-robust. They require a lot of maintenance and can be ruined by common chemicals like chlorine. A more robust desalination membrane would be a very good thing.
When I was involved in RO in the early eighties, that was exactly the issue. In the context of offshore drilling rigs, we just couldn't get the adherence to protocol around flushing and filtering that the units needed to work over a reasonable lifetime.
We eventually gave up and went with an Alfa-Laval heat exchanger based approach.
Likely the issue is, with a large RO plant you hire people for the specific domain knowledge and develop a work culture around it. For a place like an oil rig none of this specific domain knowledge is central to the work at hand. So the technology isn't reliable in that context.
Exactly. It was a small scale system and the rig mechanic or whoever was supposed to do it as one of their 100 or so responsibilities so it often wasn't done. It was also pretty much a V1 system so it was just very sensitive.
To set some context that people here might appreciate, there wasn't a single computer or data link to offshore drilling rigs at that time. We were just starting to play with radio modem links.
I suppose it's probably something along those lines or the fact that the end product doesn't(to my knowledge) reflect the RO unit working correctly. With pharma they need RO to feed to WFI to use to make the drugs or do their research and it needs to work every day. Still seems like a simple RO system with a basic PLC would work fine on a ship to supply drinking water.
I don't know much about the situation at all but a sieve should be gravity fed (with an expectation of a reasonable throughput), RO is pumped under additional pressure AFAIK.
Seeing as we are unable or unwilling to deal with the present micro and nano-particles resulting from decades of plastic use and disposal, I worry about the environmental effects of graphene.
"In groundwater, which typically has a higher degree of hardness and a lower concentration of natural organic matter, the graphene oxide nanoparticles tended to become less stable and eventually settle out or be removed in subsurface environments.
In surface waters, where there is more organic material and less hardness, the nanoparticles remained stable and moved farther, especially in the subsurface layers of the water bodies."
Funny enough, its not actually banned in the USA, just a liability nightmare. I ocasionally still see brake pads with the stuff. I suspect graphine, and other 'nano' materials will be similar in practice.
I swear I've heard about this before... is this one of those stories that emerges about a technology that never seems to enter the market? That "super slick" coating for condiment container interiors is another that springs to mind.
Desalinization is already with about a factor of 2 or 3 of the thermodynamic optimum, so improvements can't be revolutionary. Desalinization mostly needs cheap clean energy.
Are you talking about the brine? This is trivial if you just put a pipe a few hundred yards out to sea. The concentration is diluted extremely quickly. (The only exception is if your desalination plant is below sea level because then you have to pump the brine up hill, which costs some energy.)
I've seen the assumption that the brine dissipates quickly challenged.
Fluids can remain subbornly un-mixed, over large distances and for long times. Given that brine is heavier than seawater, it will almost certainly tend to sink and flow along bathymetric contours, perhaps pooling in local low spots. And sealife can be exceedingly sensitive to changes in temperature, ion density, salt content, etc.
This reminds me of a book in which an ecologist described a discussion with a chemist over the concentration of some pollutant in seawater. Roughly, "Assuming a well-mixed solution..." starts the chemist. "How are you planning to stir the oceans?" asks the ecologist....
> A state-of-the-art facility is now within a factor of two of the theoretical energy minimum, and only 25 percent higher than the realistic minimum for the current reverse osmosis process. In short, it’s going to be tough to squeeze too much more energy out of reverse osmosis, and we’re unlikely to find an alternative method of desalination that will provide a significant boost over that.
> But that doesn’t mean that there are no other ways of getting better output for our energy. The total process of desalination turns out to require three to four times the theoretical minimal energy use, since the salt water must be pumped and pretreated, the membranes maintained, and the resulting brine handled afterwards. Some of these things might be amenable to further improvements, and there has been work put into developing membranes that don’t clog up as easily or better pre-filtering of biological materials.
Not really. Basic thermodynamics tells you that if your only input is water with a certain salt concentration and your output is water with a lower salt concentration (plus either brine -- very salty water -- or dry salt), then there is a minimum free energy cost.
> Based on thermodynamic principles and practical kinetic requirements, the theoretical minimal energy for desalination with FO is always higher than that without FO. In other words, using FO cannot reduce the minimum energy of separation.
The idea behind forward osmosis is to replace the salt in water with some other solute, like sugar. A strict 1-particle-to-1-particle replacement can (I think) have arbitrarily low free energy cost, but then you're just stuck with sugar water instead of salt water. In certain special cases this is fine (like for emergency water generation at sea, when you don't mind drinking sugar water). Insofar as low levels of sugar can't be tasted, and insofar as you have access to free sugar, you can avoid the energetic cost of removing some of the salt by replacing it with sugar. But I don't think this is very much before it becomes noticeable, and sugar isn't free.
If you happen to have excess thermal energy from some source, there are also ways to harvest some of this using forward osmosis, but this is really just another way to smuggle in free energy. In principle, you could use the heat gradient to generate electricity and then use that to power normal reverse osmosis, although which is more efficient will depend on the details of your equipment losses.
OK, but then, forgetting about desalination, you'd be able to just build a power plant with this substance and sea water, right? The fact that very few such plants exit then tells us that it would probably be cheaper to just do your desalination with reverse osmosis powered by a conventional power plant.
Baring some yet undiscovered and very bizarre (but thermodynamically viable) chemistry that requires you to involve saltwater in a practical implementation, yes. Otherwise saltwater (which has a positive heat of mixing) is just fighting your actual process.
You can buy that as Rust-Oleum® NeverWet®. It works great at first, but it wears out fast. It works by creating a surface with tiny spikes. Water has so much surface tension that it rolls across the spikes, rather than breaking up and getting down to the base layer. So the contact area is tiny and the adhesion is low.
The surface is fragile, because it's composed of tiny spikes. Rubbing will destroy it. It's hard to fix this, because the property that makes it useful is the same as the one that makes it fragile.
Just a perfect explanation, thank you. There always seem to be those catch-22's in these techs; I just wish the articles didn't come out in this predictable pattern of pulses.
Yes, it is. My understanding is that there are still barriers to producing enough graphene at a large enough scale to make many of its uses commercially viable.
Production appears to be what they are improving here:
> But it has been difficult to produce large quantities of single-layer graphene using existing methods, such as chemical vapour deposition (CVD). Current production routes are also quite costly.
> On the other hand, said Dr Nair, "graphene oxide can be produced by simple oxidation in the lab".
> "In terms of scalability and the cost of the material, graphene oxide has a potential advantage over single-layered graphene."
Is that really still true in the world we live in today though? Previously we were unable to instantly share information so freely and collaborate with people around the world with so little effort.
I'm not saying it shouldn't take time to develop these things, but surely the 30-40 year timeline is significantly reduced due to information sharing today?
I'd question the 30-40 years figure. I suspect "it depends".
Check out the book "Skunk Works" sometime and marvel at what they managed to do on the frontiers with such small numbers of people and crappy computers (with relatively small budgets and tight deadlines to boot).
Peter Thiel riffs on this idea a lot. Despite our incredible advances in computing and networks, it seems like progress in everything else has slowed down. (Randomly found video with his basic stack of points: http://bigthink.com/embeds/video_idea/48434?width=512&height...)
Another example, consider how long it takes to build any skyscraper in the US. This isn't even new tech, it's well understood, but it still takes a long time from planning to legal stuff to the actual construction. And yet there's a guy in China who builds other kinds of skyscrapers at a rate of two floors per day. Slowness is not a fundamental thing.
Indeed; I would assume a big part of the bureaucratic layer exists to make everything work mostly correct even though there will be cheaters and thieves at every stage of the construction process.
I'm sure it's faster now due to reasons you're describing. Also, cold war is gone - so that kind of helps too. Thing is, this isn't your average ruby on rails app and JSON API. Applied research in chemistry, physics, and industrial scale production takes certain breakthroughs, test methodologies, etc. all of which take a lot of talent and money. From what I remember we've seen significant (for certain amounts of significant) funding in applied r&d for graphene around the same time Nobel was won for it in 2010. So, even if r&d is accelerated now significantly, we're still probably at least around 10-20 years away from seeing anything utilising it in a significant and widespread manner.
That speed should be much faster now due to the information age and globalized competition. It may not approach Ray Kurzweil's predictions, but it's certainly shorter than previous generations of commercialization.
I was thinking the same thing although I've been unable to locate the paper that I recall reading about it. There are lots of papers which discuss nano-pores in graphene as membrane but I recall something that required a current in the graphene.
This is all fine, but if it isn't inert and if it 'leaks' graphene, it can be super toxic as well. I don't want to pu-pu it, but it is legitimate concern.
The naive (very hand-wavy) explanation for the toxicity of graphene (nanotubes to be specific, not sheets in general) is not chemistry, rather the nanotubes physically rupturing cell organelles. Same with asbestos: small rigid particles that cut everything else in pieces.
I hope this isn't Science being taken to a irrational extreme, as tends to happen with news and science.
This has incredible potential not only for the developing world but also for sea travel and even the fact that we are running out of drinkable water in the west.
Only 2.5% of the water on the planet is even potentially drinkable. If we were able to convert even 1%. Crazy.
Yup. Sieve implies that the only energy required is that necessary to pump the water to a level above the filter. I highly doubt that is the case. Surely you need some significant pressure differential. Even with pores the size of proteins (100x+ larger) you need pressure.
What you're describing is Reverse Osmosis - pushing salt water through a water permeable, salt impermeable membrane. It requires very large pressures, on the order of 2-30 atmospheres of pressure. The membranes used are incredibly cheap, most of the cost of RO is the pumps and maintenance. IMO innovations on the membrane are pretty marginal to the cost of RO and are usually done for hype.
In any case, they have designed it for pressure. The article describes how pressure causes water atoms to line up, train fashion, and move water much much faster than without pressure.
right, the question is -- how much pressure is required? Is it the pressure generated by a 1 cm column of water (as is implied by sieve), or is it the pressure generated by a 1000 watt high pressure pump? The difference will determine whether they have groundbreaking technology or get a participation trophy. From the article it didn't seem like there was any sort of functional prototype.
Indeed, and even if we live in a magical world where it was 100% free to run the filter, you need to manufacture the filter in the first place, and it will have to be replaced at some point, so there is ongoing energy expenditure no matter how you slice it.
Note that reverse osmosis desalination through membranes already exists as the article notes. (Not sure what the current state of the art is as I haven't worked in this area for a long time.) The question in whether this has advantages to the desalination systems used today.
Generally speaking, the Aussies and Israelis have some of the top of the line Reverse Osmosis Purification Tech. I saw a ROPU (reverse osmosis purification unit) truck from the Army Corps of engineers when I was active duty US Army and that thing was unreal. You could ingest raw sewage into that thing and out would come drinkable, albeit not wonderful tasting, clean drinking water.
Is there a reason this wouldn't be subject to the same physics that requires a lot of energy to desalinate water by other means? Thermodynamics puts a limit on how efficiently you can reduce entropy like that.
I wouldn't say "a lot" in economic terms:
"The theoretical absolute minimum amount of energy required by natural osmosis to desalinate average seawater is approximately 1 kilowatt-hour per cubic meter (kwh/m3) of water produced, or 3.8 kilowatt-hours per thousand gallons (kwh/kgal)."
https://www.amtaorg.com/wp-content/uploads/7_MembraneDesalin...
This is somewhat OT, but I've noticed a trend -- although I can't say how recent -- of headlines of the form "British [X] do [Amazing Thing]", particularly (but not necessarily) from the BBC. I note that the HN headline has been changed to "UK researchers" (IIRC, it said "British Scientists" earlier) and this BBC article doesn't actually use this phrase in their headline, but it appears prominently in the tagline.
This may be because I'm restricted to English language articles, but I don't see, for example, "Spanish researchers do [Amazing Thing]". Even in English, I don't regularly see "US/Australian/NZ/Canadian/South African/etc. [X] do [Amazing Thing]"; even though I'm sure plenty of amazing things have been done by these folks.
I understand that the popular press is directed towards the masses, but is the nationality/allegiance of [X] really so important? More so than their discovery/invention/whatever? I'm British and, in a time when populist nationalism is causing all kinds of problems, I'm not sure this rhetoric is helpful. Just be proud of the achievement.
How about just: "[Amazing Thing]"?
Or, if you want to associate it with people, to make it more personal and less "stark" (perhaps to sell it better): "Humanity achieves [Amazing Thing]".
I'm not seeing "British" anywhere in the article though it does say "UK-based team". I agree that highlighting the nationalities or country of residence of researchers is distracting at best and that your comment is OT for HN.
It's an item on BBC radio news today. And as I half listen to the radio the impression it gives is of the Brits making a breakthrough. Maybe Manchester Uni's marketing dept talk to the Beeb and got it on there. Who knows?
As I heard it I thought, this is an odd story. Firstly for the nationalist rhetoric, and secondly for the way it's phrased. It gives the impression of a sieve, much like a kitchen sieve, that can be used to instantly turn sea water into drinking water. Which is nowhere near the truth as far as I can tell.
Careful, your politics are showing. You're advocating a sort of leftist, post-national, globalised, post-structuralist agenda. Everyone is allowed a political opinion but it comes across as slightly disingenuous to couch it in factual / self evident terminology.
> populist nationalism is causing all kinds of problems
That is not a factual statement, it is a subjective political opinion. People on the other side of the fence think the opposite. From whence do you derive this claim to objective truth? Most of your point seems to be built on that statement, but its subjective nature makes it fall apart.
>> populist nationalism is causing all kinds of problems
> That is not a factual statement, it is a subjective political opinion.
I concede to this point. You are right: this perspective is completely subjective, when I was trying to make the objective point that science/progress doesn't care about nationality, etc. My argument's motivation was to highlight that the popular [British?] press not only dismisses this, but seemingly goes out of their way to push things in the other direction. Whether that's bad or not is very much ones opinion, but it is nonetheless objectively irrelevant modulo the scientific result and arguably "bad" in the sense that it is biased. It begs the question as to what is their (or their master's) end?
I didn't put it well. Thank you for pointing it out.
> in a time when populist nationalism is causing all kinds of problems
(I realize this forum will be almost overwhelmingly in favor of the above statement, but thought I would respond anyway to give an alternative viewpoint from outside).
What problems? Is it really causing problems, or is it just that you are politically opposed to it? The lack of nationalism I would say has caused far more problems over the last few decades (Mass clashing of cultures, rise of terrorism, global multi-nationals exploiting workers, not paying taxes etc, moving democracy and accountability further and further away from people).
If a family member achieved something you would naturally feel more "proud" than if it was a person in the world picked at random.
For some people, their nationality is important to them - an extended family of shared identity, culture, experiences and values. I would much much rather use a local taxi company, which will benefit my local community, friends, family, than use some faceless global thing like Uber, which will benefit some rich people in another country.
Further, competition is good. It's the way we achieve things. If a team of scientists in [other_country] see this news, they will likely be spurred on.
This is why things like the space race worked so well.
When I went to compulsory school I was taught that competition between nations is what caused the arms race that preluded World War I. I was also told that it was the feeling (in Germany) of being humiliated by the Versaille treaty, as a nation, that laid the ground for World War II.
I fail to see how nationalism is going to help solve terrorism, bad working conditions, tax evasion and dysfunctional democratic institutions.
I am afraid that nationalism will lead to decreased understanding of and less acceptance towards cultural differences.
I really shouldn't be discussing these sort of things on the internet, because I know we're never going to reach any kind of consensus. But...
Can you please provide some references to peer-reviewed research that show terrorism is fueled by immigration? Also, what kind of interventions are you talking about? Please be more specific, and remember to cite your sources.
Your answer to people being oppressed and persecuted seems to be that it's not a problem, as long as it's not happening in your country. Or maybe just that it's not a problem to you, as long as it's not happening in your country. Is that correct? If I'm not correct, then please explain again how nationalism is going to solve these issues?
Please don't ask for things that can't reasonably exist.
I can't come up with any experiment that could produce and reproduce peer-reviewed research on the causes of terrorism. It would either be horribly unethical, or it would be horribly impractical.
We cannot ask dead terrorists to fill out survey questionnaires on why they decided to commit terrorist attacks. It is extraordinarily difficult to obtain a blinded, representative sample of live terrorists, and nearly impossible to get valid mailing addresses for sending out their questionnaires. Even then, the response rate would be abysmally low. You might be able to interview captured terrorist suspects, but their responses might be biased by the conditions of their captivity. And all that presumes that a terrorist actually knows why they do what they do.
We can't take a group of non-terrorists, apply experimental treatments and the control treatment, and release them into the wild to see if any would then go on to commit a terrorist act. That would be unethical to begin with, and the method of observation would almost certainly influence the results.
So it should be reasonably well established that everyone advancing a potential contributing cause for terrorism is stating yet another hypothesis, none of which can be reasonably tested in the real world. As such, it would be acceptable to employ simulation models, Monte Carlo methods, behavior studies on lesser mammals, and any of several other means, none quite as good as a real-life scientific study using live humans.
So what you should probably be asking for is the computer simulation model that was used to show that immigration fuels terrorism. Then we could productively argue over how flawed and simplistic the model was, and how it should have been written in a different language, or using a different software paradigm. And then someone, inevitably, would ask:
What does any of this have to do with desalinization membranes?!
There's definitely peer-reviewed research on terrorism, but I'm no expert. But yes please, let's stop this discussion now. I'm sorry for going off topic.
This is just a slippery slope fallacy. There was clear opposition to an EU superstate in many countries, there's no way the UK ever would have ended up in one. If anything, this makes a (smaller) EU superstate more likely.
It's far from clear that UK leaving EU is any kind of disaster.
I'm not from the UK but am in the EU, and I was hoping the Remain side would win the referendum. But I don't see UK leaving as a disaster, either, and after the referendum, the overblown hysteria related to Brexit has led me to see that in fact it maybe is a very wise thing to do for Brits and maybe we should follow. EU leaders and pundits seem so disconnected from reality: if this is an ultimate disaster, they are too deep gazing their own navels.
I'm aware DWN is disliked by many. But an ad hominem criticism doesn't itself refute the facts reported by the article.
And in fact, Deutsche Banke actually made the reported announcements, as reported by Bloomberg.
Are the claims false when they're on a "bad" site, but simultaneously true when they're on a "good" site? Put differently, do you have a refutation of the DB recommendations that doesn't rely on a logical fallacy?
That's not what "ad hominem" means. They frame things in misleading ways, which disqualifies them from serious discussion. Not to note that the article reports opinions, not facts.
The Bloomberg article upon which this is based, https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-03-23/deutsche-..., would have been the much better choice to link anyway since it's in English. What it says is that some DB analysts thinks German stocks are overvalued, and that British stocks could profit from the decline of the Pound's value. How does that imply that the UK is doing well? You just linked an article, claiming that it proves your point, but didn't say how.
No, it's exactly what ad hominem means. Technically, it means "criticizing the man", as opposed the argument. But modern usage absolutely encompasses "criticizing the source" as opposed to the argument. See how your last reply also does that?
The Bloomberg article makes the same basic point as DWN, which implies that the exact opposite of what "Remain" promoters predicted is happening. Many EU countries are tanking financially, with e.g. Italian banks requesting big bail outs to avoid collapse. Meanwhile capital is flowing into Britain. Focusing on the shades of spin in these various publications (which, yes, is there) sort of misses this main fact. I agree the Bloomberg article would have been a better choice on my part, sorry about that.
Apparently it's politically uncomfortable for you, but the evidence is mounting that letting the pound fall was what Britain needed to stimulate its economy. Deutche Bank has no political reason to recommend investors leave Germany, which was supposed to be the strongest country in Europe and invest in Britain, so a likely explanation for DB's recommendation is that it reflects the economic reality.
You continue to reduce the effects of the referendum to Deutsche Bank analysts' opinion on British and German stocks.
Why do you bring Italian banks into this? They are completely unrelated to the topic at hand.
It's not new or surprising that a falling currency is good for exports and can fuel an economy. Countries were and are regularly accused of manipulating their currencies to achieve that. The thing is that Brexit hasn't happened yet, so neither have its effects. Nobody knows whom it will affect or how. But the drop in the Pound's value is a clear sign that the markets don't have a whole lot of faith. If the Pound's weakness helps their economy now, then good for them. But it doesn't prove the point you think it does.
Nobody can predict the future, so claiming that predictions about it "reflect economic reality" is misleading. The recommendation is likely to represent the analyst's sincere expectation, though. I'm not arguing to the contrary.
>> It's not new or surprising that a falling currency is good for exports and can fuel an economy.
Except that was an argument promoted primarily by Leavers, who favored letting the currency fall, right?
The majority who where against Brexit predicted severe economic problems for Britain as a direct consequence of leaving what was characterized as "safety" of the EU. The relevance seems obvious, because the opposite is happening?
By the way I'm not reducing this to DB's analysis, that's why I hinted at the larger upturn for Britain and downturn for core EU countries in the wake of Brexit. There are other indicators... I would suggest looking on on your own.
I'm sorry that you think investment advice can have no bearing in economic reality... but in that light, I don't think it would be productive for us to continue.
Let me repeat: Britain hasn't left yet, negotiations for the terms of Brexit are just beginning.
I was rather hoping I wouldn't have to dig up old "BUY MORE TECH STOCKS" or "BUY MORE HOUSES" articles from the height of the dot-com bubble or US housing bubble to point out that analyst opinions aren't necessarily right.
Exactly. Of course the markets only factor in what they understand, and sometimes they get it wrong.
But the relevant thing about it is that the market is betting in the real, hard money it trades with, not political punditry which is where the disaster is being pronounced.
From a completely practical standpoint, we gotta have adjectives, otherwise every science story will be "People do stuff!"
Fair enough to pick at which adjectives are used. I certainly find the nationality of the researchers more interesting than many other aspects, such as their hair color. Different nations have different cultures and policies towards things. Using nationality as an adjective might lead to productive conversations around how to make the species better. If so, that's a win. If all it does is promote mindless nationalism, it's a loss. So far, I'm not seeing anything to worry about -- and this title is much better than "Several Short, Brown-Haired People just did some Amazing Things with Beakers!" :)
ADD: It seems like my joking title should end with "And you won't believe #7!"
Thanks for your comment. This kinda thing can certainly get out of hand. So far we are very far away from that happening.
I think your observation comes off sample bias. BBC articles come up on hacker news more than those from other national broadcasters mostly because he's in English and has regular reasonable articles on technology.
I think it's really the old 5-Ws training for journalists. Who, what, where, when, why. Then take the two biggest ones (in this case, who, what, where) and put them in the headline.
Not really, their whole purpose was to find a way to produce suitable membranes with something much easier and cheaper to produce than traditional graphene sheets (i.e. graphene oxide). The article not only puts adequate focus on that issue, but even ends in a cautionary note about the future work required.
2. I count about 12 words you can fit into the title. How else can you adequately describe what the article was about ? Their choice seems completely reasonable.
3. The scale and energy required are irrelevant. The article wasn't describing a fully fledged product it was discussing a concept.
I encourage other HN readers to actually read the article. I found it quite informative. Especially the use of graphene oxide instead of single-layer graphene.
