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Yesterday, we deployed seven biodegradable natural latex balloons with measured sulfur dioxide and hydrogen. All reached the stratosphere. Telemetry confirmed 10,525 Cooling Credits reached 20km+, offsetting 10,525 metric tons of carbon dioxide warming for a year. This is the equivalent of 478,409 mature trees that last for a year...

79,543 views • 1 year ago •via X (Twitter)

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Here's an excellent video from Florian (follow) that shows charged water on the left and neutral water in the right. This is a visual confirmation of two known effects; Electrostatic induction and dielectric relaxation time. Electrostatic induction is like when a hair-rubbed balloon sticks to the wall, despite the wall being neutral; the balloon causes charges in the wall to polarize so the wall side near the balloon turns negative and the other side of the wall is positive. That's electrostatic induction and that's why you have raindrops that stick to a car window for hours of wind and gravity, rain has a small negative charge. Wouldn't work with tap water. Now, if you remove the balloon, the wall doesn't return to a neutral state immediately. It'd happen quickly if we had a balloon on the other side of the wall, but by itself this can take seconds, minutes, hours or even days, depending on the material and thickness. Glass is quite slow, and you can see the electric forces holding each other will hold off gravity for some time; and that the water greatly prefers not to be broken off, water is like an uncountable number of those walls in series, and they all cling to each other in proportion to how many balloons we have, ie how many excess electrons we have. Furthermore, when the water is extremely charged, it will not even leave the thin remnant layer of water that trails behind, as the cohesive internal forces outweigh those by induced to outside neutral surfaces.

N'Golo⚡Wizard.Talk

22,198 views • 2 months ago

this effect is all over tiktok right now and nobody's explaining how to actually do it properly... the 3d balloon character thing. where someone turns into a shiny inflatable version of themselves that still moves and talks. looks pretty smooth in feeds. the workflow is stupid simple once you see it. step 1: take any photo. drop it into an image gen tool (nano banana pro). prompt it with something like "make the person in the photo a plastic blow up balloon character with a shiny surface. keep the face details as 3d balloon details including the person in the background. don't change background" that's it for the image. don't overcomplicate the prompt. shorter = more consistent results. (learned this after wasting like 2 hours trying to get "perfect" prompts that kept giving me garbage) step 2: take that balloon image + your original video and drop both into kling motion control. prompt: "turn the motion and detailed mouth movement of the video to the setting of the image" that's literally it. kling maps the motion from the real video onto the balloon character. mouth moves. head turns. expressions transfer. the whole thing renders in a few minutes. the result looks like a $500 custom animation and costs you maybe $0.30 in kling credits. people are getting 500k+ views with these because the scroll-stop factor is insane. nobody expects to see a shiny inflatable version of someone giving a real speech or doing a product review. the play here is obvious btw. run this for client content (mix with the hook and real body, check the results yourself) or use it on your own faceless channels as a hook pattern before the algo catches up...

KNOX

25,773 views • 6 months ago

Think Solar panels are "Green"? think again. Making solar panels requires toxic chemicals, huge amounts of energy and water, and creates toxic waste. The common types (mono- and poly-crystalline panels) need extremely high heat at every stage of production. For example, temperatures of 2,700°F to 3,600°F are required just to turn sand-like silicon dioxide into usable silicon. Up to half of that silicon is then wasted when the thin wafers are cut. For every 1 megawatt of solar panels produced: About 1.4 tons of toxic chemicals are used (including hydrochloric acid, sodium hydroxide, sulfuric acid, nitric acid, and hydrogen fluoride). Nearly 2,900 tons of water are needed. 8.6 tons of pollution are released—most of it from powerful greenhouse gases (SF₆, NF₃, and C₂F₆) that trap heat thousands of times more effectively than carbon dioxide. Other dangerous waste includes toxic gases like trichlorosilane and silicon tetrachloride, plus harmful dust from the cutting process. The thinner “amorphous” or thin-film solar panels are made with cadmium, a chemical known to cause cancer and damage DNA. By the end of 2016 the world already had about 250,000 tonnes of discarded solar panels. That was just 0.5 % of all electronic waste produced that year. The International Renewable Energy Agency estimates that by 2050 we could be throwing away 6 million tonnes of solar panels every single year, adding up to a total of 78 million tonnes. At that point dead solar panels could make up 10 % of all electronic waste, and the total amount of worn-out panels could be larger than all the electronic waste the world produced in 2018. Recycling is often presented as the easy fix, but it isn’t. It still uses large amounts of energy, water and other resources, and workers have to handle toxic materials that eventually need to be disposed of. Right now only two commercial recycling methods exist for solar panels, and there are just a handful of facilities that can do the job anywhere in the world. #GreenEnergy

John Lee Pettimore

43,397 views • 7 days ago

The fourth edition of Ather Community Day is here! The idea behind these community days actually goes back to 2016. Back then, we were a startup without a product. We started Community Meetups as a way to tell our stories and, just as importantly, learn from our owners. Those conversations shaped not just how we talked about Ather, but what we built. As Ather grew, those meetups grew with us. In 2023, they became the first Ather Community Day with around 700 people. Last year, nearly 5,000 people joined us. While the scale changed, the purpose luckily hasn't. Community Day has always been where we share the thinking behind our products. The engineering decisions. The design trade offs. The details our teams spend months, and often years, obsessing over. Some of those stories might seem small. In 2024, we spent five minutes on stage talking about a storage box 🤯. Last year, we explained how we reinvented cruise control. Most product launches don't dwell on these details. Most product launches are not aimed at the customer at all. We do, because we believe they're what make the experience feel effortless. This year is a particularly important one for us. We'll unveil the first scooter built on our all new EL platform. Our biggest product launch yet. EL is our first all new vehicle platform since the original 450. We built it with a simple objective. Bring the Ather experience to a much larger audience without compromising on what makes an Ather, an Ather. It's our entry into the mass market scooter segment and the beginning of the next chapter for Ather. And EL is just one part of the story. We'll also share what's next across the Ather ecosystem and give everyone a closer look at some of the work happening inside our engineering and R&D teams. Look forward to meeting you all in Bengaluru on 29th August!

Tarun Mehta

19,841 views • 28 days ago

Last flight of 2025. São Paulo to London. One final Atlantic crossing this year… This year asked more than I expected. There were extraordinary moments, stars over the ITCZ, dawn breaking across continents, the quiet privilege of a flight deck at night, but also periods that were heavy, uncertain, and quietly hard. Some of that showed. Some of it didn’t. Not everything needs to. Aviation has a way of holding a mirror up to you. On good days it amplifies confidence and joy; on tougher ones it demands humility, discipline, and support from the people around you. I leaned on that support more than once this year, colleagues, friends, family, and conversations that arrived at exactly the right moment to help me navigate life’s turbulence. Their wise counsel has kept me ‘grounded’ when needed and for this I’m extremely grateful. To everyone else who followed along, reached out, challenged me, or simply stayed for the avgeek nonsense, thank you. Genuinely. This space is often polarising but for me it’s more than photographs of aeroplanes. It became somewhere to reflect, to question, and occasionally to admit that things weren’t simple. That mattered. As the year closes, change feels close. New projects are forming. New conversations are waiting. A new book, Jumbo, launches in the early new year, and perhaps a different flight deck lies ahead, maybe a return to Boeing is on the cards. The curiosity is back, and so is the excitement. Some of the best conversations don’t happen on frequency. They happen when the door’s closed and the crew room is quiet. I hope to share more of these conversations with you in 2026… Thank you all for being part of the journey. See you on the other side of the Atlantic, and into whatever 2026 has planned. Have an amazing New Year!! #PilotLife #AviationJourney #LongHaul #AvGeek #FlightDeckView #EndOfYearReflection #AirlineLife #AboveTheClouds #AviationPhotography #GlobalTravel #NewHorizons #WhatsNext #NewYear2026

Scott Bateman MBE

74,318 views • 7 months ago

🇷🇺 Why wasn't the Omsk oil refinery better protected? 😁🔽 “Ukrainian drones reached the Omsk refinery — the largest in the country, accounting for almost 10% of all oil refining. The refinery supplies all of Western Siberia and the Urals. It is reported that FP-1 drones struck a unit with a capacity of 8.4 million tons of oil per year out of the plant’s total capacity of 22 million tons. The Omsk refinery is such an obvious and attractive target that it was bound to be reached sooner or later. And it was. From the Ukrainian border to Omsk is more than 2,500 km. The FP-1 flies at a speed of 140–180 km/h — that is 14–17 hours of flight in a straight line, but the drone most likely had to bypass air defense zones, so it would have taken longer. That means it took off yesterday evening and arrived today during the day. And this is a slow propeller-driven device that could have been detected in advance, its target could have been predicted, and it could have been tracked all the way to Omsk. In that time, mobile groups could have been redeployed, local forces alerted, aviation scrambled. Twenty hours, after all. Why didn’t this happen? Once again, the answer, I think, should be sought not in technology but in the structure of the Russian vertical of power itself. Imagine officials at all levels, from the Kremlin to Omsk. To organize any kind of defense system, someone has to take the initiative: find resources, involve unusual, non-system people who might be able to solve such tasks, although it’s not certain. Coordinate it with a dozen agencies, agree on coordination without calls to Moscow, cover everything with paperwork so as not to later be prosecuted for misuse of funds. And even after all that, there is still a high chance the drone will break through — and then they will have to figure out how exactly it got through and rebuild the defense again. But the main question is — who will be responsible for the first failure? That very initiative-taking official who made the decision himself? He is supposed to be held accountable for the failure. So he will be removed. By the way, until he showed up, everything was calm, Ukrainian drones weren’t arriving, and as soon as he started being active — they started arriving immediately. Maybe he’s an SBU agent, huh? Let’s be honest — would you, in his place, take on defending an oil refinery?” — Russian political blogger Igor Dimitriev Video: Exilenova+

Natalka

42,788 views • 1 month ago

Copepods, could stop climate change 5 gigatons of these 1mm-sized zooplankton called COPEPODS live in all the world’s Oceans. This is equivalent to 17 million 747 jets, and if you laid the jets end to end, they would go around the planet 31 times. The copepods migrate from around 200m below the ocean surface every night to feed on plants (phytoplankton) at the surface. It is the greatest mass migration of animals on the planet, and it happens twice a day. The vertical motion of the copepods moves just about as much water as the moon and the tides. The copepods eat 30 times more carbon than humanity generates from burning fossil fuels, and about 6%, or 3 gigatons, of their dead bodies and poop end up in the world’s largest carbon bank, the Abyss. The Abyss contains 500m to 1000’s of meters thick layer of organic carbon / mineral sludge with an area greater area than dry land on the planet. Yet humanity has wiped out more than 50% of marine plankton productivity over the last 70 years due to chemical and particle pollution. We have also wiped out 50% of Arctic krill, which are just as important. and we are now even contemplating dredging the ocean floor! We would not have had climate change if we had not poisoned and destroyed most of the world’s oceans. By 2045, the destruction will be complete unless we act now to stop the inevitable annihilation of nature and life on Earth. Let’s put things into perspective, in comparison to protecting nature, carbon mitigation, windmills and electric cars are almost a joke. Copepods churn the oceans; Bioclimatic climate change: this report provides what we consider to be the most accurate mechanism for climate disruption, and it’s not(only) carbon dioxide; via Howard Dryden

Thomas Reis

23,651 views • 8 months ago

Tuesday, April 14, 2026 at 6:52 AM: What you have witnessed yesterday and this past weekend across California and parts of Southern California is the birth pains of an El Niño development and the ongoing escalation the warming of the Pacific torrential rains came through the San Fernando Valley with such strong, thunderstorms that it caused significant flooding in the Sherman Oaks, Universal City area around 1:05 PM - 1:35 PM yesterday on April 13, 2026. This powerful storm packed winds gusts of over 50 mph and it’s a true testament that we are no longer in a pattern that brings rain in just winter time but is now extending into April and May and beyond with that said we have another storm on the heels that will be arriving very quickly on April 21 - 27, 2026. The next storm will also bring more heavy rain, thunder, and lightning, and yes, more snowfall to the local mountains. As the Pacific continues to warm, the weather will become more drastic with extreme heat waves and more unusual severe rain events for California. This situation will get quite scary if it continues to verify by the end of October and November with the super El Niño development and the atmosphere connecting something that we’ve not seen since 1982, 1997/ 1998. The main Marshall Islands low axis is already gearing up for this major event this year which you’ve seen an example already. The flooding in the Hawaiian islands. Typhoon Sinlaku has now hit the Guam region with a category five status this early in April all due to the warming of the Pacific and the emergence of El Niño. #CAwx

Jason D Farhang

28,670 views • 4 months ago

The next iPhone will cost more, and the reason has almost nothing to do with Apple. The chip that stores your photos cost Apple about 13 dollars last year. This year it runs around 51. Multiply that across every phone, laptop, and console on earth, and you are looking at the first consumer bill for the AI boom, arriving in the pocket of someone who never asked for it. Tim Cook, who has run Apple's supply chain for forty years, called it a hundred-year flood, something he has never seen. Memory prices have quadrupled in places. The cause is brutally simple. AI data centers are now expected to swallow roughly 70 percent of the world's memory production this year. Seven chips in ten go to server farms. Phones, cars, and laptops fight over the three that are left. This is one force wearing two faces. The same AI demand making the device in your hand more expensive is minting record fortunes for the handful of companies that feed it. Memory makers in Seoul just hit all-time highs in the same week Apple warned you to brace for higher prices. The shortage and the windfall are the identical event, seen from opposite ends. Then comes the part almost no one traces all the way down. Beneath the chips sit rare earth minerals, and one country controls them. China processes around 90 percent of the world's rare earths and makes roughly 94 percent of the high-performance magnets that spin inside every fab and cooling system. The polishing compound that finishes a wafer, the magnets in the machines that build it, run through Beijing. And through 2025, China has been turning that grip into leverage, licensing what leaves. So the chain is complete. AI wants memory, memory needs minerals, and the minerals answer to one government. The price of your phone is now a foreign policy.

Shanaka Anslem Perera ⚡

58,900 views • 1 month ago

I lost some of my faith in people yesterday. Do you all remember this story of the woman we found on the road carrying a dead child? Around 3pm yesterday while I was at the hospital, I got a call from Ope Ola Grace. She sounded really confused. I asked what’s wrong then she said she saw this woman at Lafenwa begging for alms among the beggars. I told her to wait there and make sure she doesn’t leave, that I am on my way to confirm with my eyes because it can’t be possible. I got there with Seeker of Truth and it was indeed true. I couldn’t believe what I saw. How’s this possible?? We set up a business worth around N300k for her last December, gave her money, gave her husband extra money to keep. Enrolled her kids (all 3 of them) in school, supplied all needed school materials for one year. Bought at least 3 months worth of food supply for them as well. The Hon Commissioner for women affairs Hon. Motunrayo Adijat Adeleye also sent delegates to her with lots of needed items; 25kg bags of rice twice in the last 5 months, 10 crates of soft drink for the wife in January. The commissioner also made sure that her husband was among the 100 beneficiaries of the N100,000 disability grant of the RHI shared on the 17th of April by First Lady Remi Tinubu in Abeokuta. He confirmed that he received the N100k the same day. I called her at the spot to show her the woman and she was confused too. Like, “Jack, what else could we have done?” I asked people there, they said she’s been begging with them for more than a month. When I explained in details all the help we have provided for her in the last 5 months, they got angry, saying she should leave. That’s not even the worst part of this story. The worst, I fear, is she appears pregnant again. However she insisted she’s not, that she just ate eba, that’s why her stomach is big. We took her back home, the husband (visually impaired as I stated then) said he was not aware that she has been begging, and he can’t see, so no way to confirm if she’s pregnant. Everyone in her community said she goes out for 3-4hours everyday when the kids have gone to school to get ‘supplies’ for their mini-stall. They said some other troubling things about her that I won’t want to share here. I am confused on what to do next.

Man of Letters.

856,625 views • 2 years ago

The discourse around the Eze penalty last night is fascinating. If nothing else it provides Arteta with an excuse as to how his team has been hard done by and robbed. He loves excuses. It’s a fascinating situation because I actually think the right outcome was reached albeit through the wrong process. Once given on the field under the current rules it shouldn't have been overturned. For that Arsenal can feel aggrieved. Don't forget Arsenal were the beneficiaries of an incredibly soft penalty in Leverkusen. It wasn’t overturned. I find the attached video interesting because it clearly shows how minimal the contact is. The defender doesn’t pin Ezes foot to the ground. Doesn’t smash into it. It brushes down the side of it. It’s where the still pictures of it were wildly misleading. Are we really saying that contact such as that is worthy of a penalty? What’s clear in the video is that Eze has absolutely made the most of the slight contact. I love the straight left leg. A very natural position. It’s a brilliant dive and normally it would have been rewarded. By saying that is a stone wall penalty all we are doing is encouraging such theatrics and cheating. Whenever you hear the words “that was clever” by a commentator they are intimating the player has cheated/made the most of it. We complain about refs all the time but what chance do they have when players are doing stuff like this. Until players are punished properly there is no disincentive for players to keep doing this stuff. I also find it fascinating when you have a foot brushed like this. When you compare it to all the holding/pushing/grappling at other times. Sometimes a contact sport and others not. Is this really what football has become?

Luke Paton

104,531 views • 3 months ago