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[PTTG??]

https://tech.slashdot.org/story/17/02/21/2020252/ups-develops-rolling-warehouse-system-in-which-drones-are-launched-from-atop-trucks
UPS wants to have trucks with drone fleets on them that do the actual delivery. Basically a truck drone aircraft carrier. Man, that's a step back from Amazon's airships with drones flying warehouse idea. Be more ambitious UPS, orbital drop pods.

Retroviruses. Ambient retroviruses.

The infect and genetically engineer a plant or animal nearby you to turn into a biomechanical factory to produce your ordered item on demand. In order to get the viruses distributed, UPS builds a network of gene printers on telephone poles all over the US.

[Bumber]

Retroviruses. Ambient retroviruses.

The infect and genetically engineer a plant or animal nearby you to turn into a biomechanical factory to produce your ordered item on demand. In order to get the viruses distributed, UPS builds a network of gene printers on telephone poles all over the US.

Why settle for near you? What if you need something printed as you walk?

[Reelya]

Not taking it far enough. Rather than your bio-machine factories it would be easier to do this:

The gene manipulation viruses bypass the plants and animals to infect humans instead. They condition your brain to both believe that you wanted, and received a product from Amazon which you used and either disposed of or gave away / on-sold. Then they hit you with a bill and you're happy to pay it. Total Recall style.

[Jopax]

http://affinelayer.com/pixsrv/index.html

It's rather limited at the moment, but holy shit it works, and almost gets passable results in some cases, this is both awesome and sligthly scary at the same time.

[Reelya]

Huh, that's really awesome. I can see a lot of future uses for that. Artists beware.

I have a good use for that: an intelligent manga colorizer. Imagine if you created a training set of millions of images from anime and colored manga, decolorized them then trained it to recolorize. Then you should be able to give it mangas it's never seen before and see what comes out the other side.

[PTTG??]

I'd be interested in seeing what happens if you give it just dialog as input and just images as the output.

[Max™]

Wow...

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

There's a guy doing a vr run of mirrors edge I think, who kinda sums up my response here: "OH MERCIFUL JESUS! This has bad news written all over it."

[Reelya]

https://news.slashdot.org/story/17/02/25/1720222/professors-claim-passive-cooling-breakthrough-via-plastic-film

What if you could cool buildings without using electricity? charlesj68 brings word of "the development of a plastic film by two professors at the University of Colorado in Boulder that provides a passive cooling effect."
The film contains embedded glass beads that absorb and emit infrared in a wavelength that is not blocked by the atmosphere. Combining this with half-silvering to keep the sun from being the source of infrared absorption on the part of the beads, and you have a way of pumping heat at a claimed rate of 93 watts per square meter.

The film is cheap to produce -- about 50 cents per square meter -- and could create indoor temperatures of 68 degrees when it's 98.6 outside. "All the work is done by the huge temperature difference, about 290C, between the surface of the Earth and that of outer space," reports The Economist.

That's cool. Passively absorbing infra-red and using space itself as a heat-sink. That's like a double-win vs global warming.

[Egan_BW]

Wrap your food in that foil and you won't even have to put it in the fridge!

[PTTG??]

This sounds fascinating! I'd only be concerned about what happens long-term with the stuff, but still, glass microbeads are just sand grains, nothing like plastic microbeads, right?

For a free-cooling system, it actually makes a lot of thermodynamic sense.

[Max™]

Why does the sciencemag article say 10 C and the economist article say 17 C?

The colorado.edu article doesn't mention either.

Though I'm wondering about the downwelling solar infrared, but at minimum this'll be handy at night, it'll be handy if you dump heat into it and shield from direct solar IR, but this isn't just "stick a film on something and it will cool it!" so much as "arrange this with the right shielding and heat transfer and you can use it to dump IR" it seems.

[Reelya]

Why does the sciencemag article say 10 C and the economist article say 17 C?

The colorado.edu article doesn't mention either.

But the Colorado.edu article references the actual paper, which is hosted at:
http://science.sciencemag.org/content/early/2017/02/08/science.aai7899
Colorado.edu is therefore not the primary source, sciencemag is. All three articles point back at the preceding paper.

That paper is also linked on the other sciencemag article in the very sentence that mentions 10 degree cooling.

The economist mentions:

The team estimates that 20 square metres of their film, placed atop an average American house, would be enough to keep the internal temperature at 20°C on a day when it was 37°C outside.

Which is a relative cooling of 17 degrees, but only when the temperature is 37 degrees. That's not necessarily a contradiction with 10 degrees of cooling on average. Perhaps the cooling effect is greater on a hotter than average day.

[Max™]

Yeah, but the research team is based at the Colorado University, and I don't have access to the science paper itself, so I was just curious why they're giving a bunch of different values because I couldn't track down the actual paper itself (fucking paywalled science wtf) and wondered if there was one I had missed.

[Reelya]

Googling something else I came across this story:
http://www.discovery.com/dscovrd/tech/town-rejects-solar-panels-that-would-suck-up-all-the-energy-from-the-sun/

A North Carolina town council approved a sweeping moratorium on solar power development after residents expressed fears that solar panels cause cancer and drain the sun's energy, which would leave their town dark and devoid of plant life.

The Woodland Town Council was meeting to re-zone land for a proposed solar power project from Strata Solar Company. During the meeting, a retired science teacher raised concerns "that photosynthesis, which depends upon sunlight, would not happen and would keep the plants from growing," local newspaper The Roanoke-Chowan News-Herald reports.

She attempted to substantiate to her claim by adding that she had "observed areas near solar panels where the plants are brown and dead because they did not get enough sunlight."

I checked this out because I was sure it had to be a hoax story, but it looks real.

[redwallzyl]

i saw that at least a year ago. the stupid level is impressive though.