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[Madman198237]

If it works, or even if it only partly works, this hydrogen + boron reaction may not be the only possible one. It's possible that the idea itself could spawn a new way of looking at the problem. Ideally you could do something with the helium by-product, and fuse to larger elements.

Fusing things heavier than hydrogen takes increasingly extreme conditions. The reason we typically try for helium fusion is because the proton-proton chain's initial reaction is really, really, REALLY hard to make happen, so difficult we can't even measure the reaction's cross section experimentally. Fusing heavier elements involves overcoming increasingly large Coulomb barriers with processes that are highly temperature dependent (we're talking about processes with exponents like T⁴⁰) and thus tend to be rather unstable when you don't have an entire star pressing down on the fusion region to keep things from getting out of hand.

It would be nice to be able to just decide we want some more [element] and order up a fusion reactor to make some, but not only would it be a rather slow process to get meaningful amounts of said material, you also have to hope that most or all the processes necessary in said hypothetical super-reactor don't go spewing neutrons all over the place, as that can either contaminate everything you make with radioactive isotopes or outright alter the materials you're trying to fuse and thus reducing output.

And of course instead of the usual suggestion of a reactor fusing helium that works "like the inside of the Sun", you'd need a reactor capable of simulating the inside of not just the Sun, but a star much, much larger than the Sun and with correspondingly more ridiculous pressures, temperatures, and densities.

[Max™]

Why doesn't someone just give Columbo another case to solve so we can get our fusion burn on?

[Reelya]

This is kinda neat too:

https://science.slashdot.org/story/20/02/29/0522239/some-clever-farmers-are-harvesting-metals-from-plants

The plants not only collect the soil's minerals into their bodies but seem to hoard them to "ridiculous" levels, said Alan Baker, a visiting botany professor at the University of Melbourne
...
On a plot of land rented from a rural village on the Malaysian side of the island of Borneo, Dr. Baker and an international team of colleagues have proved it at small scale. Every six to 12 months, a farmer shaves off one foot of growth from these nickel-hyper-accumulating plants and either burns or squeezes the metal out. After a short purification, farmers could hold in their hands roughly 500 pounds of nickel citrate, potentially worth thousands of dollars on international markets.
...
[T]he technology has the additional value of enabling areas with toxic soils to be made productive...

The good thing is if it's that easy to get and worth thousands of dollars then they'll start extracting it, the price will go down, and the industrially mined version will be priced out of the market.

The sad part is this:

Now, after decades behind the lock and key of patents, Dr. Baker said, "the brakes are off the system."

Apparently we could have been doing this decades ago, except someone was sitting on the patents. Mining companies, obviously.

[Trekkin]

Apparently we could have been doing this decades ago, except someone was sitting on the patents. Mining companies, obviously.

The assignee for the patent on nickel phytomining (US5711784A) is the University of Maryland (and, later, the University of Sheffield).

[wierd]

Perverse incentives in action


Researchers need money to do research.  The government does not want to pay them. The university they work for, does not really want to pay them.  What is a starving scientist to do?

Oh right-- Patent their discoveries, in the hopes that somebody wants to develop it, so that they can get some additional funding to do more research.  But nope, nobody will touch it.



I personally think that money for fundamental research should be increased, but then again, I clearly support the ivory tower moon-myth conspiracy that is promulgating false claims of corona virus being very near epidemic proportions and seriously dangerous, in order to circumvent the rise of God Emperor Trump for another 4 years with yet another hoax.



Damn... I need to get that sarcasm feature fixed-- I think it just about caused an explosion there.

[Kagus]

Damn... I need to get that sarcasm feature fixed-- I think it just about caused an explosion there.

Depending on the size of the energy investment versus the explosive power of the result, you may want to patent it instead.

[Reelya]

I thought this was pretty cool:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fu03F-Iah8 (~5 minutes)

A small company built an Archimedes Screw set-up but rotated the casing instead of the screw itself. It turned out that this was a pretty awesome set up with a number of advantages, but somehow nobody thought of it before, so now they have a patent on the design, and are selling them worldwide. It's kind of awesome that there are still some extremely basic engineering ideas out there yet to be found, but just nobody thought to try them before.

[Iduno]

I would expect a lot of extra friction from that method, which is probably why nobody has gotten it to work before.

[Reelya]

I don't know about that, apparently the method damages the material being moved less than rotating the screw does. Maybe that's because the force is spread around the whole thing, whereas with rotating the screw you're basically trying to force it to scrape its way up against the outer cylinder. They mention in the video that one of the advantages of this is that it produces much less dust.

[bloop_bleep]

I would expect a lot of extra friction from that method, which is probably why nobody has gotten it to work before.

Well, I mean, the relative motion of the casing and the screw is the same, so I don't see why there should be. Or do you mean erosion from the water?

[Reelya]

I would expect a lot of extra friction from that method, which is probably why nobody has gotten it to work before.

Also, it kind of seems more that nobody has actually tried this before, rather than not "gotten it to work". It's a paradigm shift, that's why these guys were able to patent it so easily. You can patent an idea without having it working yet.

[Iduno]

I would expect a lot of extra friction from that method, which is probably why nobody has gotten it to work before.

Well, I mean, the relative motion of the casing and the screw is the same, so I don't see why there should be. Or do you mean erosion from the water?

Larger surface area (because it has to be large enough to fit around the screw), and also has frictional forces acting on it from both sides.

I would expect a lot of extra friction from that method, which is probably why nobody has gotten it to work before.

Also, it kind of seems more that nobody has actually tried this before, rather than not "gotten it to work". It's a paradigm shift, that's why these guys were able to patent it so easily. You can patent an idea without having it working yet.

I had a counter-argument for that, but I remembered the parachute that attaches under your chin, so you can safely* jump out of a burning building.

*The jumping part is as safe as it always was. The part where your head lands significantly later than the rest of you is an issue.

[McTraveller]

Mechanical safety comes to mind: external moving parts are Bad Things.

Otherwise - it's definitely a neat alternative!

I think it's slightly more complex to manufacture too; a traditional screw doesn't need "scoops" for inlets but just needs holes.

[Reelya]

If you look at the video, the scoops are really just a couple of holes on the sides. It really looks like that, at most you would want the metal slightly bent at the bottom so that it's more efficient to bring in the material.

[Max™]

Drilling a hole in metal is harder than just snipping out a chunk of similar size, if all you need is an opening to pass something through I'd rather grab the snips than fiddle with my carbide bits and risk chipping one.

Source: I've done metalworking by hand for saws and some other tools, cutting is always easier and faster than drilling unless you've scaled drilling up sufficiently you'd have to retool for drillwork.

The rotating case drill method makes sense, same as pouring sand on a chick trapped in a pipe, the chick keeps moving to stay on top and poof it's out.

You could also arrange a drivetrain for spinning a case from the side at any point along the case, but a drill basically has to be spun from the inlet or outlet ends, which allows interesting new setups.