#advance materials

[mindblowingscience]

Researchers at the Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation (CABBI) have achieved a significant breakthrough that could lead to better—and greener—agricultural chemicals and everyday products. Using a process that combines natural enzymes and light, the team from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign developed an eco-friendly way to precisely mix fluorine, an important additive, into chemicals called olefins—hydrocarbons used in a vast array of products, from detergents to fuels to medicines. This groundbreaking method offers an efficient new strategy for creating high-value chemicals with potential applications in agrochemicals, pharmaceuticals, renewable fuels, and more.

Continue Reading.

[dokushoclub]

Short Story Collections for Learning Japanese

Short stories are very popular with language learners – and rightly so. Being able to finish even a short tale aimed at native speakers will feel like a great accomplishment.

I had a look at three approaches for intermediate and advanced learners to enjoy Japanese short stories. For each I can also recommend a few matching short story collections:

Short Stories in Easy Japanese

Japanese Short Stories with English Annotations

Parallel Readers

I give my more detailed thoughts on all these short story collections for learning Japanese in my blog post. You can find it here:

[reasonsforhope]

Paywall free version! LEGALLY paywall free version, even!

“Nearly any material can be used to turn the energy in air humidity into electricity, scientists found in a discovery that could lead to continuously producing clean energy with little pollution.

The research, published in a paper in Advanced Materials, builds on 2020 work that first showed energy could be pulled from the moisture in the air using material harvested from bacteria. The new study shows nearly any material can be used, like wood or silicon, as long as it can be smashed into small particles and remade with microscopic pores. But there are many questions about how to scale the product.

“What we have invented, you can imagine it’s like a small-scale, man-made cloud,” said Jun Yao, a professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and the senior author of the study. “This is really a very easily accessible, enormous source of continuous clean electricity. Imagine having clean electricity available wherever you go.”

That could include a forest, while hiking on a mountain, in a desert, in a rural village or on the road.

The air-powered generator, known as an “Air-gen,” would offer continuous clean electricity since it uses the energy from humidity, which is always present, rather than depending on the sun or wind. Unlike solar panels or wind turbines, which need specific environments to thrive, Air-gens could conceivably go anywhere, Yao said.

Less humidity, though, would mean less energy could be harvested, he added. Winters, with dryer air, would produce less energy than summers.

The device, the size of a fingernail and thinner than a single hair, is dotted with tiny holes known as nanopores. The holes have a diameter smaller than 100 nanometers, or less than a thousandth of the width of a strand of human hair.

The tiny holes allow the water in the air to pass through in a way that would create a charge imbalance in the upper and lower parts of the device, effectively creating a battery that runs continuously.

“We are opening up a wide door for harvesting clean electricity from thin air,” Xiaomeng Liu, another author and a UMass engineering graduate student, said in a statement.

While one prototype only produces a small amount of energy — almost enough to power a dot of light on a big screen — because of its size, Yao said Air-gens can be stacked on top of each other, potentially with spaces of air in between. Storing the electricity is a separate issue, he added.

Yao estimated that roughly 1 billion Air-gens, stacked to be roughly the size of a refrigerator, could produce a kilowatt and partly power a home in ideal conditions. The team hopes to lower both the number of devices needed and the space they take up by making the tool more efficient. Doing that could be a challenge.

The scientists first must work out which material would be most efficient to use in different climates. Eventually, Yao said he hopes to develop a strategy to make the device bigger without blocking the humidity that can be captured. He also wants to figure out how to stack the devices on top of each other effectively and how to engineer the Air-gen so the same size device captures more energy.

It’s not clear how long that will take.

“Once we optimize this, you can put it anywhere,” Yao said.

It could be embedded in wall paint in a home, made at a larger scale in unused space in a city or littered throughout an office’s hard-to-get-to spaces. And because it can use nearly any material, it could extract less from the environment than other renewable forms of energy.

“The entire earth is covered with a thick layer of humidity,” Yao said. “It’s an enormous source of clean energy. This is just the beginning in making use of that.””

-via The Washington Post, 5/26/23

[bestworstcase]

Anything from Volumes 1-3 that is setup that you don't think is given enough attention or respect for good setup?

Sidenote to this:

Open seat with no person in it + Salem having someone looking for the Choice Relic was hinting at Summer Rose. Did we have anything hinting at her pre Beacon's Fall or just things that she fits given additional context?

regarding summer specifically, while i wouldn’t call them hints per se, there are a handful of beats in v1-3 that smell like foreshadowing to me:

the first is “she was right about you; such arrogance.” – cinder might well be referring to salem here, of course. however. what strikes me about this remark is that arrogance is not a characteristic that salem seems to perceive in ozma; rather she describes him, in her soliloquies and songs, as a self-destructive, deceitful, manipulative fool blinded and trapped by his faith in the old gods. cowardly. fallen from grace. think of what she says to oz in 8.9—look how you’ve diminished, how you’ve lessened yourself—she sees him groveling at the feet of tyrannical monsters and sees debasement.

does it follow for salem to characterize ozpin to cinder as, primarily, arrogant? i’m not convinced it does. but summer rose? well… hm. consider, also, that the full line is “this whole time, right beneath our feet… she was right about you; such arrogance…” <- i think it is more likely than not that “she” is someone inside the brackets of “our,” and in context “our” is either [cinder + ozpin] or [cinder + her associates physically present at beacon].

in the event that “she” is not part of “our” the more naturalistic phrasing is “beneath our feet… salem was right about you” – because “she” otherwise has no antecedent. of course, some allowance here for this to be a narrative choice not to name salem yet, but we’re one (1) episode off from revealing her face and by this point we’ve known for a while that cinder works for someone else, so the choice to drop the name here or in the volume credits is of fairly trivial importance. unless of course cinder isn’t talking about salem.

second: “Oh! We've also stopped some bad guys, too! I guess it's like they say: "like mother, like daughter"! I still wonder why Ozpin let me into the school early…” [laugh track] – obv this part of ruby’s address to summer’s memorial headstone foreshadows ozpin’s conspiracy and team strq’s involvement therein. but it also foreshadows this exchange:

RUBY: We don’t have to kill you to stop you, and we will stop you. SALEM: Your mother said those words to me… she was wrong, too.

and i think it bears pointing out that ruby is wrong here, and later in the volume qrow specifically calls attention to this and lays out why she’s wrong. team rwby didn’t stop the bad guys; they cut off one avenue of attack and cinder circled around from a new direction that took advantage of torchwick’s imprisonment, and this also resulted in the public break between ozpin and ironwood which eroded the cohesion of the inner circle. ergo, ruby thinks she stopped the bad guys but in the long run the consequences of the breach all benefited salem.

looks into the camera like im on the office.

like mother, like daughter!!!

further, that sequence of events ultimately leads to the final confrontation between her and torchwick – wherein he declares “if you can’t beat them, join ’em,” and shortly gets eaten by a grimm right after making it clear that he intends to kill her. torchwick’s death is thematically motivated – a narrative rejection of his cynical every-man-for-himself, dog-eats-dog outlook – but consider that:

summer rose, if she is indeed salem’s willing agent, is certainly at beacon tonight – because she’d be the one who stayed behind to hold the fort.

summer is thus the one salem instructs to “reinforce our numbers at beacon,” meaning the grimm; that instruction only makes sense if the person receiving it can communicate with or command grimm. ergo, summer must have some degree of control over grimm.

ruby is disarmed and on the ground getting beaten by a man who fully intends to kill her, and a grimm swoops down out of nowhere to eliminate him faster than he can blinks. and then… the grimm rears up, roaring at her, and comes down with a sweep of its wings that creates a blast of air that pushes her away. that isn’t aggression!! that’s a defensive threat display!! (the feilong in v4 does the exact same thing – trying to push the boat away). it’s ruby who charges the gryphon, and while it lunges forward in reaction to her charge, all that happens is she gets her feet on its head and pushes off to leap over it, and the grimm goes fucking flying so hard it crashes into the ship’s interior and never emerges. the point being,

math.

it’s plausible that the grimm was drawn to torchwick’s murderous rage. but the way it behaves immediately after it swallows him – that very clear “get away from me please” body language, and ruby -apparently- kicking a grimm the size of a goddamned clydesdale dozens of feet and then through the hull of a literal warship? ruby is strong, but she’s not… that strong. but if the grimm didn’t want to engage her and propelled itself under and past her at the same time as she vaulted off its head? that would explain what happens perfectly – ruby’s kick altered its launch trajectory just enough that it crashed.

minutes later, someone loyal to salem scraped a very badly injured cinder off the top of beacon tower and left ruby alive where qrow would find her. salem’s vested interest in keeping ruby alive is VISIBLE throughout the battle for beacon, and notably include a perfect opportunity to capture her while she’s in a coma atop beacon tower that isn’t taken – suggesting that salem makes her singular attempt to capture ruby solely to reassure cinder that Something is being Done.

and if summer rose has command over grimm and was at beacon that night… the gryphon’s behavior is exactly what i’d expect if all the grimm had marching orders to insure this one girl in particular – the spitting image of their commander – doesn’t come to serious harm. there’s a nonzero chance that gryphon did in fact save ruby On Purpose!

…and that happens in the context of a fight between ruby and the bad guy she thought she stopped (but she was wrong), who joined salem because “if you can’t beat em, join em.” (salem voice) she was wrong, too…

also

<- like mother like daughter. summer had a nevermore’s eye view of the battle for beacon, in this essay i will –

third: this one is something i didn’t really Think About until v9 and specifically the v9 ost dropping, but some of the things cinder says in v2-3 strike me as like – she got that from summer im sure of it. for example, in midnight, cinder’s view of huntsmen is that they’re free, they have power, they can go anywhere and do whatever they want, and rhodes never contradicts this. where did she get “huntsmen and huntresses should conduct themselves with honor and mercy”? who taught her the aspirational moral ideal?

summer rose, maybe.

but in the deeper sense,

where did cinder get the ‘destiny’ conceit? her underlying beliefs about how the world is are a product of her childhood, but the overt framing of fate/destiny isn’t present in midnight; nor has salem ever spoken of destiny and her philosophical views are in many ways a rejection of destiny – salem does not believe in fate, she is the woman who dedicated her life to toppling the gods.

and on close examination this looks like yet another suspiciously summer rose shaped hole!! “you’re special, ruby […] special the way your mom was special […] it was said that those born with silver eyes were destined to lead the life of a warrior.” – in after the fall, ozpin gives coco an entire pep talk whose central conceit is embracing and submitting to the turns of fate – sacrifice “show them gods and deities/blind and keep the people on their knees” & guide my way “you were born to hypnotize them all/they all said their prayers/can you hear me up there?”

cinder, of pyrrha: “people assume she’s fated for victory, when she's really taking fate into her own hands. interesting. add her to the list.” & “it’s not about overpowering the enemy; it’s about taking away what power they have.”

<- that second statement is salem’s strategic doctrine, through and through. but the ‘power’ cinder is talking about here is derived through manipulating the perception of destiny; the self-fulfilling prophecy. the invincible girl cannot be touched because she makes subtle adjustments to insure that no one is able to try. it is pyrrha’s belief in destiny that destroys her, as it destroys ozma. ozpin invokes fate to justify and explain his choices. those born with silver eyes are destined to lead the lives of warriors.

summer rose was destined to live and die fighting the grimm – so the world promised her. maybe she believed, maybe she felt like she had no choice but to accept her prescribed fate. until she met salem, and took fate into her own hands. made a choice. broke the chains. it’s about taking away what power they have, like salem did when she tore the scales from summer’s eyes, like summer did when she refused her destiny and joined hands with the grimm instead.

what does summer rose look like through cinder’s eyes? she was a huntress. she was literally destined to be one of the greatest huntresses in history, a hero, the shining pillar upholding the world order that chose the enslavement of children as a fair price for peace. fate dictated that she be the icon, the idol, the embodiment of the system that brutalized and subjugated cinder – she had every privilege cinder could ever dream of, freedom and security and a home, a loving family – and she chose to walk away.

and if they talked about that like, ever, and specifically if summer talked about that warrior’s destiny as a cage, a curse she had to escape – is it any wonder that cinder would adopt that framing to make sense of what happened to her? if summer rose was fated to stand at the pinnacle, then does it not follow that cinder fall was fated to be ground into the foundations? and likewise, if summer rose can shatter her pedestal and fall from grace, then cinder fall can shatter her chains and rise. summer proves that the idea of destiny is powerful but not inviolate. and it is hollow, it is a lie, a fiction, and that means it can be taken away. revealed as a deception. destroyed.

anyway

to the broader question

i think people really, really do not give the jaundice arc enough credit for the long-term set up it’s doing.

(or the very overt textual statement from THE HISTORY PROFESSOR! placing the blame for the violent radicalization of the white fang squarely on human bigotry and persecution of faunus in general; the white fang arc is clunky and hamstrung by the inadequacy of its vocabulary, but the fandom talking point that the narrative perspective on this subject has “evolved” or “improved” is just. not true. v1 is very emphatically clear that 1. terroristic violence is not activism, 2. ascribing the terroristic violence of a few to an entire minority group to rationalize bigotry is bigoted in and of itself and completely unacceptable, and 3. violent radicalization is created through relentless discrimination and hate, which creates a self-reinforcing circle wherein the justifiable outrage of the persecuted outgroup and the extreme violent reactions provoked by the persecution are distorted into a justification for further persecution by those of the in-group who materially benefit from perpetuating this cycle!!! all of this is explained in an almost afterschool special manner by the main character faunus rights activist and the history professor!!! in volume one!!! what changed is that the writers developed the skill and vocabulary necessary to weave these ideas into their storytelling in a more effective and more cogent way!!! literally begging the rwby fandom to start listening to the actual words the characters say)

ahem. the jaundice arc lays so much of the groundwork for jaune’s and ruby’s character arcs reaching all the way to v9 and undoubtedly beyond; it sets up the first pieces of the ozlem fractal; it foreshadows the white fang arc and sets up blake’s character arc of self-reclamation and figuring out how she wants to use her voice as an activist; it draws attention to the misogynistic cultural norms that define and are defined by the history between ozma and salem; it lays the foundation for the scene in v2 where ozpin questions blake, which hits the way it does because we have the context of anti-faunus harassment occurring openly at ozpin’s school and nobody doing anything about it, and by extension is the first stroke of the salem-faunus connection that is almost certainly the keystone holding the entire narrative together because it is her relation to the faunus that provides the key to decipher the lost fable.

the jaundice arc is a crucial load-bearing pillar that supports the entire narrative and people revile it because nobody in this fandom can be fucking normal about jaune. lmao

[skitskatdacat63]

Happy Birthday to Seb, and Seb only.

+ some explanations

I realized as I was making this, some of the little stuff probably only makes sense to me, and maybe people who have been following me for a while atp. So I wanted to explain some of the little details I included cause I really love them!!

First of all, I wanted to incude my original sketch for this(from like 5 hours ago lmfao), bcs I find it sooooo cute. Look at him!! Little guy!

I. Fernando's Gift

This is of course a reference to the Fernando teddy bear, but more specifically to the vettonso comic with the bear I drew a while ago. As you can see from my sketch, this is the first gift I came up, which I'm pretty happy about!! It's always so cute to me no matter its form. Though...I don't think teddy bears existed yet in the early 1700s, but Fernando found a way, okay? I like to think Fernando is all gruff in the beginning, but gives Seb this or something similar and remarks "to keep you company when I'm back in Spain," and then he has to pretend he has food poisoning rather than living with having said something so sappy.

II. Mark's Gift

I don't think this is really a reference to any specific post of mine. Dog!Mark is just an important Mark characterization in general, but especially in boy king au where he is really reduced to the status of dog by virtue of his upbringing and vocation. He definitely plays this off as wanting Seb to get another hunting dog(something he advocates for often. Seb knows it's entirely self motivated but loves to humor him bcs its cute to see how much he loves dogs. Well Seb loves dogs too, one dog in particular-)

III. Jenson's Gift

AAAAHHHH I'm so proud of this one bcs of how many leves there are to it!! I couldn't for the life of me think of what Jense would gift him but then I remembered I characterize him as horse obsessed(read: ye olde carfucker.) So this is basically the ye olde version of him getting Seb ultra detailed minatures of his cars. HOWEVER this is also a callback to one of my favorite posts I've ever made, back when I translated Seb's car names into Latin. So it was fun to actually get to canonize that in a way. ALSO! BTW! Those horses are specifically Lipizzans, which are a very iconic horse breed in the Habsburg Empire and Vienna specifically. A horse breed sought after by the Habsburgs for both war but also riding schools, and they still remain as the breed of horse trained in Vienna's Spanish Riding School today. The emperor Seb is based on comissioned the school's main riding hall, and his portrait still hangs above where the riders enter. So I thought that was a fun little easter egg to include!

Also the characterization in this is so funny. I guess I'd consider them a polycule, like they're a unit and all have interesting relationships between each other. But one of the main focuses is the kinda love triangle between sebmarknando. Like Mark and Fernando constantly fighting for Seb'cs undivided affection and attention. But as per usual, Jenson, who is on the sidelines, swoops in effortlessly with the most perfect gift ever. I feel like he understands and gets along with Seb the best out of the three, but just doesn't want to deal with such a complicated thing so he's satisfied being a bit distant(he secretly takes a lot of joy one-upping the other two. It's impossible to not crave your ruler's attention, no?)

[abybweisse]

Blood Work (p1), Elitism, transmutation, and religious fear

⚠️ long post ⚠️

So, I now have a copy of Blood Work: A Tale of Medicine and Murder in the Scientific Revolution, by Holly Tucker. It's a reference for Yana-san, as she mentioned it in her old tuna.be blog around the start of the blue arc.

I see in the list of important people a mention of the real Dr. Moreau, and there's a later chapter about chimeras... so I know I'll be talking about that some, over this series of posts.

It's important here, too, because when researchers were first attempting blood transfusions in the 17th century, people were terrified about receiving blood from animals, like sheep and cattle. They thought that animal blood would transmute humans into human-animal hybrids. Even in the 20th century, some white people were terrified of receiving blood from black people, because they thought the blood could effect the race of their future children or grandchildren. Nonsense, of course, but they didn't understand.

17th century blood transfusions were generally performed by taking blood from a lamb or a calf. The barbers/physicians/researchers had no clue about blood types. Jean-Baptiste Denis successfully transfused blood from a lamb into a teenage patient. Then he made several successful attempts at transfusing from a calf to a "madman". The guy later died, and Denis was blamed. Turns out some doctors who didn't want him to succeed had actually poisoned that second subject with arsenic.

It wasn't even a matter of those physicians wanting his experiments to fail while theirs worked; no, they simply didn't want blood transfusions to become a practice. They were afraid of transmutation from animal blood, and they were afraid of what animal-to-human blood transfusions would reveal about humanity -- that we are truly just animals, too. The trial against Denis ended research into blood transfusions for about 150 years.

Blood types were still unknown in the late 18th century, when a physician wanted to attempt to revive George Washington's largely exsanguinated corpse with a transfusion of lamb's blood. FYI, he died on a December 14th, just like Prince Albert. His family refused the offer only because they feared sullying his body with animal blood, and they insisted his body must be left untainted and wholly together for him to be properly received into heaven. Such was the continued lack of understanding. Yana-san might have given Undertaker the idea to use blood transfusions in conjunction with other techniques for the reanimating and revival process from the account of what that physician wanted to do to Washington.

When blood transfusion research was in full swing, in the 19th century, they were starting to piece together the idea of blood groups, but they still didn't quite know about things like universal whole blood donor and universal whole blood recipient. There was a strong elitist element to this, so they generally thought like could only be compatible with like. They also still saw non-human blood as inferior, even if it might be compatible. The best compatibility was expected between twins and then between close relatives.

I have a feeling that Yana-san has played around with this bias, which would explain why real Ciel is only receiving AB (Sirius) blood, Canopus B, Vega O, and Polaris A. All those people at Sphere Music Hall are led to believe they are being treated as equals, when they are in fact being split up into a caste system where some "stars" are of a higher magnitude than others. And, at times, Blavat Sky and others have made it clear they see some blood types as being less worthy than others. By extension, some people are treated as less worthy. Blavat seems to realize that Sirius can receive blood from other blood types, because he gives "leftovers" of Vega and Polaris blood to the Sirius renal patients. It's possible that real Ciel doesn't know he can have any type of whole blood, but I suspect he knows and simply doesn't think anything else is good enough for him.

I'd also like to mention Snake and Finny here, since we know Finny was injected with something to increase his strength and other traits. Then we see Snake with various attributes that are associated with snakes. In either case (or both) we could be dealing with transmutation. It's not realistic in our world, but it might very well be possible in theirs. Each of them might have been injected with chemical cocktails derived from other animals: Snake from snakes and Finny from perhaps a few completely different species.

We now know Snake wasn't born a snake and turned into a human, but there's nothing to say he wasn't born human and "adulterated" with snake traits. There's also the weird story the freak show attendant claims: human mother and snake father. Maybe not an actual snake as his father but more like his mother being injected with snake blood or something... and that producing a hybrid child. Again, not what we'd consider possible, but the Kuroverse plays by different rules.

One other aspect I want to touch on in this post: Othello's and Grelle's fears regarding the very nature of human souls and existence. This is a form of religious fear, not too different from what George Washington's family feared. His family feared he wouldn't be accepted into heaven, while these two reapers fear humans might no longer even need souls, and that heaven may no longer matter to them. What would that mean for the existence of reapers, when their supposed salvation requires them to keep collecting souls?

Well, I'll probably talk about bias and fear again, as well as these other issues, but I'll stop here... for now.

[n0bluev]

@fushiglow hmm….wonder who i’d draw this for all of a sudden and why… 🤔🤔

[edwinisms]

oh yeah if anyone wants to recommend me payneland fics my ask box is wide open. mwah

[aaiieell]

You can download this sheet in PDF format here:  

"As a matter of" Idioms & Phrases

Ever notice how phrases like "as a matter of fact" or "as a matter of interest" add depth to conversations? These expressions can clarify, emphasize, or simply add curiosity to what we say!

 Check out the picture below for definitions and example sentences of some of the most popular "As a Matter of..." idioms!

Which one do you use most often? Let us know in the comments!

[margridarnauds]

Something that bothers me about a lot of academic analyses of Midsommar is when they stress Josh and Mark as examples of the dynamic of exploitation and manipulation being mutual when...I agree, it is, but simply saying that implies a greater deal of equality than there is?

[floating-hasselblad]

Where'd he get that

[quibbs126]

You know as much as I like seeing the new space Cookies, you can’t deny that they’re as far from the original concept of the Cookies as we can get (not counting Astronaut, I mean the Cookies living on Planet Xylitol)

Because like, the Cookies are made by Witches, so what the heck are they doing in space? On another planet?? How the heck were they baked??

Because I mean with the other space-faring Cookie Stardust, we know he was made from the imperfect dough the Wizards discarded when making Moonlight, he fits in with the baking method (even if I’m not entirely sure how he was actually baked but whatever). How do these Cookies work?

And as for the aliens Space Doughnut and Dr Evilglaze, they at least aren’t Cookies, they’re donuts. For all we know they have an entirely different creation process that doesn’t require being baked

[mirabellemoira]

not manifesting this week sadly because I cannot bear to be extra disappointed if we don’t get a Jacaela wedding in the finale

[icewindandboringhorror]

Everytime I face a new character limit on a website that didn't have them before/used to have really long ones... AUGHHhhh the modern social media world was not made for people like me (lovers of details, rambling, elaboration, thorough explanation, and nuance)

[aaiieell]

You can download this sheet in PDF format here:

Confused about how to use "to be about to do something" or "not be about to do something"? These phrases are super useful for talking about things that are just about to happen—or not!

Check out the sheet below for clear definitions and example sentences!

[syntheticwolf]

Dark SciFi Material