exchemist

What snails do is fertilise one another, I understand.

But you also get that with hermaphrodites like garden snails.

From what I read, the evolution of sexual reproduction is one of the unsolved problems in evolutionary biology. So a good question that is still awaiting a convincing answer.

I suspect a large part of the Biden strategy is to avoid the USA becoming too reliant on China for all its low carbon technology, which is a clear risk the way things have been going recently, whether it be the current glut of Chinese solar panels (I read that some people in continental Europe are even using them for fencing panels!) or their dominance in purifying lithium for batteries. No doubt the malevolent idiot Trump will tear all that up on principle (i.e. because it was Biden's idea) if he returns to power, even though independence from China is one of the things he talks about.

I've already given a link to read about that, earlier in the thread. Have you read it? If not, why not? But if you want to pursue this subject I suggest you need to start a new thread about it, as it is a quite different topic from the title of this one.

The problem with your idea is that the energy in sound waves is generally extremely low. There is a convenient table in this link: https://www.physicsclassroom.com/class/sound/u11l2b.cfm. from which you can see that a 100dB sound has an intensity of only 0.01Watts/sq. metre. So, far from it representing an unlimited source of energy, sounds is not going to be much use for energy extraction.

What is the point of this machine?

It's just a new concept for a battery. I repeat, the protons do not take the place of electrons, in any way. They take the the place of the lithium ions in a conventional lithium ion battery, that is all. The electrical circuit remains entirely conventional, with metal wires, through which electrons carry a current, as usual.

......thereby bringing in Edge Theory and @NeptuneSeven into the discussion as well?....................

The rate of time depends on the frame of reference, sure, but that does not make it subjective. The decay rate of the radioisotopes in your example would be affected in the same way, whether they were accompanied by an observer or not. Just as the decay rates of atmospheric muons are affected, without them being in any way conscious. So yes we can agree time ( and equally distance, by the way) are relative, but neither of them is dependent on the presence or absence of an observer.

How then do you account for the age of the Earth, say? The decay rates of radioisotopes seem to me an objective measure of duration, applying to inanimate entities (atoms).

It is not the truth. There is no centre, according to the Big Bang theory: https://www.astronomy.com/science/ask-astro-where-is-the-center-of-the-universe/

Nonsense. A time delay of a millisecond or so does not make the information received and interpreted by the brain a "lie" at all. If you want to talk about how the brain "lies" to us, you would do better to start a thread on how the brain makes assumptions about the information it receives, which can in some cases prove faulty. And neither of these is anything like the delusions experienced by someone undergoing a psychotic episode.

It seems rather obvious that sensory and mental processes in the nervous system and brain, involving as they do cascades of electrochemical reactions, must take a finite time to take place. What has this got to do with physics?

None of this makes any sense at all. For example, what can "primes could be seen as carrying specific vibrational qualities" mean? How can pure number "carry" a "quality"? And what is a "vibrational quality"?

While a lot of this seems to be gibberish, the "proton battery" is interesting. I was not aware of this. However, as I understand it from the paper: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0360319918302714 the protons do not take the place of electrons in such a battery but play the same role as Li+ ions do in a conventional Li ion battery. In a Li ion battery, Li+ ions move into and out of a metal electrode, whereas in this "proton battery" it is H+ ions that move, across a Nafion membrane, into and out an activated carbon electrode. The "battery" is described as being a reversible fuel cell, in which water is electrolysed in the charging phase, loading the electrode with H atoms, which are then released and combine with oxygen to re-form water in the discharge phase. What I am not clear about, from reading the paper, is how the oxygen side of things works. Oxygen must be generated in the electrolysis phase and oxygen must be recombined with the emerging H+ to re-form water in the discharge phase. Is this oxygen released as free O2 and is fresh O2 from the atmosphere used in the discharge phase? Or is the O generated during electrolysis somehow sequestered within the cell and made available again for recombination with H during discharge?

I found this paper, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8867790/ suggesting there has been some work on a dipstick type test for progesterone. No idea how close to commercialisation such a concept may be. One issue may be that, as I understand this, it needs to be semi-quantitative, rather than a simple go/no go (like a Covid test for instance), as one needs to know whether the level of progesterone in the blood is above a certain threshold, rather than simply whether it is present or not. Developing tests like this with the necessary degree of reliability for use by non-professionals is not straight forward and the commercial incentive/clinical need may not be sufficient to support the effort.

It has always struck me as rather surprising that empty space should have quantitatively measurable properties, such as e0 and µ0.

You are having the “Theorist experience”. The modus operandi is to keep throwing in new bits of semiscientific nonsense, to keep you coming back to correct his “misconceptions”. But it’s all just a game, designed to waste your time. He can keep this going interminably. If he’s who I think he is, he has been doing this for years, under a variety of identities. I rather think Coxy123 was one of the more recent ones here, also Splodge, Pbob and others. Elsewhere he was for a while Theorist Constant 12345, under which name some of us first came across him.

I wonder what happened to the Flying Bum: https://www.businessinsider.com/photos-see-the-flying-bum-airlander-10-2021-9?op=1 It looked quite an interesting idea and had an emissions profile similar to trains.

ZZZzzzzzz…………

Yup. A very familiar timewasting technique, I think.

No, I don't agree that anyone is ignoring the obvious. It is you, rather, that seems to be ignoring the obvious, namely that the rate of metabolism must have an input on where the balance lies between weight gain processes and weight loss processes. But it seems to me the term "metabolism" is potentially a source of confusion if we are not careful to specify what we mean by it. To my understanding (I am not a biologist and stand to be corrected by better informed people here) metabolism is all the processes that extract energy by oxidising the "food* " an organism takes in, whether this be for heat, for mechanical work done by the organism, or for biochemical synthesis, i.e. conversion to fat, bone, muscle etc. I gather metabolic rate is in fact often measured by oxygen uptake (This applies only to aerobic organisms obviously). So a faster metabolic rate could serve to enable a higher rate of doing mechanical work, or to generate more heat, or to build up body tissues. But the food also provides the building block for building body tissues, so any food used for that is not metabolised. It is an observed fact that doing a lot of mechanical work requires a larger oxygen uptake, indicating a higher metabolic rate, and that as expected athletes eat a lot more than sedentary people, without becoming fat. So you can't argue that metabolic rate is not relevant. Regarding your comments about weightlifters vs marathon runners, it is the runners who have the higher oxygen uptake, by far, indicating a higher metabolic rate. * I take "food" to comprise all the sources of chemical energy taken in by the organism, so it would not include radiation taken in through photosynthesis, for instance.

Yes so 12.6m diameter ballon, if it is approx.spherical, per tonne of lift. (The lifting gear and gondola itself may weigh half that, before you start.) So it’s going to be very big.

Actually that's a good point. Post amended.