Category Archives: Journalism

Getting My Pants On

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A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to get its pants on. Churchill, inspired by Twain, pre-internet.

Genepax Unveils a Car That Runs on Water and Air

Try again, you sensationalizing hacks. Versions of this story have spread across the web like a bad rash.

Their new “Water Energy System (WES),” generates power by supplying water and air to the fuel and air electrodes using a proprietary technology called the Membrane Electrode Assembly (MEA). The secret behind MEA is a special material that is capable of breaking down water into hydrogen and oxygen through a chemical reaction.

If there’s a chemical reaction taking place, then it’s not running on water and air!

As said in the press release

The main feature of the new system is that it uses a membrane electrode assembly (MEA), which contains a material that breaks down the water to hydrogen and oxygen.

Got that? It contains a material that breaks down the water to hydrogen and oxygen. There’s a chemical reaction going on, for Odin’s sake! There are materials that like Oxygen even more than Hydrogen does. Introduce them, let them get acquainted, and they’ll get busy producing Hydrogen. But — and this is very important — the other material will eventually run out, and you’ll have to “refuel.”

To give an example, you can generate Hydrogen with water, Aluminum and Gadolinium (the latter is a catalyst which keeps the Al from forming an oxide layer, which would shut the reaction down, and the reaction is not exactly a “new process”). I don’t know if this is what’s going on here, but something sure is, because in this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics.

Update: good takedown over at Good Math, Bad Math

Release the Press Hounds!

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I was poking around the toobz (looking for a citation or link to something about “slow light”) and ran across this press release from last year that made me clench and then start grinding my teeth. I have no idea who vets these things, but OMFG, it’s bad. The press latches onto these ideas that are just wrong, and use cutesy buzzwords and phrases to try and connect the story to the urban-legend version of physics that the popular-press readers know, partly because that’s what gets fed to them by the popular press. It becomes that much harder to undo the damage once the bad information gets ingrained, much like when superluminal physics gets reported, only to invariably find it’s anomalous dispersion, and nothing has “broken the lightspeed barrier” or in any way violated relativity.

Here’s the press release: Light and Matter United

Let me say, at the outset, that Lena Hau, et. al, do some amazing, quantum jaw-dropping atomic physics, and I’m not making any arguments or objections about that work. What I’m critiquing is how that work is being reported.

Lene Hau has already shaken scientists’ beliefs about the nature of things. Albert Einstein and just about every other physicist insisted that light travels 186,000 miles a second in free space, and that it can’t be speeded-up or slowed down. But in 1998, Hau, for the first time in history, slowed light to 38 miles an hour, about the speed of rush-hour traffic.

It’s well-known that light traveling through a medium does so at a speed slower than c, and the light that was slowed down wasn’t in a vacuum, so WTF? It was in a specially-prepared sample of a Bose-Einstein Condensate (BEC), called Electromagnetically-Induced Transparency (EIT), which creates a narrow window (in frequency-space) where light won’t be absorbed, and near a resonance you get a change in index of refraction. A rapidly-varying index of refraction, as you get here with a sharp resonance, will slow down the group velocity of light by a large factor. As one can read in the paper (pdf),

[W]e obtain a nonlinear refractive index of 0.18 cm2W-1. This nonlinear index is ~106 times greater than that measured in cold Cs atoms

So the experiment was way cool, but not something that shakes one’s belief about relativity, and the whole bit about the speed of light in a vacuum is a head-fake.
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Frame This!

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Over at Cosmic Variance, a discussion about getting the message of science out, in the context of the recent EXPELLED! brouhaha.

To the Framers, what’s going on is an essentially political battle; a public-relations contest, pitting pro-science vs. anti-science, where the goal is to sway more people to your side. And there is no doubt that such a contest is going on. But it’s not all that is going on, and it’s not the only motivation one might have for wading into discussions of science and religion.

There is a more basic motivation: telling the truth.

I keep trying to add commentary, and deleting it. The post nails it, as far as I’m concerned.

A Very Gravia Situation

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While poking around looking into the DST-doesn’t-save-energy story, looking for something that didn’t just link back to the WSJ story, I ran across this: a new lamp being hyped by some sites with a “green” tint, called Gravia. (a second story is here at treehugger)

The lamp took second place in the Greener Gadgets Design Competition. It’s described as being gravity-powered, which is wrong. It’s human-powered — you lift 50 lbs, and the weight falling back down supplies energy to some LEDs, and is supposed to supply 600-800 lumens, or the equivalent of about a 40-W light bulb, for four hours. Something about this immediately struck me as being wrong. You aren’t going to power the equivalent of a 40-W light bulb with that, not even with really efficient LEDs. 50 lbs, lifted a bit over a meter, will require 250 Joules of work. Over 4 hours, that’s 17 milliWatts of output. That didn’t add up — even the best LEDs are only 5 to 10 times more efficient than incandescent bulbs. There’s no way this can work.

And sure enough, that’s what I found

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Seriously Stupid

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The red flag proclaiming “I don’t understand science” goes up when the story sounds something like this:

The panel includes the word “evolution” in state science standards for the first time, but it is relegated to a place among a host of ideas, including Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity.

Relegated? To the “lowly” place that includes relativity?

I think writing of the phrase “just a theory” or “merely a theory” in a science article should make one’s word processor/computer explode. If you don’t understand why, and you’ve graduated from college, you need to go and ask for your money back.

Unlimited Cake and Ice Cream

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The first law of thermodynamics: Energy can neither be created nor destroyed. Pretty straightforward. No loopholes.

So why does a press release from Los Alamos sound like it’s ignoring the first law of thermodynamics after painting the room green?

Los Alamos National Laboratory has developed a low-risk, transformational concept, called Green Freedom™, for large-scale production of carbon-neutral, sulfur-free fuels and organic chemicals from air and water.

Sounds great, doesn’t it? Carbon-neutral fuel. Wow, just what the doctor ordered.

By integrating this electrochemical process with existing technology, researchers have developed a new, practical approach to producing fuels and organic chemicals that permits continued use of existing industrial and transportation infrastructure. Fuel production is driven by carbon-neutral power.

OK, no actual mention of the electrochemical process in the PR, but elsewhere it’s given as methanol production from water and carbon dioxide.

So it must be the reverse of 2 CH3OH + 3 O2 → 2 CO2 + 4 H2O

Which is going to require energy input, because the combustion of methanol is exothermic. Ah, hence the mention of the fuel production being driven by a carbon-neutral source. Recognize that? It’s the same handwave that was happening with hydrogen a few years back. It’s not an energy source, but at least it’s green … as long as you use a green source of energy.

If we had some cake we could have cake and ice cream. If we had some ice cream.
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