


A Solar Firm's Plan to Build Off-Grid Neighborhoods in California (yahoo.com) 158
"We see a future where communities, neighborhoods, and businesses can operate independently from the legacy grid with sustainable energy sources that provide uninterrupted power," says the company's founder and CEO. "We believe microgrids address a strong need in the market for more robust energy solutions and better connectivity...." But he's also offering touting another possible benefit: "relief that the existing transmission and distribution system will experience given that most of the power that will be consumed by these communities will be generated locally from renewable resources."
The company likes to point out that America's recently-passed climate bill included tax incentives to encourage microgrids. But the New York Times describes it as "a business model that is illegal in much of the United States." Sunnova said it would offer those residents electricity that was up to 20 percent cheaper than the rates charged by investor-owned utilities like Pacific Gas & Electric and Southern California Edison. If approved by regulators, the micro-utility model, also known as a microgrid, could undermine the growth of those larger utilities by depriving them access to new homes or forcing them to lower their rates to keep that business. Sunnova executives argue that the approach they are seeking approval for was authorized under a California law passed almost two decades ago for a resort just south of Lake Tahoe. In addition, the company says advances in solar and battery technology mean that neighborhoods can be designed to generate more than enough electricity to meet their own needs at a lower cost than relying on the grid.
"If they don't want to choose me, that should be their right; if they don't want to choose you, that should be their right, too," said John Berger, the chief executive of Sunnova.
A small number of homeowners have gone off the grid as the cost of solar panels and batteries has fallen. But doing so can be hard or impossible. Some local governments have rejected permits for off-grid homes on health and safety grounds, arguing that a connection to the grid is essential. But connecting a single home to the grid can cost tens or even hundreds of thousands of dollars, which means an off-grid system may actually be cheaper — especially for properties in remote areas, or in places where the local grid is at its capacity and would require significant upgrades to serve more homes. Off-grid setups can also be appealing because once a system is paid off, the cost of operating and maintaining it is often modest and predictable, whereas utility rates can move up sharply.... The nationwide average retail electricity rate increased 11 percent in June from a year earlier, according to the Energy Information Administration.
But the kind of micro-utilities that Sunnova hopes to create have also had problems. The utopian visions of generating electricity where it is used have often run into maintenance and other problems. Many tiny utilities created under such models in the United States and Canada were later swallowed up by larger power companies.... Sunnova's microgrid approach could suffer a similar fate. But the costs of solar panels and batteries have tumbled over the last decade, making the energy that off-grid systems generate much more affordable....
Utilities have been pressing regulators to reduce the compensation homeowners receive for the excess solar energy their rooftop systems send to the grid. The companies have argued that customers with solar panels are being offered generous credits for power that they are not contributing adequately toward the cost of maintaining power lines and other grid equipment....
Building and operating microgrids could provide a steady source of income to companies like Sunnova. That could essentially transform the rooftop solar companies into the kinds of utilities that they have long fought against.
Sunnova bills itself as an "Energy as a Service" company, and they expect their microgrids to experience 30 minutes or less of outages each year, the Times points out, "compared with an average of two hours a year at California's large investor-owned utilities."
In the article, the chief executive of home-building company Lennar says they've already formed a partnership with Sunnova. "We value the current electric grid and we're intrigued by new microgrid solutions that can supplement and support the traditional utility grid and help solve reliability during extreme weather and peak demand."

Underwater Datacenter Will Open For Business This Year (theregister.com) 71
The Port Angeles deployment, known as Jules Verne, will comprise one 20ft pod, which is similar in size and dimensions to a standard 20-foot shipping container (a TEU or Twenty-foot Equivalent Unit). Inside, there is space for about 16 datacenter racks accommodating about 800 servers, according to Subsea. Additional capacity, if and when required, is delivered by adding another pod. The pod-to-shore link in this deployment provides a 100Gbps connection. As it is a commercial deployment, Jules Verne will be open for any prospective clients or partners to come and check it out, virtually or otherwise, according to Reynolds. It will be sited in shallow water, visible from the port, whereas the Njord01 pod in the Gulf of Mexico and the Manannan pod in the North Sea are expected to be deeper, at 700-900ft and 600-700ft respectively.
The Subsea pods are kept cool by being immersed in water, which is one reason for the reduced power and CO2 emissions. Inside, the servers are also immersed in a dielectric coolant, which conducts heat but not electricity. However, the Subsea pods are designed to passively disperse the heat, rather than using pumps as is typical in submersion cooling in land-based datacenters. But what happens if something goes wrong, or a customer wants to replace their servers? According to Subsea, customers can schedule periodic maintenance, including server replacement, and the company says that would take 4-16 hours for a team to get to the site, bring up the required pod(s), and replace any equipment.

Major VPN Services Shut Down In India Over Anti-Privacy Law (9to5mac.com) 9
Other VPN services that have stopped operating servers in India in recent months are some of the world's best known. They include U.S.-based Private Internet Access and IPVanish, Canada-based TunnelBear, British Virgin Islands-based ExpressVPN, and Lithuania-based Surfshark. ExpressVPN said it "refuses to participate in the Indian government's attempts to limit internet freedom." The government's move "severely undermines the online privacy of Indian residents," Private Internet Access said. "Customers in India will be able to connect to VPN servers in other countries," adds 9to5Mac. "This is the same approach taken in Russia and China, where operating servers within those countries would require VPN companies to comply with similar legislation."
"Cloud storage services are also subjected to the new rules, though there would be little practical impact on Apple here. iCloud does not use end-to-end encryption, meaning that Apple holds a copy of your decryption key, and can therefore already comply with government demands for information."

One of World's Most Polluted Spots Gets Worse as $1 Billion Cleanup Drags On (bloomberg.com) 32
"We had hoped that the Ogoniland cleanup process would set the standard for the cleanup that will have to take place in the Niger Delta as a whole," said Mike Karikpo, an Ogoni attorney with Friends of the Earth International. "But we've not seen any impact. There ought to be some impact on the lives and livelihoods of people whose lands and rivers were impacted by this oil." In a scathing review of the Ogoniland cleanup efforts, led by the Hydrocarbon Pollution Remediation Project, or Hyprep, the UN body paints a picture of rampant mismanagement, incompetence, waste and lack of transparency. It highlights the haphazard storage of oil-soaked soil that lets chemicals seep into uncontaminated grounds and creeks, contracts awarded to firms with little environmental-cleanup experience and proposals for millions of dollars in unneeded work.

Japan Declares 'War' on the Humble Floppy Disk in New Digitization Push (bloomberg.com) 85

Tesla Unveils New Virtual Power Plant In Japan (electrek.co) 34
But now we have learned that Tesla also quietly built a new virtual power plant in Japan, and it has now decided to unveil it. The project is called "Miyakojima VPP" because it is located on the island of Miyako-jima, the most populous island in the Okinawa Prefecture. Tesla announced that it started to install Powerwalls in partnership with the local electric utility in 2021, and it now has over 300 Powerwalls on the island as part of the VPP. [...] Tesla explains that VPP is helping the island take better advantage of its renewable energy, but it is also proving more grid resilience, especially in the case of a natural disaster. The Miyakojima VPP is still growing, and Tesla expects that it will include 400 Powerwalls by the end of this year and 600 Powerwalls by the end of 2023. In 2024, Tesla expects to start installing Powerwalls for similar projects throughout the Okinawa Prefecture. "[W]hen power supply and demand are tight on Miyako Island, electricity generated by photovoltaic power generation is stored in Powerwall before the tight time period and discharged from Powerwall to the home during the tight time period," said Tesla in a statement translated to Japanese. "It contributes not only to the households where the is installed, but also to the stabilization of Miyako Island's grid power supply, and stabilizes the power supply on the island. In addition, in the event of a power outage due to a typhoon, etc., power will be supplied from the Powerwall to the installed home, making it possible to prevent power outages in the home."

Microsoft Launches Arm-based Azure VMs Powered by Ampere Chips (techcrunch.com) 13
The Azure Arm-based VMs have up to 64 virtual CPU cores, 8 GB of memory per core and 40 Gbps of networking bandwidth as well as SSD local and attachable storage. Microsoft describes them as "engineered to efficiently run scale-out, cloud-native workloads," including open source databases, Java and .NET applications and gaming, web, app and media servers. Preview releases of Windows 11 Pro and Enterprise and Linux OS distributions including Canonical Ubuntu, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Enterprise Linux, CentOS and Debian are available on the VMs day one, with support for Alma Linux and Rocky Linux to arrive in the future. Microsoft notes that Java apps in particular can run with few additional code changes, thanks to the company's contributions to the OpenJDK project.

Walmart Lists a 30TB Portable SSD for Just $39. It's a Scam (arstechnica.com) 122
Ars Technica goes over the details: On the inside, this "SSD" looks like two small-capacity microSD cards hot glued to a USB 2.0-capable board. This board's firmware has been modified so that each of these cards reports its capacity as "15.0TB" to the operating system, for a total of 30TB, even though the actual capacity of the cards is much lower.... It preserves the directory structure of whatever you're copying, but when it's "copying" your data, it just keeps writing and rewriting over the tiny microSD cards.
Everything will look fine until you go to access a file, only to find that the data isn't there.
Replies to Ray Redacted's thread are full of alternate versions of this scam, including multiple iterations of the hot-glued microSD version and at least one that hid a USB thumb drive inside a larger enclosure. Fake USB storage devices are neither new nor rare, though this one makes spectacularly egregious claims about its price-per-gigabyte. When it comes to buying storage online, common-sense advice is best: stick to name brands, buy from trustworthy sellers.... and know that if a deal seems too good to be true, it almost certainly is.

Pine64 Touts Its RISC-V-Based Single-Board Computer and Soldering Irons (pine64.org) 42
The Star64 also has an MiPi display output complete with a touch panel (TP) input, a 12V power port, a CSI camera port and an eMMC slot. A micro SD card slot can be found at the bottom of the PCB. Similarly to the RockPro64 and Quartz64, the 12V port on the Star64 can be used for powering other hardware directly from the board — a popular example is powering one or multiple SSDs connected to a PCIe SATA adapter. I'll add that, at least in theory, the Star64 would make a great network-attached storage device because of its SoCs low thermals and idle power. I am looking forward to seeing NAS-focused Linux or BSD* OSes available for the board.
Speaking of software, efforts to support the SoC in Linux have already begun. I've been told that both Debian and Fedora are already being ported to the StarFive JH7110, which is great news. We are certain that many other OSes will follow swiftly — especially once we start delivering the Star64 to interested developers. On the subject of availability: the Star64 will be available in a few weeks time, and will initially be available to developers. Given the interest in the Star64's and the SoC powering I hope to see functional distributions available for the board soon after launch.
The announcement also included an update on their PinecilV2 smart mini portable soldering iron (built with a 32-bit RISC-V SoC). "The Pinecil V2 landed earlier this month and sold out almost instantly. The next production run of the ought to be available soon however..."

Heroku Announces Plans To Eliminate Free Plans, Blaming 'Fraud and Abuse' (techcrunch.com) 9
[...] Wise went on to note that Heroku will be announcing a student program at Salesforce's upcoming Dreamforce conference in September, but the details remain a mystery at this point. For the uninitiated, Heroku allows programmers to build, run and scale apps across programming languages including Java, PHP, Scala and Go. Salesforce acquired the company for $212 million in 2010 and subsequently introduced support for Node.js and Clojure and Heroku for Facebook, a package to simplify the process of deploying Facebook apps on Heroku infrastructure. Heroku claims on its website that it's been used to develop 13 million apps to date.

New Aluminum-Sulfur Battery Tech Offers Full Charging In Under a Minute (mit.edu) 116
What's more, the battery requires no external heat source to maintain its operating temperature. The heat is naturally produced electrochemically by the charging and discharging of the battery. "As you charge, you generate heat, and that keeps the salt from freezing. And then, when you discharge, it also generates heat," Sadoway says. In a typical installation used for load-leveling at a solar generation facility, for example, "you'd store electricity when the sun is shining, and then you'd draw electricity after dark, and you'd do this every day. And that charge-idle-discharge-idle is enough to generate enough heat to keep the thing at temperature." This new battery formulation, he says, would be ideal for installations of about the size needed to power a single home or small to medium business, producing on the order of a few tens of kilowatt-hours of storage capacity.
For larger installations, up to utility scale of tens to hundreds of megawatt hours, other technologies might be more effective, including the liquid metal batteries Sadoway and his students developed several years ago and which formed the basis for a spinoff company called Ambri, which hopes to deliver its first products within the next year. For that invention, Sadoway was recently awarded this year's European Inventor Award. The smaller scale of the aluminum-sulfur batteries would also make them practical for uses such as electric vehicle charging stations, Sadoway says. He points out that when electric vehicles become common enough on the roads that several cars want to charge up at once, as happens today with gasoline fuel pumps, "if you try to do that with batteries and you want rapid charging, the amperages are just so high that we don't have that amount of amperage in the line that feeds the facility." So having a battery system such as this to store power and then release it quickly when needed could eliminate the need for installing expensive new power lines to serve these chargers. "The first order of business for the company is to demonstrate that it works at scale," Sadoway says, and then subject it to a series of stress tests, including running through hundreds of charging cycles.
If you're looking for a detailed breakdown of how this new battery works, we recommend you check out Ars Technica's article here.

Apple Already Sold Everyone an iPhone. Now What? (economist.com) 113
The next-biggest part is probably the payment from Google for the right to be Apple devices' default search engine. This was $10bn in 2020; analysts believe the going rate now is nearer $20bn. Apple's fast-growing advertising business -- mainly selling search ads in its app store -- will bring in nearly $7bn this year, reckons eMarketer, another research firm. Most of the rest comes from a range of subscription services: iCloud storage, Apple Music and Apple Care insurance are probably the biggest, estimates Morgan Stanley, an investment bank. More recent ventures like Apple tv+, Apple Fitness, Apple Arcade and Apple Pay make up the rest. New services keep popping up. Last November Apple launched a subscription product for small companies called Apple Business Essentials, offering tech support, device management and so on. In June it announced a "buy now, pay later" service. The company claims a total of 860m active paid subscriptions, nearly a quarter more than it had a year ago.

Has the Webb Telescope Disproved the Big Bang Theory? (iai.tv) 273
"If confirmed, this would seriously challenge current cosmological thinking." Shortly after NASA published Webb's first batch of scientific data, the astronomical preprint server arXiv was flooded with papers claiming the detection of galaxies that are so remote that their light took some 13.5 billion years to reach us. Many of these appear to be more massive than the standard cosmological model that describes the universe's composition and evolution. "It worries me slightly that we find these monsters in the first few images," says cosmologist Richard Ellis (University College London)....
Before the community accepts these claims, the reported redshifts have to be confirmed spectroscopically. Mark McCaughrean, the senior science adviser of the European Space Agency (a major partner on Webb) commented on Twitter: "I'm sure some of them will be [confirmed], but I'm equally sure they won't all be. [...] It does all feel a little like a sugar rush at the moment."
Ellis agrees: "It's one thing to put a paper on arXiv," he says, "but it's quite something else to turn it into a lasting article in a peer-reviewed journal."
Since 1991, science writer Eric Lerner has been arguing that the Big Bang never happened. Now 75 years old, he writes: In the flood of technical astronomical papers published online since July 12, the authors report again and again that the images show surprisingly many galaxies, galaxies that are surprisingly smooth, surprisingly small and surprisingly old. Lots of surprises, and not necessarily pleasant ones. One paper's title begins with the candid exclamation: "Panic!"
Why do the JWST's images inspire panic among cosmologists? And what theory's predictions are they contradicting? The papers don't actually say. The truth that these papers don't report is that the hypothesis that the JWST's images are blatantly and repeatedly contradicting is the Big Bang Hypothesis that the universe began 14 billion years ago in an incredibly hot, dense state and has been expanding ever since. Since that hypothesis has been defended for decades as unquestionable truth by the vast majority of cosmological theorists, the new data is causing these theorists to panic. "Right now I find myself lying awake at three in the morning," says Alison Kirkpatrick, an astronomer at the University of Kansas in Lawrence, "and wondering if everything I've done is wrong...."
Even galaxies with greater luminosity and mass than our own Milky Way galaxy appear in these images to be two to three times smaller than in similar images observed with the Hubble Space Telescope (HST), and the new galaxies have redshifts which are also two to three times greater.This is not at all what is expected with an expanding universe, but it is just exactly what I and my colleague Riccardo Scarpa predicted based on a non-expanding universe, with redshift proportional to distance.... [T]he galaxies that the JWST shows are just the same size as the galaxies near to us, if it is assumed that the universe is not expanding and redshift is proportional to distance.....
Big Bang theorists did expect to see badly mangled galaxies scrambled by many collisions or mergers. What the JWST actually showed was overwhelmingly smooth disks and neat spiral forms, just as we see in today's galaxies. The data in the "Panic!" article showed that smooth spiral galaxies were about "10 times" as numerous as what theory had predicted and that this "would challenge our ideas about mergers being a very common process". In plain language, this data utterly destroys the merger theory....
According to Big Bang theory, the most distant galaxies in the JWST images are seen as they were only 400-500 million years after the origin of the universe. Yet already some of the galaxies have shown stellar populations that are over a billion years old. Since nothing could have originated before the Big Bang, the existence of these galaxies demonstrates that the Big Bang did not occur....
While Big Bang theorists were shocked and panicked by these new results, Riccardo and I (and a few others) were not. In fact, a week before the JWST images were released we published online a paper that detailed accurately what the images would show. We could do this with confidence because more and more data of all kinds has been contradicting the Big Bang hypothesis for years....
Based on the published literature, right now the Big Bang makes 16 wrong predictions and only one right one — the abundance of deuterium, an isotope of hydrogen.
UPDATE: Kirkpatrick says her quote was was taken out of context, in an article from Space.com that dismises Eric Lerner as "a serial denier of the Big Bang since the late 1980s, preferring his personal pseudoscientific alternative."

Vietnam Demands Big Tech Localize Data Storage and Offices (theregister.com) 6
According to Article 26 of the government's Decree 53, the new rules go into effect October 1, 2022 -- around seven weeks from the date of its announcement. However, foreign companies have an entire 12 months in which to comply -- beginning when they receive instructions from the Minister of Public Security. The companies are then required to store the data in Vietnam for a minimum of 24 months. System logs will need to be stored for 12 months. After this grace period, authorities reserve the right to make sure affected companies are following the law through investigations and data collection requests, as well as content removal orders. Further reading: Vietnam To Make Apple Watch, MacBook For First Time Ever

Old Laptop Hard Drives Will Allegedly Crash When Exposed To Janet Jackson Music (arstechnica.com) 59
The specific hard drive model at issue -- again from an unnamed manufacturer -- would crash because "Rhythm Nation" used some of the same "natural resonant frequencies" that the drives used, interfering with their operation. Anyone trying to independently recreate this problem will face several obstacles, including the age of the laptops involved and a total lack of specificity about the hard drives or computer models. The CVE entry mentions "a certain 5400 RPM OEM hard drive, as shipped with laptop PCs in approximately 2005" and links back to Chen's post as a primary source. And while some Windows XP-era laptop hard drives may still be kicking out there somewhere, after almost two decades, it's more likely that most of them have died of natural causes. The PC manufacturer was able to partially resolve the issue "by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playbanck," says Chen. However, these HDDs would still crash if they were exposed to another device that was playing the song.

Drought-Stricken States To Get Less From Colorado River (apnews.com) 156
The river provides water across seven states and in Mexico and helps feed an agricultural industry valued at $15 billion a year. Cities and farms are anxiously awaiting official estimates of the river's future water levels that will determine the extent and scope of cuts to their water supply. That's not all. In addition to those already-agreed-to cuts, the Bureau of Reclamation said Tuesday that states had missed a deadline to propose at least 15% more cuts needed to keep water levels at the river's storage reservoirs from dropping even more. For example, officials have predicted that water levels at Lake Mead, the nation's largest reservoir, will plummet further. The lake is currently less than a quarter full. "The states collectively have not identified and adopted specific actions of sufficient magnitude that would stabilize the system," Touton said.

Parts of Europe's Largest Nuclear Plant 'Knocked Out' By Russia-Ukraine Fighting (cnn.com) 202
Energoatom said radiation levels at the site remained normal, despite renewed attacks.
Several Western and Ukrainian officials believe that Russia is using the giant nuclear facility as a stronghold to shield their troops and mount attacks, because they assume Kyiv will not return fire and risk a crisis.
Later CNN added: Ukraine and Russia again traded blame after more shelling around the plant overnight on Thursday, just hours after the United Nations called on both sides to cease military activities near the power station, warning of the worst if they didn't.
"Regrettably, instead of de-escalation, over the past several days there have been reports of further deeply worrying incidents that could, if they continue, lead to disaster," UN secretary general, António Guterres, said in a statement....
Energoatom, Ukraine's state-run nuclear power company, accused Russian forces on Thursday of targeting a storage area for "radiation sources," and shelling a fire department nearby the plant. A day later, the company said in a statement on its Telegram account that the plant was operating "with the risk of violating radiation and fire safety standards."
Ukraine's Interior Minister, Denys Monastyrskyi, said Friday that there was "no adequate control" over the plant, and Ukrainian specialists who remained there were not allowed access to some areas where they should be.... Last weekend, shellfire damaged a dry storage facility — where casks of spent nuclear fuel are kept at the plant — as well as radiation monitoring detectors, making detection of any potential leak impossible, according to Energoatom. Attacks also damaged a high-voltage power line and forced one of the plant's reactors to stop operating.
Tonight the BBC reported on a response from Ukraine's president. In his nightly address on Saturday, Volodymyr Zelensky said any soldier firing on or from the plant would become "a special target" for Ukraine. He also accused Moscow of turning the plant into a Russian army base and using it as "nuclear blackmail"...
Zelenskiy added that "every day" of Russia's occupation of the plant "increases the radiation threat to Europe"....
A BBC investigation revealed earlier this week that many of the Ukrainian workers at the site are being kept under armed guard amid harsh conditions.
UPDATE (8/14): "Ukraine's military intelligence agency said that on Saturday, Russian artillery fire hit a pump, damaged a fire station and sparked fires near the plant that could not be immediately extinguished because of the damage to the fire station," reports the New York Times: Engineers say that yard-thick reinforced concrete containment structures protect the reactors from even direct hits. International concern, however, has grown that shelling could spark a fire or cause other damage that would lead to a nuclear accident.
The six pressurized water reactors at the complex retain most sources of radiation, reducing risks. After pressurized water reactors failed at the Fukushima nuclear complex in Japan in 2011, Ukraine upgraded the Zaporizhzhia site to enable a shutdown even after the loss of cooling water from outside the containment structures, Dmytro Gortenko, a former plant engineer, said in an interview....
"Locals are abandoning the town," said the former engineer, who asked to be identified by only his first name, Oleksiy, because of security concerns. Residents had been leaving for weeks, but the pace picked up after Saturday's barrages and fires, he said.

Facing Privacy Concerns, Facebook Begins Testing End-to-End Encrypted Chats, Secure Backups (cnbc.com) 19
"As with end-to-end encrypted chats, secure storage means that we won't have access to your messages, unless you choose to report them to us."
CNBC provides some context: The announcement comes after Facebook turned over Messenger chat histories to Nebraska police as part of an investigation into an alleged illegal abortion. Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said the feature has been in the works for a while and is not related to the Nebraska case...
The feature is rolling out on Android and iOS devices this week, but it isn't yet available on the Messenger website. The company has been discussing full-scale deployment of end-to-end encryption since 2016, but critics have said the security measure would make it much more difficult for law enforcement to catch child predators....Meta said in the release that it is making progress toward the global rollout of default end-to-end encryption for personal messages and calls in 2023.
Other privacy enhancements announced Thursday by Meta:
- "We plan to bring end-to-end encrypted calls to the Calls Tab on Messenger."
- Meta announced that the deleting of messages will start syncing across your other devices "soon."
- Messenger will continue offering the option of "Disappearing" messages, in which viewed messages in an end-to-end encrypted chat automatically then disappear after a pre-specified period of time.
And there's more, according to Meta's announcement:.
"This week, we'll begin testing default end-to-end encrypted chats between some people. If you're in the test group, some of your most frequent chats may be automatically end-to-end encrypted, which means you won't have to opt in to the feature. You'll still have access to your message history, but any new messages or calls with that person will be end-to-end encrypted. You can still report messages to us if you think they violate our policies, and we'll review them and take action as necessary....
"Last year, we started a limited test of opt-in end-to-end encrypted messages and calls on Instagram, and in February we broadened the test to include adults in Ukraine and Russia. Soon, we'll expand the test even further to include people in more countries and add more features like group chats....
"We will continue to provide updates as we make progress toward the global rollout of default end-to-end encryption for personal messages and calls in 2023."

Scientists Create a More Sustainable LED From Fish Scales (smithsonianmag.com) 25
The newly discovered method requires only one step -- microwave pyrolysis of fish scales extracted from fish waste -- and can be done within ten seconds, per the authors. How exactly the fish scales are converted into CNOs is unclear, though the team thinks it has to do with how collagen in the fish scales can absorb enough microwave radiation to quickly increase in temperature. This leads to pyrolysis, or thermal decomposition, which causes the collagen to break down into gasses. These gasses then support the creation of CNOs. This method is a "straightforward way to convert fish waste into infinitely more useful materials," and the resulting CNOs have a high crystallinity, which gives them "exceptional optical properties," per the statement. They also have high functionalization, which means they're "bonded to other small molecules on their surface," writes Ellen Phiddian for Cosmos. This combination of attributes means the CNOs can glow bright blue.