Researchers were able to produce 2.5 megajoules of energy, 120 per cent of the 2.1 megajoules used to power the experiment.
Now we must wait to see if this is an aberration and can be done at scale. I'm ready for the world to change :party-parrot-science:
Government workers got the goods, fuck you capitalism, great 'innovation' you have :fidel-salute:
Yup. You can always find someone a century or eight ago who laid this all out in terrifying detail. Some guy made an offhand reference to the greenhouse gas effect in the 1880s, a guy in the 1920s ran the math and said it was going to eventually be a problem, and in the 1970s Exxon did a study, proved it was apocalyptic, and then spent the next fifty years doing everything in their power to cover it up.
Lead in gasoline? They knew it was toxic the day leaded gasoline was invented, they just couldn't prove how toxic it was. So for like seventy years the lead companies would say "Well its' not that bad" and the researchers would say "it's bad we just can't quanitfy exactly how bad" and the issue would get put off for a few years and by the time it was finally banned we had the Boomers.
Lots of shit like this. Penicillin resistant bacteria? It's been a thing at least my whole life. Some doctors in my family were describing exactly what ended up happening with Covid decades ago and basically everyone in the medical profession understood that globalization and cheap air travel would eventually result in novel pandemics society would be completely unable to cope with. It was obvious it would happen. The question was when and how bad?
Communists have been screaming about fascism in the US since 1945, most of us just didn't listen.
Rubber (rubber blight), Helium (helium is a product of radioactive decay and takes like millions of years to regenerate), a bunch of rare minerals, and a couple of other things all face serious, catastrophic shortages. All rubber trees are clones and one blight disease could wipe out natural rubber production. Helium use goes up but there will never be a new natural source of helium on earth on any human time scale.
There are so, so, so many foreseeable disasters with apocalyptic outcomes that are simply a matter of "When?"
You can't just bring this up and not mention Clair Patterson and his tireless efforts to expose the dangers of the widespread use of lead. He's largely the reason why they couldn't hide it anymore.