It’s really neat to see the open-face nature of this product as compared to others doing EWOD with a second immiscible phase / a glass top plate that the droplet is squished under — makes it much easier to do IO to the chip.
Are the chips disposable, to accomodate contamination constraints, or is there some on-site surface reconditioning that we can do to refurb the chips?
Interesting to note that this is down-scaled from some of your older prototypes. What design tradeoffs made you go fron large open faced arrays to a set of smaller arrays?
The system uses a disposable plastic consumable that gets replaced after each run.
In terms of design trade offs, its not just a electrowetting system. It employs complex magnetic manipulation, thermal controls and other forms of sample manipulation. We had to work under these constraints.
Airlines are almost certain to face significant carbon regulation or carbon taxes in the next couple of decades. In turn, lots of engines will be effectively banned.
Of course, this is nothing new: noise abatement effectively banned a whole lot of engines, too.
I don't think it requires giving up on "affordable global flight". It might be a bit more expensive -- getting aircraft to be tens of decibels quieter cost something, too.
Externalities -- whether they're noise imposed on a community or climate impacts -- aren't generally addressed by the market on its own.
Indeed, we have a new regulatory regime coming into play for airplane emissions slowly-- with first effects in 2028.
I mean, it's already happening all over the world. It's not just Germany.
The UK already taxes carbon in aviation fuel. It's about to implement a carbon pricing mechanism for jet fuel obtained in jurisdictions without it.
The EU is implementing carbon taxes, and a mandate for Sustainable Aviation Fuel. In 25 years, it will be illegal across the EU27 to use aviation fuel that is not at least 70% Sustainable Aviation Fuel.
China has the world's largest emissions trading program. Civil aviation will be included next year.
Australia has a carbon tax, and will soon have mandates on civil aviation emissions.
Brazil does not yet have a carbon tax, but in the past year there has been legislation proposed, and it looks likely to be coming sometime soon.
The US EPA just announced regulations that will not force, but will certainly make it cost prohibitive to sell lots of gasoline cars ten years from now. Civil aviation is a likely next target.
The sun's variation in intensity over the solar cycle has a typical 0.2C difference... and even then, 5 years later you get the 0.2C "back".
If you're saying "another Maunder Minimum":
- There is no consensus that is going to happen; or even a majority view that it will.
- It sure doesn't look like the Maunder minimum caused significant cooling overall (perhaps at most 0.4C, so not much more than a normal solar cycle). Yes, Europe's temperatures swung more than this.
>The sun's variation in intensity over the solar cycle has a typical 0.2C difference... and even then, 5 years later you get the 0.2C "back".
On what are you basing this statement? The climate models I've looked into were wrong about the effect of clouds and ignore types of energy from the sun.
>- There is no consensus that is going to happen; or even a majority view that it will.
If I am walking towards someone in a rocking chair, they may be moving towards me or away from me at any point, but overall I will get closer. Similarly, if solar cycle causes a variation of .2C back and forth, it doesn’t eliminate a non-oscillating trend.
When weighing what is likely to happen, fringe beliefs don’t matter much. I would not bet on a Maunder minimum to save us, because A) it is not a big enough effect even if it happens, and B) it is probably not going to happen.
You've edited your comment-- I'm glad you've reconsidered including the below which violate the site guidelines:
> Oh please, spare me the polemics.
> Do you stand to benefit financially, directly or indirectly, from climate change?
But: I think most of us stand to lose significantly from climate change.
Hi! I have tried all the gantt chart libraries, and also ended up building my own. The library isn’t open source (yet) but does this, as well as some other stuff around optimizing for print. Email in profile
This is really cool! I spent the time a couple years back to build a windows sysroot, but having a macOS one was on my mind for a while. Will definitley use
This was one of the things that made IPFS a non-starter for us. We ended up grafting Hashicorp Vault into kubo (the go-ipfs implementation) so that we could use IPFS and have things like detetes and access revocation that actually work.
I’ve been using ultorg for a couple years now, very happy to see it reach broader audiences
Its’s a game changer tool for me, providing an intuitive graphical query construction interface (via a simple stacked table header, very sum-product like) and cross-db joins. The multi-column report style layouting is also really useful for looking at wide queries with lots of data. I’ve shamelessly ripped of some of eirik’s ideas and wowed people from (especially) the financial world
IMO its one of the truest advancements in SQL clients that i’ve seen in a while.
Ultorg has a bundled internal PostgreSQL database that is used for query execution over Excel/GSheets/CSV/MS Access sources. The tables are automatically dumped into PostgreSQL in an efficient manner when necessary. If you hit the Refresh button in the toolbar (F5 or Ctrl+R), Ultorg checks if there are changes in the original sources and refreshes the extracts if necessary.
The same mechanism kicks in if you join tables from different data sources in a single visual query. E.g. you might join a table in a remote PostgreSQL database with a table in a local CSV file. Both tables end up getting extracted locally.
There's a "Generated Extracts" folder in the sidebar where you can see a list of table extracts that were auto-generated on the local machine. The process is otherwise seamless, and queries in fact often perform much better locally than being executed on a remote database. The latter is due to no network latency, powerful laptops, and a custom PostgreSQL configuration on the local database that is tuned for single-user ad hoc queries.
So this was Synthego’s OG thesis, but it didn’t validate in the market.
In the last 5 years, the industry has moved to using the LabCyte Echo in high-well-count plates for this kinda work. Zymergen (RIP) Amyris and Ginkgo have this scaled up to something that resembles model train layouts, where plates are shuffled between discrete workcells by little trains.
One of the challenges is the sheer volume of data — Illumina sequencers generate multi-TB files for analysis (synthetic biology context) — with most folks not having “fast datacenter networks” so overwhelmingly I see folks buying Snowballs, AWS direct connect, or running on-prem.
Industry is broadly interested in this kinda thing, with efforts like [1] [2] (me), and many many others integrating into the Design-Build-Test pipeline. Commercial MD (not necessarily only protein folding) has had a huge boost due to NN’s as well, with companies like [3] [4] cropping up in order to sell their analysis as a service.
Academia has also not been sitting idle, with labs like [5] [6] doing cool stuff
Pure, classic microfluidic setups are a huge PITA, but technologies like the Echo or [7] have the potential to change some of the unit economics.
It’s really neat to see the open-face nature of this product as compared to others doing EWOD with a second immiscible phase / a glass top plate that the droplet is squished under — makes it much easier to do IO to the chip.
Are the chips disposable, to accomodate contamination constraints, or is there some on-site surface reconditioning that we can do to refurb the chips?
Interesting to note that this is down-scaled from some of your older prototypes. What design tradeoffs made you go fron large open faced arrays to a set of smaller arrays?