SteamyTea

When I have a free day, a pencil, paper and a dictionary, I shall go through that. Even turning legalese into something approaching English is hard work compared to thermodynamics.

Shall order a couple when I get home. Sure I can safely modify them to be wired directly into the storage heaters and immersion heaters as they are a gnats under 3 kW each.

Not sure how plentiful it really is. Takes a lot of land and water. Microwaved bamboo could be used to build super-strong skyscrapers TECHNOLOGY 24 April 2020 By Alice Klein New Scientist Default Image Bamboo can be made strong enough to build planes or cars by microwaving it Aaron French/EyeEm/Alamy Scientists have created an exceptionally strong, lightweight material out of microwaved bamboo that could be used to construct the next generation of skyscrapers, cars and aeroplanes. At the moment, steel, concrete and bricks are the most commonly used construction materials, but they are non-renewable and their production contributes substantially to global greenhouse gas emissions. Bamboo, in contrast, is a fast-growing, renewable material that is already used in houses and scaffolding in many Asian countries. However, it is not strong enough in its natural form to construct tall buildings. Advertisement To make bamboo stronger, Liangbing Hu at the University of Maryland in the US and his colleagues treated it with chemicals to partially remove a substance called lignin, then microwaved it to remove water. This caused the bamboo to shrink by about a third of its size and its cellulose fibres to pack together in dense layers. The tightly-packed cellulose layers were able to form strong chemical bonds called hydrogen bonds that enhanced the strength of the bamboo while still maintaining its lightness, says Hu. Read more: High-tech wood could keep homes cool by reflecting the sun’s rays The tensile strength of the microwaved bamboo – or the amount of stretch it could withstand without breaking – was 6 times that of steel when compared by weight. It could also withstand slightly more compression than concrete and bricks and did not degrade when left outdoors. These properties make the material suitable for constructing skyscrapers that would be lightweight but stay stable by being strongly bolted to the ground, says Hu. It could also potentially be used to make lighter electric cars that could make up the weight with bigger batteries for travelling further, or lighter aeroplanes that require less fuel to propel them, he says. Hu’s team and other research groups have also used wood to make super-strong, renewable building materials, but bamboo has the advantage of growing faster, meaning it can be produced on a larger scale, he says. Hu and his colleagues are now planning several engineering projects to test the potential of their microwaved bamboo in real-life building contexts. Journal reference: ACS Nano, DOI: 10.1021/acsnano.9b08747 Menu Bamboo road bridge can support 16-tonne trucks TECHNOLOGY 19 December 2007 By Mason Inman The novel bridge with horizontal beams made from a bamboo composite proved strong enough to support even heavy trucks (Image: University of Southern California) Bridges built from bamboo instead of steel could provide a cheaper, more environmentally sustainable engineering solution in China, a recent experiment suggests. A novel type of bridge with horizontal beams made from a bamboo composite proved strong enough to support even heavy trucks in tests. The bamboo beams are cheaper and more environmentally friendly to make than steel or concrete, yet offer comparable structural strength. Yan Xiao, who works at the University of Southern California, in Los Angeles, US, and at Hunan University in China, led the development of the bamboo beams used to make the bridge. Advertisement Instead of using round, pole-like pieces of unprocessed bamboo, which have been used as building material for many thousands of years, he came up with a way of assembling timber-like beams from many smaller strips of bamboo. Precise details on the process remain proprietary, but Xiao says the strips are cut from large stalks of bamboo, arranged in multiple layers, and bonded together with glue. The technique has never been used to build such large beams before, Xiao says. Sustainable harvest Last week workers finished assembling a 10-metre long bridge of Xiao’s design in the village of Leiyang in Hunan province, southern China. Using prefabricated beams, it took a team of eight workers just a week to assemble and did not require heavy construction equipment. It proved strong enough to carry a 16-tonne truck and, and based on structural testing of the bridge, should be able to support even more weight, Xiao says. Pound-for-pound, bamboo is stronger than steel when stretched and more robust than concrete when compressed. Also, stalks several meters tall mature in just a few years, rather than a few decades as with trees, so more can be harvested from the same amount of land. Furthermore, since it is a grass it can be harvested like mowing a lawn – leaving the root system intact so that the plant can regrow. Green solution Bamboo beams could work for bridges up to 30-metres long, Xiao says, making them suitable for carrying pedestrians in cities or cars on highway overpasses. “I think very highly of the work that professor Xiao is doing,” says architect Darrel DeBoer, who works with unusual building materials. “It’s quite worthwhile to find alternatives to the concrete that we are using way too much of.” DeBoer notes that cement production releases a lot of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide: 5-10% of global CO2, according to different estimates. This is an unavoidable part of the chemical process used to make cement from calcium carbonate. Bamboo, on the other hand, soaks up CO2, as it grows. “From an environmental perspective, bamboo is a great choice,” DeBoer says. Cars and Motoring – Learn more about the latest technologies in our comprehensive special report.

Who makes that and can you grab live data in it into a file.

I think PayPal covers online purchases with section 75.

GRP every time, but then I am still itching after 30 years in the composite plastic industry.

Probably get a cheaper one. If you know the required voltage and the maximum amperage to restore the batteries, then you will know what to look for. Maybe this one at 40 quid https://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/195324806068 Can always flog it after, or send it back.

As a general point, I think we do have to 'build a solution' and help pay for it. Some of us have gone off to university, studied this stuff, been asked for help, offered the best advice available, explained how it all works, highlighted that it is not a 'no cost' option. And then been totally ignored. Happens on here, well in special places, in a mythical Welsh valley anyway. Some people have to have their autonomy removed for their own, and others, safety, and the rest of us have to accept that we need to pay for it. So if we have to hand over an extra 15 quid a month to help out, so be it, it will make the country a better place. I suspect that mould may become a serious issue this winter as people cut back on energy usage, and misunderstand the difference between controlled ventilation and a thermally leaky home. Killer fungi: The health threat that’s creeping up on us They kill more people than malaria, and the death toll is set to rise. But we are only just starting to understand the devious ways fungi can infect us LIFE 10 August 2016 By Tim Vernimmen Ron Kurniawan SOME are tasty, others are a nuisance. That’s probably how most of us think of fungi. Few people would consider them to be killers. But perhaps we should. Fungi are on the march. New varieties are emerging and infecting everything from crops to amphibians. Some of this is down to the ease of international travel, which is spreading hardy spores to new locations. Then there’s our disruption of natural environments, which creates opportunities for fungi to evolve. Now, some researchers are worried we could be about to reap the spores we’ve sown: might we have unleashed a killer? Neil Gow, a medical mycologist at the University of Aberdeen, UK, was co-organiser of a conference held at London’s Royal Society earlier this year to assess the growing fungal threat in areas from animal welfare to food security to ecosystem stability. He’s keen not to overstate the threat to human health – but not to downplay it either. “I don’t think a fungal pandemic is imminent: as far as we know, humanity has never been struck by one,” he says. That is not to say fungi don’t kill people. “More people die from invasive fungal infections than from malaria, a disease we hear much more about.” Even now, about a dozen fungal species kill in total around 1.5 million people every year. Fungal disease is a significant contributor to AIDS deaths, for example – and yet the threat is often overlooked. “Fungal and bacterial infections may give similar symptoms, leading to misdiagnosis,” says Gow. “So in many cases, patients with fungal infections are initially treated for bacterial infections instead.” Meet the mushroom man who wants the world to take fungi seriously – in a good way Stuart Isett Meet the mushroom man who wants the world to take fungi seriously – in a good way Fungi comprise a whole kingdom of organisms in their own right, separate from plants and animals, and far less studied. This hugely diverse group of up to 5 million species includes mushrooms, yeasts, moulds and crop-destroying rusts and smuts. Most of the time, we happily coexist even with the killer varieties – you may be inhaling them right now, or they may be living in or on your body. But occasionally they turn rogue. Take Candida albicans, which causes most fungal infections in humans. Candida cannot survive without living on us or other animals. “There’s no evidence that it’s doing us any good, but it usually doesn’t harm us either,” says Gow, who studies Candida. Yet sometimes the unassuming resident gets a bit too comfortable and multiplies so fast that it causes the infection commonly known as thrush. “More people die from invasive fungal infections than from malaria“ How and why this happens is the focus of intense research. Usually, our white blood cells and other defences do a good job of keeping the fungus under control. “But anything that tips the odds the other way,” says Gow, “such as low numbers of white blood cells or antibiotics that wipe out other microflora, may cause a local outbreak.” This can be very aggravating – just ask one of the 100 million women worldwide who suffer at least four episodes of vaginal thrush a year. Most people recover without complications, because the fungus seldom thrives in the blood. “The bloodstream of a healthy human is quite robust to infections,” says Gow. But Candida does overcome the defences of hundreds of thousands of people each year to enter their blood – and at least half of them die. How can this be? “In a way, fungal infections are the disease of the diseased,” says Gow. “People who are vulnerable after an accident or invasive surgery, or whose immune system has been weakened or suppressed after an organ or stem cell transplant, may be unable to fend off a fungal attack. Candida is very opportunistic.” To work out a way to help the immune system nip Candida in the bud, Gow and his colleagues are investigating how the fungus interacts with our white blood cells. “It’s a titanic struggle on a microscopic scale,” he says. Candida uses camouflage and can shed tiny bits of cell wall to avoid being caught. Even when it does end up inside a white blood cell, it’s not game over. “The fungus can evade digestion by reducing the acidity inside the cell compartment where it’s held, and it even scavenges some of the cell’s food,” says Gow – “which is why it’s often able to keep growing until the white blood cell bursts open.” Another potentially deadly fungus, Cryptococcus, can cause meningitis by lurking in a white blood cell until it crosses the usually impenetrable blood-brain barrier. It then forces the cell to eject it. A handful of fungi kill some 1.5 million people each year. They include Candida (above), Cryptococcus (below) and Aspergillus DAVID SCHARF/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Cryptococcus E. GUEHO/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY Unlike Candida, Cryptococcus is not a fungus native to us – instead, it usually grows on rotting plant material in the soil. “Though most of us have been exposed to it by the age of 6, the chance that a particular Cryptococcus cell has encountered a human before is absolutely minuscule,” says Robin May at the University of Birmingham, UK. Yet Cryptococcus has recently achieved something once considered almost impossible: it has infected and killed previously healthy people. First discovered in Vancouver, Canada, over a decade ago, a particular strain of Cryptococcus, C. gattii, spread across the Pacific Northwest of the US, killing hundreds along the way. How does a fungus living on plant matter manage to survive inside a healthy human body? By accident, argues May. “There is obviously very little evolutionary pressure on Cryptococcus to find a way to survive in humans,” says May. However, the fungus is preyed upon by amoebas in the soil, and their mode of attack is quite similar to that of white blood cells. That might give the fungus a head start. This means it can occasionally thrive inside the body, harming its host in the process. Like Gow, May doesn’t think a fungal pandemic is just around the corner. “Fungi have very complex life cycles, and they tend to grow and evolve much slower than bacteria or viruses do.” The fact that fungi don’t depend on us for their survival cuts both ways, though. “It means that they probably aren’t trying very hard to conquer us. But also that they couldn’t care less if we were all to die.” When fungi are on our side: Fungal products won’t win prizes for glamour but will be greener Given that there has only been a single outbreak of C. gattii, it’s difficult to establish what led to it. May surmises that the strain had been around for some time, and that a very hot and dry summer may have contributed to its spread. “The fungus likes humid soils, so perhaps the drought stimulated it to produce more spores, or simply provided conditions that helped them to blow around more,” he says. However, we don’t have clear evidence for this and May notes that the summers of the past decade have all been fairly wet. This raises the question of whether other deadly new fungal strains might emerge as climate change takes hold. That is difficult to answer because the impact on weather patterns is likely to be very variable, says May. “But you might expect, for example, that Britain, which is a bit too cold for many fungi right now, may see an influx of fungus when temperatures rise.” Another concern is that although the warmth of our body protects us from many fungal infections, a warmer world may undo that by helping fungi to adapt. “But I currently know of no studies showing that fungi from warm soils infect warm-blooded animals more easily,” says May. Aspergillus EYE OF SCIENCE/SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY In any case, Cryptococcus copes just fine with being at 37 °C. Another fungus, called Aspergillus, can live in the heart of compost heaps at temperatures of 60 °C. Aspergillus spores are absolutely everywhere, says Jacques Meis of the Canisius Wilhelmina Hospital in Nijmegen, the Netherlands. “Every breath you take, they’re infecting you.” Garden-variety killer In the early 1990s, Meis was a parasitologist working on malaria when a prominent Dutch haematologist sought his help. “We can now treat blood diseases with bone marrow transplants or cycles of chemotherapy, but then patients literally die of garden-variety fungal infections,” he told Meis. Keeping Aspergillus at bay is a constant challenge. “The fungus and its spores are really small and often very water-repellent, so they take off with the slightest air current and find their way through all but the finest air filters,” says Meis. They are also extremely hardy – the spores can survive acidity, dehydration, freezing and high heat. No wonder they’re the most common eukaryote on the planet. Eukaryotes – which include fungi but not bacteria or viruses – are organisms in which the cells contain a nucleus. The fact that we, too, are eukaryotes makes it difficult to combat fungal pathogens. “Some of the most effective medicines against fungal infections, such as amphotericin B, are quite toxic to our cells as well,” says Meis. So they are often combined with or replaced by another class of antifungal drugs, collectively known as azoles. “The azoles block an enzyme that most fungi need to maintain their cell membrane,” he says. Watch this: Fungi break acceleration record to escape dung You would expect fungi to develop resistance to these drugs in people receiving repeated or long-term treatment. But lately, Meis has seen an increasing number of patients coming down with a resistant strain right away. “We found this very odd at first,” he says. “But then it dawned on us that in the past decades, azoles have become very popular products.” They are now used to prevent fungal growth on crops, produce and flowers, and are an ingredient in many paints and coatings. Aspergillus isn’t the target of these azoles, but it is constantly exposed to them. “There is no doubt that some of these applications are contributing to azole resistance in the clinic,” says Meis. “Because Aspergillus is quite literally all over the place and exchanges genes very quickly, resistance can spread across the world incredibly fast.” Meis doesn’t expect companies to stop producing azoles or farmers to stop using them. “I’m afraid the fact that Aspergillus targets only patients who are already weak will likely undercut any arguments in favour of reduced azole use,” he says, “except if we can figure out which products are causing the biggest problems and why.” One deadly fungal strain has found a way into the human brain Koh Okamoto, Shuji Hatakeyama et al. EDMOND BYRNES AND JOSEPH HEITMAN, Duke University Deadly fungal disease is often not viewed with the seriousness it deserves because it mainly affects people that were “on the way out anyway”, says medical mycologist David Denning at the University of Manchester, UK, But that argument is very problematic, he says. “The Cryptococcus gattii outbreak shows that there is always a risk that a fungus will one day find a way to infect healthy people as well.” In any case, it isn’t true that weakened patients who contract a fungal disease are already bound to die of some other cause, says Denning: our ability to keep severely ill people alive is constantly improving. However, this means the number of people vulnerable to fungal disease will go on rising unless we tackle the problem. “It would be a terrible shame if this progress and all we’ve invested in it were offset by fungal infections.” Yet that is what is happening, especially in the fight against HIV. Antiretroviral cocktails are now highly effective, but many people with HIV live in poor countries where it can be difficult for them to take the drugs as prescribed. A lapse in treatment can cause their white-blood-cell count to drop, at which point any fungus they’re exposed to may turn invasive. “About half of all AIDS deaths are the result of fungal infections,” says Denning, “yet they’re hardly addressed.” There are multiple reasons why the problem is going untackled. “Diagnosis of fungal disease isn’t straightforward – it is as good as impossible without access to a medical lab – and treatment with amphotericin B is intravenous and risky,” says Denning. But the task isn’t impossible, and cracking it could be a big step towards achieving the UN’s target of reducing annual AIDS-related deaths to below 500,000 by 2020. “If we could treat 60 per cent of the HIV patients annually overcome by an invasive fungus, we could save at least 300,000 lives a year – typically 35-year olds, economically active, with husbands or wives and children who need them,” he says. “These people aren’t on the way out. They are ill, and they need our help.”

Yes, and we cannot read too much into the results. The main reason to have load balancing is to improve efficiency of our existing fossil fuel stock and integrate renewables into the system, it is not to give individuals a small cash bonus (equivalent to 2 cigarettes a day).

How are they managing that, it is cheaper than wholesale prices. EDF will run a cable to Hinkley C just to meet contractual obligations, be worth them spending £500 million to do so.

That will be a couple of gas plants changed over to spinning reserves, rather than actually switched off. If we stopped milking cows at the two peak periods we would save the same (ish, it takes 1 kWh/day to milk a cow and we have around a million of them being milked every day). Turning off 40 million, energy efficient fridges (8W), for an hour, would save about 320 MWh. Would have to get that back though. Using 1 litre of fuel a week less in all the cars would save 33.5 GWh a day. So we can see where the real savings are

It is possible, but probably not practicable for £1000. Here is an example. https://www.amazon.co.uk/EF-Portable-Appliances-Charging-Generator/dp/B09J8C9MVF/ref=sr_1_18_sspa But the huge output, is about 40 minutes of running with that storage. Now you could cobble together your own system with a leisure batter or two, an cheap inverter and a battery charger. The efficiency will be pretty poor, but it will work.

Not really. One at random. https://www.amazon.co.uk/Adjustable-Switching-Precision-Charging-Interface/dp/B09C8LWV9W/ref=mp_s_a_1_3

I have no idea what a homepod actually is. Or if cuddling them us discouraged.

Isn't that used to spy on you?

What happens if the charger fails and transmits mains voltage down the line into the bathroom. Isn't that why isolating transformers are used in shaver outlets.

Embracing BRSXIT to the full nine yards.

https://www.smartme.co.uk/smets-2.html 2/3G via O2 (wonder if you can get the SIM out and make some calls).

That is very close, under 5'

Not stopped them with E7. Still. Anyone can do what I have done, if they really want to.

Do you know where the gaps and fissures are on this property? Or if that is even the problem. Totally different problem. Spending a few thousand (or even a few 100,000) on a multi million project is not the same as spending a few thousand on a house. I have a feeling that large warehouses are build to different safety standards than houses, maybe @saveasteading knows as he deals with large buildings.

Not sure how long ago Octopus made this offer, but a few minutes on Gridwatch would have shown the times that were most likely to be the 'saving session'. Should have just burned up a few kWh. Not exactly a surprise that national usage goes up around tea time is it.

Because it is the right thing to do.

Yes, but only if you can utilise it. @ProDave would flush any left over down the drain.

About 90p. Bet you wished you had used more now.