Science, Time, and Spirit

Concrete Industry to Slash Carbon Emissions TL;DR: The concrete industry, responsible for 8% of global CO2 emissions, is pursuing multiple decarbonization strategies—from carbon capture to novel chemistries—while recent discoveries about self-healing Roman concrete offer additional insights. Despite promising innovations from startups and established producers, scaling low-carbon alternatives faces significant hurdles around cost, building codes, and the fundamental economics of a commodity business operating on thin margins. The world pours approximately 30 billion tons of concrete annually, making it humanity's most-consumed material after water. This ubiquitous building material also carries an enormous environmental burden: cement production alone generates roughly 2.9 billion tons of CO2 each year—approximately 8% of global emissions, rivaling the output of major industrial nations. "Concrete is literally the foundation of modern civilization, but it's also one o...

Pennies of Chemistry Command Hundreds in Price TL;DR: Carbon content—ranging from 0.05% to 2%—determines whether steel bends into car bodies or cuts through metal. Suppliers from China's Baowu to America's Nucor compete across this spectrum, with prices spanning $500 to $2,500 per tonne as tighter chemistry control and specialized applications drive premiums in a market shaped by trade barriers, raw material costs, and technological precision. The difference between steel that shapes skyscrapers and steel that machines their components comes down to less than one percent—specifically, how much carbon sits within the iron lattice. Carbon steel, the workhorse alloy underlying modern infrastructure and manufacturing, divides into distinct performance tiers based on a single variable: carbon content measured in fractions of a percentage point. Yet those fractions translate into dramatic differences in both material properties and market value, creating a global industry where ...

 The discovery of nuclear atomic structure came from Ernest Rutherford's gold foil experiment (1909-1911), conducted with Hans Geiger and Ernest Marsden at the University of Manchester. The Experiment Rutherford's team fired alpha particles (helium nuclei) at an extremely thin gold foil—only about 400 atoms thick. They expected the particles to pass through with minimal deflection, based on J.J. Thomson's prevailing "plum pudding model" which envisioned atoms as diffuse positive charge with electrons embedded throughout. Instead, they observed: Most alpha particles passed straight through (as expected) Some deflected at small angles Astonishingly, about 1 in 8,000 bounced back at angles greater than 90° Rutherford famously remarked this was "as if you fired a 15-inch shell at a piece of tissue paper and it came back and hit you." This led him to propose that atoms have a tiny, dense, positively-charged nucleus containing most of the atom's mass...

How One American Shell Turned Japanese Destroyers Into Shredded Metal - YouTube The 5"/38 Naval Gun: How American Engineering and Tactics Defeated Japanese Naval Supremacy in the Pacific BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) The 5"/38 caliber dual-purpose gun represents one of the most successful naval weapons in history, serving from 1934 through the 1990s across multiple conflicts. This assessment examines the weapon's development, integration with radar fire control systems, combat performance against Japanese forces, tactical evolution, and relevance to contemporary naval operations—particularly the magazine depth and cost-exchange challenges revealed in recent Red Sea operations against asymmetric threats. The Impossible Specification: Designing a Dual-Purpose Gun (1931-1934) In 1931, the U.S. Navy Bureau of Ordnance confronted an apparently impossible requirement: design a single gun capable of engaging both high-speed aircraft and armored warships. Conventional wisdom h...

Goodbye to the Tech That Died in 2025 - YouTube When Companies Kill Products You Paid For: The Great Tech Shutdown of 2025 TL;DR 2025 became the year technology companies aggressively abandoned functional products, remotely disabling features millions of customers depended on. Google killed smart features on Nest thermostats, Microsoft ended both Skype and Windows 10 support leaving 850 million vulnerable devices, AOL shut down dial-up service used by hundreds of thousands with no alternatives, and Apple eliminated the iPhone home button. The year exposed an uncomfortable truth: you don't own your technology—you rent access to features companies can revoke whenever profit margins demand it. BLUF (Bottom Line Up Front) Major technology companies in 2025 terminated support for functional products affecting hundreds of millions of users worldwide. Google disabled Nest thermostat connectivity requiring $230+ replacements, Microsoft ended Windows 10 security updates on October 14 le...