It could be autoclaved in a pressure cooker if the protein can tolerate the temp.

In a pressure cooker the pressure is also exerted on the outside of the ampule. No pressure differential, no kaboom.

It may be that a thorough irradiation sterilization will end up denaturing your protein anyways.

Maybe one could accept that a beautiful thing could be beautiful also because it is temporary.

At what temp will your protein denature? If the protein denatures at a high enough temp, you could hold it at a lower temp to make life really hard for bacteria and wait it out for a few days to kill it down while not denaturing your protein.

Basically pasteurize the thing at a temp that is below the temp that will damage the protein you care about.

Sorry, I misunderstood your use of the term ampule. I figured that your sample of bacteria was in the ampule rather than your uranium was encapsulated in glass.

In any case your work will be done with a weak gamma emitter which will probably work damnably slowly.

In terms of magnitude, 5x is about the same given the range of emmisivity that is observed with radioactive sources.

When one considers sterilization, one is looking for magnitudes of "kill". For instance, cooking chicken to FDA mandated temps results in log -6 reduction. One in 1 million salmonella survive the cooking process. I think that dental steam sterilization practices are going for log -9 reduction.

A multiple of 5 is not a considerable effect in the consideration of sterilization.

I think that freezing should allow one to achieve sterilization with a low emission source by basically tilting the replication rate to kill rate in a severe way.

Low emission rate sources need more time to achieve sterilization.

Still though, depleted uranium generally provides alpha and beta emissions with a bit of gamma. The alpha won't make it through the walls of the ampule. I think that much of the beta also won't make it through. You'll be dependent on the low gamma emissions to slowly achieve your sterilization.

I looked up Raman spectroscopy on wikipedia. I think they're shooting a laser at the working area of the electrodes to observe the wavelengths of scattered light. It appears to me that they are applying a kind of molecular emissions spectroscopy where they excite their sample region with a chosen wavelength of laser to excite the molecules in the region. The molecules enter a higher energy state, due to laser excitation, and when they "come back down" to a lower energy level the emit light of different wavelengths which may be analyzed. Also the emissions spectra of disassociated protons and OH radicals will have their own character that can be observed.

I suppose that they observe a different emissions spectra when they're making noise and electrolyzing than when they aren't making noise. I sure hope that they're not affecting their experiment with their use of their laser because it surely is a wavelength that can affect water molecules.

Anyways it doesn't appear to involve alkaline treated noodles as far as I can tell.

For the record: I did not notice the strange emissions spectra of my gas combustion trial soon enough. I saw a funny colour that wasn't the usual purple hue and said "huh"... Then my eyeballs, sinuses, and lungs were getting fried when I took my next breath as my brain assimilated it's findings a few seconds too late.

Thanks for that smack. I forget to look at papers directly when I'm on a phone because a phone is an abysmal platform for looking at complicated things.

I sure hurt my head trying to parse all of that. To be honest my experience with electrolysis principles is not far from being a layperson.

I had some fun generating hydrogen and oxygen gas mixtures for my potato cannon experiments way back in junior HS (somewhere back in the late '80's). I made some really neat observations on my ammeter that lined up with qualitative observations like the fizz rate would drop fairly quickly at the same time as current flow rate.

I could start my electrolysis cell with a good surge of current at the start, but in not very long current would drop quickly. I figured that it was bubble attachment and that seemed to be the problem because a sharp tap to the bottom of my setup would result in a bunch of detached bubbles and a surge of current only to decline again.

I hot glued a motor with a lead fishing weight pinched onto the output shaft to the bottom of the tank (a polypropylene tofu tub) so when I ran the motor it'd vibrate the floor and help shed bubbles. It made a big difference to my gas production.

I've tried to parse my way through that study a couple times and I can't find any reference to actual gas production rates. There is a lot of discussion of improvements to current density vs. voltage which should be a good thing. I am assuming that they are working on the assumption that their current density is going to be their bulk current divided by their exposed electrode area under the assumption that they have no bubbles attached to their electrodes.

This could be a good assumption if the macro observation is that there is never any bubbles stuck to the electrodes. Maybe this is a thing that can be easy to confirm visually.

I have to concede that it would be difficult to come up with a meaningful current per unit area if bubble attachment is an issue because it would be very difficult to measure the area of bubble attachment to calculate actual current per unit area.

It would be far easier to assume no bubble attachment and calculate current per area on that assumption. If the assumption is wrong then one would require higher voltages to drive the same current and that does not appear to be the case, based on their observations that sonicating the bath is reducing the voltage to drive similar current.

My inner dickhead concedes that they are actually achieving a better current flow per unit voltage with their ultrasonic trick, if their results are to be accepted.

Still I would have liked to have seen a gas per power expenditure. Run the electrolysis cell long enough and you'd have a handy checksum accounting of your efficiency improvement to "close the loop" on your voltage and current measurements. Also it would be a bulk observation that the layperson could understand without needing to understand the principles, which a monkey like me would appreciate.

I kind of wish that they crunched their numbers in a way to compare against Gibbs Free energy. I remember a list of chemical reactions that were related to change in enthalpy in HS. I imagine that we are trying to approach an ideal Gibbs Free energy limit so it would be useful to compare improvements in electrolysis in terms of efficiency relative to GFE limits.

I suppose the one thing that is remaining is that I do not know how much power was inputted to their ultrasonic transducer. What was the power required to run their transducer?

Piezo elements aren't very efficient (something like 10% efficient) and liquid mediums tend to eat ultrasonic energy and convert it to heat like mad.

It may be a neat trick to boost output with a sonifier, but it may be that the the effects they're playing with require too much transducer power which negates their 27% efficiency boost.

I remember dumping a bunch of salt into my water bath to increase my rate of gas production. It worked like a charm! I probably quadrupled my gas production rate! I lit a cup of gas mix to celebrate and was treated to a nice loud pop and a kind of funny different flame colour which was immediately intriguing.

Then it hit me as it hit my eyes and lungs: I had ignited a mix of hydrogen and chlorine which was making HCL in my mucous membranes and I just gassed myself...

I wish they said something about current draw. Im not clear that they were getting 14x more gas production per unit power or just a higher speed of production at constant voltage.

I used to have an electrolysis rig when I was a kid. I used carbon electrodes pulled out of old D cell carbon batteries.

I would find that gas production would slow fairly quickly unless I periodically tapped the electrodes to shake gas off of the electrodes. The accumulated bubbles would reduce contact with the water and production rate but my current draw would also decline.

I don't recall getting better gas production rate per unit power by knocking off the bubbles though.

I also remember having problem with calcium buildup fouling my electrodes. I got better results with distilled water, but I imagine that the energy required to distil water is pretty nuts. Maybe I could have used rainwater.

The problem is the threshold for "being on the take".

It is not difficult to donate money to a politician. They'll take money from all sorts of directions. Whether or not you manage to purchase some influence is another issue.

If I were CCP wanting to appear to have corrupted a particular candidate, I could donate $5k to their campaign through fairly acceptable totally legal channels then let myself get caught doing so.

I would have helped someone get elected by contributing to their campaign then get caught doing so if I wished to smear them.

If we are going to become more proof against foreign manipulation we are going to have to substantially improve our understanding of the issues being voted for in parliament.

I don't mean that we should get more compelled, I mean that we need to nurture a deeper understanding of how shit works instead of ascribing to the hot takes of influencers that excite us.

I can see some brilliance in China's play: they have recognized a kind of primal weaknesses in the human social psyche. I see that they exercise a cynical raison d'etre in their approach to governance and manipulation in respect of this realization.

The Chinese have recognized that the human psyche is prone to tribal behaviours and that our social impulse is both powerful and highly irrational.

They are working to limit individualism and keep a tight lid on their internal narrative while experimenting in destabilizing Western cultures wherever they can.

I crunched some numbers from an article on Chinese "police stations" being operated in Toronto a month or so ago. CSIS presented some estimate of how much China was spending on their efforts to destabilize us.

Lots of discussion as to which of our politicians had been corrupted. It got us thinking about what political things had happened in the past that we didn't like and could they be attributed to foreign manipulation.

I rounded up and chunked on some more cash to reach something like $20M CAD.

I was chagrined that China could spend a mere $0.60 per Canadian person to destabilize our fragile psyche. We do something insane like $70k GDP per person and we can be dicked with with a $0.60 spend.

Our GDP per person is freaking $70kCAD per freaking person and they can twizzle our psyches with 60 cents.

Ok, I'm pissed that China could dick with my country, but I have to own the fact that the vulnerability they're playing with has to be more my fault than China's.

The cash that China is spending to mess with us is a mere pittance in comparison to our productivity. They're messing with a kind of social transistor effect that is inherent to our brains and we get to take that away from China if we could somehow find some harmony with ourselves which would be good for us in the long term anyways.

We are losing the plot on how to become a better society and are instead wracked with infighting.

It is interesting that so many differently named viral infections have such common symptom sets. There may be a few things like blisters on the tongue and sores on the feet, but fever, chills, coughing, headache, are super common symptoms.

Not being able to see things directly it would be reasonable to conclude that much of our observable symptoms are more of a feature of how our immune system decides to mobilize than it is about a particular viral infection.

If this is true, our system warning light may also be turning off well after the situation has actually cleared.

I used to beatbox at orb weavers (very nice webs) to watch them throw their forelegs up when they felt vibrations in their web.

You probably make a bigger improvement in what the back panel receives with bifacing panels if you open up the spacing than you get in lower operating temp.

Bitrex is is disgusting stuff. A trace amount of it on your face can easily get to your mouth when you have lunch.

Aspartame is a pretty good option but it's detection limit will be higher in that we'd need to have more leaking in to detect it.

Gases are not dense enough for intermolecular interactions to affect bulk material behaviour as would be seen with liquids.

Liquids are far more dense than gases. When molecules are densely packed, as with liquids, intermolecular interactions can affect bulk behaviour.