Month: June 2021

As we look towards a Waterworld-esque future where our access to H20 is increasingly rare, it’s even more important to figure out how to squeeze every last drop we can, including out of thin air. In a study published Wednesday in Science Advances, a team of researchers from ETH Zurich demonstrated a new way to create drinking water from humidity using only the sun as power.

There are lots of powerful atmospheric water generators on the market. But they still rely on technologies like fans that need external power. Passive water collection systems, meanwhile, are time-limited: They generally only work at night, when humidity is higher, and the water is in danger of evaporating back into the atmosphere when the sun comes up. There’s been a recent surge in techniques that use trays of materials, like gels, metals, salts, and other compounds to collect water when humidity is high at night; the material is then naturally heated by the sun and releases the water it has collected. The downside of this technique, however, is that it’s not 24/7, and it’s not automatic. The team of researchers wanted to bypass all these systems’ various issues.

“We said, let’s try something that really doesn’t require any energy, so it’s really energy neutral and only limited by physical principles,” said Iwan Hächler, a postdoctoral fellow at ETH Zurich and the lead author of the study. “We thought, ‘what if we show we can evaporate water? What if we try to condense it using radiative heat or radiative energy?’”

The resulting design is deceptively simple–it looks basically like a wide cone placed on top of a box, with a glass pane at the narrow end of the cone on top of the box. Each component here plays a key role.

Condensation happens when water in the air comes in contact with a surface that is below the ambient temperature. To ensure this process happens, researchers coated the glass pane with polymer and silver, allowing it to reflect the sunlight back and keep itself cooler than the ambient temperature. On the underside of the pane is a special coating where moisture from the air can collect and drop without requiring human or mechanical help. The cone acts like a radiation shield, which keeps the device from overheating and deflects the heat energy created from the condensation process.

“True condensation creates a tremendous amount of heat, because of the phase change of the water from gaseous to liquid,” said Hächler. “So we designed a radiation shield, which boosted the performance to allow us to get bigger yields.”

The design works pretty well, Hächler said. In lab tests, the maximum yield his team was able to get from the device was 0.05 liters (1.8 fluid ounces) per square meter per hour, very close to the theoretical maximum yield that researchers had calculated. That means the device is able to practically produce around 1.2 liters per square meter per day, or about a third of a person’s required daily intake. This is around twice the output of other passive technologies, the researchers said.

One of the biggest pluses of this system is that it is pretty easy and cheap to set up. Hächler said that the special coating that eliminates the water-wiping action isn’t totally needed to make the system function, while the silver coating on the glass pane would probably work just as well with any super-reflective surface, like chalk or white paint.

“We made a joke that we should make a version with cardboard and aluminum, but we could,” said Gabriel Schnoering, a professor of thermodynamics at ETF Zurich and another coauthor of the study. “Maybe not the same performance, but the idea works with glass, cardboard, aluminum.”

The possibilities for a device that could just sit there and create water for days on end are, pretty big. The climate crisis is causing dry places to become even drier. In other locations, groundwater reserves are being depleted at an unsustainable level. While the system alone couldn’t meet the needs of a region like the entire western U.S., which is currently in a megadrought and facing water restrictions, it could still play a role in helping address shortages there or other parts of the world that are water stressed.

Hächler said the system could be easily coupled with desalination. The air near the surface of the ocean is pretty humid, so desalination systems “could just let [the device] float around” and do its job. And it opens up possibilities for people living in poorer or remote areas without steady power who need more water.

“You could imagine installing it on a roof for families, and they could get some potable water,” he said.

PHPInsights just released v2 with the ability to automatically fix proposed insights, PHP 8 support, faster analysis, and more!

If you haven’t tried out PHPInsights yet, this is an excellent opportunity to give it a try. PHPInsights is an opinionated (yet configurable) code quality tool to analyze your PHP projects, providing static analysis tools, framework-specific recommendations, and quality checks to ensure your code stays in tip-top shape.

Without further ado, let’s look at a few highlight features for v2!

Automatically Fix Insights from PHPCS and PHP-CS-Fixer

In v2, you can use the --fix option to the phpinsights CLI to automatically fix insights from PHPCS and PHP-CS-Fixer. You can also launch fixes using the fix command:

1vendor/bin/phpinsights fix

PHP 8 Support

With v2 released, PHPInsights is compatible with PHP 8 and Composer v2. In addition, some insights make recommendations to use newer PHP 8 features not available in previous versions.

Real-Time Monitoring

Using the new --summary option, you can get real-time monitoring of PHPInsights while you code! Using the Linux watch command, you can see the state of your code in progress!

Here’s the --summary option in action:

Analysis Performance

Between the v1.x and just-released v2, PHPInsights received various performance tuning and introduced caching to increase analysis performance. All issue details are stored in cache for quicker results when a file’s content does not change between two reports. Lastly, v2 can utilize multiple CPU cores via configuration. If you don’t specify, PHPInsights will automatically detect how many cores you have and use all of them.

Learn More

I’d highly recommend reading the PHPInsights v2 release announcement by Jibé Barth. Also, check out the following release notes from the changelog to see all the features in v2:

v2.0.0

Added

• Minimal PHP version is now PHP 7.4 (#391)
• Support multiple path to analyse (#384)
• Autofixer (#337)
• Syntax check Insight is now using PHP-Parallel-lint (#373, #437, #487)
• Cache on analysis (#407)
• Allow to override preset config (#420)
• Support Composer v2 (#433, #442)
• Support phploc v7 (#428)
• Parallelization of analysis (#414)
• Support PHP8 (#448)
• CheckStyle report use the dot notation format to be using with Checkstyle parsers (#464)
• Allow to use version in composer.json (#473)
• Upgrade to Slevomat/Coding-standard v7 (#477)
• New option to show summary only (#481)
• Support PHP-CS-Fixer v3 (#490)
• CodeClimate Formatter (#498)
• Configuring Fixers indentation (#502)
• Diff output configurable (#482)

Fixed

• Performance issues (#382, #387, #405)
• Check that lock file exist (#389)
• Avoid conflict with phpcs config file (#402)
• Clean display message without file target (#404)
• IDE Link with colors (#413)
• No error trigger when Details Message issue contains console styling (#447)
• Excluded files from Cyclomatic Complexity are no more take in account for score (#460)

Changed

• Refactoring code (#391, #393)
• Process Security Checks during the project inspection (#406)
• Drop Travis-CI and use GithubAction (#448)
• Drop object-calisthenics/phpcs-calisthenics-rules dependency (#477)

Deprecated

• Some Insights hare now deprecated or namespace changed. Find them here (#477)

One of the most promising things about Paramount’s upcoming Snake Eyes solo film is that it seemed very much like its story would focus mainly on its titular ninja hero, rather than dumping way too much information about the larger G.I. Joe franchise the way the studio’s 2013 The Rise of Cobra did. Though the new trailer definitely has origin-y vibes, the way it teases out Snake Eyes’ confrontation with Cobra makes it seem as if the villainous organization’s going to be a much more significant presence than we previously knew.

When Henry Golding’s unnamed character—who we meet working as a fishmonger—refuses to kill Tommy (Andrew Koji), the man who will one day become Storm Shadow, he’s pulled into a shadowy, secretive world of professional ninjas who’ve been waging war against evil across the globe for centuries. While becoming part of the Arashikage clan puts Golding’s character on the path to becoming the Snake Eyes, the trailer also makes clear that his journey takes an unexpected turn when Cobra’s Baroness (Úrsula Corberó) steps onto the scene, heralding her organization’s latest go for world domination.

Because Snake Eyes is meant to tell the story of how its hero become a legendary warrior, it makes sense that the movie would feature some degree of direct connection to the larger G.I. Joe franchise. But the big question now looming over the movie is how much of the plot might feel like overlong foreshadowing for a sequel versus its own solid story. Either way, the movie seems very committed to giving diehard fans of Snake Eyes and the gang the kind of visual fanservice they crave, and it’s going to be interesting to see whether that’s enough to lure audiences into theaters when Snake Eyes premieres on July 23.

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