Collection of blogs from University College London departments, covering science, history, archaeology, technology and research findings.
HN commenters cite it for individual research posts, including meteoritic iron in Egypt, solar power fact-checking, East German suicide, and Google Flu Trends.
> and the fact that cycles of power generation in most cases do not align with usage.
This is false. Power usage everywhere is highest when the sun is shining. There are also very very few places where solar power ever causes the market to bottom out with any regularity. Note that there is no technical problem with this- you can always just disconnect renewables from the grid.
The phenomenon you are thinking of -the duck curve- refers to the power demand after subtracting solar. The daily peak consumption of power in many places is wider than solar generation, so if there is enough solar you end up getting new smaller peaks just after dawn and around sunset. This is minorly inconvenient for non-renewable sources, which prefer to have more predictable demands.
> Usually most analysis ignore costs of having a buffer in the system
Correctly! Non-renewable plants are the ones that need buffer. Solar, wind, hydro etc can all be connected to a grid with zero instability- you just unplug them if nobody wants the power. Non-renewable plants have slow ramp speeds- they need the buffer in order to follow a changing load.
> Not to mention less land required, which is another of ignored costs.
This is incorrect; I don't know of any analyses which don't include land and interconnection costs which are obviously substantial. If you mean more intangibly... that's very silly. The US Interstate system is 3.9 million miles of road, with 60' medians, 16' of shoulder, and 48'…
This is something I know about.
If you waited until stuff was selectable/searchable (i.e. transcribed) then you'd never get these types of documents online. The scanning part of this process is tough considering that either a) very decent equipment must be bought, staff must be trained, extreme care must be taken handling old documents, all this costs money and takes time; b) the scanning must be outsourced because the archive doesn't have the competencies or tech and this is done at a cost.
Archives regard documents in there special collections as assets belonging to the institution. There is a resistance to putting them online. Once they are online they can be 'stolen'. If you want to have the whole lot transcribed first it could take decades because of the sheer volume of documents and the lack of researchers and archivists (and its not really the job of an archivist to transcribe stuff, merely to synopsize for a descriptive list and catalogue). For instance, The University of London, a liberal institution founded by Jeremy Bentham, wanted to get all of Bentham's documents online. Except the guy was a prolific correspondent. It was taking them years and years to transcribe the Bentham archive and they had only gotten (I don't remember exactly but something like) 2% through it. In the end the crowd-sourced the task[1] by scanning everything, putting the scans in a wiki and letting everyone on the net have a go at transcribing the documents - they are 94% done now. And…
I'll bite: the US dedicates about 5 billion bushels of corn a year to ethanol production [0], which is basically solar with extra steps. At a generous yield of 190 bushels/acre [1], this is 26 million acres dedicated to ethanol production (WRI puts it at 30m [2]).
Depending on who you ask, it would take somewhere between 2.5 [3] and 13.5 million acres [4] of solar to supply total US electricity demand, including storage and maintenance etc. We could double it to be safe and account for the reduction in ethanol production, and it would still all fit within the land currently used for corn ethanol. (btw this works out to a >10x increase in efficiency over ethanol.)
Of course I do agree that there's lots of less productive land (desert in the west, grazing land in the plains, and parking lots/rooftops everywhere) that should be used when available. But even in the midwest and east the land use is not a problem.
[0] - https://www.ers.usda.gov/publications/pub-details?pubid=105761
[1] - https://www.ncga.com/stay-informed/media/the-corn-economy/article/2025/08/usda-raises-record-projections-for-corn-yield-and-production
[2] - https://www.wri.org/insights/increased-biofuel-production-impacts-climate-change-farmers
[3] - https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/energy/2015/05/21/fact-checking-elon-musks-blue-square-how-much-solar-to-power-the-us/
[4] (PDF) - https://docs.nrel.gov/docs/fy08osti/42463.pdf
I was under the impression that the Greeks leaned into a practice that was already well-established as part of rulership in the region. At the very least it seems we have evidence that Tutankhamun's parents were brother-sister and he appears to have had some severe abnormalities as a result:
> The results of the DNA analyses show that Tutankhamun was, beyond doubt, the child born from a first-degree brother-sister relationship between Akhenaten and Akhenaten’s sister (see Fig. 3). ... Pharaoh Tutankhamun suffered from congenital equinovarus deformity (also called ‘clubfoot’). The tomography scans of Tutankhamun’s mummy also revealed that the Pharaoh had a bone necrosis for quite a long time, which might have caused a walking disability. This was supported by the objects found next to his mummy. Did you know that 130 sticks and staves were found in its tomb?
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/researchers-in-museums/2018/08/16/consanguinity-and-incest-in-ancient-egypt-2/
> The opportunity for fraud is immense
At the time, not so much. It was called "The Bronze Age" and "The Iron age" came later. The names aren't random.
From the article:
> The use of meteoritic iron particularly stands out during the Bronze Age because of the lack of iron smelting at the time.
In other words, the main source of this special metal was when the Gods occasionally threw down a piece, in a column of fire.
See also in ancient Egypt:
https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/museums/2013/09/01/23856/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1296207417305356
> I was lead to believe as long as it was invite only and you didn't charge for attending, it was legal.
The UK seems to require a 'non-theatrical' film licence [1][2] for:
- at one-off events
- at film clubs - whether or not you sell tickets
- in common areas for guests, residents and passengers
- in retail and entertainment venues
[1] https://www.gov.uk/showing-films-in-public
[2] https://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/copyright/2014/08/01/film-clubs/