Tag: filtering
Researchers can now pull hydrogen directly from seawater, no filtering required
Researchers at the University of Adelaide announced this week that they made clean hydrogen fuel from seawater without pre-treatment. Demand for hydrogen fuel, a clean energy source that only produces water when burned, is expected to increase in the coming years as the world (hopefully) continues to pivot away from fossil fuels. The findings could eventually provide cheaper green energy production to coastal areas.
“We have split natural seawater into oxygen and hydrogen with nearly 100 per cent efficiency, to produce green hydrogen by electrolysis, using a non-precious and cheap catalyst in a commercial electrolyser,” said Professor Shizhang Qiao, the team’s co-lead. Seawater typically needs to be purified before electrolysis splits it into hydrogen and oxygen. The team says its results, using cobalt oxide with chromium oxide on its surface as the catalyst, had similar performance to a standard process of applying platinum and iridium catalysts to highly purified and deionized water.
Compared to freshwater, seawater is an abundant resource, and the ability to extract hydrogen fuel from seawater without pre-treatment could save money. However, even if successfully scaled, it would likely only be practical for coastal communities with plenty of seawater — not so much for Iowa or Kansas.
The team’s next step is to scale the system with a larger electrolyzer. Then, although it’s still early in development, the researchers hope to eventually apply the findings to commercial hydrogen production for fuel cells and ammonia synthesis. Co-lead Yao Zheng summarized, “Our work provides a solution to directly utilise seawater without pre-treatment systems and alkali addition, which shows similar performance as that of existing metal-based mature pure water electrolyser.”
Republicans sue Google for filtering campaign emails as spam
Republicans are suing Google over email spam filtering
Earlier this year, Google threw a bone at Republicans who felt Gmail unfairly filtered their campaign emails to users’ spam folders. Those same Republicans are now suing Google anyway.
Axios reported that the Republican National Committee (RNC) filed a lawsuit against Google in California for allegedly and unfairly throwing GOP campaign emails to the spam folder at a time when fundraising is especially crucial ahead of the November congressional midterm elections. The lawsuit specifically alleges that said emails get filtered to spam around the end of each month, when fundraising is supposedly at its most fruitful.
This is notable because Google just launched a program in August (with approval from the Federal Election Commission) that individual campaigns can apply for with the intent of stopping emails from getting sent to spam. Per the Axios report, the RNC is not part of this program, though it’s not clear whether that’s by choice or not. If it were, its emails would avoid traditional spam detection and would have a special banner on them signaling that the sender is part of the program.
The GOP’s distrust of Google’s spam filtering gained traction when a study from North Carolina State University apparently found that Republican emails were sent to spam at a higher rate than those sent by Democrats. However, Google has repeatedly denied that this is the case, and Mashable’s own reporting on the subject found that an email sender’s habits are more likely to cause spam filtering than their political affiliation. In other words, if you send a lot of similar emails over and over and they don’t get opened very often, that’s a one-way ticket to Spamville.
Maybe there’s a Google conspiracy against Republicans or maybe the GOP just doesn’t understand how to send emails. Either way, it may go to the courts now.
Republicans sue Google over ‘discriminatory’ spam filtering practices
The Republican National Committee (RNC) is suing Google for allegedly sending “millions” of campaign emails to users’ spam folders (via Axios). According to the lawsuit filed in California’s Eastern District Court on Friday, the RNC accuses Google of “throttling its email messages because of the RNC’s political affiliation and views.”
For months, the RNC has been complaining about Google’s alleged spam filtering bias, claiming it disproportionately puts Republican-backed political emails in spam folders when compared to messages sent by Democrats. The RNC’s frustration was only exacerbated by a North Carolina State University study that suggested Google was sending RNC emails to spam folders more frequently, leading a group of…