• itsnicodegallo@lemm.ee
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    6 months ago

    Serious question: How is this different than all the other sensationalized headlines about some technology that’s gonna change everything, and then you later hear nothing about it?

    • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
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      6 months ago

      I had a little discussion with a guy complaining about sodium batteries and how you keep hearing these wild claims and then nothing. I did a quick search and saw an article about a $2 billion partnership agreement to work on a pilot plant for sodium batteries. He claimed it was yet another sensational headline and doubted anything would happen from it. Less than a week later I saw an article about a plant in America being announced.

      This stuff is hard. It’s not like Master of Orion where you throw money at a specific research and get access upon completion. Different groups around the world are researching a multitude of different ideas, some related, and after a while a bunch of these ideas are combined and associated and researched, and all of a sudden you have a new product that’s significantly different from what was available before. And then you see incremental improvements for decades, not unlike the internal combustion engine or rechargeable lithium batteries.

    • realitista@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      You are reading about it in Popular Mechanics, so it’s definitely a sensationalized headline, we know that at a minimum.