Not always. I teach a module where my lectures are fully coursework assessed and my god, a lot of the submissions are clearly AI. It’s super hard to prove though and I just mark the same as any other, but half-halluvinated school-grade garbage scores pretty damn low.

(edit: this is because we are trained on how to write questions AI struggles with. It makes writing exams harder, but it is possible. AI is terrible at chemistry. My personal favourite being when Google AI told me the melting point of pyrrole was about -2000C, so colder than absolute zero)

Sorry, should have clarified - I was speaking on the part of many academics. In my department, most people (faculty) have abandoned Twitter and a fair few have started on bluesky although more just don’t use the format in any context anymore. I only know of one who uses Mastadoon.

But we did leave and if (or when) it becomes enshitified, we will move again. We don’t need an idealised platform, we just want something easy to use which doesn’t (yet) have the baggage and culture of twiXer

Currently, garbage. They used it to reinforce a polymer to go from a strength of 50 MPa to 70 MPa. Kevlar is 10x stronger, commercially scaled, and cheap

I dont know this work, but have had a hand in some solar cell research (nanomaterials development), so can give a little context. This is a “one off” in so much as it will be centimeters sized lab based sample, although it has been repearedto verify. The current cost difference is astronomical versus mainstream (silicon) panels, but that’s typical of new discoveries. To be more exact, this is TRL 4 (technology readiness level 4) which is a scale that goes up to 9. Things only start getting cheap as you get towards the top. As for what the expected price of these materials would be, we don’t usually know for sure, although as this is a tandem cell it must be more expensive than mainstream as it literally builds a perovskite cell on top of a silicon one. They will never be used for mainstream - this is a specialist material.

The perovskite itself might make it as a general use solar cell. They have good efficiencies and you don’t have to make pure silicon (which is a bitch) and can in theory make them cheap and easy. As for time frame, I’m a bit of a skeptic it will ever be really used as there are a couple of issues this tech needs to address before it’s viable (#1, they degrade in air and encapsulating them adds new issues) and we already build silicon factories so that is soooo cheap versus building new factories to make long-term-cheaper cells. Factories are expensive. But in theory, anyone could push it to the mainstream within a decade.