I suppose many products were initially invented to get value or of an underutilized by-product, but as soon as there's a market and people want to buy it, the byproduct is no longer waste.
This made me wonder - do any cloud compute systems have an option to time jobs or use physical resources geographically based on surplus power availability to minimise emissions?
I reckon it might incidentally happen if optimising for cost of power depending how correlated that is to carbon intensivity of power generation, which admittedly I haven't thought through.
> Modern sailing vessels always sail into the wind, because they're always going faster than the wind blows.
Maybe state of the art hydrofoiling boats, cats and some quite large monohulls, but maybe that's what you meant by modern. Most sailboats built today have a pretty low top speed (due to hull speed limitations) relative to wind speed - monohulls often max out around 5-6 kts aren't going to be faster than the wind pretty much ever
You don't tend to hear about it and not that there isn't still progress to be made, but there has been tonnes of progress on fisheries interactions with protected bycatch species. For ex the infamous dolphin problem in the eastern tropical Pacific purse seine tuna fishery is down 99.8% from its peak to the point populations are recovering, despite the fishery intentionally setting on dolphin schools to catch > 150,000 t of yellowfin tuna per year.
Pelagic gillnets are probably the gear that still have the most issues with dolphin bycatch, and acoustic pingers that play a loud ultrasonic tone when they detect an echolocation click are already used to reduce interactions in some fisheries.
We had one on a yacht I crewed that did ecotour sorta sails. When we'd catch a small tuna, after the trips I'd butterfly it and George Foreman it. No added oil just right on the Teflon cooking surface and texture and taste would come out sorta like fried chicken. It was great
I'm not sure it's that unique of a situation though, most prey organisms have some antipredator adaptations but rarely are they foolproof, just like rarely are predatory adaptations like mimicry/camouflage/crypsis absolutely foolproof.
Oh yeah, 'charging up' your wetsuit is great. The replacement is fairly limited with a good suit especially if you have booties and a hood, but who cares, people pay a lot of money for skin care products with urea in them.
I bet all of these researchers involved had a long list of candidates they'd like to test and have a very good idea what the lowest hanging fruit are, sometimes for more interesting reasons than 'it was used successfully as an inhibitor for X and hasn't been tried yet in this context' — not that that isn't a perfectly good reason. I don't think ideas are the limiting factor. The reason attention was paid to this particular candidate is because google put money down.
I'm sure the scientists involved had a wish list of dozens of drug candidates to repurpose to test based on various hypotheses. Ideas are cheap, time is not.
In this case they actually tested a drug probably because Google is paying for them to test whatever the AI came up with.
