Bipolar Uranium Extraction From Seawater With Ultra-Low Cell Voltage

June 11, 2025 by Maya Posch 53 Comments

As common as uranium is in the ground around us, the world’s oceans contain a thousand times more uranium (~4.5 billion tons) than can be mined today. This makes extracting uranium as well as other resources from seawater a very interesting proposition, albeit it one that requires finding a technological solution to not only filter out these highly diluted substances, but also do so in a way that’s economically viable. Now it seems that Chinese researchers have recently come tantalizingly close to achieving this goal.

The anode chemical reaction to extract uranium. (Credit: Wang et al., Nature Sustainability, 2025)

The used electrochemical method is described in the paper (gift link) by [Yanjing Wang] et al., as published in Nature Sustainability. The claimed recovery cost of up to 100% of the uranium in the seawater is approximately $83/kilogram, which would be much cheaper than previous methods and is within striking distance of current uranium spot prices at about $70 – 85.

Of course, the challenge is to scale up this lab-sized prototype into something more industrial-sized. What’s interesting about this low-voltage method is that the conversion of uranium oxide ions to solid uranium oxides occurs at both the anode and cathode unlike with previous electrochemical methods. The copper anode becomes part of the electrochemical process, with UO₂ deposited on the cathode and U₃O₈ on the anode.

Among the reported performance statistics of this prototype are the ability to extract UO₂²⁺ ions from an NaCl solution at concentrations ranging from 1 – 50 ppm. At 20 ppm and in the presence of Cl^– ions (as is typical in seawater), the extraction rate was about 100%, compared to ~9.1% for the adsorption method. All of this required only a cell voltage of 0.6 V with 50 mA current, while being highly uranium-selective. Copper pollution of the water is also prevented, as the dissolved copper from the anode was found on the cathode after testing.

The process was tested on actual seawater (East & South China Sea), with ten hours of operation resulting in a recovery rate of 100% and 85.3% respectively. With potential electrode optimizations suggested by the authors, this extraction method might prove to be a viable way to not only recover uranium from seawater, but also at uranium mining facilities and more.

Using A Videocard As A Computer Enclosure

June 10, 2025 by Maya Posch 9 Comments

The CherryTree-modded card next to the original RTX 2070 GPU. (Credit: Gamers Nexus)

In the olden days of the 1990s and early 2000s, PCs were big and videocards were small-ish add-in boards that blended in with other ISA, PCI and AGP cards. These days, however, videocards are big and computers are increasingly smaller. That’s why US-based CherryTree Computers did what everyone has been joking about, and installed a PC inside a GPU, with [Gamers Nexus] having the honors of poking at the creatively titled GeeFarce 5027POS Micro Computer.

As CherryTree describes it on their website, this one-off build was the result of a joke about how GPUs nowadays are more expensive than the rest of the PC combined. Thus they did what any reasonable person would do and put an Asus NUC 13 with a 13th gen Core i7, 64 GB of and 2 TB of NVMe storage inside an (already dead) Asus Aorus RTX 2070 GPU.

In the [Gamers Nexus] video we can see that it’s definitely a quick-and-dirty build, with plenty of heatshrink and wires running everywhere in addition to the chopped off original heatsink. That said, from a few meter away it still looks like a GPU, can be installed like a GPU (but the PCIe connector does nothing) and is in the end a NUC PC inside a GPU shell that you can put a couple of inside a PC case.

Presumably the next project we’ll see in this vein will see a full-blown x86 system grafted inside a still functioning GPU, which would truly make the ‘install the PC inside the GPU’ meme a reality.

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Generating Plasma With A Hand-Cranked Generator

June 10, 2025 by Maya Posch 12 Comments

Everyone loves to play with electricity and plasma, and [Hyperspace Pirate] is no exception. Inspired by a couple of 40×20 N52 neodymium magnets he had kicking around, he decided to put together a hand-cranked generator and use it to generate plasma with. Because that’s the kind of fun afternoon projects that enrich our lives, and who doesn’t want some Premium Fire™ to enrich their lives?

The generator itself is mostly 3D printed, with the magnets producing current in eight copper coils as they spin past. Courtesy of the 4.5:1 gear on the crank side, it actually spins at over 1,000 RPM with fairly low effort when unloaded, albeit due to the omission of iron cores in the coils. This due to otherwise the very strong magnets likely cogging the generator to the point where starting to turn it by hand would become practically impossible.

Despite this, the generator produces over a kilovolt with the 14,700 turns of 38 AWG copper wire, which is enough for the voltage multiplier and electrodes in the vacuum chamber, which were laid out as follows:

Circuit for the plasma-generating circuit with a vacuum chamber & hand-cranked generator. (Credit: Hyperspace Pirate, YouTube)

Some of our esteemed readers may be reminded of arc lighters which are all the rage these days, and this is basically the hand-cranked, up-scaled version of that. Aside from the benefits of having a portable super-arc lighter that doesn’t require batteries, the generator part could be useful in general for survival situations. Outside of a vacuum chamber the voltage required to ionize the air becomes higher, but since you generally don’t need a multi-centimeter arc to ignite some tinder, this contraption should be more than sufficient to light things on fire, as well as any stray neon signs you may come across.

If you’re looking for an easier way to provide some high-voltage excitement, automotive ignition coils can be pushed into service with little more than a 555 timer, and if you can get your hands on a flyback transformer from a CRT, firing them up is even easier.

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The Ongoing BcacheFS Filesystem Stability Controversy

June 10, 2025 by Maya Posch 58 Comments

In a saga that brings to mind the hype and incidents with ReiserFS, [SavvyNik] takes us through the latest data corruption bug report and developer updates regarding the BcacheFS filesystem in the Linux kernel. Based on the bcache (block cache) cache mechanism in the Linux kernel, its author [Kent Overstreet] developed it into what is now known as BcacheFS, with it being announced in 2015 and subsequently merged into the Linux kernel (6.7) in early 2024. As a modern copy-on-write (COW) filesystem along the lines of ZFS and btfs, it was supposed to compete directly with these filesystems.

Despite this, it has become clear that BcacheFS is rather unstable, with frequent and extensive patches being submitted to the point where [Linus Torvalds] in August of last year pushed back against it, as well as expressing regret for merging BcacheFS into mainline Linux. As covered in the video, [Kent] has pushed users reporting issues to upgrade to the latest Linux kernel to get critical fixes, which really reinforces the notion that BcacheFS is at best an experimental Alpha-level filesystem implementation and should probably not be used with important data or systems.

Although one can speculate on the reasons for BcacheFS spiraling out of control like this, ultimately if you want a reliable COW filesystem in Linux, you are best off using btrfs or ZFS. Of course, regardless of which filesystem you use, always make multiple backups, test them regularly and stay away from shiny new things on production systems.

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Feline Genetics And Why Orange Cats Are The Most Special

June 9, 2025 by Maya Posch 43 Comments

Recently, butlers to orange-colored cats got a bit of a shock when reading the news, as headlines began to call out their fuzzy feline friends as ‘freaks of nature’ and using similarly uncouth terms. Despite the name-calling, the actual reason for this flurry of feline fascination was more benign — with two teams of scientists independently figuring out the reason why some cats have fur that is orange. Tracking down the reason for this turned out to be far more complicated than assumed, with the fact that about 80% of orange cats are male being only the tip of the cat-shaped iceberg.

It was known to be an X chromosome-linked mutation, but rather than the fur coloring being affected directly, instead the mechanism was deduced to be a suppression of the black-brownish pigmentation (eumelanin) in favor of the orange coloration (pheomelanin). Finding the exact locus of the responsible ‘O gene’ (for orange) in the cat genome has been the challenge for years, which turned out to be a mutation related to the X-linked ARHGAP36 gene, whose altered expression results in the suppression of many melanogenesis genes.

Interestingly, this particular mutation appears to be of a singular origin that apparently persisted over millennia courtesy of the domestication of humans (H. sapiens) by Felis catus.

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Texas’ Right To Repair Bill Is A Signature Away From Becoming Law

June 9, 2025 by Maya Posch 20 Comments

In what could be a big step forward for consumer rights, the Texas Senate recently unanimously voted to pass HB 2963, which references the “Diagnosis, maintenance, and repair of certain digital electronic equipment”. If signed by the governor, this would make Texas the ninth US state to enact such a law, and the seventh pertaining to consumer electronics. Interestingly, this bill saw anti-parts pairing language added, which is something that got stripped from the Oregon bill.

Much like other Right to Repair bills, HB 2963 would require manufacturers to make spare parts, documentation and repair tools available to both consumers and independent repair shops. If signed, the act would take effect in September of 2026. Included in the bill are provisions to prevent overcharging for the provided parts and documentation.

As for how useful this is going to be for consumers, [Louis Rossmann] had a read of the bill and gave his typically eloquent thoughts. The tl;dw is that while there is a lot of stuff to like, this bill leaves open potentially massive loopholes (e.g. assemblies vs parts), while also carving out massive exemptions, which leaves owners of game consoles, boats, cars, tractors, home appliances, etc. stranded with no new options.

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Microsoft Looking To Enforce USB-C Features Through WHCP

June 7, 2025 by Maya Posch 36 Comments

As much as people love USB-C, there’s one massive flaw that becomes very obvious the moment you look at the ports on any computer. This being that there’s no (standardized) way to tell what any of those ports do. Some may do display out (Alt-Mode), some may allow for charging, but it remains mostly a matter of praying to the hardware gods. According to a recent blog post, this is where Microsoft will seek to enforce a USB-C feature set on all (mobile) computers compliant with its Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP).

This also comes after years of the USB Implementers Forum, re-branding the USB specifications, with the most recent iteration thankfully using the bandwidth (in Gbps) as specifier (meaning no ‘USB PlaidSpeed’, sadly). Claiming to follow this end-user friendly spirit, the Microsoft blog post goes on to a minimum set of features that USB-C ports should have, as detailed in the above table.

Most notable is probably that PC charging support is required, as is support for at least one external display. As for the negatives, this seems to only apply to laptops, and no actual charging requirements are set (USB-PD voltages, wattage, etc.), so what the actual impact of this will be remains to be seen.

One thing remains certain, however, and that is that by trying to make USB-C the One True Connector for literally everything, there will always remain cases where end-user expectations remain unfulfilled.