Sorry, Tesla, your battery tech just became obsolete.

[Eclectic]

Growing the Super Gold Future - Feature

The ripe, golden apricot fit perfectly in my palm. “That’s the future of the automobile in your hand,” says Nygârd Lünd. “Didn’t think it would feel fuzzy, did you?”

Not any more than the bro hug I just got from this billionaire in the midst of a tour of his backyard orchard. But that’s where I found myself the target of a spontaneous embrace, the fruit still in my hand. Lünd, the six-foot-eight 47-year-old currently grabbing me, wants to reinvent the world, which predictably enough starts with completely reinventing the car.

“Have you ever seen one of those science-fair demos where some kid powers an electric clock with a watermelon or whatever?” Lünd asks. “Well, we’ve taken that idea and magnified it.”​

 

[Vitold]

Te me his silicone carbon material sounds more believable than apricot battery. Even more so that he is producing that near Shanghai, location where Tesla is looking to produce Chinese Model 3 or other Teslas.

 

[trils0n]

Pretty good april fools article. Guess it is more effective when accidently published before april fools, then you aren't expecting it.

 

[30seconds]

Man, this is a goldmine for an April Fool's Article. Well done C&D

"Lünd won’t say whether every 404 error makes him a little richer, but he also won’t deny it."
“It’s almost a matter of willing each subatomic particle to do what you want. I haven’t gotten past the laws of physics yet. But I’m getting pretty close.”
“Right now Françoise will run 240 miles at cruising speeds on a few dozen apricots,” says Lünd. “And then it only takes four minutes to swap them out.”

 

[wdolson]

Technically there is about 700 GWh of energy in 1 apricot (assuming a 1 ounce apricot), but nobody has figured out how to make a nuclear reactor that completely consumes matter and gets all the energy out. Once the conversion to energy is started, we also don't know how to stop it either. 700 GWh of energy all released at once would make a pretty big mess, equivalent to a 600 KT nuke.

Everything made of matter has nuclear energy in it. It's just that most atoms are stable, they don't decompose on their own into smaller atoms like radioactive atoms do. Nuclear reactors take advantage of the energy released from this decomposition to make electrical energy. Nuclear reactors also do things like fire neutrons at already unstable atoms to get them to come apart on demand. We can also make some man-made atoms with these processes by getting radioactive materials to absorb protons and make new elements. Plutonium is the easiest to make from uranium.

In any case, we really don't have any good methods to take a non-radioactive element and convert it to energy. Something like an apricot will have very small amounts of radioactive atoms in it (carbon 14 being the most common), but they are so tiny and we have no known nuclear reaction that can convert that energy that they are for all intents and purposes non-radioactive and the nuclear energy in them is not available to us.

The chemical energy stored in an apricot is not enough to move a car very far, even if you were able to extract all the chemical energy in it reducing it to carbon ash. The chemical energy stored in food is measured in kilocalories (though everyone calls them just calories). 1 kilocalorie is about 1.16 Wh. Assuming you can completely convert the chemical energy storied in a food product, a 2000 calorie human diet would get about 2.3 KWh of energy to drive your car. You think a teenage boy eats a lot, try taking your car on a road trip!

So unless he has somehow unleashed the nuclear energy in the apricots ala Back to the Future, what this guy is claiming is physically impossible. This ranks up there with a perpetual motion machine.

 

[cpa]

Drat! I have two apricot trees in our yard, and we eat them out-of-hand and can the surplus. In fact, I will have to thin the fruit developing on the trees in the next couple of weeks.

Seems like such a waste of a good piece of fruit to try to convert the stored energy into electricity. Perhaps he should have used a radish. Only thirty days from seed, and they can be grown year-round.

 

[Kurt Foster]

Growing the Super Gold Future - Feature

The ripe, golden apricot fit perfectly in my palm. “That’s the future of the automobile in your hand,” says Nygârd Lünd. “Didn’t think it would feel fuzzy, did you?”

Not any more than the bro hug I just got from this billionaire in the midst of a tour of his backyard orchard. But that’s where I found myself the target of a spontaneous embrace, the fruit still in my hand. Lünd, the six-foot-eight 47-year-old currently grabbing me, wants to reinvent the world, which predictably enough starts with completely reinventing the car.

“Have you ever seen one of those science-fair demos where some kid powers an electric clock with a watermelon or whatever?” Lünd asks. “Well, we’ve taken that idea and magnified it.”​

Whats this guy up to anyways!?​

 

[cpa]

That surely is not an apricot orchard. Looks more like citrus, but it is hard to see from the picture. The leaves and dense foliage appear to be rue spp.

 

[wdolson]

If you look at the pictures in the article the OP posted, there are some other pictures of the orchard. Closer up the fruit looks like something from the pitted fruit family (apricot, nectarine, peach, plum).

Just another data point that this is an early April Fools joke. The article says he was mentioned in a 1992 Wired magazine article. The first issue of Wired was March/April 1993.

 

[cpa]

If you look at the pictures in the article the OP posted, there are some other pictures of the orchard. Closer up the fruit looks like something from the pitted fruit family (apricot, nectarine, peach, plum).

Just another data point that this is an early April Fools joke. The article says he was mentioned in a 1992 Wired magazine article. The first issue of Wired was March/April 1993.

I did not see the initial picture featured in the story. There does appear to be a suture on the unripened fruits in the foreground, so maybe they could be some sort of stone fruit (prunus). However, apricot leaves are heart-shaped, and bear fruit on spurs, yet the leaves on those trees are more elongated. Perhaps a type of Asian plum. If I have time, I will post a picture of one of our apricots trees with its leaves and ripening fruit.

 

[wdolson]

I did not see the initial picture featured in the story. There does appear to be a suture on the unripened fruits in the foreground, so maybe they could be some sort of stone fruit (prunus). However, apricot leaves are heart-shaped, and bear fruit on spurs, yet the leaves on those trees are more elongated. Perhaps a type of Asian plum. If I have time, I will post a picture of one of our apricots trees with its leaves and ripening fruit.

My parents had an apricot tree when I was a kid, though I don't recall what the leaves looked like now. I googled the leaf shape for apricots just to make sure and apparently the shape can vary depending on the variety.

 

[langit]

interesting thread, I too was having the same problem

 

[ecarfan]

That article was hilarious. Special "Charged apricots" power a car, and when they run out of charge you remove them from their tank in the car and load in fresh apricots. Yeah, right.

Growing the Super Gold Future - Feature

The ripe, golden apricot fit perfectly in my palm. “That’s the future of the automobile in your hand,” says Nygârd Lünd. “Didn’t think it would feel fuzzy, did you?”

Not any more than the bro hug I just got from this billionaire in the midst of a tour of his backyard orchard. But that’s where I found myself the target of a spontaneous embrace, the fruit still in my hand. Lünd, the six-foot-eight 47-year-old currently grabbing me, wants to reinvent the world, which predictably enough starts with completely reinventing the car.

“Have you ever seen one of those science-fair demos where some kid powers an electric clock with a watermelon or whatever?” Lünd asks. “Well, we’ve taken that idea and magnified it.”​

 

[doug]

Technically there is about 700 GWh of energy in 1 apricot (assuming a 1 ounce apricot), but nobody has figured out how to make a nuclear reactor that completely consumes matter and gets all the energy out.

Would you really consider that nuclear energy (related to the strong and weak forces). That's more like a total mass to energy conversion as with a matter/antimatter reaction. Of course most of the mass is in the nucleus, but I'm not sure I'd call that a nuclear reaction.

 

[wdolson]

It slipped my mind when I wrote it, but you're right, though there doesn't seem to be a term for converting mass into energy completely. A matter-anti matter reaction is the only way we know of to release that energy, but calculating how much energy would be available from just turning the apricots into protons and neutrons is difficult. You would have to figure out how many atoms of carbon, how many of oxygen, how many nitrogen, etc. and calculate for each atom type individually. The total would be quite a bit less than for completely converting the mass into energy, but it would still be quite significant.

 

[jbcarioca]

Really people, we need to understand we're already Ludicrous with Plaid soon coming. We also need to realize he killer problem with apricot power; bees needed to pollinate our nuclear fruits are dying off, holding back hazlenut production too.

Anyway, much better to have fantasy than science. Science is hard work.

Come to think of it PChem was not really a piece of cake either.

 

[wdolson]

The bees dying is a big problem, but it doesn't affect hazlenuts, They pollinate via wind. Our hazlenut tree has been putting out flowers for the last couple of years, but it has yet to set any fruit. It's only about 4 years old though.

Signs of Spring: Hazelnuts in Bloom