"Shockingly, and inexcusably in my opinion, the researchers only state the instantaneous power (50 W/m2) of their device..."
That's not entirely fair. If Nature demanded that articles be written defensively, anticipating possible misinterpretations from non specialists, they would be very different articles with lower bandwidth for the target audience, who already know the difference between average and instantaneous power. The journal would not be improved by writing for endgadget instead.
It would be nice to have an implications section that put the effects in scale, but hardly inexcusable not to.
I think it is pretty misleading if they just gave the peak device power density. As in the car analogy given in TFA, if you were to burn all 270 Calories of a single Snickers bar in a thousandth of a second, your device would have a peak power of about 1 gigawatt, comparable to a large nuclear power plant. Yet if your publication said you had made a 1 GW device instead of saying that your device could power a single average home for 17 minutes, you reasonably be accused of misleading. Surely a subtext of the research was that energy sources are important to humanity.
(Sidenote: Huh, a snickers bar can power a home for longer that I expected.)
While I don’t have numbers, your questions are easy to answer: foods with more calories in them can power your home longer. A typical 700 calorie meal can, if used 100% efficiently, can power a 10 W LED lamp for about three days.
Actually, having read the Engadget end of things, I can see exactly what the professor is saying in his blog post.
The potential energy capture from any rain-related technique is trivial, negligible is a better word. The article sounds completely clueless to anyone who understands the energy flow involved. The fact that it was written should be a professional embarrassment for that author.
The fact that the original paper was treated with any respect is yet another level of embarrassment. A high school science project sounds more believable.
None of the original ink / bits should have been wasted. But I suppose some sort of nanoscale power supply could be some potential use, so maybe, maybe, there's some redeeming value.
But not the way the paper or the article tried to spin it.
"Shockingly, and inexcusably in my opinion, the manufacturers only state the clock speed (3.2ghz) of their CPU..."
I suppose it depends on the intent. If the intent is to impress you with numbers by giving you a seemingly "good" number, then they're being intentionally deceptive for the sake of getting published in Nature. Does instantaneous power actually matter in context, even to knowledgeable experts?
That's not entirely fair. If Nature demanded that articles be written defensively, anticipating possible misinterpretations from non specialists, they would be very different articles with lower bandwidth for the target audience, who already know the difference between average and instantaneous power. The journal would not be improved by writing for endgadget instead.
It would be nice to have an implications section that put the effects in scale, but hardly inexcusable not to.