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L'Affaire Siloxane

https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-siloxane
52•idlewords•1d ago

Comments

s0rce•1h ago
Siloxanes contaminate everything. We routinely see them on various surfaces when doing X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy.
isoprophlex•52m ago
Indeed. "Grease peaks" we called them, they were always there in basically all NMR or MS spectra I took as an organic chemist. Like PFAS or microplastics, you just can't get rid of them.
RobotToaster•57m ago
> while a further 7,000 kilograms of treated urine were sitting in orbital storage tanks, waiting to be processed.

Is that a record for the biggest piss bottle ever made?

sprinkly-dust•52m ago
I hope to see these seemingly mundane unknown unknowns raised in space travel centered hard science fiction. I think The Martian and Seveneves almost captured these but not quite.
RobotToaster•40m ago
I'm sceptical of the claim that they couldn't eliminate the majority of them from stuff that's shipped up to the ISS. Even if it meant making special space certified hair conditioner.
s0rce•29m ago
I don't see why not either, just get "organic"/plant or mineral based cosmetics, deodorants and hair products.
idlewords•16m ago
There's a nice paper on this, ICES-2018-123 "Dimethylsilanediol (DMSD) Source Assessment and Mitigation on ISS: Estimated Contributions from Personal Hygiene Products Containing Volatile Methyl Siloxanes (VMS)". The upshot is more than half of the siloxane burden on ISS comes from God knows where (packaging, plastics, machinery, you name it).

https://ttu-ir.tdl.org/items/ff1a240e-1fb1-4b04-acb2-42e9c45...

adolph•36m ago
An interesting substory that is simultaneously reminiscent of the Fogbank story and how Hayek's "curious task" is much more broadly applicable:

  There is a good cautionary tale here from the Space Shuttle era. That vehicle 
  had heat resistant tiles that had to be attached to the aluminum belly of the 
  orbiter. A special cloth had been certified for wiping the aluminum clean 
  before applying the primer that securely bonded the tiles to the metal. After 
  years of uneventful use, tile engineers discovered that new replacement tiles 
  were no longer curing properly.
  
  A careful investigation revealed that the supplier of that special cloth had 
  changed the lubricant used in the machine that sews its hem. Minute amounts 
  of the lubricant were being deposited on the stitching, and enough of that 
  residue was getting on the aluminum skin to prevent the tile adhesive from 
  curing properly.
s0rce•28m ago
In medical device manufacturing you have systems in place that your vendors have to disclose changes to their manufacturing process that hopefully can catch stuff like this before people die. I can see how minute stuff gets easily passed off as not an important change.
shmeeed•34m ago
Part of my job is to keep siloxanes out of a complex, multi-step, multi-sub-contracted manufacturing process. A supplier change that should have been a simple affair has cost us several kilobucks in analyses in the past months. I hate the stuff.

Claude Desktop spins up a VM without no way of stopping it

https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/29045
198•tonyrice•2h ago•114 comments

Anthropic's Model Naming, Extrapolated

https://samwilkinson.io/posts/2026-06-09-anthropics-model-naming-extrapolated
70•sammycdubs•1h ago•17 comments

How JPL keeps the 13-year-old Curiosity rover doing science

https://spectrum.ieee.org/curiosity-rover-jpl-mars-science
86•pseudolus•2h ago•6 comments

I'm Eric Ries, author of "The Lean Startup" and new book "Incorruptible" – AMA

365•eries•5h ago•299 comments

PgDog is funded and coming to a database near you

https://pgdog.dev/blog/our-funding-announcement
291•levkk•6h ago•149 comments

L'Affaire Siloxane

https://mceglowski.substack.com/p/laffaire-siloxane
55•idlewords•1d ago•10 comments

Meta steals a tactic from Tesla and builds data centers in tents

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/04/meta-steals-a-tactic-from-tesla-and-builds-data-centers-in-tents/
48•gnabgib•2h ago•28 comments

GitHub Authentication issues related to API requests

https://www.githubstatus.com/incidents/fcj3088jg1wx
125•Multicomp•4h ago•23 comments

Why SpaceX 2040 Revenue FCST $4.3T in highly unlikely

https://www.matteast.io/spacex-escape-velocity.html
128•meast•2h ago•113 comments

Building an HTML-first site doubled our users overnight

https://mohkohn.co.uk/writing/html-first/
860•edent•7h ago•390 comments

Mercedes‑Benz starts large‑scale production of electric axial flux motor

https://media.mercedes-benz.com/en/article/bebac2af-acdc-465a-9538-adb0bf3d8ccf
462•raffael_de•12h ago•283 comments

ΠFS

https://github.com/philipl/pifs
15•helterskelter•1h ago•3 comments

GeoLibre 1.0

https://geolibre.app/
32•jonbaer•2h ago•2 comments

Show HN: Extend UI – open-source UI kit for modern document apps

https://www.extend.ai/ui
48•kbyatnal•4h ago•10 comments

Policy on the AI Exponential

https://darioamodei.com/post/policy-on-the-ai-exponential
73•yjp20•1h ago•67 comments

Show HN: HelixDB – A graph database built on object storage

https://github.com/HelixDB/helix-db/tree/main
46•GeorgeCurtis•4h ago•25 comments

Apache Burr: Build reliable AI agents and applications

https://burr.apache.org/
125•anhldbk•5h ago•74 comments

All 9,300 Japanese train station, animated by the year it opened (1872–2026)

https://jivx.com/eki
155•momentmaker•7h ago•56 comments

A €0.01 bank transfer could compromise a banking AI agent

https://blue41.com/blog/how-we-helped-bunq-secure-their-financial-ai-assistant/
129•tvissers•6h ago•101 comments

Who's the Smartest Corvid?

https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2026/06/05/Whos-the-Smartest-Corvid/
35•NaOH•1d ago•24 comments

The Abundance Illusion

https://www.carlyle.com/carlyle-compass/the-abundance-illusion
4•cwal37•30m ago•0 comments

DiffusionGemma: 4x Faster Text Generation

https://blog.google/innovation-and-ai/technology/developers-tools/diffusion-gemma-faster-text-gen...
194•meetpateltech•4h ago•41 comments

The Dynamo and the Computer: The Modern Productivity Paradox (1989) [pdf]

https://www.almendron.com/tribuna/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/the-dynamo-and-the-computer-an-histo...
19•simonpure•2h ago•3 comments

Buy a train, bridge or tracks from the Swiss Railway

https://sbbresale.ch/
152•kisamoto•2d ago•81 comments

Farmer donates land for a park, city sells it for $10M as data center land

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/farmer-donates-land-for-a-park-city-sells-it-for-data-...
28•maxloh•1h ago•1 comments

Who Runs Your Rust Future? Hands-On Intro to Async Rust

https://aibodh.com/posts/async-rust-chapter-1-hands-on-intro-to-async-rust/
82•febin•2d ago•16 comments

'They take you out of life, out of time': a journey into Spain's cave paintings

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2026/jun/02/journey-into-spain-palaeolithic-cave-paintings-al...
49•NaOH•2d ago•23 comments

The iPad was on Tailscale: a WebRTC debugging story

https://p2claw.com/blog/2026-06-09-the-ipad-was-on-tailscale/
49•syllogistic•4h ago•24 comments

The Case for Free Online Books (2014)

http://from-a-to-remzi.blogspot.com/2014/01/the-case-for-free-online-books-fobs.html
80•jimsojim•3h ago•68 comments

Reviving Papers with Code

https://paperswithcode.co/
176•nielz_r•2d ago•42 comments