Technology

Is this it?

The device demonstrated a specific cooling power of up to 1.43W g-1 under zero-temperature-lift conditions. In addition, the system’s coefficient of performance can reach 3.4 under ideal work-recovery assumption, highlighting its potential energy efficiency.

Refrigeration already is cheap. The problem a lot of places have is not an inability to afford a refrigerator it's no energy to power the refrigerator. This technology does not into address that problem. In fact it probably worsens it because this technology is less efficient in terms of power consumption.

Also I would love to live in the world where you live because over here food costs money. It isn't free.

But the energy savings is a big deal.

I agree, but that has little to do with food waste.

Moreover, I doubt this is more efficient than traditional refrigeration. But I'd be happy to be wrong on this.

That's reflection of external heat not removal of internal heat. Refrigeration requires effort and therefore energy.

Ye canna change the laws of physics, Captin.

No, but you can write a bullshit article that has very little bearing on reality.

Goes quadruple for its title.

I did watch a real good set of videos by Tech Ingredients, the chap's gotta be either a lecturer (and) or his special interest is DIY-ing everything from pulse detonation rocket engines (that turned out better than the ones ol muskrat's using) to using an underground heatsink made of plastic tubing and carbon saturated cement outside his workshop for an in-window AC unit, turning an 800W drain down to a 300W drain for the same cooling.

He was using some kind of fine particle paint to create a large Infrared radiating surface that shed heat so well it got below ambient air temp because it was shedding IR directly up out into space

The only unfortunate limit is shielding it from catching any outside radiation and making sure all the IR actually leaves the system, he had to build a shade to protect it from trees and buildings which would have been effectively shining IR back into the system.

This video;

https://youtu.be/dNs_kNilSjk

The headline reads "A new cooling technology freezes food without warming the climate". It doesnt mention the lack of (gaseous) refrigerent.
The thing about machines that make them bad for the environment in general is the fact that they use up energy, which is nowadays still mostly created in a process that also releases massive amounts of CO2.
Its unlikely that the environmental impact of the gaseous refrigerent is as big as the impact of the CO2 that is created to run the fridge over its lifetime. It makes sense then to assume this fridge doesnt use power, since right now thats the only way it could cool without heating up the planet.

Im not saying this tech isnt interesting, but the headline is total BS

What through a wormhole?

There's a lot of air between the refrigerator and space I think it might get in the way

Yes, but the amount of gas in an AC system is insignifcant compared to the CO2 generated just making the AC system in the first place. Hell, delivering it probably generated significantly more pollution. Not saying we shouldn't strive to make it better, but it's not as actively harmful as it was 30+ years ago.

I don't think shape change materials are all that efficient. The problem being is you still need some mechanism to compress the material again, which obviously uses energy. As you say their main advantage is that they don't use traditional refrigerants. But the trade-off for that is that they are mechanically more complicated and probably for any given amount of cooling will require more electricity.

You can trade those off with renewable energy sources of course so it may still be worth it but technically they are worse efficiency than traditional vacuum pumps.

No one's saying the technology isn't interesting just at the article is rubbish.

Who wrote that headline anyway, the headline should have been scientists have created sub-zero solid state cooling, but the writer somewhat arbitrarily decided that this was about environmentalism which this has got nothing to do with.

The scientists are not even making the claim that this is a necessarily viable technology, it's just a thing that they've managed to achieve.

I'm surprised the article writer didn't do the usual thing that science "journalists" tend to do, which is claim that it kills cancer. So we should be thankful for small mercies.