A U.S.-China research team has developed the world's first one-step process to convert mixed plastic waste into gasoline and hydrochloric acid with up to 95-99% efficiency, all at room temperature and ambient pressure. InterestingEngineering reports: As the authors put it, "The method supports a circular economy by converting diverse plastic waste into valuable products in a single step." To carry out the conversion, the team combines plastic waste with light isoalkanes, hydrocarbon byproducts available from refinery processes. According to the paper, the process yields "gasoline range" hydrocarbons, mainly molecules with six to 12 carbons, which are the primary component of gasoline. The recovered hydrochloric acid can be safely neutralized and reused as a raw material, potentially displacing several high-temperature, energy-intensive production routes described in the paper. "We present here a strategy for upgrading discarded PVC into chlorine-free fuel range hydrocarbons and [hydrochloric acid] in a single-stage process," the researchers said. Reported conversion efficiencies underscore the potential for real-world use. At 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 degrees Celsius), the process reached 95 percent conversion for soft PVC pipes and 99 percent for rigid PVC pipes and PVC wires. In tests that mixed PVC materials with polyolefin waste, the method achieved a 96 percent solid conversion efficiency at 80 degrees Celsius (176 degrees Fahrenheit). The team describes the approach as applicable beyond laboratory-clean samples. "The process is suitable for handling real-world mixed and contaminated PVC and polyolefin waste streams," the paper states. SCMP points to an ECNU social media post citing the study, which characterized the achievement as a first, efficiently converting difficult-to-degrade mixed plastic waste into premium petrol at ambient temperature and pressure in a single step.

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Japan has launched its first entirely homegrown quantum computer, built with domestic superconducting qubits and components, and running on the country's own open-source software toolchain, OQTOPUS. "The system is now ready to take on workloads from its base at the University of Osaka's Center for Quantum Information and Quantum Biology (QIQB)," reports LiveScience. From the report: The system uses a quantum chip with superconducting qubits -- quantum bits derived from metals that exhibit zero electrical resistance when cooled to temperatures close to absolute zero (minus 459.67 degrees Fahrenheit, or minus 273.15 degrees Celsius). The quantum processing unit (QPU) was developed at the Japanese research institute RIKEN. Other components that make up the "chandelier" -- the main body of the quantum computer -- include the chip package, delivered by Seiken, the magnetic shield, infrared filters, bandpass filters, a low-noise amplifier and various cables. These are all housed in a dilution refrigerator (a specialized cryogenic device that cools the quantum computing components) to allow for those extremely low temperatures. It also comes alongside a pulse tube refrigerator (which again cools various components in use), controllers and a low-noise power source. OQTOPUS, meanwhile, is a collection of open-source tools that include everything required to run quantum programs. It includes the core engine and cloud module, as well as graphical user interface (GUI) elements, and is designed to be built on top of a QPU and quantum control hardware.

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Optional types are an attempt to patch the "billion dollar mistake". When you don't know if you have a value or not, you wrap it in an Optional, which ensures that there is a value (the Optional itself), thus avoiding null reference exceptions. Then you can query the Optional to see if there is a real value or not.

This is all fine and good, and can cut down on some bugs. Good implementations are loaded with convenience methods which make it easy to work on the optionals.

But then, you get code like Burgers found. Which just leaves us scratching our heads:

private static final Optional<Boolean> TRUE = Optional.of(Boolean.TRUE); private static final Optional<Boolean> FALSE = Optional.of(Boolean.FALSE);

Look, any time you're making constants for TRUE or FALSE, something has gone wrong, and yes, I'm including pre-1999 versions of C in this. It's especially telling when you do it in a language that already has such constants, though- at its core- these lines are saying TRUE = TRUE. Yes, we're wrapping the whole thing in an Optional here, which potentially is useful, but if it is useful, something else has gone wrong.

Burgers works for a large insurance company, and writes this about the code:

I was trying to track down a certain piece of code in a Spring web API application when I noticed something curious. It looked like there was a chunk of code implementing an application-specific request filter in business logic, totally ignoring the filter functions offered by the framework itself and while it was not related to the task I was working on, I followed the filter apply call to its declaration. While I cannot supply the entire custom request filter implementation, take these two static declarations as a demonstration of how awful the rest of the class is.

Ah, of course- deep down, someone saw a perfectly functional wheel and said, "I could make one of those myself!" and these lines are representative of the result.

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