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Three vaguely related observations:

1. When we lose weight due to eating right and/or exercising (excluding water weight), it's because the air that we breathe out is slightly heavier than the air that we breathe in.

2. When we're burning wood in a fireplace, the heat it gives off is essentially the sunlight that the tree has collected over its lifetime -- i.e. the heat difference between full sun and the shade of the tree.

3. A solar cell producing peak power is slightly colder than one that is either open- or short-circuited.



Re #1: You're ignoring metabolic byproducts that are excreted in urine or feces or sweat. Are there any byproducts that are released in the breath?


I should have qualified that by saying it's true to roughly the same degree as the claim that a tree's mass comes from the air. I.e. if you wave your hands and ignore a lot of potentially-important second-order effects, it more or less holds water :).


You'll have to give me some citations for 1. A priori it seems sensible ...




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