One thing I don’t get: the study excludes the first 6 months after vaccination to avoid immortal-time bias. But if people died right away due to the vaccine (hypothetically), wouldn’t this design exclude those deaths?
>As unvaccinated individuals were alive between their random index date and November 1, 2021, corresponding to a maximum duration of 6 months, starting follow-up from the index date would have introduced immortal time bias. Therefore, we initiated the study of long-term mortality 6 months after the index date, while mortality within 6 months after vaccination was analyzed separately using SCCS models. While the SCCS models are well-suited for short-term vaccine safety studies, they are less appropriate for long-term mortality, particularly due to limited control periods among vaccinated individuals, and age differences within the same individual across risk or control periods, as age is by far a major risk factor for death. For both analyses, we introduced the calendar period as an adjusting factor to account for the infection dynamics, baseline mortality trends, and the varying propension to get vaccinated.
This new solar thermoelectric generator (STEG) traps heat on one side and cools the other, making electricity from the hot-cold gap via the Seebeck effect. Unlike solar panels, which need direct sunlight, STEGs can use ambient heat and scattered light. That’s why they still work in shaded or cloudy areas—any temperature difference can generate power. Today they’re only ~1% efficient (vs. ~20% for solar), but the new design is 15× better than earlier STEGs. They won’t beat solar panels yet, but could be useful in spots where panels underperform.
I did data collection for a paper looking at the Seebeck effect in magnetic insulators about ~10-15 years ago, and it seemed like everyone in the whole physics department considered spintronics pretty dead. It feels great to see some big promising applications coming out of the field.
It’s explicitly part of Chinese science and technology strategy to think outside the box and it’s what’s pushing them forward on areas like semiconductors as well.
Given the massive advantage in talent they’ve built up while the Us reverts to Drill Baby Drill we know how this ends.
Eventually the Us with push for atmospheric dimming to “fix” the negative externalities of their approach which had the nice side effect of degrading solar ….
You’re being downvoted but i don’t think you’re entirely wrong. China has been pursuing some stuff that the western world had essentially abandoned, getting interesting wins (eg: thorium reactors).
He's wrong in the "why" tho. It's not that they must think outside the box, it's that they _must_ not all focus on a single point of research. I'm pretty sure that they are also pursuing popular research topics, because it would be pretty bad if they fall behind for not doing the obvious.
Would it be possible to do both on a single panel? In other words, put photovoltaic cells on the sunny side and thermoelectric generators on the shady side.
Photovoltaic efficiency drops as the panels overheat. Some have demonstrated active cooling methods that are net energy gain. I wonder if it would be cost effective to use these between the panels and cooling system?
so they are basically using a similar idea to that of a stirling engine in thermoelectric generator or they use a different mechanism to produce energy?
Two materials (often n-type and p-type semiconductors) are joined at two junctions, one junction is heated and the other cooled. The temperature difference makes charge diffuse from the hot side toward the cold side, and this charge is what turns into the seebeck voltage they describe. It was just very hard to get anything meaningful out of this because you can't easily get such a temperature difference. If you've read of the peltier effect, it's the same thing as this, just in reverse.
Tldr “ bright purple light suggests the phosphor layer around the lights has been “delaminated”—peeled off—exposing the blue LED light underneath, Brgoch says. Although blue LED lights are, in principle, deep blue in color”
“The radio waves that we detected were at really steep angles, like 30 degrees below the surface of the ice,” said Stephanie Wissel, associate professor of physics, astronomy and astrophysics who worked on the ANITA team searching for signals from elusive particles called neutrinos.
“My guess is that some interesting radio propagation effect occurs near ice and also near the horizon that I don't fully understand, but we certainly explored several of those, and we haven't been able to find any of those yet either,” Wissel said. “So, right now, it's one of these long-standing mysteries, and I'm excited that when we fly PUEO, we'll have better sensitivity. In principle, we should pick up more anomalies, and maybe we'll actually understand what they are. We also might detect neutrinos, which would in some ways be a lot more exciting.”
My read of this (I am a physicist by training) is that they’re possibly picking up radio emissions from triboelectric effects due to the enormous shear forces in a slowly motile ice sheet grinding over a quartz rich (east Antarctica has a high quartz concentration) substrate.
We’re talking about cubic kilometres of ice, moving jerkily with stick-slip motion over bedrock - the potentials generated would likely be in the megavolt range.
It would also explain the 30 degree incidence, as you’d expect the signal to refract within the ice and exit at a shallow angle.
In their shoes, I would be looking for correlation with seismographic events and high res GPS ice flow monitoring, not other neutrino observatories - it would seem wise to me to eliminate known physical effects as causes before invoking exotic matter.
We suspect a geothermal vent in a high-phosphorus soda lake, exposed to UV sunlight. There's one in Canada with just about the right mix of everything needed.
I would hope they are clear about what they are looking for when they talk to candidates (Given the time, I doubt they were though!) but I've seen things like this as a way to see how people approach a novel/new problem. Are they excited about giving it a try? Are they meticulous, slow, careful? What kinds of optimizations do they attempt in the process, what questions are they asking along the way?
I work in support though, and being able to be resourceful, creative, comfortable with contradiction and complexity, but ultimately you need to reduce issues to something you can communicate to a less technical customer, so an exercise like that, at least if presented clearly to a candidate, can give a really good idea of how they handle new situations they may run into when there isn't anyone there to help them (like their right hand for example).
Put more simply, I learn more from how people react to and approach hitting a wall/a problem they've never seen before than testing their ability to follow simple instructions (write algorithm X in language Z).
