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[Egan_BW]

oh yeah just hook it up backwards and it does the opposite of what it normally does neat huh

[wierd]

The "over unity" LED is kinda old news though.

(Basically, uses thermal oscillations at JUST under the band-gap energy applied, so that the thermal oscillations provide the energy to kick the electron over, and then emit the photon. This results in more photons generated than can be attributed to the energy applied, along with local cooling of the environment.)

It has some potential in some applications, but since it predominantly emits low-energy photons, its applicability is kinda low.  It might be useful for radiative cooling on a spacecraft or something though.


It's possible that running the LED backwards like this is just the same phenomena as above but with a higher bandgap to overcome.  I would expect it to destroy the LED over time though due to dopant migration.  The "over unity" method would work for very extended period.

[Il Palazzo]

Very interesting book. Can't remember the title.

Oryx and Crake, by Margaret Atwood. She's generally good.

[Max™]

The "over unity" LED is kinda old news though.

(Basically, uses thermal oscillations at JUST under the band-gap energy applied, so that the thermal oscillations provide the energy to kick the electron over, and then emit the photon. This results in more photons generated than can be attributed to the energy applied, along with local cooling of the environment.)

It has some potential in some applications, but since it predominantly emits low-energy photons, its applicability is kinda low.  It might be useful for radiative cooling on a spacecraft or something though.


It's possible that running the LED backwards like this is just the same phenomena as above but with a higher bandgap to overcome.  I would expect it to destroy the LED over time though due to dopant migration.  The "over unity" method would work for very extended period.

Different thing, this is literally cooling something by having a DEL close enough that any infrared photons emitted end up absorbed and pushing electrons back the wrong way.

[wierd]

Microscopic (and basically useless) robots are now a thing.

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/30/science/microbots-robots-silicon-wafer.html

Got some ways to go before this has any real practical application, but the research has produced "mobile" flipper bots out of thin silicon slices.  Paramecium is pretty large though, so keep that in mind.

[Greiger]

Pfft the government has been putting those in your water to control your minds for decades.  They are constantly fighting with the microbots corporations put in your food to make you impulse buy, and our own microbots from the chemtrails that we use to mess with your brains and make it so that you are incapable of visually or tactility processing our tails or scales so we appear human.

[Telgin]

That's pretty cool, but I think we're still a very long way from many useful applications.  Decades probably.  Especially anything related to biology, like disease treatments or the brain monitoring mentioned in the article, since that's an extremely sensitive environment and I can think up a whole lot of ways things can go wrong.

[scourge728]

You act like the government would CARE about things going wrong, as long as it's not them or their donors getting affected

[Telgin]

Jokes about malicious and uncaring governments aside, the process for getting medical devices and treatments approved is very rigorous, at least in the US, so the government is kind of obligated to care even if the individuals maybe don't.

Not to mention if the things cause strokes because they block capillaries in the brain, that's going to lead to expensive lawsuits so even the money grubbing corporations have reason to be cautious.

[Trekkin]

Plus which, we already have inherently biocompatible (or at least tunably immunogenic) nanoscale machines that can be oligomerized into arbitrarily large (for the cellular scale) structures: peptides.

Actually, this reminds me of something I saw at Columbia five years ago on putting nanoscale radio transmitters (trench-covered silicon cubes, really) into vesicles and tuning the pulse frequency by adjusting the membrane permeability. Optogenetics supplanted much of their utility, as I suspect they will here; the fabrication advantage is considerable.

The battery refurbishment use seems more plausible to me.

[Eric Blank]

So there was some news published back in early May, there are multiple articles covering it, some quite sensationalist.

Apparently the fossil record on the island of Aldabra in the Indian ocean reveals that a species of rail, believed to be direct descendents of the still-living white-throated rail of Madagascar, lived on the island up until ~136,000 years ago, when the island was submerged completely. Since these birds were flightless, because of a lack of incentive to fly, they all died. But 20,000 years later they reappeared again; as in, white throated rails once again colonized the now-vacant island and the colonizers once again adapted to identical living situations by losing the ability to fly, producing the modern Aldabra Rail, which is nearly identical to the one that went extinct.
Amusingly, many of the article titles and summaries on Google seem to read as if the mighty evolution gods enacted a divine miracle and resurrected these poor dead birds. The sciencemag article originally posted May 14 was edited to correct that very mistake; "*Correction, 17 May, 11:45 a.m.: This article has been updated to reflect the fact that the repeated evolution of flightlessness by the white-throated rail on the Aldabra atoll produced two subspecies thousands of years apart, and not a single subspecies that disappeared and reappeared."

But the title of USNews' article still says: "Extinct Bird Re-Evolved Itself Back Into Existence On"

CBS News posted "An extinct bird species has evolved back into existence, study says"

News Atlas used the phrase; "Extinct bird resurrected as evolution starts over again"

CNN also used "Extinct species of bird came back from the dead, scientists find"

It's almost like they're trying to to communicate, but their language is stupid, and I do not speak it.

[smjjames]

Relevant: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/6/11/18652225/hype-science-press-releases

[Trekkin]

Relevant: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/6/11/18652225/hype-science-press-releases

You know, everyone talks about the public's "faith in science," but nobody ever talks about scientists' faith in the public.

I'm not just saying this to be edgy. The majority of my immediate colleagues openly consider outreach to be a waste of time, particularly in the post-Trump era; if the public wants to believe the Earth is flat and vaccines cause autism and windmills cause cancer, why on (flat) Earth would they listen to us? Even when they're given papers, they just quote-mine them for trivial things with which they can justify disregarding them.

[Eric Blank]

That's entirely true

[smjjames]

Relevant: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2019/6/11/18652225/hype-science-press-releases

You know, everyone talks about the public's "faith in science," but nobody ever talks about scientists' faith in the public.

I'm not just saying this to be edgy. The majority of my immediate colleagues openly consider outreach to be a waste of time, particularly in the post-Trump era; if the public wants to believe the Earth is flat and vaccines cause autism and windmills cause cancer, why on (flat) Earth would they listen to us? Even when they're given papers, they just quote-mine them for trivial things with which they can justify disregarding them.

Hasn't it kind of always been this way though? I mean, even in Galileo's time...

 The Church was pretty pro-science at one point wasn't it? Because 'God would want us to learn how the world works' or something like that. Then they started finding things that contradicted God and whatever. Still, even though they've almost completly stopped being anti-science now, theres still a lingering stereotype of being anti-science. I was just sort of spontaneously wondering how it'd help things if The Church (and religion in general) was more pro-science.