Tag: science

Thermoelectric Effect Seen in Liquids for the First Time

Based on physics first observed over 200 years ago, thermoelectric devices can convert thermal energy into electrical energy and vice versa. But in all that time, thermoelectric phenomena had never been observed in an all-liquid system. That is, until researchers recently observed thermoelectricity at the interface between two liquid metals.

It’s an important observation: Liquid thermoelectrics could be used to create new devices for scavenging energy from waste heat, and insights from the research could help improve the design of liquid-metal batteries. The researchers, based at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Paris, published their results today in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“Studying the thermoelectric effect at an interface between two liquid metals is one of those ideas that’s so intuitive and elegant that it seems obvious in retrospect,” says Douglas Kelley, a mechanical engineer at the University of Rochester. “But to my knowledge, nobody has done it before,” adds Kelley, who was not involved with the research.

Christophe Gissinger, a physicist at ENS, studies the basic physics of liquid metals and their applications in batteries. He says scientists know almost nothing about how temperature gradients affect the flow of electrical currents in conductive liquids. Gissinger says it occurred to him that the conductive layers in liquid-metal batteries were similar to thermoelectric devices. So he decided to look for thermoelectricity in liquid metals.

Gissinger and his colleagues chose two metals that are liquid at room temperature: gallium and mercury. The experiments were done in a cylinder with refrigerated walls. In the center of the cylinder, the researchers placed a smaller cylindrical heater. The researchers poured dense liquid mercury into the outer cylinder, then topped it with a layer of lighter liquid gallium. They heated the liquids from the interior, and cooled the cylinder’s outer walls, creating a temperature gradient along the interface between the two metals. Wires dipping into the liquid metals measured the resulting electric fields.

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How Anthony Fauci Weaponized Science Against America

One of the biggest problems in our government is that people are promoted based on their loyalty (and sociopathy) rather than their competency (and integrity). In turn, the leadership of federal bureaucracy tends to be infested with individuals who habitually cover up the crimes of the government and those who are eager to sell out America to corporate interests—rather than the best minds our country has to offer who could genuinely move America forward.

Because of this, the employees of the federal government (e.g., our scientists) are often trapped in a position where they want to do the right thing but can’t because a president appointed a boss for them whose only qualification was lifelong loyalty to the corporation which funded the president’s election. RFK Jr. for example, has shared this was what he learned from repeatedly suing the Federal government, likewise numerous CDC employees signed a letter attesting to this, and more recently, when the GAO conducted an investigation, they found employees in the Federal agencies responsible for the pandemic response reported that they had seen political interference prevent scientifically correct policies from being enacted within their agency.

In my eyes, this reality is a product of the fact America is a superpower in decline which has gotten such an excess of wealth and power (and propaganda) that its government no longer has to produce results to stay in power (e.g., consider how pivotal institutions in the country such as the current presidential administration are now filling their ranks with grossly unqualified individuals who meet DEI metrics and then not being held to account for the horrendous failures of these individuals).

One of the individuals who best embodies the dysfunctional foundation of our government is Anthony Fauci. Despite being grossly incompetent, Fauci has amassed an unprecedented degree of power over the decades because of his unwavering commitment to the pharmaceutical industry and to covering up the (scientific) crimes of the American government.
Note: prominent figures such as Rand Paul and RFK Jr have compared Fauci to J Edgar Hoover, as both of them were career bureaucrats who amassed an unprecedented degree of power in the government and then leveraged it to force everyone else to go along with their crimes. In Fauci’s case, this is particularly unfortunate because he corrupted our national scientific apparatus and transformed it into something that hurt rather than helped the people of America.

Throughout his career, Fauci has done heinous things to the people of America, but by and large, he has completely escaped accountability for those actions. Yesterday however, this changed and Fauci was forced to testify in front of Congress, where he was formally accused by our leaders of his crimes against America. I wrote this article because much of what they accused him of, many others previously did as well (including prominent Democrats who are still in Congress).

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OPTICAL ENGINEERS INVENT ULTRA-THIN COATING THAT TURNS ORDINARY GLASSES INTO HIGH-EFFICIENCY NIGHT VISION GOGGLES

A team of scientists has created an ultra-thin coating that can provide high-efficiency night vision to any glass surface, including ordinary reading glasses. Designed using something called a non-local metasurface, the plastic-wrap-thin coating also lets through all of the visible light, allowing users to see perfectly during daytime or at night.

Some previous efforts using a non-local metasurface to create a night vision coating have shown limited success. However, those efforts have suffered from severely limited image quality. The inventors of this newest coating say they have broken through that barrier, resulting in a high-definition image visible light image that could rival the infrared to visible light up-conversion rates of bulkier, more complex night vision systems already in commercial use today.

“People have said that high-efficiency up-conversion of infrared to visible is impossible because of the amount of information not collected due to the angular loss that is inherent in non-local metasurfaces,” explained Laura Valencia Molina, a researcher from the Australian National University’s ARC Centre of Excellence for Transformative Meta-Optical Systems (TMOS). “We overcome these limitations and experimentally demonstrate high-efficiency image up-conversion.”

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Researchers Dumbfounded by High Excess Mortality ‘Despite Vaccines’ — Study

A study published Monday which analyzed statistics from ‘Our World in Data’ indicated that despite the alleged ‘savior‘ of Covid vaccines, excess deaths worldwide still remain high.

“Excess mortality has remained high in the Western World for three consecutive years, despite the implementation of containment measures and COVID-19 vaccines. This raises serious concerns. Government leaders and policymakers need to thoroughly investigate underlying causes of persistent excess mortality,” the study said in the ‘Conclusion’ section.

Interestingly, Monday’s study which looked at the entire global population is not the first piece of research analyzing mortality rates in recent years.

A Norwegian study published in January had also found an increase in non-Covid-related deaths.

“There was significant excess mortality (number of deaths) in 2021 and 2022 for all causes (3.7% and 14.5%), for cardiovascular diseases (14.3% and 22.0%), and for malignant tumours in 2022 (3.5%). In terms of ASMR, there was excess mortality in 2021 and 2022 for all causes (2.9% and 13.7%), and for cardiovascular diseases (16.0% and 25,8%). ASMR was higher than predicted in 2022 for malignant tumours (2.3%). There were fewer deaths than predicted from respiratory diseases (except COVID-19) in 2020 and 2021,” the study said in the ‘Results’ section.

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Badger culls to continue in England despite lack of scientific evidence

Badger cull licences have been issued by the government despite its own scientific adviser saying there is “no justification” for doing so.

Leaked documents seen by the Guardian show the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs this month issued 17 new licences to continue culling badgers, overruling Dr Peter Brotherton, the director of science at Natural England, the government’s adviser for the natural environment in England.

Badgers are culled to the point of local extinction because they spread bovine tuberculosis (bTB) to cattle, and the disease can wipe out entire herds. Last year, figures released by Defra revealed more than 210,000 badgers had been killed since the cull began in 2013. However, scientific reports have shown that killing badgers is not the most effective way to end the disease.

Brotherton told Defra that while in previous years a cull could be justified, “based on the evidence, I can find no justification for authorising further supplementary badger culls in 2024 for the purpose of preventing the spread of disease and recommend against doing so”.

Defra officials said that in response they were pushing ahead with the cull because farmers who were most affected by bTB would lose confidence in the government if it was ended abruptly.

Sally Randall, Defra’s director general for biosecurity, food and trade, said in a letter to Natural England: “Those most affected by the disease must have confidence in both the process and the trajectory. Changes need to be carefully timed and communicated, whilst balancing a range of potentially opposing views. Any abrupt changes to policy would seriously undermine our ability to engage constructively with the industry on future disease control interventions.”

Brotherton said the badger population was likely to remain low for at least seven years, during which time vaccinations could be deployed to stop the spread of the disease.

He told Defra: “The balance of evidence has shifted. In my opinion it is now clear that badger vaccination can provide an effective alternative to [culls].”

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Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters”

Today, npj Natural Hazards, a journal in the Nature family of journals, officially published my new paper, “Scientific integrity and U.S. “Billion Dollar Disasters.”

The paper shows — irrefutably in my view — that the “billion dollar disaster” tabulation of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), fails to meet the agency’s standards for information quality and scientific integrity.1

For reasons I describe in detail in the paper, the “billion dollar disaster” tabulation is not suitable as a “database” (scare quotes — it is not data by any standard) for the detection and attribution of trends in extreme weather. Similarly, the tabulation is not suitable for identifying the consequences of changes or variability in climate on the costs of disasters. The dataset has been widely misused inscience, by the media, and in policy.

It is, in a word, misinformation.2

Here is how the paper starts:

In the late 1990s, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) began publishing a tally of weather and climate disasters that each resulted in more than $1 billion in damage, noting that the time series had become “one of our more popular web pages”1. Originally, the data was reported in current-year U.S. dollars. In 2011, following criticism that the dataset was misleading, NOAA modified its methods to adjusted historical losses to constant-year dollars by accounting for inflation.

By 2023, the billion dollar disaster time series had become a fixture in NOAA’s public outreach, was highlighted by the U.S. government’s U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) as a “climate change indicator,” was a cited as evidence in support of a “key message” of the Fifth U.S. National Climate Assessment showing that “extreme events are becoming more frequent and severe.” The time series is often cited in policy settings as evidence of the effects of human-caused climate change to increase the frequency and intensity of extreme weather events and associated economic damage, including in federal agencies, Congress and by the U.S. President. In addition to being widely cited in justifications of policy, as of March, 2024, NOAA’s billion dollar dataset has been cited in almost 1000 articles according to Google Scholar.

NOAA’s “billion dollar disaster” tabulation began as a simplistic but clever way to market NOAA and to attract the attention of reporters with a clickbaity listicle. At some point along the way, the “billion dollar disaster” list was somehow transformed into “data” used in peer-reviewed research, an official indicator of human-caused climate change featured by the U.S. National Climate Assessment, and used by the administration of President Joe Biden to justify a wide range of regulations and policy.

It is a remarkable story of how science can get off track and how misinformation can exist in plain sight, just like the emperor’s new clothes.

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Government scientist investigating mystery brain disease ‘banned’ from researching outbreak – stoking fears of a cover-up

A top scientist who advises the Canadian Government said he was blocked from studying a freak outbreak of a mysterious and deadly brain illness in young adults and teenagers. 

More than 200 New Brunswick residents have bizarrely developed a dementia-like disorder that causes vivid hallucinations, an inability to talk and write, memory lapses and even physical paralysis.

While the disease has baffled doctors, local health officials put the outbreak down to misdiagnosis, concluding that most patients in fact suffered common illnesses like dementia and cancer. 

Now, damning evidence has come to light that suggests health chiefs may have purposefully blocked investigations into other potential causes — namely, exposure to toxic pesticides. 

In leaked emails sent between Dr Michael Coulthart, a microbiologist, and members of Canada’s public health agency (PHAC), Dr Coulthart said he was ‘essentially cut off’ from being involved in the research.

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Scientists Used CRISPR Gene Editing to Make Chickens Resist Bird Flu — Here’s What Happened

Scientists who used the gene-editing technology CRISPR to create chickens resistant to avian influenza also showed how quickly a dangerous bird flu could mutate from laboratory chickens to humans, critics of a new study in the journal Nature Communications told The Defender.

The authors of the study, led by researchers at Imperial College London and the University of Edinburgh Roslin Institute and Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, altered the genetic code of 10 chickens to make them resistant to a bird-flu virus and then exposed them to the virus.

They also included 10 chickens in the study that were not genetically altered. All 10 chickens not genetically altered got sick when they were exposed to the virus. Only one of the genetically altered chickens got sick with the bird flu.

Altering a species’ DNA “promises a new way to make permanent changes in the disease resistance of an animal,” University of Edinburgh embryologist Mike McGrew, Ph.D., an author of the study, said at an Oct. 5 news briefing announcing the peer-reviewed research.

“This can be passed down through all the gene-edited animals, to all the offspring.”

According to the study, “Chickens genetically resistant to avian influenza could prevent future outbreaks. … Breeding for resistance and resilience to disease has significant potential in farmed poultry,” freeing farmers from routinely having to vaccinate birds.

But Jonathan Latham, executive director of the Bioscience Resource Project, who has a master’s degree in crop genetics and a Ph.D. in virology, told The Defender,

“The experiments were ultimately a failure of ‘the operation was a success but the patient died’ variety.”

When the 10 genetically altered chickens were exposed to a much higher dose of bird flu — more in line with what the chickens could be exposed to in nature or a factory farm setting — five of the 10 chickens developed the flu.

Virus samples collected from the infected, genetically altered birds showed the virus had made several mutations that seemed to allow it to bind to the ANP32A protein to replicate in the chickens, the study reported.

The virus also mutated a workaround to bind to two other related proteins for replication.

Worse yet, according to Latham, mutations also helped the virus replicate more efficiently in human cells.

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Gain-of-Function May Explain Bird Flu Jump To Cows And Humans

In the past six months, bird flu has surprised scientists at least twice.

Bird flu viruses have circulated mainly in birds for a long time. However, in early December 2023, an outbreak occurred in U.S. dairy cows, even though cattle are not typically susceptible to avian influenza A, the bird flu virus.

In late March, a U.S. dairy farm worker was infected by a H5N1 virus from a cow.

On May 22, a second human case of H5N1 infection was reported with prior exposure to infected dairy cows in Michigan.

On the same day in May, an Australian child was infected by an H7 strain,  another subtype of influenza A  known to cause human infections.

Since bird flu infections in humans are rare, these incidents have raised significant concern among scientists.

Why is this happening, and how concerned should we be?

This article aims to avoid unnecessary fear about a potential future pandemic. Instead, we encourage people to think rationally and make appropriate adjustments for the future.

Rapid Spread in Birds

The history of the H5N1 virus family can be traced back to 1996 when it was first discovered in a sick goose in the Guangdong province of China.

H5N1 has evolved, resulting in different genetic lineages (clades) as they mutate, similar to a typical pattern of behavior for RNA viruses such as the ever-emerging COVID-19 variants. In 2013, the H5N1 clade 2.3.4.4b emerged. Since then, it has spread rapidly to nearly 100 countries across Asia, Europe, Africa, and America, becoming the most dominant clade and causing significant losses to the poultry industry.

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Chinese scientists create 90% lethal Ebola-like virus to study eye disorders

Chinese scientists have genetically modified a virus that imitates Ebola infection. This virus has caused severe eye ulcers and ultimately wiped out an entire group of hamsters.

Researchers are hopeful that this study will aid in the research of Ebola-related eye disorders.

In this study, vesicular stomatitis, typically found in livestock, was harboring the Ebola virus. When they gave it to the hamsters, the entire group died after the ulcers in their eyes worsened.

New model reveals promising insights into Ebola virus research

Vesicular stomatitis (VSV), carries a part of the Ebola virus called glycoprotein (GP). It helps the virus to enter and infect the cells. Five female and five male hamsters that were up to three weeks old died within three days.

They showed symptoms similar to those in Ebola patients, such as weight loss, multi-organ failure, severe eye inflammation, and ulcers. Additionally, the hamsters had high levels of the virus in their bodies.

Scientists are optimistic that this new model could help in future research on Ebola-related eye disorders. “All animals died within 2-3 days after infection,” the researchers observed, noting that this model could be useful for testing Ebola vaccines.

According to the scientists, this model allowed for quick preclinical testing of Ebola virus countermeasures in BSL-2 conditions.

They added, “This surrogate model is a safe, effective, and cost-efficient tool for rapid preclinical evaluation of medical countermeasures against the Ebola virus under BSL-2 conditions. It has the potential to accelerate technological advances and breakthroughs in combating Ebola virus disease.”

More accessible to researchers for studying

The Ebola virus causes internal bleeding and tissue damage and is spread by direct contact with infected body fluids, such as blood or sweat, or by touching contaminated objects. This is significant because studying Ebola requires expensive and high-level biological security, like that in BSL-4 facilities.

As a result, the virus has been less accessible to scientists. According to the scientists, the development of countermeasures against EBOV has been hindered by the lack of ideal animal models. The reason was that EBOV requires handling in BSL-4 facilities.

In the study, they also analyzed the influence of the virus. They found that the virus had accumulated in critical tissues. Like for example the heart, lungs, liver, spleen, kidneys, intestines, and brain. As the study showed, the highest viral loads were found in the liver, and the lowest levels were found in the brain.

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