I know it's unfashionable to read the article, but the summary? "It aims to replace coking coal, traditionally needed for ore-based steel making, with renewable electricity and hydrogen" I have yet to see anyone claim coal-powered electricity as "renewable", but the internet is vast and full of bullshit.

Interesting. I thought hydrogen was mostly made by electrolysis of water, but wikipedia says the vast majority is derived from natural gas in one way or another. Can anyone comment on whether cleaner hydrogen production is near at hand? Presumably there'll be money to develop that tech if there is demand to use it as a clean energy storage tech.

Any discussion of whether a person would or wouldn't have said the words being cast in their voice is secondary, I think, to how ghoulish this is. It's not much better than using animatronics to have his corpse wave for the camera. CGI reanimations of dead actors are already a thing: see e.g. Peter Cushing in Rogue One, and I felt much the same about that.

That sounds interesting and is not something I've heard about. Do you have any examples to hand?

Grumbling about invasions of privacy aside, is this a good idea even for science? Firefox users are a self-selected subgroup of web users. They've consciously decided to use something other than the default or most popular browser. Surely that drapes a cloud over any results gleaned from their data?

I'm an academic based in Europe. If I want to get patient data or similar personal data, I have to fill out ethics applications including a data management plan, restrict access to a named list of people associated with the project. If I were to turn around and sell it, I'd be in breach of the law, subject to legal action with substantial personal liability for which I am not insured, and I would be sacked by my university. I'm sure there have and will be people who'll take the chance, but it's not like I can just cross my fingers behind my back and sell it on without consequences.

Check out the abstract, or even the graphical abstract. They're conscious of those factors, and they're referring to paleolatitude in Laurasia.

Visible light goes up to about 0.75 microns, a little bigger than these pixels. I wonder whether they have to do any processing to compensate? Of course, they're doing other post-processing anyway.

I realised at some point in my 20s that I had published as many papers as Richard Feynman did in his entire career. While I'm not an expert on his work, I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that his contribution to science is greater than mine. Paper counts are crap. Citation counts are crap. The may not have been complete crap once, but they're performance metrics now and are gamed to death by very clever people. Someone will eventually move us on to new metrics. Those will quickly become crap too.

A recent Dilbert also seems relevant: https://dilbert.com/strip/2021...

Not entirely irrelevant, since there isn't enough of any of the vaccines to vaccinate everyone. The "pause" means that many people will have a delayed vaccination, which has a cost. I don't know whether the kinds of folks who make these calls weigh those extraneous costs or just consider the safety of the vaccine in absolute terms. The person you're replying to seems to think it's the latter, but may be assuming.

X-rays are ionising. Ionising radiation gives people cancer. There's a very good reason to make an alternative.

Techniques that penetrate human tissue, even a few mm, are a big deal in biomedical imaging, e.g. optical coherence tomography, fluorescence imaging, or optophotonics. This could be Nobel prize territory.

The laser was [i]built[/i] in the 60s. Einstein published the theory of stimulated emission of radiation in 1917.

What use were all those damned cookie notices if you can't rip facebook a new one for this kind of nonsense?