These guys are so psycho that they would think you showed them a instructional film.

People of the USA are too polite, why hasn't anyone firebombed the Heritage Foundation yet?

Cute name for an "always-on" surveillance device.

Remember that only high-level Party members are able to turn off their telescreens.

I didn't know about this stuff, and would rather eat better tasting bananas and def not gmo. But, I found out from googling that actually bananas have a lot of polyphenol oxidas (PPO) and if you eat it at the same time as berries and good antioxidant flavanoids, the PPO breaks it all down within an hour even in your stomach. You need to not mix them, or eat them like 2 hours apart, or you can process the bananas with heat etc. Lemon only slows it like 15%. Even if they aren't brown they have the PPO. So actually these GMO bananas could maybe be used in smoothies. That said, no thanks. These people are just doing it to extend shelf life and not going trust their crispr process to be safe. That, and once you grow these bananas they will end up in all kinds of supply chains eventually.

There, said it...

Who watches the watchdog?

Sorry, it's still 2027. It'll have to be called the Blockwall.

Chatbots are a powerful force for influencing opinion. They often present a reasonable-sounding chain of logic as if it were the only possibility. Often it's benign and more-or-less correct, but remember that these things are distilling the opinions of millions of Reddit users. It's best to treat it like a unscrupulous and narcissistic salesman and question everything.

Of course, that's tiring to do constantly. It's so much more convenient to just do what the computer says. I wonder what would happen if we collectively just give in and outsource all decision-making to these things.

Seems like I won't have to wait very long to get an answer to that.

Is nobody concerned about the noise pollution from these things? Or is everyone so deaf now, with the constant noise from traffic, hvac systems, lawnmowers, leaf blowers, etc. that we no longer remember what silence is?

Sometimes I think that we are so preoccupied with whether or not we could that we don't stop to think if we should.

I mean, it's one banana. What could it cost? 10 dollars?

What sense does that make? You want to discount refrigerated beverages during a heatwave, so people will come in and buy other items while they're getting reprieve from the heat in the frozen-food section

Correct on both, in fact heat decreases efficiency of PV cells (thermal dark current is opposite to photovoltaic current). However, keep in mind that "hot electrons" aren't exactly hot in the sensible-heat sense-- it means that the electrons are in a high-energy state well above the bandgap of the semiconductor. The solar photons come in at an equivalent temperature of 6000K, and all of that energy gets transferred to the minority-carrier electrons, but they quickly shed their excess energy (by transferring energy to the lattice and to other electrons or holes) and relax to the edge of the conduction band (or, ~kT above it). So, using "hot electrons" means somehow finding a way to transfer energy out of the highly-excited initial state immediately after photon absorption, rather than the relaxed quasi-equilibrium state of the conduction band.

So, there's energy there, and in principle it could be used. It's just going to take a new approach to use it. I can't think of a way to do that without adding junctions, and then you end up essentially just re-inventing the multi-junction solar cell.

Yes, but of course now you're harvesting the sensible heat, not the hot electrons. This can be useful, if you need low-grade heat.

They are kissing up to Donny by letting him rename everything he farts on.

The perovskite semiconductors here are a very different technology than the old thin photovoltaics. They have the potential to be much more efficient, and the deposition techniques are cheap and comparatively low-tech

Whether they can succeed in simultaneously be highly-efficient, resistant to degradation in the environment, and still be low cost is the subject of a lot of work. We'll see.

To be more specific, the target back in the '80s and '90s was clearly articulated as being fifty cents per watt (where "per watt" meant, when illuminated at standard conditions of 1 kW/square meter.) Silicon photovoltaics can now be purchased at 12 cents per watt. In today's dollars. They not only hit the target, they blew it away.

The reason the thin films of the '80s and '90s lost was not that they were bad, but that silicon simply outcompeted them.

I have some amount of skepticism too. Nanosecond lifetimes of hot electrons are amazing, but to date there's no way for turning hot electrons into electrical energy*. So they'd essentially have to invent a technology from scratch.

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  *(thermoelectrics convert hot electrons into usable energy, of course, but there not just the electrons, but the whole lattice is hot. And the efficiency is worse than a solar cell).