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Comment Re:Fresh food is so last year. (Score 1) 154

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.

Comment Obviously Yes (Score 1) 162

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.

Comment Offtopic (Score 2) 17

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.

Comment Hot electrons [Re:Perovskite thin films] (Score 3, Informative) 42

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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Your last sentence... I was just about to post something similar... far as I remember, heat doesn't generate electricity in PV cells... it might even hurt their efficiency, but you beat me to it.

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.

Now... you could route a water line behind the PV cell, and that'd give you warmer (depends on conditions) water (and might help cool the PV cells which might help their efficiency).

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.

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