Sabine Hossenfelder's Saturday YouTube posting is her take on Cold Fusion.
Cold Fusion is Back (there's just one problem).
She has a bit of fun, for the purposes of entertaining the viewers, but does review recent developments and does decide at the end that although she is sceptical "Something odd is going on that deserves further study".
Edit, just noticed that a link has also been put into Media/News/Video Library so mods may want to delete this!
Don't worry I expect that your expectation will be fulfilled. 
Many see your scepticism as nitpicking to the point of trolling.
I don't, I presume you are still open-minded but clearly have an interest in LENR or you would not be on this forum.
But just out of interest, to take a different tack towards the positive side of things;
If you had to speak to somebody who has already decided that LENR is bunk (perhaps an editor of a science journal, or a person who decides on who gets funding for research) I would be interested on whether you would be able to make a positive case for LENR and what research or results you might want to present to them.
Cheers
Oxford study Decarbonising the energy system by 2050 could save trillions.
They reckon that "fast transition to clean energy is cheaper than slow or no transition."
My layman's guess is that we need a mix of energy sources for at least the next decade because;
1. Solar and wind need storage and battery storage is still expensive.
2. Every energy source can be subject to black swan type crises (Fukushima, Russia/Ukraine, terrorist attacks, unusual weather patterns etc).
Politico - The Death of Das Auto
Since the dawn of the automobile, Germany’s prowess in producing the combustion engine set German-made cars apart from the competition; in recent decades, the engine has also been one of the only major vehicle components still produced inside the country.
But as the industry goes electric, that leadership position becomes as irrelevant as the skills of an Italian master tailor in the face of fast fashion mass-produced in overseas factories. In the modern age of mobility, it’s the battery and software that offers the added value, not the engine.
The race to lead the electric revolution isn’t over, but it’s already far from clear if the likes of Mercedes, Volkswagen, BMW, Bosch — or indeed Porsche — will be able to keep pace. For the first time in the industry’s history, the prospect of Germany’s most storied brands suffering the fate of faded American powerhouses like Pontiac or Oldsmobile no longer seems like an impossibility.
It is remarkable how successful companies, filled with smart, ambitious bosses and piles of money can steer their companies onto the rocks.
I guess the landscape and the rocks move about and what worked last decade may not work next decade.
This chimes with a lot of what Jed has said in the past and the many examples he has provided.
The Europeans are also trying to address their projected lithium needs, but it is all going very slowly.
NextBigFuture "Unknown cause of 1 million excess deaths per year".
"Many countries saw 18% excess deaths during the two years of the pandemic. There should have been a drop in excess deaths as we got COVID under control. More people who would have died this year from old age and natural causes died in the past 2 years from covid. Therefore, this year’s excess deaths should be below average. Excess deaths are at the 10-20% level in many countries even as COVID deaths droped and gone from pandemic to epidemic.
In England and Wales, for 14 of the past 15 weeks, around 1,000 extra deaths each week, (none of which are due to covid. IF the current trajectory continues, then non-Covid excess deaths will be more than COVID deaths this year. This was reported by Prof Carl Heneghan, director of the Centre for Evidence Based Medicine, Oxford University.
The excess deaths seem to be primarily circulatory, diabetes and cancer. But the reason for those extra deaths is unknown. IF this remains unsolved and is not fixed or does not stop on its own then this would be an extra 1 million deaths per year. [2 billion people with an extra 20% deaths.] If it also was impacting China, India, other Asian and African countries at the same level then this would be an extra 3 million deaths per year.
The US excess deaths is currently at about 8%, but the US has a population is over five times the level of the UK. This is about 2000-4000 extra deaths per week in the US."
So, I have to say that this would be potentially supportive of Wyttenbach's views about vaccine mortality.
However things may not be that simple the article goes on to say;
"Possible mix of causes related to increased systemic increases in stress, systemic decline in lifestyle and diet or some hidden and subtle long post-COVID related issues."
So currently hand-waving and guess a cause.
Certainly an interesting and unexpected effect (unexpected to the authorities, not unexpected to Wyttenbach and some others on here of course).
I do know that in the UK the health service has been on its knees since COVID hit, and was not in great shape before. There are long queues of patients, suffering from cancer and other serious conditions where treatment has been seriously delayed. Hard to see a GP or get a hospital appointment.
However that would not explain excess deaths in other countries.
Basically the stats are the facts but the cause of the stats has not been clarified at this point.
I think it might be difficult to attribute excess deaths from circulatory causes to vaccines vs some kind of long Covid effect, or even lack of exercise and poor diet during lock-downs.
Excellent. We have a number of contributors on here who will be able to show Matt where he has gone wrong. 
Wyttenbach "What is higher ????"
It is published in the BMJ so you probably should just ignore it 
The paper is based on data collected from 2001 to 2019 so no Covid effect in this research.
The fact that you say "A gullible fool who doesn't think is of no use" while at the same time dismissing the results as “White collar jobs vs blue collar jobs is the reason” without saying “maybe” or “it might be possible that white collar jobs vs blue collar jogs is the reason” is ironic.
Nonetheless it is a good point. Maybe you are correct.
It is a piece of research and should rightly be critiqued, hopefully by people smarter than us.
It may turn out to be seriously flawed.
White collar vs blue collar was not specifically mentioned in the paper.
The nearest that the paper comes to dealing with your point is a data split into metropolitan and rural;
“Given that Democratic rural counties fared much better than Republican rural counties, it is likely that political environment has an important role to play in the widening urban-rural mortality gap.”
The paper goes on to say;
“One potential explanation may be related to underlying differences in access to healthcare. Recent evidence suggests that the values and beliefs about whether health insurance coverage should be provided by the federal government vary markedly by political environment, and Republican states tend to have higher uninsurance rates, in part because many elected to not expand Medicaid over the past decade. Lack of health insurance coverage is associated with lower rates of screening, identification, and treatment of important risk factors (eg, diabetes, hypertension) and chronic conditions (heart disease, cancer). ”
Personally I would guess that this is a more significant factor than “white collar vs blue collar” but that is only my slightly informed position.
***
In respect of your posting above Dr Alexander James says;
“This is a politics of tar and feather, and it is being conducted through a pseudo-logic of coercive dichotomies, all of which have the form of the argumentum hystericum.
Until we collectively restore some sort of sense of proportion to our entire culture, there is nothing to be done. But at least, for the moment, we can identify the problem.”
I have two thoughts to share;
Hysteria; you refer to “hysteria” in the areas of Covid, climate change and wokeism.
I would agree with that. The media and certain fringe elements do try to stir up a level of hysteria. In my opinion this is partly because the media has much more competition with social media and new media such that they try to attract attention by making every headline one of “outrage”, “alarm”, “shock”. I stopped reading newspapers years ago for the good of my blood pressure. Such hysteria does not make for good policy. But this effect is across the media, not just one side or another. For example while one side is accused of hysteria on Covid and climate change, another side is predicting an economic apocalyse or stockpiling weapons for a civil war.
Which leads onto …
Dichotomy; sadly, IMO, we are not well served by our political classes, whose interest is in making everything black and white and stirring up one side against the other side (who often are portrayed as a bogeyman figure). “Coercive dichotomies” abound along with tribalism. In my view this is one of the key strategies to stop people thinking for themselves.
In the real world simple dichotomies are not the answer to most issues.
When people stop focusing on their differences they may find that they have a lot in common.
So if I ultimately want to think for myself then I reject being put into one side or another.
Report in SciTech Daily.
Research indicates republicans are dying at a higher rate than democrats.
A recent study shows how politics and health outcomes have become more intertwined over time. From 2001 to 2019, researchers from Brigham and Women’s Hospital looked at death rates and information on federal and state elections for all counties in the United States. The researchers discovered a “mortality gap,” or an increasing divergence in age-adjusted death rates in counties that had supported Democrats or Republicans in prior presidential and governor elections.
“In an ideal world, politics and health would be independent of each other and it wouldn’t matter whether one lives in an area that voted for one party or another,” said corresponding author Haider Warraich, MD, of the Division of Cardiovascular Medicine at the Brigham. “But that is no longer the case. From our data, we can see that the risk of premature death is higher for people living in a county that voted Republican.”
"A fool who votes against improvements to the health service is free to do so, but his death is still a tragedy" ZenoOfElea
Scientists Trace Earliest Cases of COVID-19 to Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China
"An international team of scientists has determined that the earliest cases of COVID-19 in humans arose at a wholesale fish market in Wuhan China in December 2019. They linked these cases to bats, foxes, and other live mammals infected with the virus sold in the market either for consumption as meat or for their fur. The team of 18 researchers included a scientist at the University of Utah Health.
The finding confirms early reports, later dismissed by senior Chinese officials, that live animals sold at the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market were the likely source of the pandemic that has claimed at least 6.4 million lives since it first emerged in China nearly three years ago. The study was published in the July 26, 2022, issue of Science."
"Among the study’s key findings:
The 15 year limit is not arbitrary. It is a function of the service life of equipment, and the time it takes people to replace their furnaces and air conditioners. No one is going to dump a new furnace just to get the benefits of a cold fusion co-generator, but when the furnace wears out, no one is going to buy another gas or electrically fired furnace. People do not throw away tens of thousands of dollars for no reason.
This is a good solid argument, generally if someone has just bought a car or a new house boiler, or a power station a new generator, then they will continue to use it till they need to think about replacing it.
Except there are special cases where people do throw away money. People throw away their phone and buy a new one, sometimes every year. That is not especially applicable to the sort of technology we are talking about but it does demonstrate an exception to the argument.
Where it may be applicable to cold fusion is because there are the replacement costs and then the running costs.
If the cost savings for running the new cold fusion device are so great then there may be a case for dumping the old tech sooner.
With boilers for instance, it may be that all new houses get the new cold fusion boiler, and anybody with an oldish standard boiler will want a new cold fusion boiler.
But even for those that have a relatively recent standard boiler it is possible that if the cost savings are so great with cold fusion that the mere running costs of their standard boiler may make it undesireable to hang onto. People who are renting may prefer apartments with cold fusion boilers which are so much cheaper than the standard boilers.
So if cold fusion energy is really ultra cheap then it might disrupt the various markets more quickly than even we anticipate.
Artificial Intelligence research at Columbia University.
AI used to discover which variables describe the data it is presented with.
The research is very interesting IMO.
I wonder if AI could be used to analyse the results of LENR experiments to try to more precisely unravel what is going on.
JedRothwell just responding to the graph showing the energy from wind dropping when demand was high.
Clearly a mix is needed and clearly what they have is not the right mix.
I am not against nuclear per se but it takes a lot of time to get a nuclear plant up and running.
I have heard that nuclear is possibly the most expensive way to produce energy (Sabine Hossenfelder on YouTube) but I would have thought one of the advantages is that at least nuclear should be pretty reliable.
There was a guy on YouTube the other day saying how nuclear was so much safer compared to fatalities from wind or solar energy (falling off roofs, pollution etc). Also bird deaths.
My thoughts were, "Yeah, ok, nuclear had a lot of money and had its chance and people don't forget 3-Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima so good luck selling that!"
Nonetheless there are many nuclear power stations around Europe and the USA that have run fine for decades and produced power reliably so it is an option that needs consideration.
Possibly there are some areas, or countries, where nuclear makes good sense.
Transitioning to wind or solar is very desirable but needs to be part of a mix and needs some kind of battery storage to smooth out the demand on the grid.
Many countries, such as the UK, still rely heavily on gas and will do for some time, although there is talk of putting hydrogen into the gas pipes.
Of course if we get LENR energy then that should solve most of the problems and kill standard nuclear for good. 
I agree with Shane D. and Gregory Byron Goble .
The field is so fractionalised and shrouded in secrecy that it is impossible to get a sense of progress, where we are and what we need to do.
True it is only day 2 and there is much more to learn yet.
But so far we have some parties saying we need to start from working to get the finance, then build the teams, then start on the theories, and take things slowly and carefully because we need to carefully assemble enough evidence to convince people outside the field. This would of course take years.
Then there are others who seem to be saying "Oh yes, we have done all that, built a great team and have been working on this for over a decade - and yes we have strong results that are reproducible."
Then there are others who have been mentioned above, who are notable by their silence.
Is Google, who are just next-door, making a presentation? Maybe Carl could go and knock on their door, if he knows somebody there (JOKE!).
Everyone agrees that we need LENR solutions ASAP.
So maybe I am wrong but we seem to seriously need some clarity and cohesion.
This is something that LENR-Forum was originally created to do but clearly there is only so much it can achieve.
The X-Prize sounds like a good idea and if there is significant financing then it could galvanize the field, but somehow we need to get beyond secrecy and teams working in isolation.
Communication is key. Another idea might be for someone at the "strategic" level, such as the Anthropocene Institute, to create a publication dedicated to LENR where papers could published and would provide an up to date source on the state of progress. I guess that this might not cost too much. Maybe Jed would say that he already has this covered with LENR-CANR, but the continuous complaint has been that researchers cannot get their work published.
A quick Google search suggests that wind accounts for around 20% energy on the Texas grid and clearly it can fluctuate.
It may be that wind is only suitable for a smaller contribution to the mix, as far as Texas is concerned.
Each country and each state has to determine what mix of energy supply is most suitable for its needs.
After 30 seconds of thought - obvious ways to solve this problem include;
* Rely less on wind and more on gas and/or nuclear and/or solar.
* Build more storage. This is starting to become a big thing, but USA does not have an active lithium mine and relies on China! However USA lithium mining should be on-stream in a few years.
* Link the Texas grid to the national grid.
* Individual building owners reduce their grid needs by installing private solar.
The people running the Texas grid must be aware of all this, so a bit of a political scandal how they they mismanaged it to this state where it is not fit for purpose.
Having said that, political decisions on the UK grid had been neglected for decades. And now the government has decided to bet big on nuclear, a large power station and millions of tax payers money invested into Rolls-Royce's modular nuclear reactors. Good British politics to invest millions into a British company but my concerns with this strategy are;
* Nuclear is the most expensive way to produce energy.
* Building and commissioning a nuclear power station will take many years - so in the short to medium term we are stuck with supply shortage.
* The Rolls-Royce modular reactors are a fantasy dream at the moment. They have not even built one. If they work then fine, but it is a big gamble.
* Modular nuclear reactors will likely mean small reactors that are placed local to the needs. Will citizens be happy with modular nuclear reactors placed within a few miles of their houses?
Not sure if liquid metal batteries have been mentioned here but could be a game changer for grid storage, which could help smooth out the supply with wind and solar generation
Research by Professor Donald Sadoway has been recently recognised for an award.
MIT professor wins european inventor award for liquid metal batteries
The company is at ambri.com and sounds interesting.
These liquid metal batteries have a lot of advantages over lithium batteries for grid storage.
They are still at a relatively early stage; "The company will soon install a unit on a 3,700 acre development for a data center in Nevada. This battery will store energy from a reported 500 megawatts of on-site renewable generation, the same output as a natural gas power plant.
But scaling up to have a significant market share will likely take at least several years.
Plus there is one slight issue in that it requires antimony and the USA has no domestic antimony mine.
The USA imports most of its antimony from China and Russia.
China supplies 53% of the worlds antimony but processes 80% of it. Sounds similar to the situation with lithium.
UK ordered 60m doses of Novavax.
Anyone want 60m vax doses going v cheap?
Reuters news; EU adds severe allergies as side effect of Novavax
The European Medicines Agency on Thursday identified severe allergic reactions as potential side effects of Novavax Inc's (NVAX.O) COVID-19 vaccine.
The vaccine was authorized by U.S. regulators on Wednesday, and its product label in the United States warns against administering the shot to people with a history of allergic reactions to any components of the shot.
Certainly interesting and controversial.
I wonder if this would make people more or less likely to invest in the Safire Project.
Yes, good point, very hard to say.
The hypothesized protective "effect" does not stop somebody getting Alzheimer's but may delay it by several years.
The suggestion that catching influenza itself may increase the risk of Alzheimer's due to inflammation or some other change to the immune system sounds plausible, but I am no expert.
However, as you say, the effect may not be specific to the flu vaccine. It is possible it might be something other than the vaccine, maybe these people also take vitamin tablets or whatever.
We know don't know what the mechanism of the beneficial effect might be and we still don't even know the cause of Alzheimer's.
So interesting research but much more to be investigated.
Scitechdaily.com
Flu Vaccination Reduces Risk of Alzheimers
Over the course of four years, those who received at least one influenza vaccine were 40% less likely than their non-vaccinated peers to acquire Alzheimer’s disease, according to a new study from the University of Texas Health Science Center at Houston.
Researchers compared the risk of Alzheimer’s disease incidence between patients with and without prior flu vaccination in a large nationwide sample of U.S. adults aged 65 and older. The study was led by first author Avram S. Bukhbinder, MD, a recent alumnus of McGovern Medical School at UTHealth Houston, and senior author Paul. E. Schulz, MD, the Rick McCord Professor in Neurology at McGovern Medical School.
