Two new families of signals: one reads economic activity from a satellite, the other reads the medical research pipeline from the public trial registry.
NO2 from space
Nitrogen dioxide (NO2) comes mostly from burning fuel in power plants, factories, trucks and cars, and it lasts only hours, so it stays close to where it was emitted. The TROPOMI instrument on the European Copernicus Sentinel-5P satellite measures it over the whole planet every day. KNMI, the Dutch weather service, averages each month on a fine grid, and Palanor averages that grid over each place.
- Area average (no2.trop_column.*): the average over the whole place, for 18 countries, the European Union and all 31 of China's provinces and municipalities.
- Hotspots (no2.trop_column_hotspots.*): the average over the tenth of a country's area with the highest NO2 in 2019: its cities, industry and power plants. For a large country this moves far more with activity than the whole-country average, which is mostly clean air.
- Change from a year earlier (no2.trop_column_hotspots_yoy.*): the hotspot average against the same month a year before, for the U.S., China, India, Japan, South Korea, Germany and the EU.
Read it by season. NO2 is much higher in winter than in summer, because weaker sunlight breaks it down more slowly and heating adds to it. Compare a month with the same month in other years, or use the change from a year earlier. Weather moves single months a lot, so read several months together. Months where clouds or snow hide most of a place are left out.
What it is good for. It is an early, independent read on industry: the month is in within days of its end. Over U.S. hotspots, the change from a year earlier has moved with U.S. industrial production since 2019. It is not a measure of output: cleaner engines and power plants lower it over the years, and it cannot tell industry from traffic.
Clinical trials
From the ClinicalTrials.gov registry of the U.S. National Library of Medicine:
- New trials registered each month (clinicaltrials.registered.*): all interventional trials, company-led trials, company-led phase 1, 2 and 3, all phase 3, NIH-led and academic-led trials, and company-led trials in eight therapeutic areas (cancer, heart, nervous system, mental health, infections, immune, metabolic, respiratory). Trials are counted in the month the registry first posted them, which never changes. Actual start dates fill in months later, so counting by start date would make every recent month look weak.
- Studies involving AI (clinicaltrials.registered.ai, and its share of all studies): studies whose record mentions artificial intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, large language models, ChatGPT or generative AI.
- Trials stopped early (clinicaltrials.termination_rate.industry): of the company-led trials that ended over the last 12 months, the share terminated rather than completed.
- Why they stopped (clinicaltrials.stopped_reason.*): the share of stops whose stated reason cites business or funding, enrollment, or safety and efficacy. Sponsors write the reason in their own words; Palanor labels it with fixed word rules, not a model. Endings are reported late, so the newest three months are held back.
Company pipelines
Entity pages now have a Clinical trials section for companies that sponsor trials: active trials by phase, the phase 3 trials with the soonest expected results, trials registered in the last year, and trials stopped early with the sponsor's reason. Where a company has named FDA decision dates on its earnings calls, those appear there too. Sponsors are matched to companies by exact name, or through a checked list of subsidiary names (Merck Sharp & Dohme is Merck, Janssen is Johnson & Johnson). The Entity Screener can filter companies by active trials and by phase 3 trials.
Charts
The Charts library has NO2 over hotspots against a year earlier, U.S. NO2 against industrial production, China, the U.S., the EU and India side by side, China by province, the North China Plain, new trials by phase and by therapeutic area, studies involving AI, and trials stopped early and why. Search "NO2" or "clinical trials" in the Library.
Sources
Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data, processed by KNMI (TEMIS, www.temis.nl). Boundaries from Natural Earth. ClinicalTrials.gov, U.S. National Library of Medicine; the data are refreshed weekly and the entity section shows the date ClinicalTrials.gov processed them. The U.S. government does not review or approve the safety and science of all studies listed on ClinicalTrials.gov; sponsors are responsible for their listings.
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