Thanks for the lead. Some thoughts after reading through the relevant journal articles…
This is all coming from the same research group still. They’ve sifted through other decay rate data to collect a handful of examples with similar (though not the same) behavior. Of note, I couldn’t find anything in the literature where they describe how many null data sets they had to go through to find a few that are supportive.
I was rather unimpressed with the quantitative aspects of the relevant articles. They are written in a rather unconvincing way, and at most of the points where you’d like to see a particular figure or number to convince yourself of a claim that is given in words, such a figure or number isn’t given. Some of the supporting data they are using was not collected with any particular need to precision rate measurements (e.g., calibration data collected for a completely separate purpose at a research reactor.) However, to be fair, they often conclude with something like, “We don’t know what this is, but better-designed experiments with appropriate controls and environmental measurements should be conducted.” I agree.
The thing is, there are seasonal variations in just about everything. Temperature, pressure, a building’s heating/cooling system cycling, other electrical systems having varying duty cycles, ambient radon rates, cosmic ray rates, sunlight… Also, some of the collated data show annual cycles, some show more frequenct cycles, and some are not quite in phase with one another.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that the claim is far from convincing at present. They’re doing good science, in that they’re reporting what they’re finding and trying to tease out what the heck is going on, and I hope they continue to push on it in an increasingly controlled way. But for now, I’m not surprised that this isn’t getting a lot of air time.
As for “neutrellos”: it’s little more than a word made up by the researchers. There is no production or interaction model proposed. There is no suggestion for how such a beast would fit into a broader particle physics context. It’s just, “If these rate variations are going to be caused by something happening in the sun, then we need something to be travelling from the sun to here. We should give it a name.” So, they did.