An infographic that can visually tell the story of climate changes has been making its rounds on the internet.
Brainchild of climate scientists Ed Hawkins and Jan Fuglestvedt, the animation shows how global temperatures have spiraled upwards and outwards since 1850.
Spiralling global temperatures from 1850-2016 (full animation) https://t.co/YETC5HkmTr pic.twitter.com/Ypci717AHq
— Ed Hawkins (@ed_hawkins) May 9, 2016
In the field of batteries, lithium is king. But a recent development from scientists at the Toyota Research Institute of North America (TRINA) may introduce a new competitor to the field.
The researchers have recently developed the first non-corrosive electrolyte for a rechargeable magnesium battery, which could open the door to better batteries for everything from cars to cell phones.
Magnesium has long been looked at as a possible alternative to lithium due to its high energy density. However, these batteries have not seen much attention in research and development due to the previously non-existent electrolyte. Now that the electrode has been developed, the researchers believe they will be able to demonstrate the value of this system.
Image: Mike Mozart/Flickr
Electronic cigarettes have paved a path for smokers to get their nicotine fix in a safer way. However, with recent news reports of the devices exploding into bursts of flames, many consumers now wary of the safety concerns.
E-cigarettes are relatively simple devices. Powered by a battery, an internal heating element vaporizes the liquid solution in the cartridge. But for a New York teen, the process wasn’t as simple as he expected.
According to a report by USA Today, the teen pressed the button to activate his e-cigarette and it exploded in his hands like “a bomb went off.”
Investigators expect that the device’s lithium-ion battery malfunctioned. Li-ion batteries, however, are the driving force behind personal electronics, electric vehicles, and even have potential in large-scale grid storage. So why are devices like hoverboards and e-cigarettes experiencing such issues with Li-ion battery safety when so many other applications consider the energy dense, long-life battery a non-safety hazard?
Whether you’re a Star Wars superfan or find yourself lost when the conversation turns to discussions of the feasibility of the Death Star, you can probably identify the epic space series’ iconic lightsaber. The lightsaber has become one of the most recognizable images in popular culture, but is it purely fiction or could it be a reality?
According to the Star Wars books, lightsabers are pretty complex devices but essentially boil down to a few key elements: a power source and emitter to create light, a crystal to focus the light into a blade, a blade containment field, and a negatively charged fissure. In the Star Wars galaxy, a lightsaber creates energy, focuses it, and contains it.
But that’s fiction and those ideas are not in line with current science and technology. So how could we build a lightsaber with the tools we have today?
Many people look initially to laser technology when discussing a practical lightsaber. It’s unrealistic to say that light could be the source of the blade seeing as light has no mass (creating a pretty insufficient weapon), but lasers could be an alternative. It may seem contradictory to say that lasers could be the blade in a lightsaber when lasers are essentially light focused to a very fine point, but as Looper puts it, light is to a laser what a tree is to paper.
While you may be unfamiliar with Khalil Amine, he has made an immense impact in your life if you happen to use batteries in any way.
As a researcher with a vision of where the science can be applied in the market, Amine has been monumental in developing and moving some of the biggest breakthroughs in battery technology from the lab to the marketplace.
Amine is currently head of the Technology Development Group in the Battery Technology Department at Argonne National Laboratory. From 1998-2008 he was the most cited scientist in the world in the field of battery technology.
He is the chair of the organizing committee for the 18th International Meeting on Lithium Batteries being held this June in Chicago.
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When we discuss energy, we usually talk about how to harness it or how to store it. But what about conserving the energy we’re wasting every day?
A recent study out of the University of Texas uncovered just how much energy we’re wasting through the excessive waste of food. For every four meals that make their way to our plates, an equivalent of one to two is discarded. When examining the energy used to grow, irrigate, fertilize, and transport that food — the amount of energy wasted begins to add up. Watch the video.
Reginald Penner (pictured) and doctoral candidate developed a nanowire-based batter that can be charged hundreds of thousands of times.
Image: Daniel A. Anderson/UC Irvine
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine may have just developed the ever-lasting battery.
A recent study, published in ACS Energy Letters, details a nanowire-based battery material that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times – making more realistic the idea of a battery that would never need to be replaced.
Potential applications for the battery range from computers and smartphones to cars and spacecrafts.
Highly-conductive nanowires have always been thought appropriate for battery design, but were held back by the fact that their fragility causes them to breakdown after multiple charging cycles. By coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and encasing the assembly in an electrolyte, the researchers have turn the frail structure into something that has almost infinite recharging capabilities.
Mya Le Thai, a doctoral candidate, led the charge on the research – cycling the tested electrode up to 200,000 times over a three month period without loss of capacity or damage to the nanowire.
“Mya was playing around, and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it. She discovered that just by using this gel, she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity,” said Reginald M. Penner, chair of UC Irvine’s chemistry department and ECS member. “That was crazy, because these things typically die in dramatic fashion after 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 cycles at most.”
Thai believes that this study shows that nanowire-based batteries could be commercially viable, and potentially the next big break in battery technology.
There may soon be a shift in the transportation sector, where traditional fossil fuel-powered vehicles become a thing of the past and electric vehicles start on their rise to dominance.
In fact, we may be seeing that shift already. Last year, battery prices fell 35 percent, which contributed to the 60 percent increase in sales of electric vehicles. If that growth continues along the same path, electric vehicles have the potential to displace oil demand of two million barrels a day as early as 2023.
The key technology at the heart of these vehicles is energy storage. Whether it be the lithium-ion, lithium-air, or fuel cells – electric vehicles depend on affordable, highly efficient electrochemical energy storage to operate.
But what if the future of these vehicles depend on a different type of energy technology?
Saturday Night Live recently made a play on the future of electric vehicles by imagining a world where cars didn’t run off of a singular, efficient battery — but rather tons of AA batteries.
Check out what a car powered entirely out of AA batteries could look like.
Image: Antalexion
With the increasing popularity of solar power and ongoing dialogue about the effects of climate changes comes inevitable discussions about the viability of renewable energy. While efficiency levels have grown tremendously over the years, many still worry about the feasibility of solar panels during inclement weather when the sun is not shining its brightest.
To address that issue, more attention has been focused on energy storage. However, a group of Chinese scientists are turning to the solar panels themselves to answer some of these questions.
In a recently published paper, scientist detailed a new way for solar panels to produce electricity from rain water. The way it works is pretty simple: researchers apply a thin layer of graphene to the bottom of the solar panel; when it rains, you simply flip the panel and allow the positively charged ions from the rain drops to interact with the graphene and produce electricity.
“Although great achievements have been made since the discovery of various solar cells, there is still a remaining problem that the currently known solar cells can only be excited by sunlight on sunny days,” wrote the researchers in the paper.
This year’s World Health Day focuses on diabetes and reducing the burden of a disease that affects over 420 million people worldwide. To put that in perspective, that number rested at 180 million in 1980. It is expected to more than double within the next 20 years.
So how can we beat diabetes? Well, electrochemistry has the potential to play a rather large role in halting the rise of this disease that kills 1.5 million people each year.
Meet Adam Heller, electrochemist and inventor of the FreeStyle and FreeStyle Libre systems; glucose monitoring devices that changed diabetes management technology.
“People were pricking their fingers and taking large blood drops,” Heller, ECS honorary member, said. “It was painful: get a strip, touch it, get a blood sample, measure the glycemia (the blood glucose concentration).”
Around 20 years ago, Heller decided to address the pressing issue of how to accurately, easily, and affordably monitor blood glucose levels. As an electrochemist, he took his work in the electrical wiring of redox enzymes and began to apply it to glucose and diabetes management.
“[My son] observed that if he pricks his skin in the arm, he can painlessly get a much smaller sample of blood,” Heller, who was awarded the National Medal of Technology and Innovation for his efforts in diabetes management technology, said. “By pricking his finger, he got, painfully, a large drop of blood. So he asked me, ‘Can we make a sensor for such a small sample of blood?’ I knew that it could be done if I used a small enough electrode.”
