In a recent post by Bill Gates, the business magnate identified the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, more commonly known as ARPA-E, as his favorite obscure government agency.

Gates cited the agency as a key in solving pressing energy issues, referencing his faith in ARPA-E as demonstrated through his involvement in the $1 billion investment funding created in 2016 through Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV).

BEV was developed as an initiative to provide affordable, clean energy to people across the globe. In order to make that energy future possible, Gates and his partners at BEV knew they would have to depend on public, government funded research.

Since its establishment in 2009 under then U.S. Secretary of Energy Steven Chu, ARPA-E has acted as an arm of the U.S. Department of Energy that can help deliver the highly innovative technology that ventures like BEV depend on. From the agency’s REFUEL program, which promotes the development of carbon-neutral fuels to BEEST, funding research in energy storage for transportation, ARPA-E funds high-risk, high-reward endeavors capable of transforming energy landscapes.

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With Peer Review Week 2017 in full swing, researchers, reviewers, and publishers worldwide are currently engaged in critical conversations about the role of peer review in scholarly communications.

In the spirit of the week’s theme of “Transparency in Review,” ECS hopes to shed as much light as possible upon its own peer review process. After all, the way peer review is conducted affects all participants involved in scientific scholarship—authors, reviewers, publishers, and consumers.

ECS prides itself on its commitment to rigorous peer review, which has remained a focus for the Society since 1902.

“All the work that we publish goes through a very rigorous peer review,” says Robert Savinell, editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, in a podcast on open science. “If you look at the editorial board that we have that makes the decisions, these are all experts in the field. We can give critical feedback to the authors that can make the papers much stronger and much better.”

Likewise, ECS takes pride in being forthright about its peer review practices. It believes all of its authors, reviewers, and readers have a right to know how peer review is performed at ECS. ECS’s goal has always been to disseminate science you can trust. Transparent peer review is the cornerstone of this trust.

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Q&A series with ECS OpenCon 2017 speakers

Dina Paltoo, director, Division of Scientific Data Sharing Policy, Office of Science Policy,
National Institutes of Health

ECS will be hosting its first ever OpenCon event on October 1 in National Harbor, MD. OpenCon will be ECS’s first, large community event aimed at creating a culture of change in how research is designed, shared, discussed, and disseminated, with the ultimate goal of making scientific progress faster.

During ECS’s OpenCon, Dina Paltoo, director of the Division of Scientific Data Sharing Policy at the National Institutes of Health’s Office of Science Policy, will give a talk on open and government.

The following conversation is part of a series with speakers from the upcoming ECS OpenCon. Read the rest of the series.

ECS: Why are you interested in OpenCon?

Dina Paltoo: OpenCon will bring together various stakeholders to learn about recent updates and current activities in open science and public access. Science is generating a vast amount of data, and these data are becoming increasingly digital. The digitization of these data, along with advances in bioinformatics and information technology, as well changes to scientific ethos and practices, are allowing for increased access to and analyses of data. Thus, these data may be used to answer additional research questions which can advance science and benefit the public. It is important for the scientific community to understand the benefits of open science and public access to data.

ECS: The bio and life sciences, as well as the math and physics community, have been early adopters of tools in the open science paradigm. Do you think there are easily transferrable lessons for other scientific disciplines?

DP: I would agree that some scientific communities have been ahead of others, with regards to the open science paradigm. Within the biological sciences for example, the genomics community has been openly sharing data for a number of years. A culture change is needed in many scientific disciplines, and the math and physics community could definitely provide case studies and lessons learned which other disciplines can adopt.

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Volunteer for six hours at the 232nd ECS Meeting and receive 50% off your meeting registration, (1) ticket to the Student Mixer and (1) free year of student membership!

As a student volunteer, you will work closely with the ECS staff and gain first-hand experience in what it takes to execute an ECS biannual meeting.

Take advantage of the opportunity to network and engage with meeting attendees, symposium organizers, and ECS staff while learning how registration operates, technical sessions run, and how major meeting programs are facilitated. In addition to hands-on experience, volunteers will also receive a meeting t-shirt, a complimentary ticket to the student mixer and a certificate of participation.

Multilingual speakers are highly encouraged to apply!

Deadline for application submissions: Thursday, September 21
Candidates notified: Monday, September 25

SUBMIT YOUR APPLICATION

NOTE: If you do not complete the six hours of work on-site, you will be invoiced for the full registration fee. We will do our best to accommodate the hours you have listed as being available but this is not a guarantee. Each volunteer position will require interaction with the attendees, long periods of standing, and foot-traffic flow management. If you are unwilling or unable to complete these tasks please make us aware upon submitting your application.

Researchers have developed a new way to alleviate many of the issues that make magnetic data storage for computer hard disks and other data storage hardware problematic, including speed and energy use.

For almost seventy years now, magnetic tapes and hard disks have been used for data storage in computers. In spite of many new technologies that have arisen in the meantime, the controlled magnetization of a data storage medium remains the first choice for archiving information because of its longevity and low price.

As a means of realizing random access memories (RAMs), however, which are used as the main memory for processing data in computers, magnetic storage technologies have long been considered inadequate. That is mainly due to its low writing speed and relatively high energy consumption.

Pietro Gambardella, professor at the materials department of ETH Zurich, and his colleagues, have now shown that using a novel technique, faster magnetic storage is possible without wasting energy.

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The third annual Peer Review Week will take place September 11-17, featuring a series of panels, webinars, interviews, and communications on the multidimensional and imperative topic of peer review.

Though no one peer review process is quite the same as the next, scientists around the world depend on peer review. Whatever its form—closed, open, even post-publication—good peer review ensures quality in scientific research and communication. It evaluates the legitimacy of scholarly work and offers potential for the improvement and expansion of research.

Peer Review Week is a global event aimed at honoring the fundamental role peer review plays within the scholarly community. More than that, though, Peer Review Week extends authors, reviewers, and thinkers worldwide an opportunity to analyze the construct of peer review in its many shapes—to assess its many challenges and successes while considering its future.

The theme of Peer Review Week 2017 is “Transparency in Review.” The week’s events will deliberate what transparency means in peer review and examine its connection to scholarly accountability.

The week will feature virtual and in-person events from Monday, September 11 through Friday, September 15. Be sure to check out the full listing of Peer Review Week 2017’s activities.

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Q&A series with ECS OpenCon 2017 speakers

Meredith Morovati, executive director of Dryad

ECS will be hosting its first ever OpenCon event on October 1 in National Harbor, MD. OpenCon will be ECS’s first, large community event aimed at creating a culture of change in how research is designed, shared, discussed, and disseminated, with the ultimate goal of making scientific progress faster.

During ECS’s OpenCon, Meredith Morovati, executive director of Dryad, will give a talk on open data.

The following conversation is part of a series with speakers from the upcoming ECS OpenCon. Read the rest of the series.

ECS: How and why did Dryad get its start; and how has it grown since then?

Meredith Morovati: Editors from journals in the fields of evolution and life science—some of them competing journals—were becoming concerned that it was difficult to find data that supported the literature; the “policy” of asking an author to share data after the fact was a failure. In 2011, twelve of these editors came together to remedy this, and developed the Joint Data Archive Policy (JDAP). JDAP required, as a condition of publication, that data be archived in an appropriate public archive and stated that data are products of the scientific enterprise in their own right. These editors argued that data must be preserved and usable in the future. JDAP is now a model for requiring data as a condition of publishing an article.

The use of Dryad was not stipulated as part of this policy, but Dryad became the preferred solution due to its one-to-one relationship with data and scholarly literature. In addition, Dryad curates data to ensure high quality metadata and is committed to discoverability.

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Left to right: Mark Burgess, Kenneth Hernández-Burgos, and Peng Sun

ECS’s honors and awards program recognizes scientific excellence in electrochemical and solid state science. Every year, ECS presents two young author awards for the best papers published in both the Journal of The Electrochemical Society – ECS’s flagship journal, published continuously since 1902 – and the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology.

Mark Burgess and Kenneth Hernández-Burgos from University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign will receive the Norman Hackerman Young Author Award for best paper published by young authors in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. Peng Sun from University of Michigan will receive the Bruce Deal & Andy Grove Young Author Award for best paper published by a young author in the ECS Journal of Solid State Science and Technology.

This year’s young author awards will be presented at the 232nd ECS Meeting in National Harbor, MD, Oct. 1-5, 2017.

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Chemical engineers have generated ultra-pure green light for the first time.

The new light-emitting diode paves the way for visibly improved color quality in a new generation of ultra-high definition displays for TVs and smartphones.

Electronic devices must first be able to produce ultra-pure red, blue, and green light in order to enable the next generation of displays to show images that are clearer, sharper, richer in detail, and with a more refined range of colors. For the most part, this is already possible for red and blue light; green light, however, has been at the limits of technology.

This is due mainly to human perception, since the eye is able to distinguish between more intermediary green hues than red or blue ones. “This makes the technical production of ultra-pure green very complex, which creates challenges for us when it comes to developing technology and materials,” says Sudhir Kumar of ETH Zurich, co-lead author of the study.

Ultra-pure green plays a key role in extending the color range, or gamut. Ultimately, new hues arise from the technical mixture of three base colors: red, blue, and green. The purer the base colors, the broader the range of hues a screen can display. The new LED is in line with 97 to 99 percent of the international standard for Ultra HD, Rec.2020. By comparison, the purest color TV displays currently available on the market cover on average only 73.11 to 77.72 percent; none exceeds 80 percent.

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The Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) Focus Issue on Oxygen Reduction and Evolution Reactions for High Temperature Energy Conversion and Storage is now complete, with 16 open access papers published in the ECS Digital Library.

“In this new and exciting era of distributed electricity generation, the modularity (sub-kW to 100 kW systems) with minimal efficiency loss at small scales makes solid oxide fuel cells (SOFCs) an exciting energy conversion technology,” the authors say in the focus issue’s preface. “This focus issue presents some of the latest research in understanding fundamental mechanisms of ORR and OER, and highlights new materials and concepts to achieve both greater performance and long-term durability.”

Read the full JES Focus Issue on Oxygen Reduction and Evolution Reactions for High Temperature Energy Conversion and Storage.

ECS would like to thank JES technical editor Tom Fuller and this focus issue’s guest editors Sean Bishop, Ainara Aguadero, and Xingbo Liu.