Global estimates report that nearly 600 million people are sickened by a foodborne illness annually, resulting in over 400,000 deaths. In the United States alone, foodborne illnesses such as Salmonella and E. coli result in an overall cost of $77 billion per year.

Researchers from the Washington State University (WSU) are looking to help put an end to the spread of foodborne illnesses with the development of a new and improved biosensor.

We’ve see in in the recent food recalls; harmful pathogens in food are almost always discovered after people have become sick. The work from WSU, led by ECS member Yuehe Lin, focuses on detecting and amplifying the signal of food pathogens, reducing the risk of small (but dangerous) pathogens to go undetected.

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The landscape of Bangladesh is lined with tin huts and a practically invisible energy grid. Over 70 percent of the country’s population lives without power, and in a location that approaches 45°C (113°F) in the summer months, that could mean unbearable and dangerous living conditions.

Enter the zero-electricity cooler: Eco-Cooler. Built with re-purposed bottles, the panels use the simple concept that as hot air passes through the wide end of the bottle, it will cool as it is compressed and pushed out of the narrow end into the home. So far, families have seen temperature drops of five degrees after using the devices.

“After initial tests, blueprints of the Eco-Cooler were put up online for everyone to download for free.” Sayed Gousul Alam Shaon, managing partner of the project said in a release. “Raw materials are easily available, therefore, making Eco-Coolers a cost-effective and environmentally-friendly solution.”

A new study has emerged from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory demonstrating that through the combination of biology and 3-D printing, scientists can turn methane into methanol.

In recent years, methanol has shown a lot of promise as a clean burning fuel. According to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the alcohol’s high-performance and low emission levels could make it an ideal alternative to gasoline for cars.

On the other hand, methane is a potent greenhouse gas that is adding to the acceleration of climate change. While the chemical compound does not stay in the atmosphere as long as carbon dioxide, it is 84 times more potent due to its ability to effectively absorb the sun’s heat and warm the atmosphere. In fact, methane has outpaced carbon dioxide in climate change impact over the least 100 years, with methane’s impact being 25 times greater.

The development from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory not only provide a clean burning fuel alternative, it effectively helps combat the pressing effects of climate change.

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How solar panels can save everyone money

When talking about the benefits of solar energy, one challenge always makes its way into the conversation: cost. While many see solar as a costly alternative to conventional means of generating electricity, a study out of Boston University is showing how solar not only saves those who own panels money, but even those who generate electricity conventionally.

According to the study, the 40,000 solar panels deployed in Massachusetts have effectively cut electricity prices for the nearly three million power users in the state (even those households and businesses not utilizing the panels).

“Until now, people have focused on how much was being saved by those who owned PV,” says Robert Kaufmann, professor of Earth and environment at Boston University. “What this analysis quantified was that it actually generates savings for everybody.”

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An odd partnership emerged at the Waste EXPO 2016 as truck manufacturer Mack Trucks and Tesla Motors joined forces to introduce an electrified garbage truck based on Mack’s LR model.

The innovative car manufacturer outfitted the truck with a regenerative braking system, which allows the truck to recharge its battery while it operates.

Because of the frequent stopping and start of a garbage truck’s engine, a significant amount of energy is wasted in its day-to-day operation.

“We don’t make vehicles, we just make powertrains,” said Ian Wright, co-founder of Tesla. “There’s a battery pack that you can charge from the grid, and there’s a range-extender generator which can burn fuel, make electricity and keep the battery pack charged so that you don’t run out of range.”

U.S. Vice President Joe Biden is making his voice heard in the quest for open access of vital scientific research.

After losing his son to cancer in May of 2015, Biden has been on a mission to accelerate cancer research in search of a cure. In order to make those leaps and bounds in prevention, diagnosis, and treatment, Biden is now pushing for an open access database to gain better understanding of the disease and advance innovation.

According to The Washington Post, Biden stated that the path toward breakthroughs relies upon increasing the number of researchers who can access data.

While the scope of ECS’s science may be different, our mission to accelerate innovation and open access to our research is the same.

ECS’s Free the Science initiative aims to make all of the research in our Digital Library free to publish and free to read – freeing the science for everyone.

Instead of putting money into the publishing industry, Free the Science is investing in research – allowing scientists to share their work with readers around the world and attracting more minds to think about how to solve some of our planet’s most pressing problems.

Learn more about Free the Science.

A team of researchers from Iceland is looking to fight climate change by turning greenhouse gases into rocks.

A recent paper published in Science details how researchers have been able to capture carbon emissions and lock them in the ground, transforming them from harmful atmospheric greenhouse gases to volcanic rock.

“Our results show that between 95 and 98 percent of the injected carbon dioxide was mineralized over the period of less than two years, which is amazingly fast,” said lead author Juerg Matter.

A large majority of all electricity in Iceland come from geothermal energy. While geothermal may seem like a very clean source of energy, it is not carbon dioxide independent.

In fact, the geothermal energy of Iceland produces 40,000 pounds of carbon dioxide every year. That is only about five percent of what a fossil fuel plant of the same size would emit, but research team is looking to work toward a completely carbon dioxide independent economy.

New research from the University of Washington is opening another avenue in the quest for better batteries and fuel cells. But this research is not a breakthrough in efficiency or longevity, rather a tool to more closely analyze how batteries work.

While we’ve come a long way from the voltaic pile of the 1800s, there is still much work to be done in the field of energy storage to meet modern day needs. In a society that is looking for ways to power electric vehicles and implement large scale grid energy storage for renewables, batteries and fuel cells have never been more important.

A research team from the University of Washington – including ECS members Stuart B. Adler and Timothy C. Geary – believes that these improvements will likely have to happen at the nanoscale. But in order to improve batteries and fuel cells at that microscopic level, we must first understand and see how they function.

[MORE: Read the full journal article.]

The newly developed probe offers a window for researchers to understand how batteries and fuel cells really work.

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When eLife emerged in 2012, the biomedical journal aimed to be on-par with such competitors as Nature and Cell as far as content goes, but publish those papers at no cost to the author or reader.

After 1,800 papers four years of a complete open access model, eLife will get another boost from its funders to allow the journal to continue down its path of high standards and openness.

“eLife’s status in the field is rising quite quickly,” eLife editor Sjors Scheres told Nature News. “I liked the idea behind it — to make a high-impact journal completely driven by scientists, and open.”

ECS’s Free the Science initiative draws many parallels to eLife’s publication model. Much like eLife, ECS looks to maintain our rigorous peer-review process as we move toward making the ECS Digital Library completely open access.

Free the Science is an initiative that seeks to remove all fees associate with publishing and accessing our scientific content so scientists can share their research with readers around the world, allowing more minds to think about and solve problems.

Learn more about Free the Science and watch our video explaining why it has never been more important to advance our technical domain.