Leveraging electrochemistry to beat diabetes

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.

A pioneer in diabetes management

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.”

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Image: Peter Stevens

Wild mushrooms have recently made a surprising (but not unwelcome) foray into the battery realm.

In a new study, researchers from Purdue University derived promising carbon fibers from a wild mushroom and modified them with nanoparticles to cook up new battery anodes that outperform conventional graphite electrodes for lithium-ion batteries.

(READ: “Wild Fungus Derived Carbon Fibers and Hybrids as Anodes for Lithium-Ion Batteries“)

Outperforming traditional anodes

“Current state-of-the-art lithium-ion batteries must be improved in both energy density and power output in order to meet the future energy storage demand in electric vehicles and grid energy-storage technologies,” said Vilas Pol, ECS member and associate professor at Purdue. “So there is a dire need to develop new anode materials with superior performance.”

This from Purdue University:

[The researchers] have found that carbon fibers derived from Tyromyces fissilis and modified by attaching cobalt oxide nanoparticles outperform conventional graphite in the anodes. The hybrid design has a synergistic result.

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A research team, including ECS members Stephen Doorn and Erik H Hároz, has created flexible, wafer-scale films of highly aligned and closely packed carbon nanotubes thanks to a simple filtration process. In a discovery that was previously though impossible, the researchers found that in the right solution and under the right conditions, the tubes can assemble themselves by the millions into long rows.

(ICYMI: Get the freshman 101 on carbon nanotubes from nanocarbons expert Bruce Weisman.)

“Once we have centimeter-sized crystals consisting of single-chirality nanotubes, that’s it,” said Junichiro Kono, Rice University physicist leading the study. “That’s the holy grail for this field. For the last 20 years, people have been looking for this.”

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Climate CoLab is currently running a series of contests where people all over the world can work with experts and each other to develop climate change solutions.

The waste management contest is now open. We are seeking practical proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from waste and waste management that can be rapidly implemented, scaled-up and/or replicated. We especially encourage proposals that address national (e.g. Intended Nationally Determined Contributions or National Adaptation Plans) and/or sub-national strategies to address the challenges of climate change and aim to help countries, states, and communities implement those strategies.

The Judges’ and Popular Choice Winners will be invited to MIT to present their proposal, enter the Climate CoLab Winners Program and be eligible for the $10,000 Grand Prize. All award winners will receive wide recognition and visibility by the MIT Climate CoLab. See last year’s conference. Entries are due May 23, 2016. Early submissions welcome — entries can be edited until the contest deadline.

Even if you don’t have new ideas yourself, you can help improve other people’s ideas and support the ones you find most promising. Visit the CoLab to learn more.

While we may have a good understanding of battery application and potential, we still lack a great deal of knowledge about what is actually happening inside a battery cell during cycles. In an effort to build a better battery, ECS members from the U.S. Department of Energy’s Argonne National Laboratory have made a novel development to improve battery performance testing.

Future of energy

The team’s work focuses on the design and placement of the reference electrode (RE), which measure voltage of the individual electrodes making up a battery cell, to enhance the quality of information collected from lithium-ion battery cells during cycles. By improving our knowledge of what’s happening inside the battery, researchers will more easily be able to develop longer-lasting batteries.

“Such information is critical, especially when developing batteries for larger-scale applications, such as electric vehicles, that have far greater energy density and longevity requirements than typical batteries in cell phones and laptop computers,” said Daniel Abraham, ECS member and co-author of the newly published study in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. “This kind of detailed information provides insight into a battery cell’s health; it’s the type of information that researchers need to evaluate battery materials at all stages of their development.”

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Edward Goodrich Acheson (1856-1931), one of the charter members of ECS, is best known for having invented and commercialized carborundum, an artificial graphite.

Biography

Acheson was born in southwestern Pennsylvania and raised its coal fields. At the age of 16, after his father died, he left school to help support his family. Nevertheless, Acheson devoted his nights to the scientific endeavors, especially electrical experiments.

In 1880, Acheson attempted to sell a battery of his own invention to Thomas Edison, who ended up hiring him to assist with his research. He experimented with creating a conducting carbon that Edison could use in his electric light bulbs.

After working for Edison for four years, Acheson left his employ to become an independent inventor. In 1891, Acheson acquired access to an electric
generating plant and attempted to use electric heat to impregnate clay with carbon. What resulted from this experiment was his discovery of a crystalline substance that had value as an abrasive, which Acheson named “carborundum” (also known as silicon carbide).

In 1894, he established the Carborundum Company in Monongahela City, Pennsylvania, which created grinding wheels, whet stones, knife sharpeners, and powdered abrasives. Later, Acheson used his electric furnace to produce artificial graphite, which  he commercialized, discovering that various organic substances allowed colloidal suspension of particles of graphite mixed in oil or water.

Acheson received 70 patents related to abrasives, graphite products, reduction of oxides, and refractories. ECS awarded him the first Acheson Award, named in his honor, in 1931.

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ECS is currently accepting nominations for the following award of the Luminescence and Display Materials Division:

LDM Outstanding Achievement Award was established in 2002 (the Centennial Year of The Electrochemical Society) to encourage excellence in luminescence and display materials research and outstanding technical contributions to the field of luminescence and display materials science. The award consists of a scroll and a $1,000 prize. The recipient is required to attend the designated Society meeting to receive the award and give a lecture to the LDM Division.

Extended Deadline: April 15, 2016

ECS will be offering five short courses at the 229^th ECS Meeting this year in San Diego.

What are short courses? Taught by academic and industry experts in intimate learning settings, short courses offer students and professionals alike the opportunity to greatly expand their knowledge and technical expertise. 

Short Course #5: Nanobiosensors

Raluca-Ioana Stefan-van Staden, Instructor

This course is intended for chemists, physicists, materials scientists, and engineers with an interest in applying electrochemical sensors on fields like biomedical analysis, pharmaceutical analysis, and food analysis. Also, this course can help understand the manufacturers of new electrochemical tools to explore better the response characteristics of nanobiosensors, and to connect in the best way their sensitivity with the sensitivity of the instrument. The course is best suited for an attendee who has basic knowledge of electrochemistry. The attendee will develop a basic understanding of the principles of molecular recognition, design, response characteristics, a new class of stochastic nanobiosensors, and various applications and features of nanobiosensors.

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Bruce Weisman, chemistry and materials science professor at Rice University, is internationally recognized for his contributions to the spectroscopy and photophysics of carbon nanostructures. He is a pioneer in the field of spectroscopy, leading the discovery and interpretation of near-infrared fluorescence for semiconducting carbon nanotubes. Aside from his work at Rice University, Weisman is also the founder and president of Applied NanoFluorescence.

Weisman is currently the Division Chair of the ECS Nanocarbons Division, which will be celebrating 25 years of nanocarbons symposia at the upcoming 229th ECS Meeting in San Diego, CA, May 2016. Since starting in 1991, the symposia has totaled 5,853 abstracts at ECS biannual meetings, with Nobel Laureate Richard Smalley delivering the inaugural talk.

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Research highlighting transformative scientific discoveries

ECS published its first Editors’ Choice article on Tuesday, March 22, 2016 in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. The article, entitled “Communication—Comparison of Nanoscale Focused Ion Beam and Electrochemical Lithiation in β-Sn Microspheres,” details transformative findings in the dosage and spatial distribution of lithiation.

Editors’ Choice articles are a special designation of ECS’s newly established Communication articles, which are designed to highlight breakthrough preliminary research and bolster the scientific discovery process. ECS journal editors designate exemplary Communication articles as Editors’ Choice when the research presented is transformative, detailing either novel advancements in a field or completely new discoveries.

“This paper introduces the use of a focused Li-ion beam (Li-FIB) as a new tool that is designed to probe lithiation mechanism at the nanoscale,” says Nick Wu, Associate Editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. “This technique, which employs a focused Li-ion beam with spot size of a few tens of nanometers and kinetic energy of a few keV, enables precise dosage and spatial distribution of lithiation.”

Papers chosen as Editors’ Choice are regarded as having the highest quality, impact, significance, and scientific or technological interest to electrochemical and solid state science and technology. In order to disseminate these findings to the scientific community at large and open the door to faster developments of practical applications, all Editors’ Choice articles are published Open Access.

“Furthermore,” Wu says, “lithiation in this technique is carried out in the absence of electrolytes so that it allows the study of lithiation dynamics solely in the bulk or surface layers (coatings) of the electrode material without the confounding influences from the electrolyte interactions.”

Each paper undergoes the same rigorous peer-review process associated with ECS journals, with Editors’ Choice articles showing extraordinary direction, concept, interpretation, field, or way of doing something.

Read the full Open Access paper in the ECS Digital Library: http://jes.ecsdl.org/content/163/6/A1010.full.