Smartphones are amazing little bundles of electrochemistry. From the sensors that pick up your touch and analyze your voice to the battery that is small and powerful enough to provide enough power to run applications on demand – the innovative science behind smartphones has changed the lives of people around the world.

But sometimes those changes are not completely positive. With increased dependence on smartphones, many people now roam the sidewalk with their nose buried in their phones. According to The Wall Street Journal, the number of distracted pedestrians using cellphones is up 124 percent from 2010. Some researchers are even blaming portable electronic gadgets for 10 percent of pedestrian injuries and a half-dozen deaths each year.

In Germany, these distracted pedestrians have been deemed “sombies,” or “smartphone zombies.” And the German government isn’t just looking to throw out a new buzzword, they’re also seeking to solve this issue.

According to reports from The Local, the city of Augsburg recently installed rows of LED lights into the sidewalk that can sense when distracted pedestrians are approaching and give off a bright flash of red to warn them to not mindlessly wander into the street.

“We realized that the normal traffic light isn’t in the line of sight of many pedestrians these days,” said Tobias Harms of the Augsburg city administration in an interview with The Augsburger Allgemeine. “So we decided to have an additional set of lights – the more we have, the more people are likely to notice them.”

The U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has recently announced up to $30 million in funding for a new program that focuses on renewable energy to convert air and water into cost-competitive liquid fuels.

The program, titled Renewable Energy to Fuels through Utilization of Energy-dense Liquids (REFUEL), is aimed at developing technologies that use renewable energy to convert air and water into carbon neutral liquid fuels – which can be converted into hydrogen or electricity to provide power for sustainable transportation.

The majority of vehicles in the transportation sector depend on liquid fuels such as gasoline or diesel to operate. While liquid fuels are energy dense and can be stored for a long period of time, liquid fossil fuels emit significant amounts of carbon dioxide into the environment. These emissions account for over 20 percent of the U.S.’s total greenhouse gas emissions and contribute to the overall effects of climate change.

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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.

Whether you’re looking at the transformation of scholarly publications or the overall conversation across the globe, it’s clear to see that open access is picking up steam nearly everywhere. In a recent article from Thomson Reuters, the firm takes a deeper look at the move toward open access and its implications.

Cost of open access

Like any publishing model, open access is not without its costs and values. In a traditional open access model, the burden of the cost falls back, in part, on the researcher. Because publishers are not earning subscription fees and individuals no longer have to purchase articles, the author takes on some of the cost of publishing and copy editing.

However, Reuters points out that it is pretty common for publications that are truly dedicated to open access to make affordable those costs to people who may typically not be able to afford it (i.e. waiving fess or article processing credits).

Academic and societal value

In contrast to the cost, the value of open access publications is felt on both an academic and societal level.

For researchers, open access allows scientists to get their findings published faster. By getting the data disseminated faster, researchers can get more citations and begin to connect the dots between the science and our everyday lives.

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Image: István Berta/Flickr

Nanoparticles have been central to many recent developments, including computing, communications, energy, and biology. However, because nanoparticles are hard to observe, it’s often difficult to pick the best shapes and sizes to perform specific tasks at optimal capacity.

That may be a problem no longer thanks to research out of Stanford University, where researchers gazed inside phase-changing nanoparticles for the first time – allowing them to understand how shape and crystallinity can have dramatic effects on performance.

Practically, this means that the design of energy storage materials could begin to change.

Take the lithium-ion battery, which stores and releases energy due to the electrode’s ability to sustain large deformations over several charge and discharge cycles without degrading. By nanosizing the electrode, researchers recently improved upon the efficiency process.

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Endowed by the Dow Chemical Company Foundation to recognize significant advances in industrial electrochemistry, the IEEE Division New Electrochemical Technology (NET) Award is the only award within the ECS Honors & Awards Program presented to an organization. The purpose of the award is to promote high quality applied electrochemical research and development and is intended to highlight novel electrochemical technology which has been practiced at a commercial scale.

Apply today!
Deadline: June 15, 2016

IEEE NET Award consists of a commemorative plaque (for up to 6 key contributors). The Award will be presented at the annual IEEE Division business luncheon and the winners will be asked to present a paper on the technology development during a Division-sponsored symposium. Recipients may receive travel assistance in order to attend the designated meeting. Organizations are encouraged to self-nominate and re-application is allowed.

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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.

We talk about climate change a lot here at ECS, but the realities of rising sea levels and record-breaking carbon emissions in the atmosphere makes for pretty grim material. In an effort to drum up support for environmental protection, Defend Our Future teamed up with Funny or Die to give the climate change discussion a little comic relief.

Cloris Leachman, Michael Lerner, and a few other funny people discuss how seniors view climate change – or as they describe it, the “after I’m dead problem.”

After all the laughs, Defend our Future has one simple message: old people don’t care about climate change, that’s why you have to.

Dr. Ardemis A. Boghossian

The Roger Taylor Award is a travel grant for students and early career researchers who have achieved up to ten years of postdoctoral experience to attend the 229th meeting of The Electrochemical Society and submit to Symposium B: Carbon Nanostructures and Devices. The Roger Taylor Award is generously funded by the Taylor family as an endowment to the British Carbon Group.

Dr. Ardemis A. Boghossian
Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering (ISIC)
École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL)

The winner of the 2016 Roger Taylor award is Dr. Ardemis A. Boghossian who is currently an Assistant Professor at the Institute of Chemical Sciences and Engineering (ISIC) of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL). Dr. Boghossian received her BSE in Chemical Engineering at the University of Michigan – Ann Arbor. She holds a PhD in Chemical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and served as a Postdoc in the Department of Chemical Engineering at the California Institute of Technology.

Currently, Dr. Boghossian implements an interdisciplinary approach to addressing fundamental challenges and developing novel technologies that exploit the synergy between nanotechnology and synthetic biology. The award consists of a certificate and a £750 prize. Join us at the 229th ECS biannual meeting in San Diego where she will deliver Wrapped Up in Nanotubes: Dynamics of Wrapped Single-Walled Carbon Nanotubes (SWCNTs) within the B Symposia: Carbon Nanostructures and Devices.

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Building a sustainable future

Image: NASA

Over 40 years ago, the modern environmental movement was born. Passion and concern drove a small group of twenty-somethings together in a rallying cry to create a more environment-conscious society, establishing what has become known as Earth Day.

The original Earth Day focused on the issues of pollution, but today’s modern Earth Day focuses the pressing global issue of climate change.

Global challenges

Currently, carbon dioxide levels in the air are at their highest in over 650,000 years, the global temperature has risen 1.4°F since 1880, and the sea level nearly 7” over the past 100 years.

While a few people and politicians may sill dismiss climate change, around 200 worldwide scientific organizations now formally hold the position that climate change has been caused by human action. Additionally, nearly 170 countries are preparing to sign the Paris Climate Agreement today, which will put global plans into motion in an effort to tackle the issue of rising temperatures.

The science of renewable energy

Here at ECS, we believe the path to stopping climate change and tackling these issues that are devastating the environment begins with science.

With population growth and industrialization, global energy needs continue to grow. Economic, political, and environmental issues are largely dictated by energy needs.

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