The challenges of developing new materials to deliver sustainability, reduce waste, transform clean energy technologies, and integrate into industrial applications present direct, actionable opportunities for science and engineering at UChicago and its affiliates. Corporate and government partners have an immediate need to implement sustainable materials and sensors into their production processes and infrastructure, and UChicago already has the foundations in place to build a research platform that can meet these challenges. With expanded academic expertise, education and training programs, and fabrication and testing facilities across its research ecosystem, UChicago and its affiliates will have the capability to rapidly translate fundamental discoveries in materials science into practical solutions to engineer a sustainable future.

A. Paul Alivisatos developed the techniques that are now widely used for synthesizing colloidal nanocrystals and exquisitely controlling their sizes, shapes, and other properties. He continues to advance nanoscience and its applications in electronics and medical technology. Alivisatos, this year’s Priestley Medalist, has also worked tirelessly as a leader in the scientific and academic communities, having served as the editor in chief of a research journal and in various high-level executive roles, including national laboratory director. He is currently a university vice chancellor and provost and later this year will take on a new role—university president.

Matthew Tirrell has been reappointed dean of the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME), effective July 1, President Robert J. Zimmer and Provost Ka Yee C. Lee announced Thursday.

Tirrell is the Robert A. Millikan Distinguished Service Professor. A pioneering researcher in the fields of biomolecular engineering and nanotechnology, he has led the University’s program in molecular engineering since its inception in 2011. As the Founding Pritzker Director of the Institute for Molecular Engineering, which became the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering in 2019, he helped establish the first formal engineering program at the University and launch the first school in the nation dedicated to molecular engineering.

Under his leadership, the faculty and student body in molecular engineering have grown to include more than three dozen faculty and hundreds of undergraduate and graduate students. Its unique facilities, such as the Pritzker Nanofabrication Laboratory, allow exploration at the frontiers of modern science, helping to build and define the field of molecular engineering.

A thesis or dissertation takes years of painstaking research, thought and writing. But could you distill it down to three minutes?

That was the challenge of the Three Minute Thesis competition, recently hosted by UChicago-GRAD. Thirteen master’s and PhD students had just a few minutes, and the use of only one static slide, to share their scholarship in a concise, compelling and impactful presentation.

“The less amount of time, the more you have to focus on what you think is most important about what you do,” said Michael O’Toole, senior assistant director for GRADTalk, a public speaking program for graduate students and postdoctoral researchers through UChicagoGRAD. “Students have plenty of opportunities to speak to other specialists, but they also need to be able to communicate their research to the general public in a way that’s accessible, and that a family member or friend could understand.”

With the Pfizer-BioNTech, Moderna, and Johnson & Johnson vaccines for COVID-19 receiving Emergency Use Authorizations from the US Food and Drug Administration, one might be tempted to think, wishfully, that the period of uncertainty is ending and that things will soon be back to “business as usual.” However, as history indicates, the next crisis is in all probability just around the corner.

Crises have an uneven and asymmetric impact on companies, with some emerging as winners, some showing scars, and some even perish. Companies that win or even just survive often have, or have had, to pivot their business models to adapt to a new, changed environment. As we described in a previous article, pivoting is defined as a “structured course correction” of a business model. It essentially entails a deliberate shift in the main strategic components of the business model: the customer, the company, and the competition (the “3Cs”).

However, transforming organizations so that they’re able to respond quickly to a crisis cannot always be done when they’re already in the midst of one. An effective and rapid response needs planning, operating models, and capabilities that unlock accelerated innovation, particularly around a company’s “4Ps”: product, price, place (i.e., channels of distribution), and promotion. Organizations will be well served by closely examining where they are with these processes to ensure they are crisis ready. 

Their new discovery, published May 12 in Nature, represents a first step towards that transformation: a way to easily cut nitrogen atoms from molecules.

The events highlighted the broad range of work in the field, with applications from cancer to allergies to infectious diseases, techniques from experimental to computational, and based in institutions from academia to businesses large and small. The field's trajectory was summarized well in the Polsky Center's latest issue of the Deep Tech Dive Newsletter.

The research, co-led by Asst. Prof. Samantha Riesenfeld, reveals new pathways underlying immune responses and ultimately could lead to better treatment for the disease.

PME ImmunoEngineering Laboratories

Quantum Engineering News

“Quantum technologies of the future that address unmet needs with disruptive business models simply cannot be built in isolation” said Chuck Vallurupalli, the newly appointed senior director of Duality and a seasoned business executive with over 20 years of experience scaling startups. “We are pleased to welcome six startups into the inaugural cohort of Duality, offer a unique set of resources and help them grow.”

Quantum technology seeks to harness the peculiar laws of quantum mechanics to build more powerful tools for processing information. Quantum computers are the most headline-grabbing form of the technology, but quantum particles are also being deployed to build more secure communications networks and more powerful sensors for imaging and measurement.

The technology has obstacles to overcome before it achieves widespread use, but the pace of progress is akin to the dawn of the electronics industry, said David Awschalom, a University of Chicago physicist and molecular engineering professor who helped create the new accelerator, Duality.

Scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory and the University of Chicago, including David Schuster, associate professor of molecular engineering at the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago, have demonstrated a new technique based on quantum technology that will advance the search for dark matter, which accounts for 85% of all matter in the universe.

The technique now demonstrated by the Fermilab-University of Chicago team could enable searches for dark matter to proceed 1,000 times faster than previous methods.

Climate Vault’s innovative solution will shorten the timeline for individuals and organizations seeking to reduce their emissions. Its mission is to significantly reduce carbon dioxide, one of the leading causes of climate change, while supporting the innovation in carbon removal technologies designed to eliminate historical CO2.

Climate Vault’s approach leverages the power of government-regulated compliance markets by purchasing and “vaulting” carbon permits, preventing polluters from using them. In addition, Climate Vault will help create the world’s first ecosystem for carbon dioxide removal (CDR) technologies by providing grants that spur innovation in those technologies to help make them viable and cost effective—encouraging a renewed commitment to environmental, social and governance (ESG) investing.

In 2012 MIT Professor Amos Winter was asked to develop a lighter, cheaper prosthetic leg for the huge Indian market. And not just a bit cheaper: the new limbs needed to be 90% cheaper than those sold in western markets to meet the needs of the over half a million amputees unable to afford prosthetics that often cost tens of thousands of dollars and lasted only 2-3 years. Under these dramatic constraints, Winter’s team went back to fundamentals and reframed the problem: what could the science of movement teach us about how to design and deliver a radically different prosthetic?

Rather than taking a traditional approach, which sought to mimic a human foot, the team focused on a tunable but passive foot design that would instead mimic lower leg movements. By 2019, Winter’s team had unveiled their new, low-cost solution — one that could cheaply and easily be tailored to a patient’s weight and height. It was fundamentally different from existing products in terms of cost, design, and material. This achievement was only possible because the initial constraints imposed on the challenge forced a complete re-thinking of the problem.

So what’s an engineer who wants to save the planet to do? Even as we work on the changeover to a society powered by carbon-free energy, we must get serious about carbon sequestration, which is the stashing of CO₂ in forests, soil, geological formations, and other places where it will stay put. And as a stopgap measure during this difficult transition period, we will also need to consider techniques for solar-radiation management—deflecting some incoming sunlight to reduce heating of the atmosphere. These strategic areas require real innovation over the coming years. To win the war on climate change we need new technologies too.

Ever since a new class of ­materials called topological insulators was first created—a discovery that helped win the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2016—researchers have been intrigued by the possibilities for electronics applications such as ultralow-energy transistors, cancer-scanning lasers­, and free-space communication beyond 5G. Topological insulators’ unusual name stems from their being insulating on the inside and conductive on the outside: On the outer boundaries of a topological insulator, electricity or (in some cases) light flows readily around corners and defects, and with virtually no losses.

When you think of micro- or nanotechnology, you likely think of small electronics like your phone, a tiny robot or a microchip. But COVID-19 tests – which have proven to be central to controlling the pandemic – are also a form of miniaturized technology. Many COVID-19 tests can give results within hours without the need to send a sample to a lab, and most of these tests use an approach called microfluidics.

I am a professor of bioengineering and work with microfluidics for my research. Everything from pregnancy tests to glucose strips to inkjet printers to genetic tests rely on microfluidics. This technology, unbeknownst to many people, is everywhere and critical to many of the things that make the modern world go round.

Hydrogen is an appealing fuel. A kilogram of hydrogen has about three times as much energy as a comparable amount of diesel or gasoline. If it can be made cleanly and cheaply, it could be the key to cleaning up an array of tricky vital sectors.

This so-called “green” hydrogen is today about three times more expensive to produce than hydrogen derived from natural gas (which is mostly methane, whose molecules are composed of one carbon atom bonded to four hydrogen atoms). But that is half of what it cost 10 years ago. And as the cost of wind and solar power continues to drop, and economies of scale around green hydrogen production kick in, it could get a lot cheaper. If that happens, green hydrogen has the potential to become a core fuel for a decarbonized future.

Using a novel toolkit of approaches, the scientists uncovered the first full structure of the Nucleocapsid (N) protein and discovered how antibodies from COVID-19 patients interact with that protein. They also determined that the structure appears similar across many coronaviruses, including recent COVID-19 variants—making it an ideal target for advanced treatments and vaccines.

In a major scientific leap, University of Queensland researchers have created a quantum microscope that can reveal biological structures that would otherwise be impossible to see.

The microscope is powered by the science of quantum entanglement, an effect Einstein described as "spooky interactions at a distance".

Professor Warwick Bowen, from UQ's Quantum Optics Lab and the ARC Centre of Excellence for Engineered Quantum Systems (EQUS), said it was the first entanglement-based sensor with performance beyond the best possible existing technology.

Quantum computers, you might have heard, are magical uber-machines that will soon cure cancer and global warming by trying all possible answers in different parallel universes. For 15 years, on my blog and elsewhere, I’ve railed against this cartoonish vision, trying to explain what I see as the subtler but ironically even more fascinating truth.

I approach this as a public service and almost my moral duty as a quantum computing researcher. Alas, the work feels Sisyphean: The cringeworthy hype about quantum computers has only increased over the years, as corporations and governments have invested billions, and as the technology has progressed to programmable 50-qubit devices that (on certain contrived benchmarks) really can give the world’s biggest supercomputers a run for their money. And just as in cryptocurrency, machine learning and other trendy fields, with money have come hucksters.

Organizations can’t afford to underestimate the value of a change in thinking which leads to a new culture of innovation among their employees. In the science and technology sector, this is particularly true. And we believe the most important factor in the pursuit of progress is human curiosity and its role as a driving force for innovation.

In total, 64 percent of the 3,000 employees we surveyed across multiple countries and sectors identified barriers to curiosity and innovation in the working environment, such as lack of communication with colleagues outside of their own team or working under strict supervision. The biggest obstacle identified for all employees surveyed was that most initiatives are controlled from the top down, meaning that their own ideas are rarely realized.

Encouragingly, however, extensive research shows a strong association between increased curiosity and increased innovation – and business leaders worldwide are starting to recognize and embrace curiosity as a mechanism to drive success

Membranes that allow certain molecules to quickly pass through while blocking others are key enablers for energy technologies from batteries and fuel cells to resource refinement and water purification. For example, membranes in a battery separating the two terminals help to prevent short circuits, while also allowing the transport of charged particles, or ions, needed to maintain the flow of electricity.

The most selective membranes—those with very specific criteria for what may pass through—suffer from low permeability for the working ion in the battery, which limits the battery's power and energy efficiency. To overcome trade-offs between membrane selectivity and permeability, researchers are developing ways to increase the solubility and mobility of ions within the membrane, therefore allowing a higher number of them to transit through the membrane more rapidly. Doing so could improve the performance of batteries and other energy technologies.

In the year 2000, the International Energy Agency made a prediction that would come back to haunt it: by 2020, the world would have installed a grand total of 18 gigawatts of photovoltaic solar capacity. Seven years later, the forecast would be proven spectacularly wrong when roughly 18 gigawatts of solar capacity were installed in a single year alone.

Ever since the agency was founded in 1974 to measure the world’s energy systems and anticipate changes, the yearly World Energy Outlook has been a must-read document for policymakers the world over. Over the last two decades, however, the IEA has consistently failed to see the massive growth in renewable energy coming. Not only has the organization underestimated the take-up of solar and wind, but it has massively overstated the demand for coal and oil.

Tissues, not blood, are where immune cells function

The airway cells were producing high levels of cytokines — factors that recruit immune cells such as T cells to a tissue site and promote inflammation. By contrast, the corresponding blood samples were low in T cells, but high in other immune cells called monocytes, which were displaying unusual patterns of cell-surface receptors. Lung samples from patients who had died showed monocytes and a further type of immune cell (macrophages) clustered in the lung’s tiny air sacs; this is associated with the damage that typifies severe COVID-19. The unusual receptors suggested to us that monocytes circulating in the blood had been both altered and summoned by the cytokines produced in the airway. Had we not collected both airway and blood samples, we would not have put these pieces together.

As this example shows, the pandemic has revealed major gaps in our understanding of the human immune system. One of the biggest is the reactions in tissues — at sites of infection and where disease manifests.

Scientists have made much progress in using light to transmit data in the open air, as well as to power various devices from a distance–but how to accomplish these feats underwater has been a bit murkier. However, in a new study published May 4 in IEEE Transactions on Wireless Communications, researchers have identified a new way to boost the transfer of power and data to devices underwater using light.

The ocean and other bodies of water are full of mysteries yet to be observed. Networks of underwater sensors are increasingly being deployed to gather information. Currently the most common approach for remotely transmitting signals underwater is via sound waves, which easily travel long distances through the watery depths. However, sound cannot carry nearly as much data as light can.

“Visible light communication can provide data rates at several orders of magnitude beyond the capabilities of traditional acoustic techniques and is particularly suited for emerging bandwidth-hungry underwater applications,” explains Murat Uysal, a professor with the Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering at Ozyegin University, in Turkey.

Researchers used platinum and aluminum compounds to create a catalyst which enables certain chemical reactions to occur more efficiently than ever before. The catalyst could significantly reduce energy usage in various industrial and pharmaceutical processes. It also allows for a wider range of sustainable sources to feed the processes, which could reduce the demand for fossil fuels required by them.

Assistant Professor Xiongjie Jin and Professor Kyoko Nozaki from the Department of Chemistry and Biotechnology at the University of Tokyo and their team have created a new catalyst, a material that enables or speeds up a specific chemical reaction, that allows for more sustainable production of so-called aromatic hydrocarbons. At present the process typically requires temperatures of 200 degrees Celsius or more and pressures of 2 or more atmospheres. But with the team's new catalyst, the temperature can be brought down to between 100 degrees and 150 degrees Celsius, and the pressure to just 1 atmosphere, or ambient pressure. This could hugely reduce the energy cost of production.

Direct drug delivery with carbon nanotube porins

But getting those drugs into disease-ridden cells has remained a major challenge for modern pharmacology and medicine. To tackle this difficulty, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory and University of California Merced scientists and collaborators from the Max Planck Institute of Biophysics in Germany have used carbon nanotubes to enable direct drug delivery from liposomes through the plasma membrane into the cell interior by facilitating fusion of the carrier membrane with the cell.

Painter and Holman weren’t talking about targeting Covid at the time. The disease and the coronavirus that causes it, SARS-CoV-2, weren’t major concerns at the J.P. Morgan-run conference, where handshakes and cocktail parties with hundreds of guests were still the norm. Rather, Painter was hoping his drug, molnupiravir, could get more funding to speed up flu studies. Holman was eager to see if it worked on Ebola. That’s the thing about molnupiravir: Many scientists think it could be a broad-spectrum antiviral, effective against a range of threats.

Since that TED talk 10 years ago, Griffith’s San Francisco lab has attracted $100 million in capital from investors and spun out a dozen companies.

His solution: mass electrification.

Next: they want to make that same tire a data engine and, while they’re at it, fully recyclable. Hyperdrive caught up with Alexis Garcin, chairman and president of Michelin North America, to talk about the company’s R&D blitz and how he’s preparing for a massive wave of electric vehicles.

Argonne scientists across several disciplines have combined forces to create a new process for testing and predicting the effects of high temperatures on refractory oxides.

A team of researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory has come up with a way to do just that. Using innovative experimental techniques and a new approach to computer simulations, the group has devised a method of not only obtaining precise data about the structural changes these materials undergo near their melting points, but more accurately predicting other changes that can't currently be measured.

All three were among locations that had water tested as part of a nine-month investigation by Consumer Reports (CR) and the Guardian into the US’s drinking water. Since the passage of the Clean Water Act in 1972, access to safe water for all Americans has been a US government goal. Yet millions of people continue to face serious water quality problems because of contamination, deteriorating infrastructure, and inadequate treatment at water plants.

CR and the Guardian selected 120 people from around the US, out of a pool of more than 6,000 volunteers, to test for arsenic, lead, PFAS (per- and polyfluoroalkyl substances), and other contaminants. The samples came from water systems that together service more than 19 million people.

A total of 118 of the 120 samples had concerning levels of PFAS or arsenic above CR’s recommended maximum, or detectable amounts of lead.

An influenza vaccine that is made of nanoparticles and administered through the nose enhances the body's immune response to influenza virus infection and offers broad protection against different viral strains, according to researchers in the Institute for Biomedical Sciences at Georgia State University.

Recurring seasonal flu epidemics and potential pandemics are among the most severe threats to public health. Current seasonal influenza vaccines induce strain-specific immunity and are less effective against mismatched strains. Broadly protective influenza vaccines are urgently needed.

Intranasal vaccines are a promising strategy for combatting infectious respiratory diseases, such as influenza. They are more effective than vaccines injected into a muscle because they can induce mucosal immune responses in respiratory tracts, preventing infection at the portal of virus entry. 

That skepticism is understandable when a new battery design promises a revolution, but it risks missing the fact that batteries have gotten better. Lithium-ion batteries have reigned for a while now—that’s true. But “lithium-ion” is a category of batteries that includes a wide variety of technologies, both in terms of batteries in service today and the ones we've used previously. A lot can be done—and a lot has been done—to make a better lithium-ion battery. In fact, gains in the amount of energy they can store have been on the order of five percent per year. That means that the capacity of your current batteries is over 1.5 times what they would have held a decade ago. Lithium-ion batteries have evolved, whether you noticed or not. Here's how.

Converting sunlight into hydrogen is a seemingly ideal way to address the world’s energy challenges. The process doesn’t directly involve fossil fuels or create any greenhouse gas emissions. The resulting hydrogen can power fuel-cell systems in vehicles, ships, and trains; it can feed into the electrical grid or be used to make chemicals and steel. For now, though, that clean energy vision mainly exists in the lab. 

Recently, Japanese researchers said they’ve made an important step toward making vast amounts of hydrogen using solar energy. The team from Shinshu University in Nagano studies light-absorbing materials to split the hydrogen and oxygen molecules in water. Now they’ve developed a two-step method that is dramatically more efficient at generating hydrogen from a photocatalytic reaction. 

Most people on Earth get fresh water from lakes and rivers. But these account for only 0.007% of the world’s water. As the human population has grown, so has demand for fresh water. Now, two out of every three people in the world face severe water scarcity at least one month a year.

I am a doctoral student in chemical and biomolecular engineering and part of a team that recently created a new water-purification method that we hope can make desalination more efficient, the waste easier to manage and the size of water treatment plants smaller. This technology features a new type of filter that can target and capture toxic metals while removing salt from water at the same time.

Let’s face it, most meetings have always sucked because there’s often little to zero accountability for engagement. When we are together in a room, we often compensate with coercive eye contact. Participants feel some obligation to feign interest (even if they’re staring at their phones). In situations where you can’t demand attention with ocular oppression, you have to learn to do what we should’ve mastered long ago: create voluntary engagement. In other words, you have to create structured opportunities for attendees to engage fully.

We’ve spent the last few years studying virtual training sessions to understand why most virtual gatherings bore groups into a coma. As we’ve done so, we’ve discovered and tested five rules that lead to predictably better meeting outcomes. In one study we did, comparing 200 attendees of a face-to-face experience with 200 of a virtual experience, we found that when these rules are applied, 86% of participants report as high or higher levels of engagement as in face-to-face meetings. And we’ve now applied these rules with over 15,000 meeting participants. Here’s what works.

As restrictions are lifted and people start to leave their masks at home, some people worry: Can you catch COVID-19 from someone who’s vaccinated?

Behind clean energy today is a sharp, continuing drop in photo­voltaic solar-cell prices. And behind the scenes, the prices of lithium-ion batteries are plummeting just as quickly. Between 1991 and 2018, the average price of the batteries that power mobile phones, fuel electric cars, and underpin green energy storage fell more than thirtyfold, according to work by Micah Ziegler and Jessika Trancik at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Engineers and energy-policy planners benefit from knowing future battery prices, but unlike solar prices, they aren’t always readily available. Lithium-ion batteries tend to be manufactured or bought in bulk by large companies. “Those contracts aren’t necessarily public documents,” says Ziegler. That’s partly why the drivers for the price decline are, for Ziegler and Trancik, an open area of research. Ziegler and Trancik published their comprehensive survey of studies of lithium-ion battery prices in a recent issue of the journal Energy & Environmental Science.

2D materials have triggered a boom in materials research. Now it turns out that exciting effects occur when two such layered materials are stacked and slightly twisted.

Now another chapter is being added to this field of research: If two such 2D layers are stacked at the right angle, even more new possibilities arise. The way in which the atoms of the two layers interact creates intricate geometric patterns, and these patterns have a decisive impact on the material properties, as a research team from TU Wien and the University of Texas (Austin) has now been able to show. Phonons—the lattice vibrations of the atoms—are significantly influenced by the angle at which the two material layers are placed on top of each other. Thus, with tiny rotations of such a layer, one can significantly change the material properties.

Early successes in developing vaccines by upstarts like Moderna and BioNTech papered over the struggles of vaccine heavyweights like Merck, GSK and Sanofi. But those companies that have surmounted the challenges of development now face the next phase: manufacturing doses on an enormous scale.

Modern human activity adds large amounts of nutrients to the environment, especially nitrogen, which is added faster than other nutrients. Although plants depend on nitrogen to live and grow, an excess of a single nutrient in a complex ecosystem may do more harm than good.

In this study, El-Madany et al. monitored leaf-level changes, but they also raised their sights to the ecosystem level to get an accurate picture of the real-world consequences of nutrient availability. The scientists investigated how added nitrogen and phosphorus affect water use efficiency in plants—how much carbon a plant takes in for the amount of water it loses—in a Mediterranean savanna ecosystem over 6 years.

Seawater could provide nearly unlimited amounts of critical battery material

Booming electric vehicle sales have spurred a growing demand for lithium. But the light metal, which is essential for making power-packed rechargeable batteries, isn’t abundant. Now, researchers report a major step toward tapping a virtually limitless lithium supply: pulling it straight out of seawater.

“This represents substantial progress” for the field, says Jang Wook Choi, a chemical engineer at Seoul National University who was not involved with the work. He adds that the approach might also prove useful for reclaiming lithium from used batteries.

For more insights such as the following, You can read the complete Global Hackathon Report here.

Boston-based Clean Energy Ventures, a $110 million venture capital firm that invests in early-stage climate tech startups, is pouring money into the energy storage sector for the first time. The company announced today that it will invest in battery materials (Volexion) and second-life battery recycling (Nth Cycle) startups.

Volexion was founded by Professor Mark Hersam, director of the Northwestern University Materials Research Center and a MacArthur Fellow, who discovered that coating battery cathodes with graphene can improve battery performance. Volexion’s graphene coating acts as a protective layer around battery cathode materials to suppress material and electrolyte degradation. Battery cells with Volexion’s coating can see a 30% increase in energy density, 40% increase in power density, and run twice as long as non-coated lithium-ion batteries.

Beverly, Massachusetts-based Nth Cycle is a developer of a recycling technology that extracts critical metals from batteries for a second life. It is receiving $3.2 million in seed funding led by Clean Energy Ventures.

A clean energy future propelled by hydrogen fuel depends on figuring out how to reliably and efficiently split water. That's because, even though hydrogen is abundant, it must be derived from another substance that contains it—and today, that substance is often methane gas. Scientists are seeking ways to isolate this energy-carrying element without using fossil fuels. That would pave the way for hydrogen-fueled cars, for example, that emit only water and warm air at the tailpipe.

Water, or H2O, unites hydrogen and oxygen. Hydrogen atoms in the form of molecular hydrogen must be separated out from this compound. That process depends on a key—but often slow—step: the oxygen evolution reaction (OER). The OER is what frees up molecular oxygen from water, and controlling this reaction is important not only to hydrogen production but a variety of chemical processes, including ones found in batteries.

A study led by scientists at the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Argonne National Laboratory illuminates a shape-shifting quality in perovskite oxides, a promising type of material for speeding up the OER.

In a new report in NPG Asia materials, Chisa Norioka and a team of scientists in Chemistry and Materials Engineering in Japan, detailed a universal method to easily prepare tough and stretchable hydrogels without special structures or complications. They tuned the polymerization conditions to form networks with many polymer chain entanglements, to achieve energy dissipation throughout the resulting materials.

The team prepared the tough and stretchable hydrogels via free radical polymerization using a high monomer concentration and low crosslinker content to optimize the balance between physical and chemical crosslinks via entanglements and covalent bonds. The research team used polymer chain entanglements for energy dissipation to overcome the limits of low mechanical performance for use in a wide-range of hydrogels.

Campaign finance records reveal that seven of largest PFAS producers and their industry trade groups spent at least $61 million (£44 million) during 2019 and 2020, the majority of which did not comprise campaign donations but instead funded lobbying efforts aimed at members of Congress and Donald Trump’s administration. Various proposals to address PFAS were ‘slow-walked’ by Trump political appointees, The Guardian wrote.

Plants contain several types of specialized light-sensitive proteins that measure light by changing shape upon light absorption. Chief among these are the phytochromes. Phytochromes help plants detect light direction, intensity and duration; the time of day; whether it is the beginning, middle or end of a season; and even the color of light, which is important for avoiding shade from other plants.

Remarkably, phytochromes also help plants detect temperature.

New research from Washington University in St. Louis helps explain how the handful of phytochromes found in every plant respond differently to light intensity and temperature, thus enabling land plants to colonize the planet many millions of years ago and allowing them to acclimate to a wide array of terrestrial environments.

For all the hype and hope around electric vehicles, they still make up only about 2% of new car sales in the US and just a little more globally. For many buyers, they’re simply too expensive, their range is too limited, and charging them isn’t nearly as quick and convenient as refueling at the pump.

All these limitations have to do with the lithium-ion batteries that power the vehicles. They're costly, heavy, and quick to run out of juice. To make matters worse, the batteries rely on liquid electrolytes that can burst into flames during collisions. Making electric cars more competitive with gas powered ones will require a breakthrough battery that remedies these shortcomings. That, at least, is the argument of Jagdeep Singh, chief executive of QuantumScape, a Silicon Valley startup that claims to have developed just such a technology.

When a piece of conducting material is heated up at one of its ends, a voltage difference can build up across the sample, which in turn can be converted into a current. This is the so-called Seebeck effect, the cornerstone of thermoelectric effects. In particular, the effect provides a route to creating work out of a temperature difference. Such thermoelectric engines do not have any movable part and are therefore convenient power sources in various applications, including propelling NASA's Mars rover Perseverance. The Seebeck effect is interesting for fundamental physics, too, as the magnitude and sign of the induced thermoelectric current is characteristic of the material and indicates how entropy and charge currents are coupled.

Writing in Physical Review X, the group of Prof. Tilman Esslinger at the Department of Physics of ETH Zurich now reports on the controlled reversal of such a current by changing the interaction strength among the constituents of a quantum simulator made of extremely cold atoms trapped in shaped laser fields. The capability to induce such a reversal means that the system can be turned from a thermoelectric engine into a cooler.

Where does snow come from? This may seem like a simple question to ponder as half the planet emerges from a season of watching whimsical flakes fall from the sky—and shoveling them from driveways. But a new study on how water becomes ice in slightly supercooled Arctic clouds may make you rethink the simplicity of the fluffy stuff.

The study, published by scientists from the U.S. Department of Energy's (DOE) Brookhaven National Laboratory in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, includes new direct evidence that shattering drizzle droplets drive explosive "ice multiplication" events. The findings have implications for weather forecasts, climate modeling, water supplies—and even energy and transportation infrastructure.

A plant cell wall's unique ability to expand without weakening or breaking—a quality required for plant growth—is due to the movement of its cellulose skeleton, according to new research that models the cell wall. The new model, created by Penn State researchers, reveals that chains of cellulose bundle together within the cell wall, providing strength, and slide against each other when the cell is stretched, providing extensibility.

The new study, which appears online in the journal Science, presents a new concept of the plant cell wall, gives insights into plant cell growth, and could provide inspiration for the design of polymeric materials with new properties.

Those warnings echoed in Armbrust’s head in April 2020 as he surveyed a 7-foot-tall machine wielding two pairs of sharp steel shears. In an impulsive pandemic project, the software entrepreneur had spent millions standing up a mask factory in Pflugerville, Texas, to meet Covid-driven demand and show that nimble manufacturing was still possible in the US. But the project was going off the rails.

Exxon Mobil Corp. has been fending off a so-called proxy fight from a hedge fund known as Engine No. 1, which blames the energy giant’s poor performance in recent years on its failure to transition to a “decarbonizing world.” In a May 26, 2021 vote, Exxon shareholders approved at least two of the four board members Engine No. 1 nominated, dealing a major blow to the oil company. The vote is ongoing, and more of the hedge fund’s nominees may also soon be appointed.

While its focus has been on shareholder value, Engine No. 1 says it was also doing this to save the planet from the ravages of climate change. It has been pushing for a commitment from Exxon to carbon neutrality by 2050. As business sustainability scholars, we can’t recall another time that an energy company’s shareholder – particularly a hedge fund – has been so effective and forceful in showing how a company’s failure to take on climate change has eroded shareholder value. That’s why we believe this vote marks a turning point for investors, who are well placed to nudge companies toward more sustainable business practices.

Using messenger rna to make vaccines was an unproven idea. But if it worked, the technique would revolutionise medicine, not least by providing protection against infectious diseases and biological weapons. So in 2013 America’s Defence Advanced Research Projects Agency (darpa) gambled. It awarded a small, new firm called Moderna $25m to develop the idea. Eight years, and more than 175m doses later, Moderna’s covid-19 vaccine sits alongside weather satellites, gps, drones, stealth technology, voice interfaces, the personal computer and the internet on the list of innovations for which darpa can claim at least partial credit.

It is the agency that shaped the modern world, and this success has spurred imitators. In America there are arpas for homeland security, intelligence and energy, as well as the original defence one. President Joe Biden has asked Congress for $6.5bn to set up a health version, which will, the president vows, “end cancer as we know it”. His administration also has plans for another, to tackle climate change. Germany has recently established two such agencies: one civilian (the Federal Agency for Disruptive Innovation, or sprin-d) and another military (the Cybersecurity Innovation Agency). Japan’s interpretation is called Moonshot r&d. In Britain a bill for an Advanced Research and Invention Agency—often referred to as UK ARPA—is making its way through Parliament.

The demand for high energy-density batteries is unstoppable. According to a recent article appearing in Nature, the number of electric vehicles in use globally is estimated to balloon by a factor of 72 – reaching nearly 1 billion vehicles between 2020 and 20501. And all those vehicles are going to need batteries. ‘Batteries are an enabler of a sustainable society,’ says Chris Stumpf, senior manager of Waters Corporation’s materials science business segment. Not forgetting that lithium-ion batteries also power our mobile devices and computers.

Despite incredible technology advances within the last decade, researchers around the world are constantly challenged with innovating the next generation of high-performance batteries that are more cost-effective, last longer, charge faster, are safer, and are also more environmentally friendly.

Leading the pack is the lithium-ion rechargeable battery, first developed in the latter half of the 20th century and so widely adopted that its developers were awarded the Nobel prize for chemistry in 2019. As researchers strive to produce better materials aimed at improving each of a rechargeable battery’s components, the next step is to put them into a working cell for evaluation. Traditionally, a cell would be made and then measured for its cycling performance, discharge rate, and energy density among other things as a finished unit. The downside to this approach is that it does not allow for the identification of the specific component responsible for any changes to the batteries performance and can significantly slow down innovation.

For most life forms on Earth, oxygen is a necessity, not an optional extra – and because of our warming planet, oxygen is quickly disappearing from our freshwater lakes, putting aquatic life and ecosystems under threat.

"All complex life depends on oxygen," says environmental biologist Kevin Rose, from the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. "It's the support system for aquatic food webs. And when you start losing oxygen, you have the potential to lose species."

We are in the middle of the biggest revolution in motoring since Henry Ford's first production line started turning back in 1913. And it is likely to happen much more quickly than you imagine. Many industry observers believe we have already passed the tipping point where sales of electric vehicles (EVs) will very rapidly overwhelm petrol and diesel cars.

It is certainly what the world's big car makers think. Jaguar plans to sell only electric cars from 2025, Volvo from 2030 and last week the British sportscar company Lotus said it would follow suit, selling only electric models from 2028. And it isn't just premium brands. General Motors says it will make only electric vehicles by 2035, Ford says all vehicles sold in Europe will be electric by 2030 and VW says 70% of its sales will be electric by 2030.

Human biology is different from that of rats, mice or rabbits, and there is no guarantee that animal test results will also apply to humans. While huge strides have been made in developing more human-relevant alternatives in recent years their acceptance by regulators remains a problem.

Humans often metabolize chemicals differently from animals, further reducing the relevance of animal models for exposure. ‘Now and again, the body will metabolize something in a way that activates it, and makes it worse,’ says Steve Gutsell, a computational scientist and team leader in Unilever’s Safety and Environmental Assurance Centre (SEAC). He believes that many instances where animal and human effects differ have their roots in metabolism.