Researchers find a way to stabilize a promising material for solar panels

This image shows the difference between an ordinary perovskite solar cell, top, and a perovskits solar cell with a water-repellent molecular-thin layer, below.

One of the solar energy market’s most promising solar cell materials—perovskite—is also the most frustrating. A research team in Sweden reports a possible solution to the environmental instability of perovskite—an alternative to silicon that’s cheap and highly efficient, yet degrades dramatically when exposed to moisture.

The team from KTH Royal Institute of Technology developed a new synthetic alloy that increases perovskite cells’ durability while preserving energy conversion performance. The researchers published their findings in Nature’s Communications Materials.

“Perovskite usually dissolves immediately on contact with water,” says co-author James Gardner, associate professor at KTH. “We have proven that our alloyed perovskite can survive for several minutes completely immersed in water, which is over a 100 times more stable than the perovskite alone. What’s more, the solar cells that we have built from the material retain their efficiency for more than 100 days after they are manufactured.”

1 day. 3 rockets. 23 experiments

Sandia National Laboratories conducted three sounding rocket launches for the Department of Defense on Oct. 20. The launches supported research for hypersonic weapons programs.
(Photos by Mike Bejarano and Rana Weaver)

One year to design, build and test three rockets. Six weeks to unpack, assemble and test them at the flight range. One day to launch them.

Sandia National Laboratories launched three sounding rockets in succession for the Department of Defense on Wednesday. The triple launch was conducted at NASA’s launch range at Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia to hasten development of 23 technologies for the nation’s hypersonic modernization priority, including the Navy’s Conventional Prompt Strike and the Army’s Long-Range Hypersonic Weapon programs.

This was the first mission for the High Operational Tempo for Hypersonics rocket program, funded by the Department of Defense. Experiments were supplied by Sandia, entities within the Defense Department and partner institutions. Other collaborators included Oak Ridge National Laboratory, the Applied Physics Laboratory at Johns Hopkins University and several defense contractors.

Machine learning predicts antibiotic resistance spread

Genes aren’t only inherited through birth. Bacteria have the ability to pass genes to each other, or pick them up from their environment, through a process called horizonal gene transfer, which is a major culprit in the spread of antibiotic resistance.

Cornell researchers used machine learning to sort organisms by their functions and use this information to predict with near-perfect accuracy how genes are transferred between them, an approach that could potentially be used to stop the spread of antibiotic resistance.

The team’s paper, “Functions Predict Horizontal Gene Transfer and the Emergence of Antibiotic Resistance,” published Oct. 22 in Science Advances. The lead author is doctoral student Hao Zhou.

“Organisms basically can acquire resistance genes from other organisms. And so it would help if we knew which organisms bacteria were exchanging with, and not only that, but we could figure out what are the driving factors that implicate organisms in this transfer,” said Ilana Brito, assistant professor and the Mong Family Sesquicentennial Faculty Fellow in Biomedical Engineering in the College of Engineering, and the paper’s senior author. “If we can figure out who is exchanging genes with who, then maybe it would give insight into how this actually happens and possibly even control these processes.”

Many novel traits are shared through gene transfer. But scientists haven’t been able to determine why some bacteria engage in gene transfer while others do not.

A new vision for farming would help the world tackle climate change and restore biodiversity

A coalition of agroecological and regenerative farming organizations are calling on leaders to be bold on sustainable agriculture in tackling the climate and nature emergency at COP26 in Glasgow.

The coalition is pleased to see the Government publish its Net Zero Strategy this week. There are certainly many elements that are welcome, particularly around agroforestry and tree planting, as well as a focus on the need to curtail excess nitrogen from slurry and synthetic fertilizers.

However, the Strategy failed to recognize the power of agroecology to help reduce emissions and the value of species-rich grasslands as a nature-based solution. Whilst a step in the right direction, the strategy lacks ambition and vague statements on emerging technology take priority over concrete commitments.

The Government’s Net Zero Strategy echoed the Climate Change Committee’s recommendations for land use outlined in their 6th Carbon Budget. Both documents demonstrate siloed thinking that could be detrimental to nature’s recovery and the transition to sustainable farming. Both demonstrate siloed thinking that could be detrimental to nature’s recovery and the transition to sustainable farming.

The coalitions briefing outlines how farming and land use can deliver for climate, nature and public health, while still providing food security through the wider adoption of agroecology and regenerative farming.

Pioneering new process creates versatile moldable wood

Structures and vehicles built with sustainable materials are in high demand to meet today’s needs and for future generations.

Natural wood already boasts an inherently lower life cycle cost than other materials and is a naturally strong, lightweight, and durable composite material that could offer an attractive alternative to commonly used polymers, metals and alloys, if its properties and functionality could be improved.

Previous approaches, such as delignification and densification, have been tried and so far failed to provide the same formability offered by metals and plastics.

That’s why the development of an innovative new technique, using a rapid ‘water-shock’ process, able to create strong and moldable wood is so exciting and made the cover story of Science.

After extracting the lignin – a polymer which binds the cell walls inside wood that give it strength – which softens it, and then closing the fibers via evaporation, the research team, involving the University of Bristol, re-swelled the wood by "shocking" it with water.

"The rapid water-shock process forms a distinct partially open, wrinkled cell wall structure that provides space for compression as well as the ability to support high strain, allowing the material to be easily folded and molded," said lead author Professor Liangbig Hu, Director of the Center of Materials Innovation, University of Maryland.

Infant planet discovered

Discovery image of planet, which lies about 100 times the Earth-Sun distance from its parent star.

One of the youngest planets ever found around a distant infant star has been discovered by an international team of scientists led by University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa faculty, students, and alumni.

Thousands of planets have been discovered around other stars, but what sets this one apart is that it is newly-formed and can be directly observed. The planet, named 2M0437b, joins a handful of objects advancing our understanding of how planets form and change with time, helping shed new light on the origin of the Solar System and Earth. The in-depth research was recently published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society.

“This serendipitous discovery adds to an elite list of planets that we can directly observe with our telescopes,” explained lead author Eric Gaidos, a professor in the UH Mānoa Department of Earth Sciences. “By analyzing the light from this planet we can say something about its composition, and perhaps where and how it formed in a long-vanished disk of gas and dust around its host star.”

A third of leukemia patients do not generate any antibody response to two doses of COVID-19 vaccination

A University of Birmingham-led study has shown that a third of patients with the most common type of leukemia fail to generate any measurable antibody response following two doses of COVID-19 vaccination.

Furthermore, the research showed that in the two thirds of patients who do develop antibodies, levels are much lower than compared to healthy people and also have a profoundly reduced ability to ‘neutralize’ the globally dominant Delta variant.

The largest study of its kind, the research identified a number of important new findings which researchers say will be crucial to shaping future management and public health policy for patients with this type of blood cancer, who are immunosuppressed and at an increased clinical risk from SARS-CoV-2 infection.

Key new findings are:

• Only 67% of the leukemia patients generated any measurable antibody response to double COVID-19 vaccination, compared to 100% of the age-matched healthy population.
• In those patients with leukemia who did have an antibody response, antibody levels were 3.7 times lower than that seen in the healthy control group.
• Antibody levels declined by 33% at four months after leukemia patients’ second vaccine.
• No difference in antibody responses were observed between those participants receiving the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine and those receiving the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine.
• Antibody responses showed weak ability to neutralize the spike protein from the now globally dominant SARS-CoV-2 Delta variant compared to healthy controls.

500 patients with chronic lymphocytic leukemia - the most common leukemia in adults - were recruited to the study. 41% had received two doses of the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine, whilst 59% had received two doses of the Oxford/AstraZeneca vaccine. The average age of participants was 67 and 53% of the cohort was male. Their antibody response to double COVID-19 vaccination was compared to that of 94 age-matched healthy ‘controls’. Blood samples were obtained from all study participants between two to three weeks following their second vaccination, and again up to 30 weeks later.

Subconscious Bias Drives Negative Attitudes Toward Snakes

Baby copperhead snake. Credit: Peter Pattavina, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Snakes rank among Americans’ top animal phobias, and are among the most disliked animals globally. A new study from North Carolina State University finds that the dislike of snakes is subconscious and, to some extent, learned.

“Snakes are important,” said the study’s first author Audrey Vaughn, a former graduate student at NC State. “They serve as both important predators and sources of prey for other wildlife. They can also serve as important ecological indicators. This disdain that people have for them is something that impacts our ability to make sure they are well conserved. That in and of itself is a reason to better understand these attitudes and to try to figure out what can be done about them.”

In the study, researchers used the implicit association test (IAT) to understand the attitudes of 175 people, including adults and children, toward snakes versus songbirds. They compared results for parents aged 21 to 76 years, and children 7 to 17 years, and attitudes between households. They used a software system developed at NC State to deliver the test, which has been used to test people for subconscious gender and racial biases.

“Studies can be divided into two types: explicit studies, which often use surveys and allow people to think and have a rationale for why they feel a certain way, and the other is implicit, which is subconscious,” said study co-author Nils Peterson, a professor in NC State’s Fisheries, Wildlife and Conservation Biology program. “The test is somewhat of an imperfect tool in large part because implicit attitudes aren’t great predictors of what people actually do.”

Bat study reveals secrets of the social brain

In one experiment, the researchers used an infra-red camera to track the positions of the bats as they socialized within a darkened enclosure. They found that, while most bats preferred to spend most of their time tightly clustered with other bats, a few “less friendly” bats would often break away from the group — and, when these less friendly bats vocalized, their calls did not cause the brain waves of the other bats to “sync up” as well as did calls from the friendlier bats.

 (Video courtesy the NeuroBat Lab)

Whether chatting with friends at a dinner party or managing a high-stakes meeting at work, communicating with others in a group requires a complex set of mental tasks. Our brains must track who is speaking and what is being said, as well as what our relationship to that person may be — because, after all, we probably give the opinion of our best friend more weight than that of a complete stranger.

A study published in the journal Science provides the first glimpse into how the brains of social mammals process these types of complex group interactions.

In the study, neuroscientists at the University of California, Berkeley, used wireless neural recording devices to track the brain activity of Egyptian fruit bats as they freely interacted in groups and occasionally vocalized to each other through high-pitched screeches and grunts.

“Most studies of communication, particularly vocalization, are typically performed with single animals or with pairs of animals, but basically none have been conducted in actual group settings,” said study co-first author Maimon Rose, a graduate student in the NeuroBat Lab at UC Berkeley. “However, many social mammals, including humans, typically interact in groups. Egyptian fruit bats, specifically, like to interact within large colonies.”

Lab-grown ‘mini brains’ hint at treatments for neurodegenerative diseases

Mini brain organoids showing cortical-like structures 
Credit: Andras Lakatos

A common form of motor neuron disease, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, often overlaps with frontotemporal dementia (ALS/FTD) and can affect younger people, occurring mostly after the age of 40-45. These conditions cause devastating symptoms of muscle weakness with changes in memory, behavior and personality. Being able to grow small organ-like models (organoids) of the brain allows the researchers to understand what happens at the earliest stages of ALS/FTD, long before symptoms begin to emerge, and to screen for potential drugs.

In general, organoids, often referred to as ‘mini organs’, are being used increasingly to model human biology and disease. At the University of Cambridge alone, researchers use them to repair damaged livers, SARS-CoV-2 infection of the lungs and model the early stages of pregnancy, among many other areas of research.

Typically, researchers take cells from a patient’s skin and reprogram the cells back to their stem cell stage – a very early stage of development at which they have the potential to develop into most types of cell. These can then be grown in culture as 3D clusters that mimic particular elements of an organ. As many diseases are caused in part by defects in our DNA, this technique allows researchers to see how cellular changes – often associated with these genetic mutations – lead to disease.