These Energy-Packed Batteries Work Well in Extreme Cold and Heat

Study first author Guorui Cai, a nanoengineering postdoctoral researcher at UC San Diego, prepares a battery pouch cell for testing at subfreezing temperature.
Credit: David Baillot/UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed lithium-ion batteries that perform well at freezing cold and scorching hot temperatures, while packing a lot of energy. The researchers accomplished this feat by developing an electrolyte that is not only versatile and robust throughout a wide temperature range, but also compatible with a high energy anode and cathode.

The temperature-resilient batteries are described in a paper published the week of July 4 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). (As of this posting the paper is not on PNAS)

Such batteries could allow electric vehicles in cold climates to travel farther on a single charge; they could also reduce the need for cooling systems to keep the vehicles’ battery packs from overheating in hot climates, said Zheng Chen, a professor of nanoengineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering and senior author of the study.

“You need high temperature operation in areas where the ambient temperature can reach triple digits and the roads get even hotter. In electric vehicles, the battery packs are typically under the floor, close to these hot roads,” explained Chen, who is also a faculty member of the UC San Diego Sustainable Power and Energy Center. “Also, batteries warm up just from having a current run through during operation. If the batteries cannot tolerate this warmup at high temperature, their performance will quickly degrade.”

Nitrogen footprint: high pollution and loss of resources due to manure

In Germany, manure is usually applied to arable or grassland areas without pretreatment. The nitrogen released has a negative impact on the environment.
Credit: Markus Breig, KIT

Factory farming for meat production harms the environment. In addition to the directly emitted methane, the spreading of liquid manure releases climate-damaging nitrogen compounds such as ammonia and laughing gas into the atmosphere. In addition, the groundwater is contaminated with nitrate via the liquid phase. Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) have now examined how the manure that is produced in livestock farming and is often used as fertilizer affects the nitrogen footprint. They have shown that the nitrogen pollution from manure from beef production is three or eight times higher than for manure from pork and poultry meat production.

Large quantities of nitrogenous fertilizers and animal feed are used in agriculture. A significant part of the nitrogen used is released into the environment unused, for example by washing out nitrate from arable soils or by ammonia emissions from animal husbandry. “It is known that meat production has a very negative impact on the global nitrogen balance. The Nitrogen footprint calculator So far, however, it has not shown what a large proportion of the amount of manure that is generated in it,” says Prantik Samanta from the Engler Bunte Institute - Water Chemistry and Water Technology at KIT. “At the same time, these amounts of nitrogen mean an enormous loss of resources. Because recovering nitrogen is very expensive in terms of energy. "The doctoral student and first author of the study has now examined together with colleagues how much nitrogen about manure in beef, pork and poultry meat production pollutes the environment and is lost as a raw material. In addition, they calculated how much energy would be needed to process the manure and recover nitrogen. Again, this could be made available specifically as fertilizer.

Study explores coevolution of mammals and their lice

Elephant shrews, also called jumping shrews or sengis, are small insectivorous mammals native to Africa. The elephant shrew louse was among the earliest diverging lineages of mammalian lice.
Credit: Joey Makalintal, CC BY 2.0

According to a new study, the first louse to take up residence on a mammalian host likely started out as a parasite of birds. That host-jumping event tens of millions of years ago began the long association between mammals and lice, setting the stage for their coevolution and offering more opportunities for the lice to spread to other mammals.

The first louse to take up residence on a mammalian host likely started out as a parasite of birds, a new study finds. Pictured: A bird louse of the genus Rhopaloceras. 
Credit: Stephany Virrueta Herrera

Reported in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution, the study compared the genomes and family trees of lice and their mammalian hosts. The effort revealed that the two trees share a lot of parallel branches and twigs. Those branching points – where one group of mammals began diverging into new forms – often were echoed in the genomes of the lice that parasitized those mammals, the researchers reported.

Nature restoration as a climate solution not enough to reduce peak global temperatures

The research found the process of restoring degraded natural ecosystems is crucial, but any climate benefits are dwarfed by the scale of fossil fuel emissions.
Source: University of Melbourne

Nature restoration cannot be scaled up quickly enough to compensate for fossil fuel emissions, new research led by the University of Melbourne has found.

Published today in One Earth, the research found that nature restoration, the process of restoring degraded natural ecosystems, is crucial but any climate benefits are dwarfed by the scale of ongoing fossil fuel emissions.

Lead author Dr Kate Dooley said nature restoration can marginally lower peak warming but should not be seen as a substitute for reducing fossil fuel emissions.

“Any form of land-based carbon dioxide removal takes decades to be realized, meaning the benefits from nature restoration could take generations to make a notable reduction in global temperatures,” Dr Dooley said.

“If we are to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement then relying on nature restoration and land management options are not the complete solution. We need policies that respect and understand the most crucial factor to mitigating rising temperature, which is to categorically move away from fossil fuels.”

The Higgs particle turns ten

A collision event in the Atlas detector: Higgs boson coupling to top quark 
Credit: ATLAS/CERN

Exactly ten years ago, the Atlas and CMS experiments announced a resounding success: Little less than three years after the launch of the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at Cern, the last missing piece in the Standard Model of particle physics had been found: The Higgs boson, a kind of messenger of the Higgs field that in turn gives mass to all matter particles. To mark the Higgs birthday physicists, among them two researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Physics, sum up what they found out about the Higgs boson so far and look into the future, which insights might to be gained, yet.

July 4, 2012, was all about the Higgs boson: The particle physics community rejoiced at its success, and there was hardly a newspaper or news program that did not report on the spectacular discovery. Predicted by the theorists Peter Higgs, Robert Brout and François Englert as early as the 1960s, it took almost 50 years until the appropriate "search engine" was ready: the particle accelerator LHC with the experiments Atlas and CMS. Proton-proton collisions take place there, and physicists have successfully searched the debris for traces of the predicted Higgs particle.

With the Higgs boson, particle physics completed its Standard Model: Twelve elementary matter particles, four exchange particles and, as the keystone, the Higgs boson - the only particle without spin. This particle is the manifestation of the Higgs quantum field which fills the universe like a syrup, "sticking" to the other particles as mass.

Male dogs four times more likely to develop contagious cancer on nose or mouth than females

A new study has found that male dogs are four to five times more likely than female dogs to be infected with the oro-nasal form of Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumor.

Researchers think this is because of behavior differences between the sexes: male dogs spend more time sniffing and licking female dogs’ genitalia than vice versa.

Canine Transmissible Venereal Tumor, or CTVT, is an unusual cancer – it is infectious and can spread between dogs when they come into contact. The living cancer cells physically ‘transplant’ themselves from one animal to the other.

CTVT commonly affects dogs’ genitals and is usually transmitted during mating. But sometimes the cancer can affect other areas like the nose, mouth and skin.

In the study, the researchers reviewed a database of almost 2,000 cases of CTVT from around the globe and found that only 32 CTVT tumors affected the nose or mouth. Of these, 27 cases were in male dogs.

“We found that a very significant proportion of the nose or mouth tumors of canine transmissible cancer were in male dogs,” said Dr Andrea Strakova in the University of Cambridge’s Department of Veterinary Medicine, first author of the paper. She performed this study with colleagues from the Transmissible Cancer Group, led by Professor Elizabeth Murchison.

Strakova added: “We think this is because male dogs may have a preference for sniffing or licking the female genitalia, compared to vice versa. The female genital tumors may also be more accessible for sniffing and licking, compared to the male genital tumors.”

13 Years and More at the Moon

This year, the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) celebrates its 13th anniversary orbiting the Moon. This mission has given scientists the largest volume of data ever collected by a planetary science mission at NASA. Considering that success and the continuing functionality of the spacecraft and its instruments, NASA has awarded the mission an extended mission phase to continue operations. This is LRO's 5th extended science mission (ESM5), and during this time there will be 4 major areas of focus: 1) The study of volatiles; 2) Studying the Moon's interior, volcanic features, and the tectonics of the surface; 3) Studying the Moon's regolith and impact craters; and 4) Support for future missions. This video goes into detail about these focus areas and shows how LRO continues to be one of NASA's most valuable tools for advancing lunar science.

Source/Credit: 

Video: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center
Final Editing and Conversion: Scientific Frontline
Full Credits embedded in video

Humpback whales may steer clear of Hawaiʻi due to climate change

Humpback whale
Photo by Joshua Sukoff on Unsplash

Humpback whales may one day avoid Hawaiian waters due to climate change and rising greenhouse gasses, according the findings of a new paper published in Frontiers in Marine Science by a team of researchers including three University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa graduate students—Hannah von Hammerstein and Renee Setter from the Department of Geography and Environment in the College of Social Sciences, and Martin van Aswegen from the Marine Mammal Research Program in the Institute for Marine Biology.

Humpback whales are known to migrate toward tropical coastal waters, such as Hawaiʻi’s, where they give birth to their calves. These areas lay in regions with sea surface temperatures ranging between 21 and 28 degrees Celsius (approximately 70–82 degrees Fahrenheit), and the whales typically return to the same sites annually.

According to von Hammerstein, Setter, van Aswegen and co-researchers from the Pacific Whale Foundation, anthropogenic climate change is warming the oceans at unprecedented rates. At the current pace, it is likely that some of these breeding grounds will heat up past the 21–28℃ temperature range over the next century.

“Soft” CRISPR May Offer a New Fix for Genetic Defects

Restorative gene editing using sequences from the counterpart chromosome: The standard CRISPR enzyme Cas9 offers the ability to make repairs but also potentially results in unintended mutations (mutagenic events) at the targeted site and possibly elsewhere in the genome (left). In contrast, the nickase enzyme results in more efficient gene correction and no mutagenic events (right).
Source: University of California San Diego

Curing debilitating genetic diseases is one of the great challenges of modern medicine. During the past decade, development of CRISPR technologies and advancements in genetics research brought new hope for patients and their families, although the safety of these new methods is still of significant concern.

Publishing July 1 in the journal Science Advances, a team of biologists at the University of California San Diego that includes postdoctoral scholar Sitara Roy, specialist Annabel Guichard and Professor Ethan Bier describes a new, safer approach that may correct genetic defects in the future. Their strategy, which makes use of natural DNA repair machinery, provides a foundation for novel gene therapy strategies with the potential to cure a large spectrum of genetic diseases.

In many cases, those suffering from genetic disorders carry distinct mutations in the two copies of genes inherited from their parents. This means that often, a mutation on one chromosome will have a functional sequence counterpart on the other chromosome. The researchers employed CRISPR genetic editing tools to exploit this fact.

“The healthy variant can be used by the cell’s repair machinery to correct the defective mutation after cutting the mutant DNA,” said Guichard, the senior author of the study, “Remarkably, this can be achieved even more efficiently by a simple harmless nick.”

Mining's effect on fish warrants better science-based policies

Migrating sockeye salmon approach their spawning grounds on a tributary of the Copper River.
Credit: University of Alaska Fairbanks

A new paper published in Science Advances synthesizes the impact of metal and coal mines on salmon and trout in northwestern North America, and highlights the need for more complete and transparent science to inform mining policy.

It is the first comprehensive effort by an interdisciplinary group of experts that explicitly links mining policy to current understanding of watershed ecology and salmonid biology.

“Our paper is not for or against mining, but it does describe current environmental challenges and gaps in the application of science to mining governance. We believe it will provide critically needed scientific clarity for this controversial topic,” said lead author Chris Sergeant, a graduate student at the University of Alaska Fairbanks College of Fisheries and Ocean Sciences and a research scientist at the University of Montana.

For the study, experts integrated and reviewed information on hydrology, river ecology, aquatic toxicology, biology and mining policy. Their robust assessment maps more than 3,600 mines throughout Montana, Washington, British Columbia, the Yukon and Alaska. The size of the mines ranges from family-run placer sites to massive open-pit projects.