Moving toward cleaner, more efficient hydrogen production

Hydrogen-fueled vehicles could be an important step toward a cleaner planet. They emit no chemicals other than water vapor, and would help reduce harmful carbon dioxide and air pollution levels. But although hydrogen is one of the most abundant elements on the planet, it is currently costly to produce from nonfossil sources.

Hydrogen is conventionally derived from natural gas through a process called methane steam reforming, but splitting water through an electrochemical process is cleaner and more sustainable. That process uses catalysts, which are substances that increase the rate of a chemical reaction without themselves undergoing any permanent chemical change. However, the cost of the greener technique has been a barrier in the marketplace.

Now a team of researchers led by Oregon State University (OSU) has shown that hydrogen can be cleanly produced with much greater efficiency and at a lower cost than is possible with current commercially available catalysts. The new findings, which describe ways to design catalysts that can greatly improve the efficiency of the clean hydrogen production process, were published in Science Advances and JACS Au.

The research team used the resources of the Advanced Photon Source (APS), a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Office of Science user facility at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory, to test and confirm their findings.

Micro­cavities as a sensor plat­form

Nano particles trapped between mirrors might be a promising platform for quantum sensors.
Credit: IQOQI Innsbruck

Sensors are a pillar of the Internet of Things, providing the data to control all sorts of objects. Here, precision is essential, and this is where quantum technologies could make a difference. Researchers in Innsbruck and Zurich are now demonstrating how nanoparticles in tiny optical resonators can be transferred into quantum regime and used as high-precision sensors.

Advances in quantum physics offer new opportunities to significantly improve the precision of sensors and thus enable new technologies. A team led by Oriol Romero-Isart of the Institute of Quantum Optics and Quantum Information at the Austrian Academy of Sciences and the Department of Theoretical Physics at the University of Innsbruck and a team lead by Romain Quidant of ETH Zurich are now proposing a new concept for a high-precision quantum sensor. The researchers suggest that the motional fluctuations of a nanoparticle trapped in a microscopic optical resonator could be reduced significantly below the zero-point motion, by exploiting the fast unstable dynamics of the system.

New Insights into the Neuroscience Behind Conscious Awareness of Choice

Nancy Smith participates in neuroscience experiments to play a digital piano using a brain-computer interface.
Credit: T. Aflalo

When you absentmindedly reach out to pick up your cup of coffee and take a sip, what happens in your brain? Many studies have shown that brain activity begins to ramp up even before you are aware of your choice to move. But this poses a conundrum: Do we have free will to make our own choices, if our brains are already preparing for actions before we are even conscious of them?

Now, a new study from the laboratory of Richard Andersen, James G. Boswell Professor of Neuroscience, and Leadership Chair and Director of the T&C Chen Brain–Machine Interface Center, gives new insights into how the brain encodes for our choices about movement. The research indicates that brain activity of abstract high-level choices (such as the desire to consume more coffee) connects to the actual actions (such as reaching out a hand) even before the awareness of such choices to move.

"The implementation of current brain-machine interfaces that read out the intent of patients assume that they are simultaneously consciously aware of the intent that is being decoded from their brains," says Andersen. "Taking into account this early subconscious activity is critical when designing algorithms for brain-computer interfaces that could one day enable people with spinal or brain damage to regain function."

CUORE team places new limits on the bizarre behavior of neutrinos

CUORE scientists Dr. Paolo Gorla (LNGS, left) and Dr. Lucia Canonica (MIT, right) inspects the CUORE cryogenic systems.
Credit: Yury Suvorov and the CUORE Collaboration

In a Laboratory under a mountain, physicists are using crystals far colder than frozen air to study ghostly particles, hoping to learn secrets from the beginning of the universe. Researchers at the Cryogenic Underground Observatory for Rare Events (CUORE) announced this week that they had placed some of the most stringent limits yet on the strange possibility that the neutrino is its own antiparticle. Neutrinos are deeply unusual particles, so ethereal and so ubiquitous that they regularly pass through our bodies without us noticing. CUORE has spent the last three years patiently waiting to see evidence of a distinctive nuclear decay process, only possible if neutrinos and antineutrinos are the same particle. CUORE’s new data shows that this decay doesn’t happen for trillions of trillions of years, if it happens at all. CUORE’s limits on the behavior of these tiny phantoms are a crucial part of the search for the next breakthrough in particle and nuclear physics – and the search for our own origins.

“Ultimately, we are trying to understand matter creation,” said Carlo Bucci, researcher at the Laboratori Nazionali del Gran Sasso (LNGS) in Italy and the spokesperson for CUORE. “We’re looking for a process that violates a fundamental symmetry of nature,” added Roger Huang, a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) and one of the lead authors of the new study.

CUORE – Italian for “heart” – is among the most sensitive neutrino experiments in the world. The new results from CUORE are based on a data set ten times larger than any other high-resolution search, collected over the last three years. CUORE is operated by an international research collaboration, led by the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (INFN) in Italy and Berkeley Lab in the US. The CUORE detector itself is located under nearly a mile of solid rock at LNGS, a facility of the INFN. U.S. Department of Energy-supported nuclear physicists play a leading scientific and technical role in this experiment. CUORE’s new results were published today in Nature.

Study finds genetic link between childhood and adult anxiety and depression

Hereditary factors are partly responsible for childhood anxiety and depression that persists into adulthood, according to University of Queensland researchers.

In the largest study of its kind in the world, the genetics of 64,641 children, aged between 3 and 18 years, were analyzed using longitudinal data from the Early Genetics and Lifeforce Epidemiology consortium.

Professor Christel Middeldorp, who holds a co-joint appointment with the UQ Child Health Research Centre and Children’s Health Queensland, said the study showed children who had similar levels of anxiety and depression were also alike genetically.

“It also revealed a genetic overlap between childhood and adult mental health disorders when comparing the results in this childhood study with results of previous studies in adults.

“These findings are important because they help identify people most at risk of symptoms continuing across the lifespan, so intense treatment can be provided where needed,” Professor Middeldorp said.

It’s the first-time researchers have conducted such a large-scale study examining the role of genetics in repeated measures of anxiety and depression in children.

Professor Middeldorp said genetic variants needed to be investigated because they increased the risk of recurrence and co-occurrence with other disorders.

“Mental health symptoms often come together, so those who experience anxiety or depression have a greater risk of disorders such as ADHD, aggressive behavior,” she said.

Amazon Rainforest Foliage Gases Affect the Earth’s Atmosphere

PNNL Earth scientist Manish Shrivastava and his team identified an atmospheric process that creates a type of fine particle over the Amazon rainforest. Through the process, semi-volatile gases, which are natural carbon-based chemical compounds that can easily condense to form fine particles in the upper atmosphere, are emitted throughout the Amazon rainforest by previously unrecognized in-plant and surface chemistry processes.
Illustration by Nathan Johnson | Pacific Northwest National Laboratory

Plant-foliage-derived gases drive a previously unknown atmospheric phenomenon over the Amazon rainforest, according to a recent study by researchers at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL).

The findings have important applications for atmospheric science and for climate change modeling.

“The tropical Amazon rainforest constitutes the lungs of the Earth, and this study connects natural processes in the forest to aerosols, clouds, and the Earth’s radiative balance in ways that have not been previously recognized,” said Manish Shrivastava, Earth scientist at PNNL and principal investigator of the study.

The findings were recently published in ACS Earth and Space Chemistry.

Filling the missing data gap

Shrivastava and his team were studying fine particles in the upper atmosphere when they discovered a large disparity between their measurements and what would have been expected based on current understanding in atmospheric models. Through further study, the team found that there was key forest–atmosphere interactions missing from current atmospheric models that govern the number of fine particles in the upper atmosphere.

Researchers unravel mummy bird mystery

Carol Anne Barsody scans the mummy bird for a 3D model that will be included in a multisensory exhibition she is planning to hold in October.
Credit: Ryan Young/Cornell University

Over the last several months, a certain bird – believed to be a sacred ibis – has been drawing a lot of attention, and covering a lot of ground, from the College of Arts and Sciences to the College of Veterinary Medicine, College of Engineering and, later, the Lab of Ornithology.

Not bad for an animal that has been dead and mummified for more than 1,500 years.

The so-called “mummy bird” has had help getting around. Carol Anne Barsody, a master’s student in archaeology, has been trying to learn everything she can about the artifact, which is part of the Anthropology Collections in the College of Arts and Sciences, by consulting an array of researchers from across the university.

“One of the things I love about this project is that it incorporates expertise from across Cornell, all working together on a common goal,” Barsody said. “Where else but Cornell can you speak with a curator of vertebrates about a skeleton, and then call the vet school and have it X-rayed? There are so many different resources that students can utilize. And interdisciplinary projects make for stronger research.”

What began as a passion project, and grew into an independent study and then a proposed master’s thesis, has become a cross-campus fascination that encompasses everything from ancient burial rituals to the lost history of donated artifacts, the totemic power of animals, the ways museums can better engage the public, and even Egyptian beer.

Vegetarian birds are more sociable than insect eaters

The lesser masked weaver builds its nests in large colonies and has several partners per breeding season.
Credit: Chao Zhao

Weaver birds that eat seeds flock together and nest in colonies more commonly than those species that eat insects, suggests new research by an international team of scientists led by the Milner Centre for Evolution at the University of Bath. For the first time, the study statistically supports an influential ecological hypothesis on social behavior first proposed 58 years ago.

Weaver birds are a family of 118 songbird species that live mostly in sub-Saharan Africa and are so-called because of the elaborate construction of their nests.

Whilst some species live on the savannah feeding on seeds, other species live in the forest and mostly dine on insects.

The researchers looked at data collected from previously published studies of many weaver species to investigate the relationships between diet, habitat and social behavior.

They observed that birds living in the open savannah tended to flock together, foraging in groups to help find the best sources of seeds. The same birds also nested in large colonies and often had a polygamous breeding behavior, pairing with multiple mates during each season.

In contrast, the species living in the forest tended to be solitary foragers and nesters that did not flock together or live in colonies. These birds tended to be monogamous breeders with a single mate per season.

New Polymer Membrane Tech Improves Efficiency of CO2 Capture

Image credit: Chris Robert.

Researchers have developed a new membrane technology that allows for more efficient removal of carbon dioxide (CO2) from mixed gases, such as emissions from power plants.

“To demonstrate the capability of our new membranes, we looked at mixtures of CO2 and nitrogen, because CO2/nitrogen dioxide mixtures are particularly relevant in the context of reducing greenhouse gas emissions from power plants,” says Rich Spontak, co-corresponding author of a paper on the work. “And we’ve demonstrated that we can vastly improve the selectivity of membranes to remove CO2 while retaining relatively high CO2 permeability.”

“We also looked at mixtures of CO2 and methane, which is important to the natural gas industry,” says Spontak, who is a Distinguished Professor of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering and Professor of Materials Science & Engineering at North Carolina State University. “In addition, these CO2-filtering membranes can be used in any situation in which one needs to remove CO2 from mixed gases – whether it’s a biomedical application or scrubbing CO2 from the air in a submarine.”

Membranes are an attractive technology for removing CO2 from mixed gases because they do not take up much physical space, they can be made in a wide variety of sizes, and they can be easily replaced. The other technology that is often used for CO2 removal is chemical absorption, which involves bubbling mixed gases through a column that contains a liquid amine – which removes CO2 from the gas. However, absorption technologies have a significantly larger footprint, and liquid amines tend to be toxic and corrosive.

‘Flash Droughts’ Coming on Faster, Global Study Shows

A map of drought conditions across the United States in mid-July 2012, the peak of a flash drought that decimated crops in the Midwest.
Credit: Richard Heim/ NCEI/NOAA

Just like flash floods, flash droughts come on fast — drying out soil in a matter of days to weeks. These events can wipe out crops and cause huge economic losses. And according to scientists, the speed at which they dry out the landscape has increased.

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University and Texas Tech University found that although the number of flash droughts has remained stable during the past two decades, more of them are coming on faster. Globally, the flash droughts that come on the fastest — sending areas into drought conditions within just five days — have increased by about 3%-19%. And in places that are especially prone to flash droughts — such as South Asia, Southeast Asia and central North America — that increase is about 22%-59%.

Rising global temperatures are probably behind the faster onset, said co-author and UT Jackson School Professor Zong-Liang Yang, who added that the study’s results underscore the importance of understanding flash droughts and preparing for their effects.

“Every year, we are seeing record-breaking warming episodes, and that is a good precursor to these flash droughts,” he said. “The hope and purpose [of this research] is to minimize the detrimental effects.”