Super-powered battery breakthrough claimed by US team

Continue reading the main storyA new type of battery has been developed that, its creators say, could revolutionise the way we power consumer electronics and vehicles.

The University of Illinois team says its use of 3D-electrodes allows it to build "microbatteries" that are many times smaller than commercially available options, or the same size and many times more powerful.

Researchers claim their technology could shrink the size of batteries by 10 times while offering the same power

It adds they can be recharged 1,000 times faster than competing tech.

However, safety issues still remain.

Details of the research are published in thejournal Nature Communications.

Battery breakthrough

The researchers said their innovation should help address the issue that while smartphones and other gadgets have benefited from miniaturised electronics, battery advances have failed to keep pace.

Batteries work by having two components - called electrodes - where chemical reactions occur.

In simple terms, the anode is the electrode which releases electrons as a result of a process called oxidation.

The cathode is the electrode on the other side of the battery to which the electrons want to flow and be absorbed - but a third element, the electrolyte, blocks them from travelling directly.

When the battery is plugged into a device the electrons can flow through its circuits making the journey from one electrode to the other.

Meanwhile ions - electrically charged particles involved in the anode's oxidation process - do travel through the electrolyte. When they reach the cathode they react with the electrons that travelled via the other route.

The scientists' "breakthrough" involved finding a new way to integrate the anode and cathode at the microscale.

"The battery electrodes have small intertwined fingers that reach into each other," project leader Prof William King told the BBC.

"That does a couple of things. It allows us to make the battery have a very high surface area even though the overall battery volume is extremely small.

"And it gets the two halves of the battery very close together so the ions and electrons do not have far to flow.

"Because we've reduced the flowing distance of the ions and electrons we can get the energy out much faster."

Repeatable technique

The battery cells were fabricated by adapting a process developed by another team at the university which is designed to make it faster to recharge the batteries than lithium ion (Li-on) and nickel metal hydride (NiMH) equivalents.

A cross-section of the battery reveals the 3D-design of the research project's anodes and cathodes

It involves creating a lattice made out of tiny polystyrene spheres and then filling the space in and around the structure with metal.

The spheres are then dissolved to leave a 3D-metal scaffold onto which a nickel-tin alloy is added to form the anode, and a mineral called manganese oxyhydroxide to form the cathode.

Finally the glass surface onto which the apparatus was attached was immersed into a liquid heated to 300C (572F).

"Today we're making small numbers of these things in a boutique fabrication process, but while that's reliable and we can repeat it we need to be able to make large numbers of these things over large areas," said Prof King.

"But in principle our technology is scalable all the way up to electronics and vehicles.

"You could replace your car battery with one of our batteries and it would be 10 times smaller, or 10 times more powerful. With that in mind you could jumpstart a car with the battery in your cell phone."

Safety fear

Other battery experts welcomed the team's efforts but said it could prove hard to bring the technology to market.

"The challenge is to make a microbattery array that is robust enough and that does not have a single short circuit in the whole array via a process that can be scaled up cheaply," said Prof Clare Grey from the University of Cambridge's chemistry department.

University of Oxford's Prof Peter Edwards - an expert in inorganic chemistry and energy - also expressed doubts.

"This is a very exciting development which demonstrates that high power densities are achievable by such innovations," he said.

"The challenges are: scaling this up to manufacturing levels; developing a simpler fabrication route; and addressing safety issues.

"I'd want to know if these microbatteries would be more prone to the self-combustion issues that plagued lithium-cobalt oxide batteries which we've seen become an issue of concern with Boeing's Dreamliner jets."

Prof King acknowledged that safety was an issue due to the fact the current electrolyte was a combustible liquid.

Prof William King hopes to use the microbattery to power electronic equipment before the end of the year

He said that in the test equipment only a microscopic amount of the liquid was used, making the risk of an explosion negligible - but if it were scaled up to large sizes the danger could become "significant".

However, he added that he soon planned to switch to a safer polymer-based electrolyte to address the issue.

Prof King added that he hoped to have the technology ready to be trialled as a power source for electronic equipment before the end of the year.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign team is one of several groups attempting to overhaul the way we power gadgets.

Researchers in Texas are working on a kind of battery that can be spray-painted onto any surface while engineers at the University of Bedfordshire are exploring the idea of using radio waves as an energy source.

in BBC World News

Scientists make 'laboratory-grown' kidney

A kidney "grown" in the laboratory has been transplanted into animals where it started to produce urine, US scientists say.

Similar techniques to make simple body parts have already been used in patients, but the kidney is one of the most complicated organs made so far.

A study, in the journal Nature Medicine, showed the engineered kidneys were less effective than natural ones.

But regenerative medicine researchers said the field had huge promise.

Kidneys filter the blood to remove waste and excess water. They are also the most in-demand organ for transplant, with long waiting lists.

The researchers' vision is to take an old kidney and strip it of all its old cells to leave a honeycomb-like scaffold. The kidney would then be rebuilt with cells taken from the patient.

This would have two major advantages over current organ transplants.

The tissue would match the patient, so they would not need a lifetime of drugs to suppress the immune system to prevent rejection.

It would also vastly increase the number of organs available for transplant. Most organs which are offered are rejected, but they could be used as templates for new ones.Scaffolding

Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have taken the first steps towards creating usable engineered kidneys.

They took a rat kidney and used a detergent to wash away the old cells.

The remaining web of proteins, or scaffold, looks just like a kidney, including an intricate network of blood vessels and drainage pipes.

This protein plumbing was used to pump the right cells to the right part of the kidney, where they joined with the scaffold to rebuild the organ.

It was kept in a special oven to mimic the conditions in a rat's body for the next 12 days.

When the kidneys were tested in the laboratory, urine production reached 23% of natural ones.

The team then tried transplanting an organ into a rat. Once inside the body, the kidney's effectiveness fell to 5%.

Yet the lead researcher, Dr Harald Ott, told the BBC that restoring a small fraction of normal function could be enough: "If you're on haemodialysis then kidney function of 10% to 15% would already make you independent of haemodialysis. It's not that we have to go all the way."

He said the potential was huge: "If you think about the United States alone, there's 100,000 patients currently waiting for kidney transplants and there's only around 18,000 transplants done a year.

"I think the potential clinical impact of a successful treatment would be enormous."'Really impressive'

There is a huge amount of further research that would be needed before this is even considered in people.

The technique needs to be more efficient so a greater level of kidney function is restored. Researchers also need to prove that the kidney will continue to function for a long time.

There will also be challenges with the sheer size of a human kidney. It is harder to get the cells in the right place in a larger organ.

Prof Martin Birchall, a surgeon at University College London, has been involved in windpipe transplants produced from scaffolds.

He said: "It's extremely interesting. It is really impressive.

"They've addressed some of the main technical barriers to making it possible to use regenerative medicine to address a really important medical need."

He said that being able to do this for people needing an organ transplant could revolutionise medicine: "It's almost the nirvana of regenerative medicine, certainly from a surgical point of view, that you could meet the biggest need for transplant organs in the world - the kidney."

in BBC

Nasa Ladee mission: Solving a Moon mystery

You would be forgiven for thinking that America lost interest in the Moon forty years ago, in December 1972, when Apollo 17 astronaut Gene Cernan left the final footprint on its dusty surface. It’s certainly true that in the 1970s and 80s there was little desire to return to our grey, cratered cosmic neighbour. In fact during the 1980s no-one sent a single spacecraft, robot or orbiter. Thanks to Apollo, American scientists had an enormous pile of lunar rocks to study, Nasa’s attention had switched to the Space Shuttle and the Soviets had run out of money.

But in recent years, there has been a resurgence of interest in studying the Moon in order to tackle some of the many unanswered scientific questions. In the last decade, Europe, Japan, China and India have all sent unmanned orbiters to probe the Moon’s chemical composition, gravitational field and topography. Among other things, they’ve proved the presence of water, discovered potentially useful minerals and uncovered evidence that the Moon may still be geologically active. Now, later this year, the US will be launching its fourth mission since 2009:Ladee.

Ladee (pronounced Lad-ee, rather than Lay-dee) stands for Lunar Atmosphere and Dust Environment Explorer and is designed to build on Apollo science. Looking disconcertingly like an Apollo Command Module smothered in shiny solar panels, this robotic spacecraft will study lunar dust in the Moon’s tenuous atmosphere. “Yes the Moon has an atmosphere,” exclaims Brian Day from Nasa’s Lunar Science Institute. “People are astonished to find that out.

“We uncovered the very beginnings of our understanding of the lunar atmosphere when we visited with Apollo,” Day says, “but we haven’t really revisited the question of how much there is, what it’s made of and how it changes from month to month.”

‘Dead world’

The mission will also aim to solve another related question that’s unresolved from Apollo: a weird glow that the astronauts saw from lunar orbit. “There were these interesting ‘streamers’ that were seen out the window of the Command Module when it was round the Moon,” says Ladee project scientist Richard Elphic. “Some of the supposition is that these may be pillars of levitated dust, high into the lunar sky. But we don’t know for sure, so we’re trying to understand what role dust might play in the lunar atmosphere.”

Observations made through telescopes on Earth have already given the Ladee science team some idea of what they might find. They know, for instance, that the lunar atmosphere contains argon and helium and they were surprised to also find two metals: sodium and potassium. “Those are just the tip of the iceberg,” says Elphic, “there are probably many other species of chemicals and just as exotic.

The Moon’s thin and fragile atmosphere is technically known as a surface boundary exosphere and what makes this investigation even more interesting is that these types of atmospheres are found around bodies elsewhere in the Solar System. Mercury has one, so do larger asteroids, many of the moons of the gas giants, even the minor planets beyond Neptune. “This may be the most common type of atmosphere in our solar system and we know very little about it,” says Day. “But we happen to have one right next door – how lucky is that? We’re going to take advantage of that and go and explore it.”

in BBC

The 6 Most Mind-Blowing Ways Your Brain Can Malfunction

By:Lana Frankle August 18, 2011 1,674,291 views

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There is nothing we take for granted as much as sanity. No matter what "crazy" unexpected thing might happen at the office tomorrow, you still know that you're not going to show up and find, say, your boss replaced by a talking guitar.

But as we have explored before, there are mental disorders that can mess with your perception of reality in unimaginable ways, while often leaving the rest of your mind untouched.

Disorders like ...

#6.

Fregoli Syndrome

+Share #6

Imagine you get into an argument with your asshole roommate about the unpaid rent. You need to let off some steam, so you call your girlfriend to see if she wants to go for a nice burrito somewhere, but for some reason it's your asshole roommate on the end of the line and he's calling you "honey." So you hang up and go outside, but your asshole roommate is waving at you from the neighbor's yard.

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Apparently Mr. Moneybags has enough cash for two rents.

Furious, you go to the local bar, only to find that your asshole roommate is the one pouring the drinks. Ten minutes and two black eyes later, you find yourself getting arrested by your asshole roommate.

The Condition:

Fregoli syndrome is the delusion that some or all of the people you meet during the course of a day are actually the same person. It's named after a famous actor who was able to change costumes rapidly onstage. As you would expect, Fregoli sufferers are frequently paranoid, as they reasonably assume that some master of disguise is fucking with them. Or maybe some kind of shape-shifting wizard.

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Keep practicing, buddy. You can be James Hetfield, but you can't be all of Metallica.

The disorder comes with different degrees of severity, though. Sometimes, sufferers don't know exactly who is stalking them, but everybody looks really familiar somehow. It's like waking up to find your town populated entirely by people who went to your high school that you never spoke to much. One guy was known to just walk up to everybody and ask where they'd met before.

Fregoli syndrome also makes for an interesting insanity stew when it tag-teams with other disorders. For instance, a woman who was diagnosed with the condition also suffered from schizophrenia and something called erotomania, the belief that someone is in love with you when they aren't. She believed that actor Erik Estrada was in love with her, communicated with her telepathically and disguised himself to show up in her daily life in the form of her acquaintances and current boyfriend.

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This is someone's fantasy.

It's such a sad story that we're hoping someday it will turn out she was right all along, and Mr. Estrada will be arrested.

#5.

Mirrored-Self Misidentification

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You wake up in the middle of the night and shuffle down the hall to the bathroom. You stumble in and flick on the light, and look up at the mirror on the medicine cabinet over your sink.

A stranger is standing there. He's staring right at you, as surprised to see you as you are to see him. You scream, "Get the hell out of my bathroom, you pervert! Go look at someone else's dick!" but the man only screams your own words back at you.

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"Bring it on, buddy, I can do this all day."

The Condition:

People suffering from a disorder called mirrored-self misidentification have a breakdown with the part of their brain that understands how reflections work, so when they look at a mirror, their brain tells them they're looking at a stranger through a window. On a rational level, they understand what mirrors are and what they do, but they maintain the strong impression that their reflection is some nefarious doppelganger. It shows up mostly in Alzheimer's patients, but even then it's rare.

Scientists study the disorder by presenting subjects with a mirror, then holding up an object behind them and asking them to grab it. People without the disorder will turn around and reach for the object behind them, but someone who suffers from the condition tries to reach through the mirror, providing hours of quality entertainment for the researchers.

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"You guys are DICKS!

One patient known as TH described the man in his mirror as "a dead ringer" for himself. He would even try to talk to his reflection, though their conversations were a little one-sided. TH did not particularly dislike this person, saying he had no reason to be suspicious of him. He believed that this man lived in the apartment adjoining his own. (There was no apartment adjoining his own.)

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And they liked to look at each other while masturbating.

#4.

Visual Agnosia

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You go to the grocery store to pick up your weekly supply of Red Bull and Febreze, but you quickly realize that something is a little off. Specifically, all of the products you pick up scream and fight back when you try to shove them into your cart. Worse, when you finally get to the register, a potted fern asks if you're paying by cash or charge.

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"Hey, asshole, my fronds are up here."

The Condition:

Visual agnosia is caused by a dysfunction in some of the brain's visual processing areas, the result of which is that you're unable to correctly identify things for what they are. And we're not talking about confusing a dog with a cat from a distance; we're talking about looking at your brother and trying to cram bread into his hair because you think he's the toaster.

If you think we made up that example to be funny, the neurologist Oliver Sacks described a patient in the book The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat who, at the end of an interview, grabbed his wife's head and tried to put it on his own head. According to the wife, this was the kind of bullshit she had to put up with every day.

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"Sick bastard just walked up and started dry-humpin' my head."

People suffering from visual agnosia are stuck seeing the world kind of the way a space rover on Mars does. When a person with a normally functioning brain looks at something familiar, like a rose, she sees a bunch of shapes and colors and her brain automatically tells her what that thing is. The process is so lightning fast that you aren't even aware of it.

But it is a process and it can break down. Agnosia sufferers are permanently trapped in the shapes-and-colors stage. Sacks' patient looked at a rose and described it literally as "a convoluted red form with a linear green attachment." It's kind of like being blind, except you have some jackass following you around describing things to you and making you figure out what those things are on your own. For the rest of your life.

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"Convoluted red form with a linear green attachment ... Rose McGowan?"

Mercifully, visual agnosia is just that -- a visual disorder. Sufferers retain the ability to identify things by using their other senses. Sacks' patient was able to recognize the rose when he smelled it.

Pause here and take a moment to thank your brain for all of the shit it does in the background just so you can get around every day.

"I sure hope none of those convoluted gray shapes are people!"

Read more: http://www.cracked.com/article_19369_the-6-most-mind-blowing-ways-your-brain-can-malfunction.html#ixzz2QG4lusWQ