Our plastic problem is out of control. Here’s how we can fight it

The worldwide total volume of plastic has reached 8.3 billion metric tons, the equivalent of more than 800,000 Eiffel Towers. Image: REUTERS/Damir Sagolj

On a street in Phnom Penh, Cambodia, a seafood café is setting up for the evening rush. Styrofoam boxes are ripped open. The broken tops are dumped in the street. Plastic bags full of prawns are emptied into trays, then thrown out. In a few minutes, a small mountain of trash piles up on the sidewalk. As a rickshaw trundles by, its riders chuck an empty plastic drink container onto the heap. This is one of the hundreds of mounds of plastic that dot this rapidly urbanizing city.

In April, The Guardian featured a shocking photo essay on the accumulation of plastic in the Cambodian city of Sihanoukville. It showed mountains of trash dumped on streets and beaches. But this plastic dystopia is not unique to Cambodia. If we don’t act now and cut it out of our daily lives, we, as well as the environment, will suffer irreparable harm.

We live in a world of plastic. It is an amazingly convenient material - cheap, light, flexible, and durable. Used for bags, bottles, and containers, it is in our homes, schools, and workplaces. But that rampant use has come at a heavy price.

The worldwide total volume of plastic has reached 8.3 billion metric tons, the equivalent of more than 800,000 Eiffel Towers, according to a 2017 article in Science Advances. Of this enormous amount, 6.3 billion metric tons have been disposed as waste.

Around 10 million plastic bags are used in Phnom Penh every day, according to the ACRA Foundation. Urban Cambodians use more than 2,000 plastic bags every year.

Around 90% of the world’s plastic waste ends up in the ocean. Most of it arrives by way of just 10 major rivers, one of which is the Mekong. Every year, 8 million tons of plastic reach the ocean, which is the equivalent of a full garbage truck every minute.

The biggest problem is that plastic does not biodegrade easily. It stays around for thousands of years. Slowly, it leaks chemical substances that are harmful to the environment, for animals and for people.

In marine areas, many mammals, fish, and birds suffer from ingesting plastic or becoming entangled in plastic materials. More than 90% of all birds and fish are reported to have plastic particles in their stomach. In this way, toxic chemicals accumulate and pass through the food chain. Since fish comprises more than 60% of the protein intake for rural Cambodians, this is a significant problem.

A landfill site in Siem Reap, Cambodia

Image: UNDP

For all these reasons, taking action to mitigate the harmful impacts of plastic is an urgent task. So what can be done?

It is heartening that many countries have implemented policy measures to tackle their plastic problem. Last year, Kenya completely banned the production, sale, and use of plastic bags. Violations may result in imprisonment of up to four years or fines of up to $40,000. Many other countries, including Bangladesh, Rwanda, and China, are following Kenya’s lead, putting in place either total or partial bans on plastic bags, or new forms of plastic taxation.

In Cambodia, too, new initiatives are emerging to fight plastic pollution. In April, the Ministry of Environment introduced new regulation for the use of plastic bags. Major supermarkets such as Aeon and Lucky now charge 10 cents per bag. The Ministry of Environment is also considering plans for jute bags as an alternative. The school curriculum is being updated to educate future generations on the harm caused by plastics.

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Seaweed, Indonesia’s answer to the global plastic crisis

These countries are getting creative with plastic waste

One promising idea to fight plastic pollution is known as the circular economy, which focuses on Waste Reduction, Reuse, and Recycling (3R). In a circular economy, waste is treated as a valuable material that should be reused or recycled, not only in order to reduce the volume of trash but also to generate new economic opportunities.

Image: SmartSign.com

First of all, this requires policies that actively encourage a 3R approach to plastic waste. For example, the EU adopted a Circular Economy Action Plan in 2016, which includes targets for recycling 75% of packaging waste by 2030 and making all plastic packaging recyclable by the same date. The EU is also proposing a ban on the most commonly used single-use plastic products.

But making a circular economy take off also requires the active involvement of citizens and the private sector. Even small individual acts, such as bringing one’s own shopping bag to the market, contribute to lowering the amount of plastic waste. Businesses can ban plastic bags and encourage the use of biodegradable bags. The United Nations Development Programme in Cambodia has done so, at its office. Hotels and factories have the opportunity to create networks of recycling and reusing materials, simultaneously saving money and decreasing waste.

In order to introduce lasting change, it is critical to raising awareness. This can happen through environmental education and information campaigns, directed at young people especially, as well as at the private sector.

Finally, new approaches to good solid waste management are essential. Given the mountains of plastic we generate, this won’t be easy. But if we all commit to beating plastic pollution, we can make a monumental difference.

ORIGINAL: World Economic Forum

Nick Beresford United Nations Development Programme Country Director, Cambodia

Moeko Saito Jensen Senior Policy Advisor, United Nations Development Programme in Cambodia

George Edgar  Ambassador, Head of European Union Delegation to Cambodia

Maria Sargren Ambassador of Sweden to Cambodia

05 Jun 2018

Older than dinosaurs: last South African coelacanths threatened by oil exploration

Just 30 of the prehistoric fish known to exist, raising fears oil wells will push it to extinction

Coelacanths have remained almost unchanged for 420m years. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

Bright blue, older than dinosaurs and weighing as much as an average-sized man, coelacanths are the most endangered fish in South Africa and among the rarest in the world.

Barely 30 of these critically-endangered fish are known to exist off the east coast of South Africa, raising concern that a new oil exploration venture in the area could jeopardise their future.

Coelacanths, whose shape has remained almost unchanged for 420m years, captured world attention when the first living specimen was caught off the port city of East London in 1938. This discovery was followed by the subsequent capture of several more off the Comoros islands in the early 1950s, confirming that coelacanths were definitely not extinct.

December 2000 brought further excitement when divers found a small coelacanth colony in underwater canyons near South Africa’s Sodwana Bay, adjacent to the iSimangaliso wetland park and world heritage site.

Now the Rome-based energy group Eni plans to drill several deep-water oil wells in a 400km long exploration block known as Block ER236.

Dr. Andrew Venter, the chief executive of Wildtrust, one of several conservation groups lobbying for a significant expansion of South Africa’s protected ocean areas, said: “The Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico in 2010 decimated fish populations – so if we had an oil spill off iSimangaliso it is very likely it could wipe out these coelacanths.”

The Sodwana coelacanths are about 40km from the northern boundary of the Eni exploration area and nearly 200km north of the first drilling sites, but Venter said oil spills spread far and swiftly.

His concerns have been echoed by the coelacanth expert Prof Mike Bruton, who said the fish are specialist creatures, sensitive to environmental disturbance.

Staff at the National Museum of Kenya show a coelacanth caught by a fisherman on 21 November 2001. Photograph: Simon Maina/AFP/Getty Images

“Anything that interferes with their ability to absorb oxygen, such as oil pollution, would threaten their survival. The risk of oil spills or blowouts during exploration or future commercial production in Block ER236 is a source of serious concern.”

Last year, Eni commissioned a mandatory environmental impact assessment (EIA) but the scoping report makes scant mention of the potential threat to the Sodwana coelacanths.

Instead, the report suggested that coelacanths were unlikely to be found next to the first exploration wells.

Responding to fears the fish could be wiped out by leaks or undersea blowouts, the oil drilling company said: “Eni always applies the highest operational and environmental standards, which often exceed local compliance regulations.

“Prior to any operation, we undertake sensitivity mapping to identify sensitive offshore marine habitat which guides our planning. In addition to this, Eni would comply with all the requirements of the environmental management programme which is based on the outcomes of the impact assessment.

“Specialist studies have been conducted for both marine ecology and oil spill modelling scenarios and no specific threat has emerged in relation to this. The specialist study pertaining to accidental spillage modelling is currently being independently third-party peer-reviewed.”

Bruton said studies on coelacanths caught off the coasts of Indonesia and Tanzania showed that the remoteness of their habitat had not protected them from exposure to pollutants such as PCB and DDT, which had been used on land but had drifted over the sea on atmospheric winds and had accumulated up the food chain to the top predators, such as the coelacanth.

If oil were to be spilled in the ocean, Bruton feared the coelacanth colony could be destroyed. “The risk needs to carefully evaluated before this commercial venture has progressed too far and it is too late,” he said. “Oil spills do not respect the boundaries of marine protected areas.”

ORIGINAL: The Guardian

Tony Carnie in Durban

17 Aug 2018

Inexpensive biology kits offer hands-on experience with DNA

Image: Felice Frankel

To help students gain a better grasp of biological concepts, MIT and Northwestern University researchers have designed new educational kits that can be used to perform experiments that produce glowing proteins, scents, or other easily observed phenomena, through the engineering of DNA.

Image: M. Scott Brauer

“Our vision is these kits will serve as a creative outlet for young individuals, and show them that biology can be a design platform,” says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering

To help students gain a better grasp of biological concepts, MIT and Northwestern University researchers have designed new educational kits that can be used to perform experiments that produce glowing proteins, scents, or other easily observed phenomena, through the engineering of DNA.

Using freeze-dried, shelf-stable cellular components, students can learn about key biological concepts.

Biology teachers could use the BioBits kits to demonstrate key concepts such as how DNA is translated into proteins, or students could use them to design their own synthetic biology circuits, the researchers say.

“Our vision is that these kits will serve as a creative outlet for young individuals, and show them that biology can be a design platform,” says James Collins, the Termeer Professor of Medical Engineering and Science in MIT’s Institute for Medical Engineering and Science (IMES) and Department of Biological Engineering. “The time is right for creating educational kits that could be utilized in classrooms or in the home, to introduce young folks as well as adults who want to be retrained in biotech, to the technologies that underpin synthetic biology and biotechnology.”

The new kits contain no living cells but instead consist of freeze-dried cellular components, which makes them inexpensive, shelf-stable, and accessible to any classroom, even in schools with minimal resources.

All life on Earth, in one staggering chart

Scientists estimated the mass of all life. It’s mind boggling.

By weight, human beings are insignificant.

If everyone on the planet were to step on one side of a giant balance scale, and all the bacteria on Earth were to be placed on the other side, we’d shoot violently upward. That’s because all the bacteria on Earth combined are about 1,166 times more massive than all the humans.

Comparisons to other categories of life similarly demonstrate how very, very small we are. As a sweeping new study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences finds, in a census sorting all the life on Earth by weight (measured in gigatons of carbon, the signature element of life on Earth), we make up less than 1 percent of life.

There are an estimated 550 gigatons of carbon of life in the world. A gigaton is equal to a billion metric tons. A metric ton is 1,000 kilograms, or about 2,200 pounds.

We’re talking in huge, huge, mind-boggling terms here.

So, using the new data in PNAS, we tried to visualize the weight of all life on Earth to get a sense of the scale of it all.

All life on Earth, in one chart

What you’ll see below is a kind of tower of life. Each large block of this tower represents a gigaton of life, and the blocks are grouped into broad kingdoms. There are the protists (think microscopic life like amoebae), archaea (single-celled organisms somewhat similar to bacteria), fungi (mushrooms and other types of fungus), bacteria (you’re familiar with these, right?), plants, and animals.

As you can see, plants dominate our world. If the tower of life were an office building, plants would be the main tenants, taking up dozens of floors. Comparatively, all the animals in the world — seen in gray in the tower — are like a single retail shop (a trendy one, to be sure) on the ground floor.

FROM INFO ON : 
The biomass distribution on Earth
Yinon M. Bar-On, Rob Phillips, and Ron Milo

And if we zoom in on all animal life, we again see how insignificant humans are compared to everyone else in the kingdom. Arthropods (insects) outweigh us by a factor of 17. Even the mollusks (think clams) weigh more.

What’s missing from this chart is just as important

Yet despite our small biomass among animals, we’ve had an overwhelmingly huge impact on the planet. The chart above represents a massive amount of life. But it doesn’t show what’s gone missing since the human population took off.

The authors of the PNAS article estimate that the mass of wild land mammals is seven times lower than it was before humans arrived (keep in mind it’s difficult to estimate the exact history of the number of animals on Earth). Similarly, marine mammals, including whales, are a fifth of the weight they used to be because we’ve hunted so many to near extinction.

And though plants are still the dominant form of life on Earth, the scientists suspect there used to be approximately twice as many of them — before humanity started clearing forests to make way for agriculture and our civilization.

The census in the PNAS paper isn’t perfect. Though remote sensing, satellites, and huge efforts to study the distribution of life in the ocean make it easier than ever to come up with estimates, the authors admit there’s still a lot of uncertainty. But we do need a baseline understanding of the distribution of life on Earth. Millions of acres of forests are still lost every year. Animals are going extinct 1,000 to 10,000 faster than you’d expect if no humans lived on Earth. Sixty percent of primate species, our closest relatives on the tree of life, are threatened with extinction.

We have to know how much more we stand to lose.

ORIGINAL: VOX

By Brian Resnick and Javier Zarracina
May 29, 2018

Plug-and-play diagnostic devices

Jose Gomez-Marquez, co-director of MIT’s Little Devices Lab, holds a sheet of paper diagnostic blocks, which can be easily printed and then combined in various ways to create customized diagnostic devices. Image: Melanie Gonick/MIT

Modular blocks could enable labs around the world to cheaply and easily build their own diagnostics.

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Researchers at MIT’s Little Devices Lab have developed a set of modular blocks that can be put together in different ways to produce diagnostic devices. These “plug-and-play” devices, which require little expertise to assemble, can test blood glucose levels in diabetic patients or detect viral infection, among other functions.

Ampli blocks. Image by Melanie Gonick, MIT. 

“Our long-term motivation is to enable small, low-resources laboratories to generate their own libraries of plug-and-play diagnostics to treat their local patient populations independently,” says Anna Young, co-director of MIT’s Little Devices Lab, lecturer at the Institute for Medical Engineering and Science, and one of the lead authors of the paper.

Using this system, called Ampli blocks, the MIT team is working on devices to detect cancer, as well as Zika virus and other infectious diseases. The blocks are inexpensive, costing about 6 cents for four blocks, and they do not require refrigeration or special handling, making them appealing for use in the developing world.

“We see these construction kits as a way of lowering the barriers to making medical technology,” says Jose Gomez-Marquez, co-director of the Little Devices Lab and the senior author of the paper.

Elizabeth Phillips ’13, a graduate student at Purdue University, is also a lead author of the paper, which appears in the journal Advanced Healthcare Materials on May 16. Other authors include Kimberly Hamad-Schifferli, an associate professor of engineering at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and a visiting scientist in MIT’s Department of Mechanical Engineering; Nikolas Albarran, a senior engineer in the Little Devices Lab; Jonah Butler, an MIT junior; and Kaira Lujan, a former visiting student in the Little Devices Lab.

Advanced Healthcare Materials Paper (click to enlarge)

Customized diagnostics

Over the past decade, many researchers have been working on small, portable diagnostic devices based on chemical reactions that occur on paper strips. Many of these tests make use of lateral flow technology, which is the same approach used in home pregnancy tests.

Despite these efforts, such tests have not been widely deployed. One obstacle, says Gomez-Marquez, is that many of these devices are not designed with large-scale manufacturability in mind. Another is that companies may not be interested in mass-producing a diagnostic for a disease that doesn’t affect a large number of people.

The Little Devices Lab researchers realized that they could get these diagnostics into the hands of many more people if they created a kit of modular components that can be put together to generate exactly what the user needs. To that end, they have created about 40 different building blocks that lab workers around the world could easily assemble on their own, just as people began assembling their own radios and other electronic devices from commercially available electronic “breadboards” in the 1970s.

“When the electronic breadboard came out, that meant people didn’t have to worry about building their own resistors or capacitors. They could worry about what they actually wanted to use electronics for, which is to make the entire circuit,” Gomez-Marquez says.

In this case, the components consist of a sheet of paper or glass fiber sandwiched between a plastic or metal block and a glass cover. The blocks, which are about half an inch on each edge, can snap together along any edge.

• Some of the blocks contain channels for samples to flow straight through, 
• some have turns, and 
• some can receive a sample from a pipette or 
• mix multiple reagents together.

The blocks can also perform different biochemical functions. Many contain antibodies that can detect a specific molecule in a blood or urine sample. Those antibodies are attached to nanoparticles that change color when the target molecule is present, indicating a positive result.

These blocks can be aligned in different ways, allowing the user to create diagnostics based on one reaction or a series of reactions. In one example, the researchers combined blocks that detect three different molecules to create a test for isonicotinic acid, which can reveal whether tuberculosis patients are taking their medication.

The blocks are color-coded by function, making it easier to assemble predesigned devices using instructions that the researchers plan to put online. They also hope that users will develop and contribute their own specifications to the online guide.

Better performance

The researchers also showed that in some ways, these blocks can outperform previous versions of paper diagnostic devices. For example, they found that they could run a sample back and forth over a test strip multiple times, enhancing the signal. This could make it easier to get reliable results from urine and saliva samples, which are usually more dilute than blood samples, but are easier to obtain from patients.

“These are things that cannot be done with standard lateral flow tests, because those are not modular — you only get to run those once,” says Hamad-Schifferli.

The team is now working on tests for human papilloma virus, malaria, and Lyme disease, among others. They are also working on blocks that can synthesize useful compounds, including drugs, as well as blocks that incorporate electrical components such as LEDs.

The ultimate goal is to get the technology into the hands of small labs in both industrialized and developing countries, so they can create their own diagnostics. The MIT team has already sent them to labs in Chile and Nicaragua, where they have been used to develop devices to monitor patient adherence to TB treatment and to test for a genetic variant that makes malaria more difficult to treat.

Catherine Klapperich, associate dean for research and an associate professor of biomedical engineering at Boston University, says the MIT team’s work will help to make the diagnostic design process more inclusive.

“By reducing the barriers to designing new point-of-care paperfluidics, the work invites nonexperts in and will certainly result in new ideas and collaborations in settings all around the world,” says Klapperich, who was not involved in the research. “The practical demonstrations of the system presented here are poised to be immediately useful, while the possibilities for others to build on the tool are large.”

The researchers are now investigating large-scale manufacturing techniques, and they hope to launch a company to manufacture and distribute the kits around the world.

“We are excited to open the platform to other researchers so they can use the blocks and generate their own reactions,” Young says.

The research was funded by a gift from Autodesk and the U.S. Public Health Service.

ORIGINAL: MIT News

By Anne Trafton | MIT News Office 

May 16, 2018

This Hard-to-Destroy Drone Goes From Rigid to Flexible When It Crashes

Image: EPFL Don't worry, the drone is fine!

Anyone who’s ever flown a drone of any sort will tell you that sooner or later, you’re going to crash it. The question is how exactly you will go about doing this, and how much of the drone will be functional after it’s happened. Most flying animals somewhat frustratingly don’t have this problem: Birds and insects run into things occasionally (or all the time, for small bugs), and just shrug it off and keep on going, thanks to their biological design, which includes both stiffness and flexibility. Now roboticists at the EPFL, in Lausanne, Switzerland, are relying on these same qualities to design a highly resilient quadrotor that’s impressively difficult to destroy.

There are three primary strategies for designing drones with impact resistance.

1. The first is to just protect the propellers by surrounding them with the frame of the drone or with individual propeller guards. Most commercial drones have something like this. With this level of protection, you’re less likely to injure people, but since the prop protection is rigid, you’re more likely to injure the drone itself if (I mean, when) you crash it. The EPFL quadrotor uses a flexible frame that locks in place with magnets. When a collision occurs, the frame breaks away from the magnets, and once the energy is dissipated, elastic bands pull the frame back together and you’re good to go.
2. The second level of impact protection is to design your drone in a way that it can absorb energy from the crash without breaking into pieces. One way of doing that is to decouple the frame of the drone by, say, using flexible, elastic couplers. This gives you a “squishy” drone, which is very effective at handling impacts, but it’s also squishy in-flight, which causes all kinds of structural and stability problems. 
3. The most impressive level of impact protection that we’ve seen in drones is the brute force approach of just surrounding the entire thing with a flexible, rotating cage. Flyability has made a compelling business case for using drones with protective cages, and for some applications, it’s fantastic. You do, however, pay a penalty, since the cage can increase the overall size of the drone by upwards of 60 percent, meaning that it’s safer to run into things, but you’re also much more likely to run into things. The cage adds mass as well, leading to a drone that can’t lift as much or fly as far.

EPFL’s idea is a compromise of sorts: They’ve managed to create a drone with a frame that’s rigid right up until it smashes into something, at which point it turns flexible:

The inspiration for this design came from insect wings. To fly, insects need wings with high stiffness, but flexibility is critical for absorbing shock, and wasps do it with a special joint that allows the entire wing to “reversibly crumple” during a collision, as the EPFL researchers explain:

Wasp wings display dual stiffness, that is the ability to reversibly transition between rigid and soft states, which provides mechanical resilience without impairing flight performances. The wings of wasps contain a flexible resilin joint... This design allows the wing tip to slightly flex during flight (rigid state), but reversibly crumple… during collisions (soft state). If the dual-stiffness behavior is impaired... the rigid wings undergo severe tear during collision. Therefore, this design provides crash resilience by effectively preventing wing overload during collisions without compromising flight capabilities.

Image: EPFL The quadcopter has two main parts: the external frame and a central case. They are held together by magnetic joints, each with two magnets and a spring (inset).

The quadrotor that the researchers came up with uses a flexible frame that locks in place around the core of the quadrotor with magnets. When a collision occurs, the frame breaks away from the magnets, absorbing the energy of the collision. Once the energy is dissipated, elastic bands pull the frame back into its original configuration, and the magnets snap together again, and you’re good to go.

The uniqueness of the proposed design lies in the fact that the frame is rigid during flight, but softens during collisions. This allows combination of the advantages of both rigid and soft systems: stability and rapid response to user commands during flight, leading to flight performance equivalent to a drone equipped with a standard rigid frame, and crash resilience like a soft system. The experiments showed a satisfying survivability of the frame of the drone, that withstood roughly 50 collisions with no permanent damage.

The researchers, who are members of EPFL’s Laboratory of Intelligent Systems, suggest that an approach like this could be useful for all kinds of robots, not just drones. Most robots are rigid for various performance reasons (like precision), but the ability to be flexible when necessary without using intrinsically soft materials could could come in handy for grasping, locomotion, or simply as an added safety measure for human-robot interaction tasks.

S. Mintchev, Member, IEEE, S. de Rivaz and D. Floreano, Senior Member, IEEE
“Insect-Inspired Mechanical Resilience for Multicopters,” by S. Mintchev, S. de Rivas, and D. Floreano from EPFL was published in the 25 January 2017 issue of IEEE Robotics and Automation Letters.

[ EPFL ]

ORIGINAL: IEEE Spectrum
By Evan Ackerman
Posted 9 Mar 2017

Hybrid solid-state system harvests more hydrogen from water

(From left) Junyoung Kim, Professor Guntae Kim, and Ohhun Gwona are part of the team who developed the Hybrid-SOEC, a more efficient new system for producing hydrogen(Credit:UNIST)

Clean and plentiful, hydrogen is a promising fuel source, but there are a few problems standing in the way of it becoming mainstream. South Korean scientists have now developed a new system for producing hydrogen from water, which that they say overcomes some of these issues and produces the gas more efficiently than other water electrolysis systems.

The new device was developed by a research team consisting of scientists from the 

• Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST), 
• Korea Institute of Energy Research (KIER) and 
• Sookmyung Women's University, 

and is based on an existing design called a solid oxide electrolyzer cell (SOEC).

These work like other electrolyzers in that an electrical current splits water into its constituent molecules – hydrogen and oxygen – which can then be harvested. The difference is that in this setup, both electrodes are solid-state, as is the electrolyte that carries the ions between them.

This has a few advantages over systems that use liquid electrolytes – namely, 

• the liquids need to be topped up occasionally, and over time they tend to corrode other components. 
• And since solid-state electrolyzers operate at higher temperatures, they don't need as much electrical energy to function because they can draw energy from that heat.

But SOECs still have room for improvement. There are two main designs that use different electrolytes: 

• One allows only oxygen ions to pass through, and 
• the other only hydrogen ions. 

In either case, that one-way street limits the amount of hydrogen that can be produced.

So the researchers developed a new Hybrid-SOEC, which uses a mixed-ion conductor to transport both negatively-charged oxygen ions and positively-charged hydrogen ions (protons) at the same time. The end result had all the benefits of a solid-state electrolyzer, with improved efficiency.

"By controlling the driving environment of the hydrogen ion conductive electrolyte, a 'mixed ion conductive electrolyte' in which two ions pass can be realized," says Junyoung Kim, first author of the study. "In Hybrid-SOEC where this electrolyte was first introduced, water electrolysis occurred at both electrodes, which results in significant increase in total hydrogen production."

Using the mixed-ion conductor and electrodes made of layered perovskite, the Hybrid-SOEC produced 1.9 liters (0.5 gal) of hydrogen per hour, running at a cell voltage of 1.5 V and a temperature of 700° C (1,292° F). The researchers say that's four times more efficient than existing water electrolysis systems, and after running the device continuously for 60 hours, there were no signs of that performance degrading.

The research was published in the journal Nano Energy.

Source: UNIST

ORIGINAL: New Atlas

Michael Irving

December 28th, 2017

This Living Light is powered by a houseplant

1- The lamp works using photosynthesis. As organic compounds are released in the soil, bacteria generates electrons and protons. Those in turn are used as a battery to power the light.

Imagine a lamp that doesn’t need to be plugged in – and that you have to water once a week. Ermi van Oers is making it happen with this incredible plant-turned-lamp. The Living Light is an off-grid light that’s powered by a houseplant instead of an electrical socket.

2- The healthier your plant is, the more photosynthesis takes place and the more energy you generate, which is a pretty cool way to gauge how happy your plant lamp is.

3- Imagine a lamp that doesn't need to be plugged in and that you have to water once a week. Ermi van Oers is making it happen with this incredible plant-turned-lamp. The Living Light uses a houseplant to generate its energy in a totally self-sufficient, off-grid system that doesn't need an electric socket to power up.

As organic compounds are released into the soil from photosynthesis, bacteria generates electrons and protons. These particles are tapped as an energy source to power the light. The healthier the plant is, the more photosynthesis takes place – and the more energy the system generates. It’s a pretty cool way to gauge how happy your plant lamp is.

4- Living Light produces up to 0.1mW of energy, which isn't enough to light an entire room, but is plenty to act as your evening reading lamp.

5- Living Light produces up to 0.1mW of energy, which isn't enough to light an entire room, but is plenty to act as your evening reading lamp.

6- The plant and the light form a circle of energy that can go off-grid and requires no electric socket to work.

7- The project was featured at this year's Dutch Design Week.

8- Imagine a lamp that doesn't need to be plugged in and that you have to water once a week. Ermi van Oers is making it happen with this incredible plant-turned-lamp. The Living Light uses a houseplant to generate its energy in a totally self-sufficient, off-grid system that doesn't need an electric socket to power up.

The Living Light produces up to 0.1mW of energy, which isn’t enough to light an entire room, but it’s plenty to act as your evening reading lamp.

Van Oers and team aren’t done yet – they’re working on increasing the energy output, and they imagine that entire towns could be powered by forests one day.

+ Ermi van Oers

Via Dezeen

ORIGINAL: Inhabitat

by Kristine Lofgren

11/17/2017

Scientists Develop A Battery That Can Run For More Than A Decade

Credit: Harvard University

Researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have developed a new flow battery that stores energy in organic molecules dissolved in neutral pH water. This new chemistry allows for a

• non-toxic,
• non-corrosive battery
• with an exceptionally long lifetime and
• offers the potential to significantly decrease the costs of production.

The research, published in ACS Energy Letters, was led by Michael Aziz, the Gene and Tracy Sykes Professor of Materials and Energy Technologies and Roy Gordon, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of Chemistry and Professor of Materials Science.

A Neutral pH Aqueous Organic–Organometallic Redox Flow Battery with Extremely High Capacity Retention
Eugene S. Beh†‡ , Diana De Porcellinis†#, Rebecca L. Gracia∥, Kay T. Xia∥, Roy G. Gordon*†‡, and Michael J. Aziz*†

† John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, United States
‡ Department of Chemistry and Chemical Biology, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, United States
# Department of Chemical Science and Technologies, University of Rome “Tor Vergata”, 00133 Rome, Italy
∥ Harvard College, Cambridge, Massachusetts 02138, United States
ACS Energy Lett., 2017, 2 (3), pp 639–644
DOI: 10.1021/acsenergylett.7b00019
Publication Date (Web): February 7, 2017
Copyright © 2017 American Chemical Society
*E-mail: gordon@chemistry.harvard.edu., *E-mail: maziz@harvard.edu.

Abstract

We demonstrate an aqueous organic and organometallic redox flow battery utilizing reactants composed of only earth-abundant elements and operating at neutral pH. The positive electrolyte contains bis((3-trimethylammonio)propyl)ferrocene dichloride, and the negative electrolyte contains bis(3-trimethylammonio)propyl viologen tetrachloride; these are separated by an anion-conducting membrane passing chloride ions. Bis(trimethylammoniopropyl) functionalization leads to ∼2 M solubility for both reactants, suppresses higher-order chemical decomposition pathways, and reduces reactant crossover rates through the membrane. Unprecedented cycling stability was achieved with capacity retention of 99.9943%/cycle and 99.90%/day at a 1.3 M reactant concentration, increasing to 99.9989%/cycle and 99.967%/day at 0.75–1.00 M; these represent the highest capacity retention rates reported to date versus time and versus cycle number. We discuss opportunities for future performance improvement, including chemical modification of a ferrocene center and reducing the membrane resistance without unacceptable increases in reactant crossover. This approach may provide the decadal lifetimes that enable organic–organometallic redox flow batteries to be cost-effective for grid-scale electricity storage, thereby enabling massive penetration of intermittent renewable electricity.

Flow batteries store energy in liquid solutions in external tanks—the bigger the tanks, the more energy they store. Flow batteries are a promising storage solution for renewable, intermittent energy like wind and solar but today’s flow batteries often suffer degraded energy storage capacity after many charge-discharge cycles, requiring periodic maintenance of the electrolyte to restore the capacity.

By modifying the structures of molecules used in the positive and negative electrolyte solutions, and making them water soluble, the Harvard team was able to engineer a battery that loses only one percent of its capacity per 1000 cycles.

“Lithium ion batteries don’t even survive 1000 complete charge/discharge cycles,” said Aziz.

“Because we were able to dissolve the electrolytes in neutral water, this is a long-lasting battery that you could put in your basement,” said Gordon. “If it spilled on the floor, it wouldn’t eat the concrete and since the medium is noncorrosive, you can use cheaper materials to build the components of the batteries, like the tanks and pumps.”

This reduction of cost is important. The Department of Energy (DOE) has set a goal of building a battery that can store energy for less than $100 per kilowatt-hour, which would make stored wind and solar energy competitive to energy produced from traditional power plants.

“If you can get anywhere near this cost target then you change the world,” said Aziz. “It becomes cost effective to put batteries in so many places. This research puts us one step closer to reaching that target.”

“This work on aqueous soluble organic electrolytes is of high significance in pointing the way towards future batteries with vastly improved cycle life and considerably lower cost,” said Imre Gyuk, Director of Energy Storage Research at the Office of Electricity of the DOE. “I expect that efficient, long duration flow batteries will become standard as part of the infrastructure of the electric grid.”

The key to designing the battery was to first figure out why previous molecules were degrading so quickly in neutral solutions, said Eugene Beh, a postdoctoral fellow and first author of the paper. By first identifying how the molecule viologen in the negative electrolyte was decomposing, Beh was able to modify its molecular structure to make it more resilient.

Next, the team turned to ferrocene, a molecule well known for its electrochemical properties, for the positive electrolyte.

“Ferrocene is great for storing charge but is completely insoluble in water,” said Beh. “It has been used in other batteries with organic solvents, which are flammable and expensive.”

But by functionalizing ferrocene molecules in the same way as with the viologen, the team was able to turn an insoluble molecule into a highly soluble one that could also be cycled stably.

“Aqueous soluble ferrocenes represent a whole new class of molecules for flow batteries,” said Aziz.

The neutral pH should be especially helpful in lowering the cost of the ion-selective membrane that separates the two sides of the battery. Most flow batteries today use expensive polymers that can withstand the aggressive chemistry inside the battery. They can account for up to one third of the total cost of the device. With essentially salt water on both sides of the membrane, expensive polymers can be replaced by cheap hydrocarbons.

This research was coauthored by Diana De Porcellinis, Rebecca Gracia, and Kay Xia. It was supported by the Office of Electricity Delivery and Energy Reliability of the DOE and by the DOE’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy.

With assistance from Harvard’s Office of Technology Development (OTD), the researchers are working with several companies to scale up the technology for industrial applications and to optimize the interactions between the membrane and the electrolyte. Harvard OTD has filed a portfolio of pending patents on innovations in flow battery technology.

ORIGINAL: Daily Accord
Credit: Harvard University
Feb 9, 2017 

MIT Just Created Living Plants That Glow Like A Lamp, And Could Grow Glowing Trees To Replace Streetlights

Roads of the future could be lit by glowing trees instead of streetlamps, thanks to a breakthrough in creating bioluminescent plants. Experts injected specialized nanoparticles into the leaves of a watercress plant, which caused it to give off a dim light for nearly four hours. This could solve lots of problems.

The chemical involved, which produced enough light to read a book by, is the same as is used by fireflies to create their characteristic shine. To create their glowing plants, engineers from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) turned to an enzyme called luciferase. Luciferase acts on a molecule called luciferin, causing it to emit light.

 

Roads of the future could be lit by glowing trees instead of streetlamps, thanks to a breakthrough in creating bioluminescent plants. Experts created a watercress plant which caused it to glow for nearly four hours and gave off enough light to illuminate this book

Another molecule called Co-enzyme A helps the process along by removing a reaction byproduct that can inhibit luciferase activity. The MIT team packaged each of these components into a different type of nanoparticle carrier.

The nanoparticles help them to get to the right part of the plant and also prevent them from building to concentrations that could be toxic to the plants. The result was a watercress plant that functioned like a desk lamp.

Researchers believe with further tweaking, the technology could also be used to provide lights bright enough to illuminate a workspace or even an entire street, as well as low-intensity indoor lighting. 

Michael Strano, professor of chemical engineering at MIT and the senior author of the study, said: 'The vision is to make a plant that will function as a desk lamp — a lamp that you don't have to plug in. The light is ultimately powered by the energy metabolism of the plant itself. Our work very seriously opens up the doorway to streetlamps that are nothing but treated trees, and to indirect lighting around homes.'

Luciferases make up a class of oxidative enzymes found in several species that enable them to 'bioluminesce', or emit light. Fireflies are able to emit light via a chemical reaction.

In the chemical reaction luciferin is converted to oxyluciferin by the luciferase enzyme. Some of the energy released by this reaction is in the form of light. The reaction is highly efficient, meaning nearly all the energy put into the reaction is rapidly converted to light.

Lighting accounts for around 20 per cent of worldwide energy consumption, so replacing them with naturally bioluminescent plants would represent a significant cut to CO2 emissions. The researchers’ early efforts at the start of the project yielded plants that could glow for about 45 minutes, which they have since improved to 3.5 hours.

The light generated by one ten centimetre (four inch) watercress seedling is currently about one-thousandth of the amount needed to properly read by, but it was enough to illuminate the words on a page of John Milton's Paradise Lost.

The MIT team believes it can boost the light emitted, as well as the duration of light, by further optimising the concentration and release rates of the chemical components. For future versions of this technology, the team hopes to develop a way to paint or spray the nanoparticles onto plant leaves, which could make it possible to transform trees and other large plants into light sources. 

The researchers have also demonstrated that they can turn the light off by adding nanoparticles carrying a luciferase inhibitor. This could enable them to eventually create plants that shut off their light emission in response to environmental conditions such as sunlight, they say.

The full findings of the study were published in the American Chemical Society journal Nano Letters.

ORIGINAL: The Space Academy
December 18, 2017