Storming of the United States Capitol

On January 6, 2021, at the behest of United States President Donald Trump, his supporters stormed the United States Capitol, breaching security and occupying parts of the building for several hours. The event disrupted a joint session of Congress to count the vote of the Electoral College and certify Joe Biden's victory in the 2020 presidential election.

On January 5 and 6, thousands of Trump supporters gathered in Washington, D.C. to protest against the election results, which Trump had been falsely claiming were due to electoral fraud. Trump, his supporters, and allies were demanding that Vice President Mike Pence and Congress reject Biden's victory.  On the morning of January 6, protesters assembled at the "Save America" rally on the Ellipse, where President Trump, Donald Trump Jr., and Rudy Giuliani spoke. Trump encouraged his supporters to "fight like hell" for Republicans to "take back our country", and asked his supporters to march to the U.S. Capitol. Giuliani called for them to engage in "a trial by combat", and Trump Jr. used similar language to advocate "total war" and threatening fellow Republicans in Congress “we’re coming for you” if they didn’t back the undoing of his father’s electoral defeat.

The demonstration culminated in a violent attack on the Capitol by Trump supporters.  Congress was in session at the time, conducting the Electoral College vote count and debating the results of the vote. As the rioters entered the Capitol, breaking through windows and soon after through the doors, Capitol security evacuated the Senate and House of Representatives chambers. Several buildings in the Capitol complex were evacuated, and all buildings in the complex were subsequently locked down. Rioters broke past security to occupy the evacuated Senate chamber while guards drew handguns to prevent entry to the evacuated House floor. The evacuated office of the Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi was occupied.

A woman was shot by law enforcement officers as she attempted to enter the House chamber through a broken window and later died of her injuries; three others died as a result of medical emergencies throughout the day. Three improvised explosive devices were reported to have been found: one on Capitol grounds, and one each at the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee offices.

Trump reacted slowly to the storming, eventually praising the rioters while telling them to "go home in peace"; he described the rioters as being "great patriots" and "very special", expressed "love" for them, and attributed the insurrection to a "stolen election".  As a result, Twitter temporarily locked Trump's account and removed three of his tweets for violations of its civic integrity policy, while Facebook banned him indefinitely after initially taking similar temporary measures. The crowd was dispersed out of the U.S. Capitol later that evening. The process to certify Electoral College results resumed shortly after 8:00 p.m. (EST) and continued to its conclusion the following morning.

These events transpired after weeks of numerous failed attempts by Trump and his supporters to overturn the election results.  The riots and storming of the Capitol were described as insurrection, sedition, and domestic terrorism.  Some news outlets labeled the act as an attempted coup d'état by Trump. The incident was the first time the Capitol had been overrun since the 1814 burning of Washington by the British during the War of 1812.  Under pressure from his own administration, Trump reluctantly committed to an "orderly transition" of power in a statement after the violence.

The events prompted widespread condemnation by political and corporate leaders across the country. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell called the storming of the Capitol a "failed insurrection."  Twitter and Facebook responded by locking Trump's accounts and removing posts related to the incident. On January 7, 2021, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senator Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called on vice president Mike Pence to formally invoke the 25th amendment, which would prevent Trump from exercising the powers of the presidency. The two Democratic congressional leaders also threatened to impeach Trump for a second time if Pence decides not to take any action.

                 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2021_storming_of_the_United_States_Capitol

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The Atlantic on the mob attacking the Capitol:   https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/republicans-meet-their-monster/ar-BB1cxker?ocid=msedgdhp

Shrill radio host Rush Limbaugh, the uncrowned prince of theocracy, supports more violence during his Thursday broadcast: Limbaugh dismisses calls to end violence after mob hits Capitol (msn.com)

Microwaving Coal Powder To Make Graphite

Researchers created an environment in a microwave oven to successfully convert raw coal powder into nano-graphite, which is used as a lubricant and in items ranging from fire extinguishers to lithium ion batteries.

January 6, 2021 -- Using copper foil, glass containers and a conventional household microwave oven, University of Wyoming researchers have demonstrated that pulverized coal powder can be converted into higher-value nano-graphite.

The discovery is another step forward in the effort to find alternative uses for Wyoming's Powder River Basin coal, at a time when demand for coal to generate electricity is declining due to concerns about climate change.

In a paper published in the journal Nano-Structures & Nano-Objects, the UW researchers report that they created an environment in a microwave oven to successfully convert raw coal powder into nano-graphite, which is used as a lubricant and in items ranging from fire extinguishers to lithium ion batteries. This "one-step method with metal-assisted microwave treatment" is a new approach that could represent a simple and relatively inexpensive coal-conversion technology.

"This method provides a new route to convert abundant carbon sources to high-value materials with ecological and economic benefits," wrote the research team, led by Associate Professor TeYu Chien, in UW's Department of Physics and Astronomy.

Others involved in the project were Professor Jinke Tang, in the Department of Physics and Astronomy; Associate Professor Brian Leonard, in the Department of Chemistry; Professor Maohong Fan, in the Department of Petroleum Engineering and the School of Energy Resources; graduate students Rabindra Dulal, of Nepal, Joann Hilman, of Laramie, Wyo., Chris Masi, of Syracuse, N.Y., and Teneil Schumacher, of Buffalo, Wyo.; and postdoctoral researchers Gaurab Rimal, of Nepal, and Bang Xu, of China.

While previous research has shown that microwaves can be used to reduce the moisture content of coal and remove sulfur and other minerals, most such methods require specific chemical pretreatment of the coal. In their experiment, the UW researchers simply ground raw Powder River Basin coal into powder.

That powder was then placed on copper foil and sealed in glass containers with a gas mixture of argon and hydrogen, before being placed in a microwave oven. A conventional microwave oven was chosen because of convenience and because it provided the desired levels of radiation.

"By cutting the copper foil into a fork shape, the sparks were induced by the microwave radiation, generating an extremely high temperature of more than 1,800 degrees Fahrenheit within a few seconds," says Masi, lead author of the paper. "This is why you shouldn't place a metal fork inside a microwave oven."

The sparks caused by the microwaves generated the high temperatures necessary to transform the coal powder into polycrystalline graphite, with the copper foil and hydrogen gas also contributing to the process.

While the experiment included microwave durations ranging from 3 to 45 minutes, the optimal duration was found to be 15 minutes.

The researchers say this new method of coal conversion could be refined and performed at a larger scale to yield both a higher quality and quantity of nano-graphite materials.

"Finite graphite reserves and environmental concerns for the graphite extraction procedures make this method of converting coal to graphite a great alternative source of graphite production," the scientists wrote.

                  https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/01/210106133023.htm

Promising Next-Generation Energy Material

These materials are exceptionally good at turning sunlight into electrical current in solar cells.

From:  SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory

By Glennda Chui

January 4, 2021 -- Polarons are fleeting distortions in a material’s atomic lattice that form around a moving electron in a few trillionths of a second, then quickly disappear. As ephemeral as they are, they affect a material’s behavior, and may even be the reason that solar cells made with lead hybrid perovskites achieve extraordinarily high efficiencies in the lab.

Now scientists at the Department of Energy’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have used the lab’s X-ray laser to watch and directly measure the formation of polarons for the first time. They reported their findings in Nature Materials today.

“These materials have taken the field of solar energy research by storm because of their high efficiencies and low cost, but people still argue about why they work,” said Aaron Lindenberg, an investigator with the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences (SIMES) at SLAC and associate professor at Stanford who led the research.

“The idea that polarons may be involved has been around for a number of years,” he said. “But our experiments are the first to directly observe the formation of these local distortions, including their size, shape and how they evolve.”

Exciting, complex and hard to understand

Perovskites are crystalline materials named after the mineral perovskite, which has a similar atomic structure. Scientists started to incorporate them into solar cells about a decade ago, and the efficiency of those cells at converting sunlight to energy has steadily increased, despite the fact that their perovskite components have a lot of defects that should inhibit the flow of current.

These materials are famously complex and hard to understand, Lindenberg said. While scientists find them exciting because they are both efficient and easy to make, raising the possibility that they could make solar cells cheaper than today’s silicon cells, they are also highly unstable, break down when exposed to air and contain lead that has to be kept out of the environment.

Previous studies at SLAC have delved into the nature of perovskites with an “electron camera” or with X-ray beams. Among other things, they revealed that light whirls atoms around in perovskites, and they also measured the lifetimes of acoustic phonons – sound waves ­– that carry heat through the materials.

For this study, Lindenberg’s team used the lab’s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS), a powerful X-ray free-electron laser that can image materials in near-atomic detail and capture atomic motions occurring in millionths of a billionth of a second. They looked at single crystals of the material synthesized by Associate Professor Hemamala Karunadasa’s group at Stanford.

They hit a small sample of the material with light from an optical laser and then used the X-ray laser to observe how the material responded over the course of tens of trillionths of a second.

Expanding bubbles of distortion

“When you put a charge into a material by hitting it with light, like what happens in a solar cell, electrons are liberated, and those free electrons start to move around the material,” said Burak Guzelturk, a scientist at DOE’s Argonne National Laboratory who was a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford at the time of the experiments.

“Soon they are surrounded and engulfed by a sort of bubble of local distortion – the polaron – that travels along with them,” he said. “Some people have argued that this ‘bubble’ protects electrons from scattering off defects in the material, and helps explain why they travel so efficiently to the solar cell’s contact to flow out as electricity.”

The hybrid perovskite lattice structure is flexible and soft ­– like “a strange combination of a solid and a liquid at the same time,” as Lindenberg puts it – and this is what allows polarons to form and grow.

Their observations revealed that polaronic distortions start very small ­– on the scale of a few angstroms, about the spacing between atoms in a solid – and rapidly expand outward in all directions to a diameter of about 5 billionths of a meter, which is about a 50-fold increase. This nudges about 10 layers of atoms slightly outward within a roughly spherical area over the course of tens of picoseconds, or trillionths of a second.

“This distortion is actually quite large, something we had not known before,” Lindenberg said. “That’s something totally unexpected.”

He added, “While this experiment shows as directly as possible that these objects really do exist, it doesn’t show how they contribute to the efficiency of a solar cell. There’s still further work to be done to understand how these processes affect the properties of these materials.”

LCLS is a DOE Office of Science user facility. Lindenberg is also an investigator with the Stanford PULSE Institute, which like SIMES is a joint institute of SLAC and Stanford. Scientists from the University of Cambridge in the U.K.; Aarhus University in Denmark; and Paderborn University and the Technical University of Munich in Germany also contributed to this study. Major funding came from the DOE Office of Science. 

Citation: Burak Guzelturk et al., Nature Materials, 4 January 2021 (10.1038/s41563-020-00865-5)

https://www6.slac.stanford.edu/news/2021-01-04-first-glimpse-polarons-forming-promising-next-gen-energy-material.aspx

Diamond Stretching for New Microelectronics Functions

From: City University of Hong Kong

December 31, 2020 -- Diamond is the hardest material in nature. But out of many expectations, it also has great potential as an excellent electronic material. A joint research team led by City University of Hong Kong (CityU) has demonstrated for the first time the large, uniform tensile elastic straining of microfabricated diamond arrays through the nanomechanical approach. Their findings have shown the potential of strained diamonds as prime candidates for advanced functional devices in microelectronics, photonics, and quantum information technologies.

The research was co-led by Dr Lu Yang, Associate Professor in the Department of Mechanical Engineering (MNE) at CityU and researchers from Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harbin Institute of Technology (HIT). Their findings have been recently published in the scientific journal Science, titled "Achieving large uniform tensile elasticity in microfabricated diamond."

"This is the first time showing the extremely large, uniform elasticity of diamond by tensile experiments. Our findings demonstrate the possibility of developing electronic devices through 'deep elastic strain engineering' of microfabricated diamond structures," said Dr Lu.

Diamond: "Mount Everest" of electronic materials

Well known for its hardness, industrial applications of diamonds are usually cutting, drilling, or grinding. But diamond is also considered as a high-performance electronic and photonic material due to its ultra-high thermal conductivity, exceptional electric charge carrier mobility, high breakdown strength and ultra-wide bandgap. Bandgap is a key property in semi-conductor, and wide bandgap allows operation of high-power or high-frequency devices. "That's why diamond can be considered as 'Mount Everest' of electronic materials, possessing all these excellent properties," Dr Lu said.

However, the large bandgap and tight crystal structure of diamond make it difficult to "dope," a common way to modulate the semi-conductors' electronic properties during production, hence hampering the diamond's industrial application in electronic and optoelectronic devices. A potential alternative is by "strain engineering," that is to apply very large lattice strain, to change the electronic band structure and associated functional properties. But it was considered as "impossible" for diamond due to its extremely high hardness.

Then in 2018, Dr Lu and his collaborators discovered that, surprisingly, nanoscale diamond can be elastically bent with unexpected large local strain. This discovery suggests the change of physical properties in diamond through elastic strain engineering can be possible. Based on this, the latest study showed how this phenomenon can be utilized for developing functional diamond devices.

Uniform tensile straining across the sample

The team firstly microfabricated single-crystalline diamond samples from a solid diamond single crystals. The samples were in bridge-like shape -- about one micrometre long and 300 nanometres wide, with both ends wider for gripping (See image: Tensile straining of diamond bridges). The diamond bridges were then uniaxially stretched in a well-controlled manner within an electron microscope. Under cycles of continuous and controllable loading-unloading of quantitative tensile tests, the diamond bridges demonstrated a highly uniform, large elastic deformation of about 7.5% strain across the whole gauge section of the specimen, rather than deforming at a localized area in bending. And they recovered their original shape after unloading.

By further optimizing the sample geometry using the American Society for Testing and Materials (ASTM) standard, they achieved a maximum uniform tensile strain of up to 9.7%, which even surpassed the maximum local value in the 2018 study, and was close to the theoretical elastic limit of diamond. More importantly, to demonstrate the strained diamond device concept, the team also realized elastic straining of microfabricated diamond arrays.

Tuning the bandgap by elastic strains

The team then performed density functional theory (DFT) calculations to estimate the impact of elastic straining from 0 to 12% on the diamond's electronic properties. The simulation results indicated that the bandgap of diamond generally decreased as the tensile strain increased, with the largest bandgap reduction rate down from about 5 eV to 3 eV at around 9% strain along a specific crystalline orientation. The team performed an electron energy-loss spectroscopy analysis on a pre-strained diamond sample and verified this bandgap decreasing trend.

Their calculation results also showed that, interestingly, the bandgap could change from indirect to direct with the tensile strains larger than 9% along another crystalline orientation. Direct bandgap in semi-conductor means an electron can directly emit a photon, allowing many optoelectronic applications with higher efficiency.

These findings are an early step in achieving deep elastic strain engineering of microfabricated diamonds. By nanomechanical approach, the team demonstrated that the diamond's band structure can be changed, and more importantly, these changes can be continuous and reversible, allowing different applications, from micro/nanoelectromechanical systems (MEMS/NEMS), strain-engineered transistors, to novel optoelectronic and quantum technologies. "I believe a new era for diamond is ahead of us," said Dr Lu.

The research at CityU was funded by the Hong Kong Research Grants Council and the National Natural Science Foundation of China.

Journal Reference:

1. Chaoqun Dang, et al. Achieving large uniform tensile elasticity in microfabricated diamond. Science, Jan 1st, 2021 DOI: 10.1126/science.abc4174

                      https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/12/201231141509.htm

Link Between Iron Levels and Lifespan

In an article revised on December 31, 2020, for Sciencealert, David Nield discusses a million-person study speculating that high iron levels in human blood decrease healthy lifespan.

Put simply, having too much iron in the blood appeared to be linked to an increased risk of dying earlier.

"We are very excited by these findings as they strongly suggest that high levels of iron in the blood reduces our healthy years of life, and keeping these levels in check could prevent age-related damage," said data analyst Paul Timmers, from the University of Edinburgh in the UK.

"We speculate that our findings on iron metabolism might also start to explain why very high levels of iron-rich red meat in the diet has been linked to age-related conditions such as heart disease."

While correlation doesn't necessarily mean causation, the researchers used a statistical technique called Mendelian randomisation to reduce bias and attempt to infer causation in the data. 

More at:  https://www.sciencealert.com/study-of-more-than-1-million-people-finds-intriguing-link-between-iron-levels-and-lifespan

UK Parliament Ratifies “Brexit”

The EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement (TCA) is a trade agreement signed on 30 December 2020, between the European Union (EU), the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) and the United Kingdom (UK). It is applied provisionally since 1 January 2021, when the Brexit transition period ended.

The agreement that governs the relationship between the EU and the UK after Brexit was concluded after eight months of negotiations.  It provides for free trade in goods and limited mutual market access in services, as well as for cooperation mechanisms in a range of policy areas, transitional provisions about EU access to UK fisheries, and UK participation in some EU programmes. Compared to the UK's previous status as an EU member state, on 1 January 2021 the following ended as they are not incorporated in the TCA or the Brexit withdrawal agreement: free movement of persons between the parties, UK membership in the European Single Market and Customs Union, UK participation in most EU programmes, part of EU-UK law enforcement and security cooperation, defense and foreign policy cooperation, and the authority of the European Court of Justice in dispute settlement (except with respect to the Northern Ireland Protocol).

The TCA awaits ratification by the European Parliament and the Council of the European Union and legal revision before it formally comes into effect. The UK Parliament ratified the TCA on 30 December 2020 and the European Parliament will consider the draft in early 2021.

Background

The UK became a member of the European Communities in 1973, which later became the EU and Euratom.  Since then, the UK contributed to making and was subject to EU law, whose application was governed by the European Court of Justice.

After the UK decided in a 2016 referendum to leave the EU ("Brexit"), it did so on 31 January 2020. Until 31 December 2020, a transition period applied, in which the UK was still considered for most matters to be part of the EU. After the first negotiations between the UK and the EU led to the Brexit withdrawal agreement hat implemented the UK's withdrawal, negotiations commenced for an agreement to govern trade and other relations between the EU and the UK after the end of the transition period.

Negotiations

The UK government led by Boris Johnson pursued a desire to trade freely with the EU while being subject to as few EU rules as possible, and especially not to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice. For its part, the EU insisted that the price for UK access to the European Single Market was compliance with EU subsidies, social, environmental and other regulations to avoid distorting competition in the single market. Another major point of contention was fisheries. Part of the impetus for Brexit was the British desire to regain full control over their fishing waters, whereas EU coastal states demanded to retain all or most of the fishing rights they enjoyed under the EU's Common Fisheries Policy.

The trade agreement, negotiated under increasing time pressure due to the end of the transition period on 31 December 2020, had to address all of these issues. Formal trade negotiations, in which Michel Barnier represented the EU and David Frost represented the UK, began on 31 March 2020. They were originally due to be concluded by the end of October 2020. However, negotiations continued and formally ended on 24 December 2020 when an agreement was reached in principle after ten negotiating rounds.

Contents

The 1,246-page agreement (including annexes) covers its general objectives and framework with detailed provisions for fisheries, social security, trade, transport, visas; and cooperation in judicial, law enforcement, and security matters. Other provisions include continued participation in community programmes and mechanisms for dispute resolution.

According to summaries of the agreement published by the European Commission and the UK government, the agreement provides for the following or has the following effects on the EU–UK relationship compared to when the UK was an EU member state. For Northern Ireland other arrangements may be in place through the Ireland/Northern Ireland Protocol.

[Topics include trade in goods,. trade in services, energy public policy and other aspects of trade, movement of persons, aviation and road transport, fisheries, cooperation and UK participation in EU programmes, and institutional provisions and dispute settlement.]

                                    EU–UK Trade and Cooperation Agreement - Wikipedia

Desalination Breakthrough for Cheaper Water

A complex problem that has baffled scientists for decades has been solved

From: University of Texas at Austin

December 31, 2020 -- Desalination membranes remove salt and other chemicals from water, a process critical to the health of society, cleaning billions of gallons of water for agriculture, energy production and drinking. The idea seems simple -- push salty water through and clean water comes out the other side -- but it contains complex intricacies that scientists are still trying to understand.

The research team, in partnership with DuPont Water Solutions, solved an important aspect of this mystery, opening the door to reduce costs of clean water production. The researchers determined desalination membranes are inconsistent in density and mass distribution, which can hold back their performance. Uniform density at the nanoscale is the key to increasing how much clean water these membranes can create.

"Reverse osmosis membranes are widely used for cleaning water, but there's still a lot we don't know about them," said Manish Kumar, an associate professor in the Department of Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering at UT Austin, who co-led the research. "We couldn't really say how water moves through them, so all the improvements over the past 40 years have essentially been done in the dark."

The findings were published today in Science.

The paper documents an increase in efficiency in the membranes tested by 30%-40%, meaning they can clean more water while using significantly less energy. That could lead to increased access to clean water and lower water bills for individual homes and large users alike.

Reverse osmosis membranes work by applying pressure to the salty feed solution on one side. The minerals stay there while the water passes through. Although more efficient than non-membrane desalination processes, it still takes a large amount of energy, the researchers said, and improving the efficiency of the membranes could reduce that burden.

"Fresh water management is becoming a crucial challenge throughout the world," said Enrique Gomez, a professor of chemical engineering at Penn State who co-led the research. "Shortages, droughts -- with increasing severe weather patterns, it is expected this problem will become even more significant. It's critically important to have clean water availability, especially in low-resource areas."

The National Science Foundation and DuPont, which makes numerous desalination products, funded the research. The seeds were planted when DuPont researchers found that thicker membranes were actually proving to be more permeable. This came as a surprise because the conventional knowledge was that thickness reduces how much water could flow through the membranes.

The team connected with Dow Water Solutions, which is now a part of DuPont, in 2015 at a "water summit" Kumar organized, and they were eager to solve this mystery. The research team, which also includes researchers from Iowa State University, developed 3D reconstructions of the nanoscale membrane structure using state-of-the-art electron microscopes at the Materials Characterization Lab of Penn State. They modeled the path water takes through these membranes to predict how efficiently water could be cleaned based on structure. Greg Foss of the Texas Advanced Computing Center helped visualize these simulations, and most of the calculations were performed on Stampede2, TACC's supercomputer.

Journal Reference:

1. Tyler E. Culp et al. Nanoscale control of internal inhomogeneity enhances water transport in desalination membranes. Science, Jan 1st, 2021 DOI: 10.1126/science.abb8518

                     https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/12/201231141511.htm