Chemical Storage of Energy

Chemistry Student in Sun

Harvest Breakthrough

The University of Copenhagen, May 5, 2015 -- The Sun is a huge source of energy. In just one hour, planet Earth is hit by so much sunshine that humankind could cover its energy needs for an entire year if only we knew how to harvest and save it. But storing sunshine is not trivial. Now a student at Department of Chemistry, University of Copenhagen has researched his way to a breakthrough which may prove pivotal for technologies trying to capture the energy of the sun, and saving it for a rainy day.

Solar energy breakthrough in European top journal

Anders Bo Skov has recently started studying for his Master’s degree in chemistry at University of Copenhagen. Together with his supervisor, Mogens Brøndsted Nielsen, he is publishing the paper ”Towards Solar Energy Storage in the Photochromic Dihydroazulene-Vinylheptafulvene System” in the journal “Chemistry – A European Journal”.

Efficient solar storage blocked by apparant law of nature

Professor Brøndsted is in charge of “Center for Exploitation of Solar Energy” at University of Copenhagen. Here his team is attempting to develop molecules capable of harvesting and holding substantial amounts of solar energy, storing it for significant amounts of time, and releasing it on demand. Regrettably, a year of research had them butting their heads against what looked like an irksome law of nature. As the capacity of the molecules to hold energy seemed to improve, the capacity to store it over time dropped; and vice versa.

Doubled capacity- Multiplied time

The group is working with molecules known as the Dihydroazulene-Vinylheptafulvene system. Put very simply, this stores energy by changing shape, but every time the Brøndsted group managed to design improved molecules, the molecules lost some of their ability to hold their “energy storage” shape, says professor Brøndsted.

“Regardless of what we did to prevent it, the molecules would change their shape back and release the stored energy after just an hour or two. Anders’ achievement was that he managed to double the energy density in a molecule that can hold its shape for a hundred years. Our only problem now is how we get it to release the energy again. The molecule does not seem to want to change its shape back again“, grins Mogens Brøndsted.

Success in the nick of time

During his Bachelor studies Anders Bo Skov had four months to improve Brøndsted’s unstable molecule for his bachelor project. And he made it in the nick of time. Chemistry is a lot like baking. No bread is likely to come out of the oven if, for example, the flour disappears while the dough is proving. Using that analogy, Skov’s “bread” persisted in disappearing between his very hands. The molecules he was working with were that unstable.

“My chemical “recipe” demanded four synthesis steps in order to work. The first three were a piece of cake. I had them working in just a month. Getting the last step in order took me three months”, explains Skov.

When theory meets reality and reality wins

Regardless of method, when you store energy, there is a theoretical limit to the energy density… And then there is reality. In theory, a kilogram of the right molecules could store a megajoule of energy if they were perfectly designed. With that amount of energy you can heat three liters of water from room temperature to boiling.

A kilo of Skov’s molecules can boil only 75 centiliters but it does that in just three minutes. This means that his molecules could bring 15 liters of water to boil per hour, and Skov as well as his supervisor are convinced that this is just the beginning.

“What Anders has achieved is an important breakthrough. Admittedly we do not have a good method to release the energy on demand, and we should increase the energy density further still. But now we know which path to take in order to succeed”, says a visibly enthusiastic professor Mogens Brøndsted.

Solar batteries might make nice cup of tea

Skov too is excited: Mostly because his molecules are sustainable on more levels than just the obvious one. Not only do they harvest sustainable solar energy. They are also completely non-toxic, he relates.

“When it comes to storing solar power, our biggest competition comes from lithium ion batteries, and lithium is a poisonous metal. My molecule releases neither CO2, nor any other chemical compounds while working. It is “Sunlight in-power out”. And when the molecule wears out one day, it degrades to a colorant which is also found in chamomile flowers”, explains the Masters student.

http://news.ku.dk/all_news/2015/05/chemistry-student-in-sun-harvest-breakthrough/

 

Soon: Robot Dogs!

Robot Pets to Rise in an Overpopulated, Tech-Crazed World

University of Melbourne, May 12, 2015 --Robotic dogs are likely to replace the real thing in households worldwide in as little as a decade, as our infatuation with technology grows and more people migrate to high-density city living.

 

University of Melbourne animal welfare researcher Dr Jean-Loup Rault says the prospect of robopets and virtual pets is not as far-fetched as we may think.

His paper in the latest edition of Frontiers in Veterinary Science argues pets will soon become a luxury in an overpopulated world and the future may lie in chips and circuits that mimic the real thing.

“It might sound surreal for us to have robotic or virtual pets, but it could be totally normal for the next generation,” Dr Rault said.

“It’s not a question of centuries from now. If 10 billion human beings live on the planet in 2050 as predicted, it’s likely to occur sooner than we think. If you’d described Facebook to someone 20 years ago, they’d think you were crazy. But we are already seeing people form strong emotional bonds with robot dogs in Japan.

“Pet robotics has come a long way from the Tamagotchi craze of the mid-90s. In Japan, people are becoming so attached to their robot dogs that they hold funerals for them when the circuits die.”

Dr Rault embarked on research for the paper after discovering a huge lack of information about how technology may influence our relationships with animals in the future.

“You won’t find a lot of research on pet robotics out there, but if you Google robot dogs, there are countless patents. Everyone wants to get ahead of this thing because there is a market and it will take off in the next 10 to 15 years.”

But the emergence of robotic pets is a double-edged sword, he warns. They can benefit people who are allergic to pets, short on space, in hospital, or scared of real animals, but the ethics of depending on a robot for companionship begs many big ethical questions.

“Robots can, without a doubt, trigger human emotions,” Dr Rault added. “If artificial pets can produce the same benefits we get from live pets, does that mean that our emotional bond with animals is really just an image that we project on to our pets?”

As an animal welfare researcher, Dr Rault is particularly interested in whether a surge in popularity of disposable fake pets could lead to a shift in how humanity treats animals.

“Of course we care about live animals, but if we become used to a robotic companion that doesn’t need food, water or exercise, perhaps it will change how humans care about other living beings.”

Dr Rault says it’s not too far-fetched to imagine that robot pets of the future could feature bonafide Artificial Intelligence and could learn to think and respond on their own.

“When engineers work on robotic dogs, they work on social intelligence, they address what people need from their dogs: companionship, love, obedience, dependence,” he said. 

“They want to know everything about animal behaviour so they can replicate it as close as possible to a real pet.”

And what about robotic cats? “Well, that’s a little harder because you have to make them unpredictable,” he concluded.

Facts about robopets

•                                  The Sony AIBO robotic pet dog is the most well known commercially available attempt at an artificial pet. Children treat the AIBO as if it were a living dog. Research shows people tend to give AIBO a status of its own, somewhere between an animal and an object.
•                                  Paro, a robotic baby seal, is being used in the USA as therapy for medical patients
•                                  Virtual worlds, where people can own animals, have been very successful – HappyFarm had 23 million users every day at its peak.
•                                  More than 76 million Tamagotchis were sold worldwide.

http://newsroom.melbourne.edu/news/robot-pets-rise-overpopulated-tech-crazed-world?_ga=1.190487598.447189447.1431490311

Auroras on Mars

By Dr. Tony Phillips

NASA -- May 11, 2015:  One day, when humans go to Mars, they might find that, occasionally, the Red Planet has green skies. 

In late Dec. 2014, NASA's MAVEN spacecraft detected evidence of widespread auroras in Mars's northern hemisphere.  The "Christmas Lights," as researchers called them, circled the globe and descended so close to the Martian equator that, if the lights had occurred on Earth, they would have been over places like Florida and Texas.

"It really is amazing," says Nick Schneider who leads MAVEN's Imaging Ultraviolet Spectrograph (IUVS) instrument team at the University of Colorado.  "Auroras on Mars appear to be more wide ranging than we ever imagined."

This isn't the first time a spacecraft has detected auroras on Mars.  Ten years ago, the European Space Agency's Mars Express found an ultraviolet glow coming from "magnetic umbrellas" in the southern hemisphere.

Unlike Earth, Mars does not have a global magnetic field that envelops the entire planet.  Instead, Mars has umbrella-shaped magnetic fields that sprout out of the ground like mushrooms, here and there, but mainly in the southern hemisphere.  These umbrellas are remnants of an ancient global field that decayed billions of years ago.   

"The canopies of the patchwork umbrellas are where we expect to find Martian auroras," says Schneider. "But MAVEN is seeing them outside these umbrellas, so this is something new."

Auroras occur, both on Earth and Mars, when energetic particles from space rain down on the upper atmosphere.  On Earth, these particles are guided toward the poles by our planet's global magnetic field.  That's why auroras are seen most often around the Arctic and Antarctic. On Mars, there is no organized planetary magnetic field to guide the particles north and south—so they can go anywhere.

"The particles seem to precipitate into the atmosphere anywhere they want," says Schneider. "Magnetic fields in the solar wind drape across Mars, even into the atmosphere, and the charged particles just follow those field lines down into the atmosphere."

According to the MAVEN data, solar particles that caused the "Christmas lights" penetrated deeply into the Martian atmosphere---sparking auroras less than 100 km from the surface.  That's lower than auroras on Earth, which range from 100 km to 500 km high.

Like Mars Express 10 years ago, MAVEN has an ultraviolet camera, so it is not seeing the same thing as human eyes.  What would a human see?

Schneider isn't certain. "We’re still doing the physics," he says, "but we have some educated guesses."

Although the Martian atmosphere is primarily CO₂, it does contain some oxygen--and that is key to the color of the auroras. Excited oxygen atoms in the Martian atmosphere would likely produce green light.

"A diffuse green glow seems quite possible in the Mars sky, at least when the Sun is throwing off energetic particles," says Schneider.

MAVEN arrived at Mars in Sept. 2014 on a mission to investigate a planetary mystery:  Billions of years ago, Mars was blanketed by layer of air massive enough to warm the planet and allow liquid water to flow on its surface. Life could have thrived in such an environment. Today, however, only a tiny fraction of that ancient air remains, leaving Mars a desiccated wasteland. 

Where did the Martian atmosphere go?  A favorite theory is solar wind erosion.  Because Mars no longer has a global magnetic field to protect it, solar wind might strip away material from the upper layers of the atmosphere. Watching the auroras could help MAVEN mission scientists learn more about this process.

"Plus," says Schneider, who is looking forward to future data, "I just love auroras."

http://science.nasa.gov/science-news/science-at-nasa/2015/11may_aurorasonmars/

Street Smarts -- Argentina Style

Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre  is a clever and personable Argentine native who as a young adult went through the chaos in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 2001.  He has written about it and has become something of a zen master of urban survival;  He’s widely respected by survivalists internationally, including in the United States.  Below is a recent entry on his blog.

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Argentina’s “Strongest Man”

Stabbed to Death by Scavenger

Alan Garay (43 years old) was a 260 pound “strongman” that won competitions both in Argentina and Spain. He could lift 880 pounds, pull 15 ton trucks and lift cars with little problem, but that didn’t save him from getting killed two days ago in the province of Mendoza, Argentina.

After an argument with Fernando Pezetti, a 50 year old cartonero (paper and trash scavenger) over trash left on the sidewalk next to his house,  Mr. Garay got into a fight with the man, easily overpowering him and punching him in the face. As Garay left, the scavenger produced a knife and stabbed him twice in the torso. The neighbors called for help but Garay was dead by the time help arrived.

Garay had lived in Madrid for ten years and had recenlty moved back to Argentina. He worked security at night clubs and at times was part of security details of international celebrities.

Lessons Learned:

1)  Don’t get into a fight if you can avoid it.
2)  Don’t EVER underestimate your opponent, even if you’re literally the strongest man in the country going against some random 50 year old hobo.
3)  Always assume your opponent may be armed, NEVER turn your back on him.
4)  Knives are ALWAYS lethal weapons. They don’t jam, they don’t run out of ammo and its practically impossible to pry one away from an attacker without losing a few fingers.
5)  Again, just don’t get into fights, ESPECIALLY against someone that has nothing to lose.

                                           -- FerFAL

Fernando “FerFAL” Aguirre is the author of “The Modern Survival Manual: Surviving the Economic Collapse” and “Bugging Out and Relocating: When Staying is not an Option”.

http://ferfal.blogspot.com/

The Quasicrystal Revolution

          Not to be confused with Quasi-crystals (supramolecular).

A quasiperiodic crystal, or quasicrystal, is a structure that is ordered but not periodic.  A quasicrystalline pattern can continuously fill all available space, but it lacks translational symmetry.  While crystals, according to the classical crystallographic restriction theorem, can possess only two, three, four, and six-fold rotational symmetries, the Bragg diffraction pattern of quasicrystals shows sharp peaks with other symmetry orders, for instance five-fold.

Aperiodic tilings were discovered by mathematicians in the early 1960s, and, some twenty years later, they were found to apply to the study of quasicrystals. The discovery of these aperiodic forms in nature has produced a paradigm shift in the fields of crtystallography.  Quasicrystals had been investigated and observed earlier, but, until the 1980s, they were disregarded in favor of the prevailing views about the atomic structure of matter. In 2009, after a dedicated search, a mineralogical finding, icosahedrite, offered evidence for the existence of natural quasicrystals.

Roughly, an ordering is non-periodic if it lacks translational symmetry, which means that a shifted copy will never match exactly with its original. The more precise mathematical definition is that there is never translational symmetry in more than n – 1 linearly independent directions, where n is the dimension of the space filled, e.g., the three-dimensional tiling displayed in a quasicrystal may have translational symmetry in two dimensions. The ability to diffract comes from the existence of an indefinitely large number of elements with a regular spacing, a property loosely described as long-range order.  Experimentally, the aperiodicity is revealed in the unusual symmetry of the diffraction pattern, that is, symmetry of orders other than two, three, four, or six. In 1982 materials scientist Dan Shechtman observed that certain aluminium-manganese alloys produced the unusual diffractograms which today are seen as revelatory of quasicrystal structures. Due to fear of the scientific community's reaction, it took him two years to publish the result for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2011.

Link (with patterns and visual examples):

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quasicrystal

Oldest Known Bird Ancestor

Archaeornithura is an extinct genus of ornithuromorphs from the early Cretaceous period. It is known from two fossil specimens of a single species, A. meemannae. The specimens have been dated to the Hauterivian age, 130.7 million years ago, making A. meemannae the oldest known ornithuromorph (the lineage that gave rise to modern birds, and contains all living birds as well as many of their extinct relatives)

Description

Archaeornithura had a moderately advanced plumage, fan-shaped tail feathers, a U-shaped furcula, highly fused wing apexes, and a well-developed alula – a projection on the front edges of the wings that is typically used to boost maneuverability during flight. Collectively, these traits mean that it shares many morphological features with a modern bird – more than found in any other bird of equivalent age. This suggests that ornithuromorpha diverged from other bird-like animals and dinosaurs earlier than previously thought. "The new bird is quite derived and has many advanced features of modern birds," said discoverer Wang Min.

It also suggests that key evolutionary advantages of birds – skilled flight and rapid growth in development – arose rapidly, and that habit specialization happened early in bird history.  The species had long legs and feet similar to modern plovers, suggesting the it was a shore bird that waded into shallow water to feed. The species appears to have been adept at flying.  Both known specimens of A. meemannae are excellently preserved, including substantial feathers.  Some Archaeornithura feathers feature a central grove, a feature thought to arise from derived flight feathers. This feature was not previously known in ornithuromorpha, suggesting that modern feather morphology evolved separately within the Archaeopteryx lineage and a subset of the ornithuromorphs.

Phylogenetic analysis showed that Archaeornithura is closely related to more recent hongshanornithids, confirming that it is a valid family. Archaeornithura was shown to be the sister taxa of Tianyuornis, with fused metatarsals II–IV and the shape of outermost trabecula of the sternum in common. The specialized wading features of Archaeornithura suggest that the hongshanornithids originated in a semi-aquatic environment.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Archaeornithura

Warm-Blooded Fish Studied

Not-So-Cold-Blooded Creatures
A new study finds that a rise in body temperature enables certain species of fish to maximize their swimming distance and speed
      By Julie Cohen, UC Santa Barbara Current -- Wednesday, May 6, 2015

Marine scientists have long known that some species of fish possess a unique physiological characteristic — a web of arteries and veins lying very close together — that enables them to raise their internal temperatures higher than that of the water surrounding them.

Now, a new study by an international team of scientists that includes UC Santa Barbara research biologist Jenn Caselle has demonstrated that species possessing the ability to warm their core — a process called endothermy — are able to swim two and a half times faster than those whose body temperature doesn’t change. In addition, these species, which include some sharks and tunas, can also swim twice as far — ranges comparable to those of warm-blooded animals such as penguins and other marine mammals. The researchers’ findings appear in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The cost of moving faster and farther is high so there has to be an ecological reason that outweighs the physiological expenditure,” Caselle said. “These endothermic fishes are putting a lot more energy into each unit of movement than their cold-blooded counterparts are.

“In fact, the estimated cost of transport is twice as high, but in return they’re getting benefits from that increased swimming speed and wider range of migration,” she added. “We hypothesize these gains allow these endotherms to be more efficient hunters and to span larger areas in their migration, which probably provides feeding and reproduction benefits.”

To conduct the study, the team combined existing data with new information they obtained by attaching sensors — designed and built by lead author Yuuki Watanabe of Japan’s National Institute of Polar Research — to several sharks in different locations around the world. The researchers’ analysis suggests that warmer “red” muscle endothermy permits speedier cruising and greater endurance, which in turn enables these fishes to swim long distances relatively quickly. This characteristic, the marine scientists speculate, allows the fishes to take advantage of seasonally variable food sources.

Of those examined in the study, four shark species are endothermic — salmon, porbeagle, white and shortfin mako — as are five species of tuna — yellow fin, southern bluefin, Atlantic bluefin, Pacific bluefin and albacore. One species in particular, the white shark, has a migration range greater than that of the humpback whale.

 Of specific interest, Caselle noted, is the fact that endothermy evolved independently in these distinctly different groups of fishes. The two taxonomic groups diverged more than 450 million years ago, and their common ancestor was most likely cold-blooded. “The mechanisms of convergent evolution aren’t always the same, although in this case they pretty much are,” Caselle said. “There are only a limited number of ways a fish can rewire.

“This research begins to shed light on possible reasons why these endothermic fish evolved in this way,” Caselle concluded. “Our paper contains almost every piece of electronically recorded information in the literature right now — and that’s not a lot. We’d like to be able to expand the use of sensor-captured data to other groups of fishes in order to build a dataset we could analyze to see what different species are doing in terms of their movements and speed.”

See more at: http://www.news.ucsb.edu/2015/015405/not-so-cold-blooded-creatures#sthash.bQkh5zlO.dpuf