Pretty interesting find. (Not completely sure if this is the right community for this- let me know if you know where else it would be a good fit!)

UChicago Pritzker Molecular Engineering Prof. Y. Shirley Meng’s Laboratory for Energy Storage and Conversion has created the world’s first anode-free sodium solid-state battery.

With this research, the LESC – a collaboration between the UChicago Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering and the University of California San Diego’s Aiiso Yufeng Li Family Department of Chemical and Nano Engineering – has brought the reality of inexpensive, fast-charging, high-capacity batteries for electric vehicles and grid storage closer than ever.

“Although there have been previous sodium, solid-state, and anode-free batteries, no one has been able to successfully combine these three ideas until now,” said UC San Diego PhD candidate Grayson Deysher, first author of a new paper outlining the team’s work.

The paper, published today in Nature Energy, demonstrates a new sodium battery architecture with stable cycling for several hundred cycles. By removing the anode and using inexpensive, abundant sodium instead of lithium, this new form of battery will be more affordable and environmentally friendly to produce. Through its innovative solid-state design, the battery also will be safe and powerful.

This work is both an advance in the science and a necessary step to fill the battery scaling gap needed to transition the world economy off of fossil fuels.

https://pme.uchicago.edu/news/uchicago-prof-shirley-mengs-laboratory-energy-storage-and-conversion-creates-worlds-first

Survey data from 14 countries, researchers found individuals dissatisfied with their lives are more likely to hold negative views on immigration and distrust political institutions.

"Politicians and nonprofit groups have blamed offshore wind turbines for whale deaths, but the science doesn’t support those claims—at all"

"Conducting necropsies on beached whales to pin down a cause of death is made difficult by the animals’ layer of blubber and by the fact that organs can literally cook inside a stranded whale. But it is starkly clear that human activity—in the form of ships that hit whales or fishing gear that wraps around them—is often to blame."

From the article: A brain-controlled bionic leg has allowed people with amputations to walk more quickly and navigate stairs and obstacles more easily in a groundbreaking trial.

The device allows the wearer to flex, point and rotate the foot of the prosthetic using their thoughts alone. This led to a more natural gait, improved stability on stairs and uneven terrain and a 41% increase in speed compared with a traditional prosthetic. The bionic leg works by reading activity in the patient’s residual leg muscles and uses these signals to control an electrically powered ankle.

“No one has been able to show this level of brain control that produces a natural gait, where the human’s nervous system is controlling the movement, not a robotic control algorithm,” said Prof Hugh Herr, a co-director of the K Lisa Yang Center for Bionics at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the senior author of the study.

“Not only will they be able to walk on a flat surface, but they’ll be able to go hiking or dancing because they’ll have full control over their movement,” he added.

Herr is himself a double amputee, having lost both legs to severe frostbite after being caught in a blizzard during a rock climbing trip in 1982. Despite having his original amputations decades ago, he hopes to have revision surgery to be able to benefit from a pair of similar bionic legs in the future.

“I’m thinking of doing that for both of my legs in the coming years,” he said.

In the trial, published in Nature Medicine, seven patients were given the bionic leg and compared with seven patients with traditional amputations. Patients reported less pain and less muscle atrophy following the pioneering surgery required for control of the bionic leg, which preserves natural connections between leg muscles. The patients were also more likely to feel that their prosthetic limb was part of their body.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jul/01/bionic-leg-walking-quicker-easier-amputees-trial

From the article: While Matt Damon relied on potatoes cultivated in crew biowaste to survive in the hit film The Martian, researchers say it is a humble desert moss that might prove pivotal to establishing life on Mars.

Scientists in China say they have found Syntrichia caninervis – a moss found in regions including Antarctica and the Mojave desert – is able to withstand Mars-like conditions, including drought, high levels of radiation and extreme cold.

The team say their work is the first to look the survival of whole plants in such an environment, while it also focuses on the potential for growing plants on the planet’s surface, rather than in greenhouses.

“The unique insights obtained in our study lay the foundation for outer space colonisation using naturally selected plants adapted to extreme stress conditions,” the team write.

Prof Stuart McDaniel, an expert on moss at the University of Florida and who was not involved in the study, suggested the idea had merits.

“Cultivating terrestrial plants is an important part of any long-term space mission because plants efficiently turn carbon dioxide and water into oxygen and carbohydrates – essentially the air and food that humans need to survive. Desert moss is not edible, but it could provide other important services in space,” he said.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/jun/30/scientists-find-desert-moss-that-can-survive-on-mars

Highlights

• Little is known about the association between facial attractiveness and longevity
• We analyze how attractiveness based on yearbook pictures is linked to longevity
• We find that the least attractive 1/6th had a significantly Higher Hazard of mortality
• The least attractive 1/6th of women lived almost 2 years less than others at 20.
• The least attractive 1/6th of men lived almost 1 years less than others at 20.

Additional article: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/science/butterflies-ocean-migration.html?unlocked_article_code=1.2U0.moxh.43MfSjCSno_6&smid=url-share