By: Jeremy Straub, North Dakota State University

In the wake of car- and truck-based attacks around the world, most recently in New York City, cities are scrambling to protect busy pedestrian areas and popular events. It’s extremely difficult to prevent vehicles from being used as weapons, but technology can help.

Right now, cities are trying to determine where and how to place statues, spike strip nets and other barriers to protect crowds. Police departments are trying to gather better advance intelligence about potential threats, and training officers to respond – while regular people are seeking advice for surviving vehicle attacks.

These solutions aren’t enough: It’s impractical to put up physical barriers everywhere, and all but impossible to prevent would-be attackers from getting a vehicle. As a researcher of technologies for self-driving vehicles, I see that potential solutions already exist, and are built into many vehicles on the road today. There are, however, ethical questions to weigh about who should control the vehicle – the driver behind the wheel or the computer system that perceives potential danger in the human’s actions.

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Scientists have developed an extremely efficient “molecular trap” that can be recycled and reused to capture radioactive iodides in spent nuclear reactor fuel.

The trap is like a tiny, porous super-sponge. The internal surface area of just one gram could stretch out to cover five 94-by-50-foot basketball courts, or 23,500 square feet. And, once caught inside, radioactive iodides will remain trapped for eons.

“This type of material has tremendous potential because of its high porosity,” says Jing Li, professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. “It has far more space than a sponge and it can trap lots of stuff.”

Reprocessing means separating spent nuclear reactor fuel into materials that may be recycled for use in new nuclear fuel or discarded as waste, according to the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The United States has no commercial reprocessing facilities at the moment, but they are operating in other countries.

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Capitalizing on tiny defects can improve electrodes for lithium-ion batteries, new research suggests.

In a study on lithium transport in battery cathodes, researchers found that a common cathode material for lithium-ion batteries, olivine lithium iron phosphate, releases or takes in lithium ions through a much larger surface area than previously thought.

“We know this material works very well but there’s still much debate about why,” says Ming Tang, an assistant professor of materials science and nanoengineering at Rice University. “In many aspects, this material isn’t supposed to be so good, but somehow it exceeds people’s expectations.”

Part of the reason, Tang says, comes from point defects—atoms misplaced in the crystal lattice—known as antisite defects. Such defects are impossible to completely eliminate in the fabrication process. As it turns out, he says, they make real-world electrode materials behave very differently from perfect crystals.

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A method to overcome the inherent trade-off between strength and flexibility in certain types of polymers gets inspiration from the tough, flexible polymeric byssal threads that marine mussels use to secure themselves to surfaces in the rugged intertidal zone.

A wide range of polymer-based materials, from tire rubber and wetsuit neoprene to Lycra clothing and silicone, are elastomers valued for their ability to flex and stretch without breaking and return to their original form.

Making such materials stronger, however, usually means making them more brittle. That’s because, structurally, elastomers are rather shapeless networks of polymer strands—often compared to a bundle of disorganized spaghetti noodles—held together by a few chemical cross-links.

Strengthening a polymer requires increasing the density of cross-links between the strands by creating more links. This causes the elastomer’s strands to resist stretching away from each other, giving the material a more organized structure but also making it stiffer and more prone to failure.

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By: Gunnar W. Schade, Texas A&M University

Urban air pollution in the U.S. has been decreasing near continuously since the 1970s.

Federal regulations, notably the Clean Air Act passed by President Nixon, to reduce toxic air pollutants such as benzene, a hydrocarbon, and ozone, a strong oxidant, effectively lowered their abundance in ambient air with steady progress.

But about 10 years ago, the picture on air pollutants in the U.S. started to change. The “fracking boom” in several different parts of the nation led to a new source of hydrocarbons to the atmosphere, affecting abundances of both toxic benzene and ozone, including in areas that were not previously affected much by such air pollution.

As a result, in recent years there has been a spike of research to determine what the extent of emissions are from fracked oil and gas wells – called “unconventional” sources in the industry. While much discussion has surrounded methane emissions, a greenhouse gas, less attention has been paid to air toxics.

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Deadline: December 31, 2017

ECS recognizes outstanding technical achievements in electrochemistry and solid state science and technology through its honors and awards program. We are currently accepting nominations for the Canada Section Electrochemical Award, which was established in 1981 to recognize significant contributions to the advancement of electrochemistry in Canada. The recipient will be recognized for his/her achievements with a gold medal at the section’s 2018 annual meeting.

It has been a few years since we have conferred this award. The last recipient was David Shoesmith of Western Science University in 2010. In 2006, the award was presented to Jeff Dahn of Dalhousie University. Consider your fellow electrochemists and let’s find out whose next!

Please review the full award details carefully before completing the application. I encourage you to submit a nomination and acknowledge the hard work of your peers!

Scientists have learned how to tame the unruly electrons in graphene.

Graphene is a nano-thin layer of the carbon-based graphite in pencils. It is far stronger than steel and a great conductor. But when electrons move through it, they do so in straight lines and their high velocity does not change. “If they hit a barrier, they can’t turn back, so they have to go through it,” says Eva Y. Andrei, professor in the Rutgers University-New Brunswick department of physics and astronomy and the study’s senior author.

“People have been looking at how to control or tame these electrons.”

Graphene is a better conductor than copper and is very promising for electronic devices.

The new research “shows we can electrically control the electrons in graphene,” says Andrei. “In the past, we couldn’t do it. This is the reason people thought that one could not make devices like transistors that require switching with graphene, because their electrons run wild.”

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Extended Deadline for Nominations: November 15, 2017

ECS recognizes outstanding technical achievements in electrochemistry and solid state science and technology through its honors and awards program. We are currently accepting nominations for the Physical and Analytical Electrochemistry Division David C. Grahame Award, which was established in 1981 to encourage excellence in physical electrochemistry research and to stimulate publication of high quality research papers in an ECS journal. This award recognizes Society members who have made outstanding contributions to the field and enhanced the scientific stature of the Society by the presentation of well-recognized papers and at Society meetings.

In spring 2017, Viola Birss delivered “Nanoscale Templates and Scaffolds for Electrochemical Device Applications” as the most recent Grahame award recipient, joining a respected group of award-winning scientists.

The award consists of a framed certificate and a $1,500 prize. The recipient is required to attend the requisite Society meeting and present a symposium lecture that will be sponsored by PAED.

Please review the award rules carefully before completing the application.

Transparent solar materials on windows could gather as much energy as bulkier rooftop solar units, say researchers.

The authors of a new paper argue that widespread use of such highly transparent solar applications, together with the rooftop units, could nearly meet US electricity demand and drastically reduce the use of fossil fuels.

“Highly transparent solar cells represent the wave of the future for new solar applications,” says Richard Lunt, an associate professor of chemical engineering and materials science at Michigan State University. “We analyzed their potential and show that by harvesting only invisible light, these devices can provide a similar electricity-generation potential as rooftop solar while providing additional functionality to enhance the efficiency of buildings, automobiles, and mobile electronics.”

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