Silly putty isn’t just for kids anymore.

Researchers in Ireland combined the classic kid’s toy with a special form of carbon to create a new material that has potential applications in medical devices such as heart monitors.

About 70 years ago, scientists came up with the recipe for silly putty as a substitute for rubber. The resulting formula yielded strange properties, but not many applications. However, by taking the strange silly putty formula and mixing it with graphene, the new mixture showed remarkable electrical, bouncy, liquid-like properties.

Water and energy are inextricably linked. The two have shared a long technological and symbolic connection, which has led to what researchers in the field call the energy/water nexus.

The energy/water nexus refers to the relationship between the water used for energy production and the energy consumed to extract, purify, and deliver water. During the PRiME 2016 meeting in October, researchers from across the globe gathered together for the Energy/Water Nexus: Power from Saline Solutions symposium to discuss emerging technologies and how the interplay between water and energy could affect society now and in the future.

“It’s very hard to say energy and not say water in the same sentence. They are completely interconnected systems,” says Andrew Herring, co-organizer of the symposium and Colorado School of Mines professor. “You cannot have clean water without energy, and to have clean water, you have to have energy.”

Some of the most common research topics in the water/energy nexus are water purification, desalination, and cooling efforts to create energy sources. However, there is another subcategory of this field that is overlooked but could play a vital role in the development of future technologies: blue energy.

Potential of blue energy

The concept of blue energy – otherwise known as osmotic power – was developed upon the realization that through electrochemistry, researchers can create a concentration cell with salt water on one side and fresh water on the other, which results in a novel way to power devices.

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Bill Gates is taking climate change head on with his newly formed Breakthrough Energy Ventures fund. Gates is leading the fund along with a network of investors worth $170 billion, including Virgin’s Richard Branson and Amazon’s Jeff Bezos.

BEV will donate more than $1 billion into clean energy innovation projects over the next 20 years, focusing on its goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

“Anything that leads to cheap, clean, reliable energy we’re open-minded to,” Gates says.

This move by Gates comes after his commitment last year to personally invest an additional $1 billion into clean energy.

However, this move will shift Gates away from his home turf of information technology.

“People think you can just put $50 million in and wait two years and then you know what you got,” Gates says. “In this energy space, that’s not true at all.”

A driving force behind the fund is to take innovative new technologies from the lab to the marketplace. Currently, the federal government funds a huge percentage of fundamental research efforts in fields such as energy storage, which are the subsequently commercialized by private investors.

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A team of researchers at Case Western Reserve University is building a flow battery prototype to provide cleaner, cheaper power.

The team, co-led by ECS member Bob Savinell, is working to scale up the technology in order develop a practical, efficient energy storage device that can store excess electricity and potentially augment the grid in light of a shift toward renewables.

With a $1.17 million federal grant, the team has started to build a 1-kilowatt prototype with enough power to run various, high-powered household devices for six hours.

“Intermittent energy sources, such as solar and wind, combined with traditional sources of coal and nuclear power, are powering the grid. To meet peak demand, we often use less-efficient coal or gas-powered turbines,” says Savinell, ECS Fellow and editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society. “But if we can store excess energy and make it available at peak use, we can increase the overall efficiency and decrease the amount of carbon dioxide emitted and lower the cost of electricity.”

One of the biggest barriers preventing the large-scale use of electrochemical energy storage devices has been the cost. To address this, Savinell and his team have been developing the flow battery with cheaper materials, such as iron and water.

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By: Jungwoo Ryoo, Pennsylvania State University

Cybersecurity concerns crop up everywhere you turn lately – around the election, email services, retailers. And academic institutions haven’t been immune to security breaches either. According to a recent report by VMware, almost all universities (87 percent) in the United Kingdom have been the victims of cyber crime. In general, from 2006 to 2013, 550 universities suffered data breaches. When higher ed breaches occur, attackers typically steal student information, intellectual property or research data. Among the criminals behind these attacks are nation-states and organized crime groups motivated by the economic gain.

A common knee-jerk reaction to a cyberattack – wherever it happens – is to clamp down on access and add more security control. For example, in 2005 after a major attack against a credit card processor affected 40 million customers, there were urgent calls for new mandatory encryption standards in the U.S. Senate. As paranoia sets in, a sense of urgency to do something about a possible next attack takes over, just like what happened in the University of California system. After a 2015 hack, the university administration started monitoring user traffic without consulting faculty and students (not to mention receiving their consent), resulting in a huge backlash.

As is so often the case, too much of anything is not good. Cybersecurity is a delicate balancing act between usability and countermeasures designed to reduce or prevent threats. A one-size-fits-all, or Procrustean, approach usually leads to lower productivity and a large group of unhappy users. And it’s particularly tricky to get the balance right in an academic setting.

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Recent safety concerns with lithium-ion batteries exploding in devices such as the Samsung Galaxy Note 7 phone and hoverboards have many energy researchers looking into this phenomenon for a better understanding of how batteries function when stressed.

A new open access paper published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society provides some insight into these safety hazards associated with the Li-ion battery by taking a look inside the battery as it is overworked and overcharged.

Overcharging or overheating Li-ion batteries causes the materials inside to breakdown and produce bubbles of oxygen, carbon dioxide, and other gases. As more of these gases are produced, they begin to buildup and cause the battery to swell. That swelling can lead to explosion.

“The battery can either pillow a small amount and keep operating, pillow a lot and cease operation, or keep generating gas and rupture the cell, which can be accompanied by an explosion or fire,” Toby Bond, co-author of the paper, told New Scientist.

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After a short hiatus, Clean Technica’s Celantech Talk podcast has returned. For their first episode back, ECS member and podcast co-host Matthew Klippenstein discusses speed bumps in renewable energy, transforming the grid, and the demise of diesel.

Klippenstein is a 13 year veteran of the fuel cell industry with Ballard Power Systems. He was part of the 2007 group that received ECS’s Industrial Electrochemistry and Electrochemical Engineering Division New Electrochemical Technology Award, which has recognized significant advances in industrial electrochemistry since 1997. Listen to the podcast below.

PS: To learn more about science and some of the key contributors, download the ECS Podcast for free through the iTunes Store, SoundCloud, or our RSS Feed. You can also find us on Stitcher.

Google is going green.

Tech giant Google announced that it will run entirely on renewable energy in 2017. This will be a huge shift for the company that, according to the New York Times, consumed as much energy as the city of San Francisco in previous years.

Google states that both its data centers and offices will reach the 100 percent renewable energy mark in 2017, with the majority of power derived from wind and solar. According to a press release by the company, going green makes the most sense economically in addition to Google’s goal of reducing its carbon footprint to zero. With wind energy prices down 60 percent and solar down 80 percent over the past six years, Google’s move to renewables will both make an environmental impact and help the company cut operating expenses.

In part, Google is able to make this transition due to the number of large-scale deals the company has made with renewable energy producers over the past few years. Google has guaranteed to purchase energy from renewable start-ups, which then allows those start-ups to obtain the capital necessary to expand their business.

“We are the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world,” Joe Kava, Google’s senior vice president of technical infrastructure, told the New York Times. “It’s good for the economy, good for business and good for our shareholders.”

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ECS Fellow and technical editor of the Journal of The Electrochemical Society, Charles Hussey, recently added one more item to his list of career accomplishments.

The esteemed scientist and integral member of the University of Mississippi’s chemistry and biochemistry department has been named the new associate dean for research and graduate education at the university’s College of Liberal Arts.

“I am very excited about the chance to serve in this role and anxious to get started,” Hussey said in a release.

Hussey states that since the appointment of Dean Lee Cohen, the university began to shift in a new direction focused on research and graduate education. “I want to be part of helping him move the college forward in these areas,” he said.

With his extensive scientific background and experience serving as a chair of a department, Hussey will be looking to reflect those experiences in his new position. He will also be aiming to evaluate current issues students face pertaining to research engagement, scholarship, and graduate education.

“Once I have a sense of the issues, then we will work with other departments to develop long-range strategies that make use of our available resources to attack these roadblocks,” said Hussey, the 2014 winner of ECS’s Max Bredig Award in Molten Salt and Ionic Liquid Chemistry. “I also see potential for the growth of new graduate programs in the college.”

In addition to his new appointment, Hussey plans to continue his research into electrochemistry and transport properties of ionic liquids and molten salts.

Global energy demands are predicted to reach 46 terawatts by 2100. That number is a far reach from the 18 terawatts of energy currently generated around the world. According to one expert in the field, a major shift in the way we produce and consume energy is necessary in order to meet future demands.

Meng Tao, ECS member and Arizona State University professor, discussed how society could move toward meeting those demands at the PRiME 2016 meeting, where he presented his paper, “Terawatt Solar Photovoltaics: Roadblocks and Our Approaches.”

“We just cannot continue to consume fossil fuels the way we have for the last 200 years,” Tao told ECS. “We have to move from a fossil fuel infrastructure to a renewable infrastructure.”

For Tao, the world’s society cannot set on a path of “business as usual” by producing energy via coal, oil, and natural gas. And while solar energy has experienced a growth rate of nearly 45 percent in the last decade, it still only accounts for less than one percent of all electricity generated.

The shift to solar

Historically, solar technology soars when oil prices are at their highest. This is especially true during the oil embargo of the 1970s. During that time, private and public investments began to shift away from fossil fuels and toward solar and other renewable energies. That trend emerged again in the early 2000s when oil prices skyrocketed to a record-setting $140 per barrel.

“In the 1970s, the motivation to invest in solar and other forms of renewable energy was geopolitical,” Tao says. “Now, that motivation tends to focus more on the environment and sustainability.”

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