You are cordially invited to join the ECS Canada Section for its 2016 Fall Symposium! 
The meeting will be held on November 12, 2016 at the University of Ontario Institute of Technology in Oshawa, Ontario. The theme of the symposium will be “Interdisciplinary Electrochemistry.”
The meeting will feature an illustrious array of distinguished speakers, as well as a poster competition open to students and postdoctoral fellows.
We’re delving into our archives as part of our continuing Masters Series podcasts. In 1995, ECS and the Chemical Heritage Foundation worked to compile various oral histories of some of the biggest names in electrochemical and solid state science.
One key figure is Charles Tobias. Often referred to as the “father of electrochemical engineering.” Tobias took a field that deals with the effects of electricity produced by chemical reaction and gave it a sound scientific footing.
Throughout his years at Berkeley, Tobias influenced the lives of many students and faculty members. He was not only a scholar, but a role model and friend to many – especially at ECS where he served as the Society’s president from 1970-71.
Listen and download these episodes and others for free through the iTunes Store, SoundCloud, or our RSS Feed. You can also find us on Stitcher.
Cards Against Humanity, the comedy card game, has announced that applications are now being accepted for their Science Ambassador Scholarship. The scholarship is geared to award full-tuition to young women seeking undergraduate degrees in STEM.
This year, one winner will be selected by a board of sixty women in STEM to receive full tuition coverage for up to four years.
“I’m so excited that we’re able to offer another scholarship for a woman studying STEM. A lot of us at Cards Against Humanity have backgrounds in science and tech, and the under-representation of women in these fields is staggering,” says Jenn Bane, the Cards Against Humanity community director. “Ask a kid to draw a scientist, they’ll draw a man in a lab coat, because science and math are historically male-dominated fields. Cards Against Humanity has a large audience, so with the Science Ambassador Scholarship we hope to help change the public perception of what a scientist looks like.”
To apply, applicants must submit a three-minute video explaining a scientific topic they’re passionate about. Find more details here.
PS: If you want to contribute to the fund, you can pick up the Science Pack to add to your Cards Against Humanity Deck. All profits go to the Science Ambassador Scholarship.
Lithium-air batteries are viewed by many as a potential next-generation technology in energy storage. With the highest theoretical energy density of all battery devices, Li-air could revolutionize everything from electric vehicles to large-scale grid storage. However, the relatively young technology has a few barriers to overcome before it can be applied. A new study published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) is taking a fundamental step forward in advancing Li-air through the development of mixed metal catalyst that could lead to more efficient electrode reactions in the battery.
The paper, entitled “In Situ Formed Layered-Layered Metal Oxide as Bifunctional Catalyst for Li-Air Batteries,” details a cathode catalyst composed of three transition metals (manganese, nickel, and cobalt), which can create the right oxidation state during the battery cycling to enable both the catalysis of the charge and the discharge reaction.
According to K.M. Abraham, co-author of the paper, the manganese allows for the catalysis of the oxygen reduction reaction while the cobalt catalyzes the charge reaction of the battery.
“This offers opportunities for future research to develop similar materials to optimize the catalysis of the Li-air battery using one material that will combine the functions of these mixed metal oxides,” Abraham says.
Image: NYU’s Jerschow Lab
Researchers from New York University have developed a new technique to give a highly detailed, 3D look inside a lithium-ion battery.
“One particular challenge we wanted to solve was to make the measurements 3D and sufficiently fast, so that they could be done during the battery charging cycle,” explains Alexej Jerschow, co-author of the study that details the development. “This was made possible by using intrinsic amplification processes, which allow one to measure small features within the cell to diagnose common battery failure mechanisms. We believe these methods could become important techniques for the development of better batteries.”
The look that the researchers offer gives new insight to dendrites – the deposits that build up inside a Li-ion battery that can affect performance and safety. To do this, the team used MRI technology to focus the image and took an additional step to improve image quality.
Corrosion costs the U.S. economy over $450 billion per year. In an effort to better predict the effects of corrosion, ECS Fellow Robert Kelly has built something akin to a time machine at the University of Virginia.
Kelly, who has recently been awarded ECS’s Corrosion Division H. H. Uhlig Award, is launching pieces of metal into the future to accelerate corrosion rates and observe how they will degrade over time. Being able to see the degradation of materials prior to application could be key to drastically cutting funds used to repair infrastructure when corrosion takes its toll.
Recently, Kelly applied his testing technique to Rolls-Royce’s small jet engine compressor blades to see how they would inevitably hold up in an airplane turbine. By aggressively spraying salt on the parts, Kelly could effectively predict how it will react when jet engines take in salt water in the form of sea salt aerosols. Rolls-Royce currently coats the blades with ceramic material – which if used in too small a quantity could lead to corrosion, but if used in too excessive a quantity could lead to slow, heavy blades. The tests conducted by Kelly and his team could help the company create a blade with the perfect balance of ceramic coating.
Image: Forschungszentrum Juelich
Artificial photosynthesis has carved out a promising corner in renewable energy research in recent history. This novel process is solar-driven, harvesting renewable energy and storing in in chemical bonds. Breakthroughs in artificial photosynthesis could lead to the development of solar fuels that could potentially shift the energy infrastructure.
However, while many technological barriers have been surpassed in the advancement of artificial photosynthesis, there are still hurdles to overcome. However, a research team from Forschungszentrum Juelich believes they may have just taken a significant step forward in the advancement of this field.
In a recently published paper, the team of scientists state that they have developed the first complete and compact design for an artificial photosynthesis facility.
The artificial photosynthesis process was first investigated in the 1970s. In fact, ECS Fellow Allen J. Bard can be seen here discussing the process in 1983. But only recently has artificial photosynthesis began to garner larger amounts of attention from the scientific community as a whole.
Image: CSAW, CC BY-ND
Each morning seems to bring new reports of hacks, privacy breaches, threats to national defense or our critical infrastructure and even shutdowns of hospitals. As the attacks become more sophisticated and more frequently perpetrated by nation-states and criminal syndicates, the shortage of defenders only grows more serious: By 2020, the cyber security industry will need 1.5 million more workers than will be qualified for jobs.
In 2003, I founded Cyber Security Awareness Week (CSAW) with a group of students, with the simple goal of attracting more engineering students to our cyber security lab. We designed competitions allowing students to participate in real-world situations that tested both their knowledge and their ability to improvise and design new solutions for security problems. In the past decade-plus, our effort has enjoyed growing interest from educators, students, companies and governments, and shows a way to closing the coming cyber security workforce shortage.
Today, with as many as 20,000 students from around the globe participating, CSAW is the largest student-run cyber security event in the world. Recruiters from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security and many large corporations observe and judge each competition. (Registration for this year’s competition is still open for a little while.)
The scope of ECS transcends academia. Its members are more than scholars; they are global leaders in the fields of research, innovation, and industry. With each passing day, they further develop the potential of electrochemical and solid state science, paving the way toward a cleaner, brighter future.
We are proud to recognize the top 15 non-academic institutions based upon ECS membership:
The death of a person earlier this year while driving with Autopilot in a Tesla sedan, along with news of more crashes involving Teslas operating in Autopilot, has triggered a torrent of concerns about the safety of self-driving cars.
But there is a way to improve safety across a rapidly evolving range of advanced mobility technologies and vehicles – from semi-autonomous driver assist features like Tesla’s Autopilot to a fully autonomous self-driving car like Google’s.
The answer is connectivity: wireless communication that connects vehicles to each other, to the surrounding infrastructure, even to bicyclists and pedestrians. While connectivity and automation each provide benefits on their own, combining them promises to transform the movement of people and goods more than either could alone, and to do so safely. The U.S. Department of Transportation may propose requiring all new cars to have vehicle-to-vehicle communication, known as V2V, as early as this fall.
Tesla blamed the fatal crash on the failure of both its Autopilot technology and the driver to see the white tractor-trailer against a bright sky. But the crash – and the death – might have been avoided entirely if the Tesla and the tractor-trailer it hit had been able to talk to each other.
Autonomous vehicles that aren’t connected to each other is a bit like gathering together the smartest people in the world but not letting them talk to each other. Connectivity enables smart decisions by individual drivers, by self-driving vehicles and at every level of automation in between.
Despite all the safety advances in recent decades, there are still more than 30,000 traffic deaths every year in the United States, and the number may be on the rise. After years of steady declines, fatalities rose 7.2 percent in 2015 to 35,092, up from 32,744 in 2014, representing the largest percentage increase in nearly 50 years, according to the U.S. DOT.
