The Electrochemical Society honors 2019 Nobel Chemistry Prize laureates, John B. Goodenough, M. Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino, by the launch of a new collection highlighting their scientific contributions published by ECS. In addition, ECS recognizes their contributions in the winter 2019 issue of Interface, now available online.

Goodenough, Whittingham, and Yoshino have been deeply involved with The Electrochemical Society—as members, authors, editors, fellows, meeting participants and organizers, awardees, and more. Their publications with ECS, to varying degrees, trace the history of the development of the Lithium-ion battery, the revolutionary invention for which they shared the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. (more…)

John Goodenough, Stanley Whittingham, and Akira Yoshino, co-winners of the 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, delivered their Nobel Lectures at The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences in Stockholm, Sweden, on December 8. The 2019 Nobel Prize in Chemistry recognized the three scientists’ seminal contributions in the development of the Lithium-ion battery. Goodenough, Whittingham, and Yoshino are longtime members of The Electrochemical Society (ECS); Goodenough and Whittingham are ECS Fellows.

The Nobel Foundation statutes require the Laureates to give lectures on a subject connected with the work for which the prize has been awarded.

John Goodenough had his pre-taped lecture delivered by Arumugam Manthiram on the topic of Designing Lithium-ion Cathodes.

Stanley Whittingham discussed The Origins of the Lithium Battery.

Akira Yoshino presented a Brief History and Future of Lithium-ion Batteries. (more…)

The 2014 Nobel Prize in Chemistry has been awarded “for the development of super-resolved fluorescence microscopy.”

The awardees are as follows: Eric Betzig, 54, of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Janelia Research Campus in Ashburn, VA.; Stefan W. Hell, 51, of the Max Planck Institute for Biophysical Chemistry in Gottingen, and the German Cancer Research Center in Heidlberg, Germany; and William E. (W.E.) Moerner, 61, of Stanford University.

Because of these men, it is possible for us to obtain optical images at the nanometer scale and understand molecules.

This from The Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences:

For a long time optical microscopy was held back by a presumed limitation: that it would never obtain a better resolution than half the wavelength of light. Helped by fluorescent molecules the Nobel Laureates in Chemistry 2014 ingeniously circumvented this limitation. Their ground-breaking work has brought optical microscopy into the nanodimension.

Read the full article here.

The committee noted the importance of these achievements, by which we’re able to see how proteins in fertilized eggs divide into embryos and track proteins involved in Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s disease.

“Due to their achievements, the optical microscope can now peer into the nanoworld,” said the committee.

Find out more information on the discoveries of the winners at Chemical & Engineering News.

Also, check out our past issue of Interface entitled, “25 Years of Scanning Electrochemical Microscopy.” The journal is completely open access, allowing everyone to partake in and share this wealth of information.