Gather with your colleagues The plenary session is one of the highlighted events of the meeting, allowing participants from every symposia to come together and recognize some of the greatest minds in the field. ECS President Johna Leddy will wrap up the first full day of the 233rd ECS Meeting by welcoming the ECS meeting attendees and introducing the highly anticipated lecturer, Miguel Nicolelis and his talk “Linking Brains to Machines: From Basic Science to Neurological Neurorehabilitation.” The agenda also includes: Vittorio de...
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A new water-based air-conditioning system cools air to as low as 18 degrees Celsius (about 64 degrees Fahrenheit) without using energy-intensive compressors and environmentally harmful chemical refrigerants. This technology could potentially replace the century-old air-cooling principle that is still used in modern-day air-conditioners. Suitable for both indoor and outdoor use, the new system is portable and can be customized for all types of weather conditions. The team’s novel air-conditioning system is cost-effective to produce, and it is also more eco-friendly…
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A new method to quickly produce fibers from carbon nanotubes is both handmade and high tech. The method allows researchers to make short lengths of strong, conductive fibers from small samples of bulk nanotubes in about an hour. In 2013, Rice University chemist Matteo Pasquali found a way to spin full spools of thread-like nanotube fibers for aerospace, automotive, medical, and smart-clothing applications. The fibers look like cotton thread but perform like metal wires and carbon fibers.

Nitrogen-doped carbon nanotubes or modified graphene nanoribbons could be effective, less costly replacements for expensive platinum in fuel cells, according to a new study. In fuel cells, platinum is used for fast oxygen reduction, the key reaction that transforms chemical energy into electricity. The findings come from computer simulations scientists created to see how carbon nanomaterials could be improved for fuel-cell cathodes. Their study reveals the atom-level mechanisms by which doped nanomaterials catalyze oxygen reduction reactions (ORR). Doping with nitrogen…
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Sensors on tape that attach to plants yield new kinds of data about water use for researchers and farmers. “With a tool like this, we can begin to breed plants that are more efficient in using water,” says Patrick Schnable, plant scientist at Iowa State University. “That’s exciting. We couldn’t do this before. But, once we can measure something, we can begin to understand it.” The tool making these water measurements possible is a tiny graphene sensor that can be…
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Over 1,840 articles were published in ECS journals in 2017, ranging from battery technology to materials science. Among those articles, “The Development and Future of Lithium Ion Batteries” by ECS member of 48 years, George E. Blomgren, stood out as the most downloaded paper of the year, with over 25,000 downloads in total. The open access paper was published in the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) and has held the number one top download spot for the majority of…
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A new chemical sensor prototype will be able to detect “single-fingerprint quantities” of chemicals and other substances at a distance of more than 100 feet—and its creators are working to make it the size of a shoebox. The device could potentially identify traces of drugs and explosives, as well as speed up the analysis of certain medical samples. A portable infrared chemical sensor could be mounted on a drone or carried by users such as doctors, police, border officials, and…
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Applying a tiny coating of costly platinum just 1 nanometer thick—about 1/100,000th the width of a human hair—to a core of much cheaper cobalt could bring down the cost of fuel cells. This microscopic marriage could become a crucial catalyst in new fuel cells that use generate electricity from hydrogen fuel to power cars and other machines. The new fuel cell design would require far less platinum, a very rare metal that sold for almost $900 an ounce the day…
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Submit your manuscripts to the Journal of The Electrochemical Society (JES) Focus Issue on The Brain and Electrochemistry, Honoring R. Mark Wightman and Christian Amatore by March 11, 2018. This focus issue of the JES is devoted to work at the juncture of electrochemistry, the brain, and the nervous system. The issue will provide a forum for the discussion of research and developments on how the central (CNS) and the peripheral nervous systems (PNS) can be viewed and studied in…
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Researchers have developed a prototype device that mimics natural photosynthesis to produce ethylene gas using only sunlight, water, and carbon dioxide. The novel method, which produces ethylene at room temperature and pressure using benign chemicals, could be scaled up to provide a more eco-friendly and sustainable alternative to the current method of ethylene production. Ethylene, which is the building block of polyethylene, is an important chemical feedstock produced in large quantities for manufacturing plastics, rubber, and fibers. More than 170…
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