Category Archives: Formats

IEEE Spectrum, News

Lithium-Air Batteries Get a Recharge

Lithium, the lightest metal, when paired with oxygen from the atmosphere, makes for a tantalizing partnership in a lightweight battery. In theory, this “lithium-air battery” offers several times the energy per kilogram of today’s lithium-ion batteries. But so far, in laboratory tests the lithium gets distracted by dead-end chemical reactions that prevent the batteries from recharging. A one-shot battery is fine for a wristwatch, but not for a next-generation electric vehicle.

Last month, researchers in Rome and Seoul, South Korea, reported designing a lithium-air battery that did not have the recharging problem, achieving approximately 100 charge and discharge cycles with little capacity loss. And this week, a research team led by chemist Peter Bruce of the University of St. Andrews, in Scotland, reports in the journal Science a differently designed lithium-air battery that reached 100 cycles, losing only 5 percent of its capacity in the process. Bruce says that these recent results show that lithium-air batteries can sustain “a truly reversible reaction.” The group measured the mix of chemicals involved, showing that the lithium was really being recycled through a reversible substance, lithium peroxide (Li2O2), during each charge and discharge. Continue reading Lithium-Air Batteries Get a Recharge →

Features, Science Careers

Asking the Public for Money

Postdoctoral research fellow David Kipping has often seen other astronomers don smart jackets when attending meetings or giving presentations, especially when they knew that funding powers-that-be would also be there. So before heading to one of his science presentations last year, Kipping pulled on a smart jacket. His next moves, however, were less conventional. He climbed the stairs to the roof of the Perkins building at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, pointed his laptop’s video camera at himself and, with the center’s 9-inch Clark telescope dome in the background, made a science sales pitch directly to the public. The video, which appears on YouTube and on the science crowd-funding Web site Petridish.org, raised $12,247. The pitch was to buy and install a small supercomputer, which he would name for the biggest donor, to speed up data processing on a search for moons in other solar systems.

Continue reading Asking the Public for Money →

Features, Nature

Grant applications: Find me the money

The e-mails were arriving in Pete Kissinger’s inbox almost every day: “TODAY ONLY: Extra 25% Off … Craft your R01 Grants Management … Only 1 Day Left.” They were from consultants trying to charge him to do something that scientists have long done for themselves: search for research-grant opportunities, write proposals and, in some cases, manage the grant once it has been won. Eventually, Kissinger’s curiosity got the better of him.

Continue reading Grant applications: Find me the money →

News, Technology Review

Privacy Laws Turn Europe into Economic Laboratory

In the tradition of printed newspapers, most news websites reserve the prime real estate “above the fold” for their biggest headlines. Since late May, however, sites including the Financial Times and the Economist have instead been greeting visitors with a text box warning them that they are being tracked.

The notifications explain to readers that the publications have placed a cookie in their browsers—a bit of code that allows the sites to record what pages they visit. Cookies are hardly unusual: many websites (including Technology Review’s) place a half-dozen in visitors’ machines. What is unusual is that a website would bother to tell anyone. Continue reading Privacy Laws Turn Europe into Economic Laboratory →