Aurelia Butler

Creating a hydrogen economy is no small task, but Rice University engineers have discovered a method that could make oxygen evolution catalysis in acids, one of the most challenging topics in water electrolysis for producing clean hydrogen fuels, more economical and practical.
The lab of chemical and biomolecular engineer Haotian Wang at Rice’s George R. Brown School of Engineering has replaced rare and expensive iridium with ruthenium, a far more abundant precious metal, as the positive-electrode catalyst in a reactor that splits water into hydrogen and oxygen.
The lab’s successful addition of nickel to ruthenium dioxide (RuO2) resulted in a robust anode catalyst that produced hydrogen from water electrolysis for thousands of hours under ambient conditions.
“There’s huge industry interest in clean hydrogen,” Wang said. “It’s an important energy carrier and also important for chemical fabrication, but its current production contributes a significant portion of carbon emissions in the chemical manufacturing sector globally. We want to produce it in a more sustainable way, and water-splitting using clean electricity is widely recognized as the most promising option.”
Iridium costs roughly eight times more than ruthenium, he said, and it could account for 20% to 40% of the expense in commercial device manufacturing, especially in future large-scale deployments.
The process developed by Wang, Rice postdoctoral associate Zhen-Yu Wu and graduate student Feng-Yang Chen, and colleagues at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Virginia is detailed in Nature Materials.
Water splitting involves the oxygen and hydrogen evolution reactions by which polarized catalysts rearrange water molecules to release oxygen and hydrogen. “Hydrogen is produced by the cathode, which is a negative electrode,” Wu said. “At the same time, it has to balance the charge by oxidizing water to generate oxygen on the anode side.” More

Missing knowledge in the global distribution of plant traits could be filled with data from species identification apps. Researchers from Leipzig University, the German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) and other institutions were able to demonstrate this based on data from the popular iNaturalist app. Supplemented with data on plant traits, iNaturalist input results in considerably more precise maps than previous approaches based on extrapolation from limited databases. Among other things, the new maps provide an improved basis for understanding plant-environment interactions and for Earth system modelling. The study has been published in the journal Nature Ecology and Evolution.
Nature and climate are mutually dependent. Plant growth is absolutely dependent on climate, but this is, in turn, strongly influenced by plants, such as in a forest, which evaporates a lot of water. In order to be able to make accurate predictions about how the living world may develop, extensive knowledge of the characteristics of the vegetation at the different locations is necessary, for example, leaf surface size, tissue properties and plant height. However, such data usually have to be recorded manually by professional scientists in a painstaking, time-consuming process. Consequently, the available worldwide plant trait data are very sparse and cover only certain regions.
The TRY database, managed by iDiv and the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, currently provides such data on plant traits for almost 280,000 plant species. This makes it one of the most comprehensive databases for plant characteristics mapping in the world. Up to now, global maps of plant traits have been created using extrapolations (estimation beyond the original observation range) from this geographically limited database. However, the resulting maps are not particularly reliable.
In order to fill large data gaps, the Leipzig researchers have now taken a different approach. Instead of extrapolating existing trait data geographically from the TRY database, they have linked it to the vast dataset from the citizen science project iNaturalist.
With iNaturalist, users of the associated smartphone app share their observations of nature, providing species names, photos and geolocation. In this way, more than 19 million data points have been recorded, worldwide, for terrestrial plants alone. The data also feeds the world’s largest biodiversity database, the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF). This is accessible to the public and also serves as an important database for biodiversity research.
In order to test the accuracy of the maps based on the combination of iNaturalist observations and TRY plant traits, they were compared to the plant trait evaluations based on sPlotOpen; the iDiv sPlot platform is the world’s largest archive of plant community data. It contains nearly two million datasets with complete lists of plant species which occur in the locations (plots) studied by professional researchers. The database is also enhanced with plant trait data from the TRY database.
The conclusion: The new iNaturalist-based map corresponded to the sPlot data map significantly more closely than previous map products based on extrapolation. “That the new maps, based on the citizen science data, seem to be even more precise than the extrapolations was both surprising and impressive,” says first author Sophie Wolf, a doctoral researcher at Leipzig University. “Particularly because iNaturalist and our reference sPlotOpen are very different in structure.”
“Our study convincingly demonstrates the potential for research into voluntary data,” says last author, Dr Teja Kattenborn from Leipzig University and iDiv. “It is encouraging to make increasing use of the synergies between the combined data from thousands of citizens and professional scientists.”
“This work is the result of an initiative of the National Research Data Infrastructure for Biodiversity Research (NFDI4Biodiversity), with which we are pushing for a change in culture towards the open provision of data,” says co-author Prof Miguel Mahecha, head of the working group Modelling Approaches in Remote Sensing at Leipzig University and iDiv. “The free availability of data is an absolute prerequisite for a better understanding of our planet.” More

Indiana University researchers are combining psychological principles with innovative virtual reality technology to create a new immersive therapy for people with substance use disorders. They’ve recently received over $4.9 million from the National Institutes of Health and launched an IU-affiliated startup company to test and further develop the technology.
Led by Brandon Oberlin, an assistant professor of psychiatry at the IU School of Medicine, IU researchers have built a virtual environment using “future-self avatars” to help people recover from substance use disorders. These avatars are life-sized, fully animated and nearly photo realistic. People can converse with their avatars, who speak in their same voice using personal details in alternate futures.
“VR technology is clinically effective and increasingly common for treating a variety of mental health conditions, such as phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder and post-operative pain, but has yet to find wide use in substance use disorders intervention or recovery,” Oberlin said. “Capitalizing on VR’s ability to deliver an immersive experience showing otherwise-impossible scenarios, we created a way for people to interact with different versions of their future selves in the context of substance use and recovery.”
After four years of development and testing in collaboration with Indianapolis-based treatment centers, Oberlin and his colleagues’ pilot study was published Sept. 15 in Discover Mental Health. Their findings suggest that virtual reality simulation of imagined realities can aid substance use disorder recovery by lowering the risk of relapse rates and increasing participants’ future self-connectedness.
“This experience enables people in recovery to have a personalized virtual experience, in alternate futures resulting from the choices they made,” Oberlin said. “We believe this could be a revolutionary intervention for early substance use disorders recovery, with perhaps even further-reaching mental health applications.”
The technology is particularly well-suited for people in early recovery — a crucial time as there is a high risk for relapse — because the immersive experiences can help them choose long-term rewards over immediate gratification by deepening connections to their future selves, he said. More

Cardiogenic shock — a life threatening condition when a person’s heart can’t pump enough blood to meet the needs of the body — is most often caused by serious heart attack or advanced heart failure. Historically, data related to cardiogenic shock have been limited, inconsistent and challenging to interpret. As a result, varying treatment recommendations exist around best practices.
To address this need, the American Heart Association, the leading voluntary organization devoted to longer, healthier lives for all, created the Cardiogenic Shock Registry powered by Get With The Guidelines®. The new registry will help researchers, clinicians and regulators to better understand the clinical symptoms of shock types, treatment patterns and outcomes. The registry will provide a foundation for working toward improving the quality and consistency of care in patients in U.S. hospitals with cardiogenic shock symptoms.
“To understand how to improve care for cardiogenic shock patients, we first need a clearer view of the landscape of existing treatment practices for cardiogenic shock in U.S.-based acute care settings,” said Mitchell Krucoff, M.D., FAHA, volunteer expert for the American Heart Association and professor of medicine at Duke University, Durham, N.C.”No organization is better positioned to advance this critical public health question than the American Heart Association, with already established networks of sites entering data on heart failure, acute cardiac syndromes, cardiac arrest and COVID — all of which involve patients at risk of progressing to cardiogenic shock.”
The Cardiogenic Shock Registry builds on more than 20 years of quality improvement and registry experience rooted in the Association’s Get With The Guidelines® platform. Data from this no-cost registry will help inform the larger medical community on how best to treat cardiogenic shock.
The steering committee of the American Heart Association Cardiogenic Shock Registry provides guidance and expertise for establishing the registry and managing the data. The steering committee includes leading academic surgeons and cardiologists, representatives from founding funders, as well as representatives of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration and the U.S. Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
The American Heart Association’s Cardiogenic Shock Registry is made possible through the generous financial support of founding supporters Abbott and Getinge.
“The new Cardiogenic Shock Registry will leverage the unparalleled reach of the American Heart Association in a unique collaboration between academic clinicians and researchers, federal agencies and funding supporters’ experts to provide high-quality evidence and promote best practices for the treatment of patients with cardiogenic shock,” said David Morrow, M.D., M.P.H., FAHA, volunteer expert for the American Heart Association and professor of medicine, Harvard Medical School, Boston.
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Materials provided by American Heart Association. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

Mathematical models that predict policy-driving scenarios — such as how a new pandemic might spread or the future amount of irrigation water needed worldwide — may be too complex and delivering ‘wrong’ answers, a new study reveals.
Experts are using increasingly detailed models to better predict phenomena or gain more accurate insights in a range of key areas, such as environmental/climate sciences, hydrology and epidemiology.
But the pursuit of complex models as tools to produce more accurate projections and predictions may not deliver because more complicated models tend to produce more uncertain estimates.
Researchers from the Universities of Birmingham, Princeton, Reading, Barcelona and Bergen published their findings today in Science Advances. They reveal that expanding models without checking how extra detail adds uncertainty limits the models’ usefulness as tools to inform policy decisions in the real world.
Arnald Puy, Associate Professor in Social and Environmental Uncertainties at the University of Birmingham, commented: “As science keeps on unfolding secrets, models keep getting bigger — integrating new discoveries to better reflect the world around us. We assume that more detailed models produce better predictions because they better match reality.
“And yet pursuing ever-complex models may not deliver the results we seek, because adding new parameters brings new uncertainties into the model. These new uncertainties pile on top of the uncertainties already there at every model upgrade stage, making the model’s output fuzzier at every step of the way.”
This tendency to produce more inaccurate results affects any model without training or validation data used to check its output’s accuracy — affecting all global models such as those focused on climate-change, hydrology, food-production, and epidemiology, as well as models projecting estimates into the future, regardless of the scientific field.
Researchers recommend that the drive to produce increasingly detailed mathematical models as a means to get sharper estimates should be reassessed.
“We suggest that modelers should calculate the model’s effective dimensions (the number of influential parameters and their highest-order interaction) before making the model more complex. This allows to check how the addition of model complexity affects the uncertainty in the output. Such information is especially valuable for models aiming to play a role in policy making,” added Dr. Puy. “Both modelers and policy makers benefit from understanding any uncertainty generated when a model is upgraded with novel mechanisms.
“Modelers tend not to submit their models to uncertainty and sensitivity analysis but keep on adding detail. Not many scholars are interested running such an analysis on their model if it risks showing that the emperor runs naked and its alleged sharp estimates are just a mirage.”
Excess complexity prevents scholars and public alike to ponder the appropriateness of the models’ assumptions, often highly questionable. Puy and his team note, for example, that global hydrological models assume that irrigation optimises crop production and water use — a premise at odds with practices of traditional irrigators.
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Materials provided by University of Birmingham. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

A recent discovery by materials science researchers in Drexel University’s College of Engineering might one day prevent electronic devices and components from going haywire when they’re too close to one another. A special coating that they developed, using a type of two-dimensional material called MXene, has shown to be capable of absorbing and disbursing the electromagnetic fields that are the source of the problem.
Buzzing, feedback or static are the noticeable manifestations of electromagnetic interference, a collision of the electromagnetic fields generated by electronics devices. Aside from the sounds, this phenomenon can also diminish the performance of the devices and lead to overheating and malfunctions if left unchecked.
While researchers and technologists have progressively reduced this problem with each generation of devices, their strategy thus far has been to encase vital components with a shielding that deflects electromagnetic waves. But according to the Drexel team, this isn’t a sustainable solution.
“Because the number of electronics devices will continue to grow, deflecting the electromagnetic waves they produce is really just a short-term solution,” said Yury Gogotsi, PhD, Distinguished University and Bach professor in the College of Engineering, who led the research. “To truly solve this problem, we need to develop materials that will absorb and dissipate the interference. We believe we have found just such a material.”
In the recent edition of Cell Reports Physical Science, Gogotsi’s team reported that combining MXene, a two-dimensional material they discovered more than a decade ago, with a conductive element called vanadium in a polymer solution, produces a coating that can absorb electromagnetic waves.
While researchers have previously demonstrated that MXenes are highly effective at warding off electromagnetic interference by reflecting it, adding vanadium carbide in a polymer matrix enhances two key characteristics of the material that improve its shielding performance.
According to the researchers, adding vanadium to MXene structure — a material known for its durability and corrosion-resistant properties, that is used in steel alloys for space vehicles and nuclear reactors — causes layers of the Mxene to form in sort of electrochemical grid that is perfect for trapping ions. Using microwave-transparent polymer, makes the material also more permeable to the electromagnetic waves.
Combined, these properties produce a coating that can absorb, entrap and dissipate the energy of electromagnetic waves at greater than 90% efficiency, according to the research.
“Remarkably, combining polyurethane, a common polymer used in common wall paint, with a tiny amount of MXene filler — about one part MXene in 50 parts polyurethane — can absorb more than 90% of incident electromagnetic waves covering the entire band of radar frequencies — known as X-band frequencies,” said Meikang Han, PhD, who participated in the research as a post-doctoral researcher at Drexel. “Radio waves just disappear inside the MXene-polymer composite film — of course, nothing disappears completely, the energy of the waves is transformed to a very small amount of heat which is easily dissipated by the material.”
A thin coating of the vanadium-based MXene material — less than the width of a human hair — could render a material impermeable to any electromagnetic waves in the X-band spectrum, which includes microwave radiation and is the most common frequency produced by devices. Gogotsi predicts that this development could be important for high-stakes applications such as medical and military settings when maintaining technological performance is crucial.
“Our results show that vanadium-based MXenes could play a key role in the expansion of Internet of Things technology and 5G and 6G communications.” Gogotsi said. “This study provides a new director for the development of thin, highly absorbent, MXene-based electromagnetic interference protection materials.”
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Materials provided by Drexel University. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More

When states want to gauge quail populations, the process can be grueling, time-consuming and expensive.
It means spending hours in the field listening for calls. Or leaving a recording device in the field to catch what sounds are made — only to spend hours later listening to that audio. Then, repeating this process until there’s enough information to start making population estimates.
But a new model developed by researchers at the University of Georgia aims to streamline this process. By using artificial intelligence to analyze terabytes of recordings for quail calls, the process gives wildlife managers the ability to gather the data they need in a matter of minutes.
“The model is very accurate, picking up between 80% and 100% of all calls even in the noisiest recordings. So, you could take a recording, put it through our model and it will tell you how many quail calls that the recorder heard,” said James Martin, an associate professor at the UGA Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources who has been working on the project, in collaboration with the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, for about five years. “This new model allows you to analyze terabytes of data in seconds, and what that will allow us to do is scale up monitoring, so you can literally put hundreds of these devices out and cover a lot more area and do so with a lot less effort than in the past.”
The software represents about five years of work by Martin, postdoctoral researcher Victoria Nolan and numerous key contributors who have worked with a code writer to create the model. It’s also part of a larger shift taking place in the field of wildlife research, where computer algorithms are now assisting with work that once took humans thousands of hours to complete.
Increasingly, computers are getting smarter at, for example, identifying specific noises or certain traits in photos and sound recordings. For researchers such as Martin, it means hours once spent on tasks such as listening to audio or looking at game camera images can now be done by a computer, freeing up valuable time to focus on other aspects of a project.
The new tool can also be a valuable resource for state and federal agencies looking for information on their quail populations, but with limited funds to spend on any one project. “So, I think this is something states might jump on as far as replacing their current monitoring with acoustic recording devices,” added Martin.
The software’s success was recently documented by the Journal of Remote Sensing in Ecology and Conservation.
As the software gets more use and is exposed to sounds from new geographic areas, Martin said, it gets even “smarter.” As it is, quail offer several different kinds of calls. But when the software is exposed to a variety of sounds that aren’t quail, he said, it’s better able to distinguish the correct calls from the ambient noises of the grasses and trees around them.
Over time, the software will grow more discerning.
“So that’s why you have to keep giving it training data, and when you move geographies, you encounter new sounds that you didn’t train the model for,” he added. “It’s always about adaption.”
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Materials provided by University of Georgia. Original written by Kristen Morales. Note: Content may be edited for style and length. More