Tech

Northwestern University researchers have developed a more efficient and stable method to conduct electrocatalytic reactions.

The technique, which fluidizes catalyst particles in electrolyte instead of gluing them to electrodes, avoids a rapid decline in reaction performance -- a phenomenon researchers call fatigue. The approach could improve production processes for electrolysis and electrochemical energy conversion and storage.

"There has been extensive effort to find new high-performance catalysts that can also better withstand electrochemical reactions," said Jiaxing Huang, professor of materials science and engineering at the McCormick School of Engineering, who led the research. "We developed a drastically different approach to make electrocatalysis less prone to decay -- not by finding another new material, but by doing the reaction differently."

The study, titled "Fluidized Electrocatalysis," was published on February 10 in the journal CCS Chemistry and featured on the cover of the February issue.

In a typical electrocatalysis setting, once catalytic materials are glued onto the electrode, they are soaked in electrolyte and undergo a reaction spurred by a voltage. Since the voltage is continuously applied through the electrode, the materials experience continuous electrochemical stress. Over time, their catalytic performance can decay due to accumulated structural damage in the electrode as a whole, or on individual particles.

The team's approach avoids the continuous stress by fluidizing the particles in the electrolyte. Now the particles work in rotation, experiencing electrochemical stress only momentarily when colliding with the electrode. Collectively, the output from the individual collision events merge into a continuous and stable electrochemical current.

"Fluidized electrocatalysis breaks the spatial and temporal continuum of electrochemical reactions, making the catalysts more efficient." Huang said. "Fluidization also reduces the mass transport limit of the reactants to the catalyst, since the particles are swimming in the electrolyte."

Huang tested his ideas using a well-known, commercially available catalyst called Pt/C, which is made of carbon black powders decorated by platinum nanoparticles to catalyze oxygen evolution, hydrogen evolution, and methanol oxidation reactions. These three electrochemical reactions, when catalyzed by Pt/C, normally suffer from severe performance decay, but all showed higher efficiency and stability when the particles were fluidized.

"The new strategy makes an unstable catalyst deliver stable performance for all three of the model reactions. It was an exciting proof-of-concept," said Yi-Ge Zhou, the first author of the paper and a former visiting postdoc in Huang's group. "When we calculated single particle efficiency for some of these reactions, it was at least three orders of magnitude higher than the fixed particles. Instead of stressing them out, we gave the particles a chance to relax, and they became a lot more efficient as a result."

While more work is needed to identify the types of electrochemical reactions that could best maximize the benefit of fluidized electrocatalysis, Huang believes his method could be applied to a variety of different types of materials and produce more efficient, longer lasting electrocatalytic reactions. This could lead to improved electrochemical synthesis processes, which play an important role in converting energy to chemicals for large-scale energy storage.

"I hope other researchers consider our method to re-evaluate their catalysts. It would be exciting to see previously deemed unusable catalysts become usable," Huang said.

A new study published by Dauphin Island Sea Lab researchers adds a new layer to understanding how an oil spill could impact marine life.

A diverse community of worms and other marine organisms on the seafloor plays a significant role in nutrient cycling, organic matter burial, and remineralization. The burrowing and feeding activities of these organisms, or bioturbation, helps in the oxygenation of the sediment.

The research team, led by Dr. Kelly Dorgan, conducted a mesocosm experiment to investigate how sublethal levels of oil contamination in seawater may affect animals that live in marine sediments. The mesocosm is a flowthrough facility with tanks large enough to include the elements of field realism, but small enough to control some factors.

The research exposed tube worms and brittlestars to seawater that had been mixed and contaminated with oil but had the oil solids removed. These taxa are abundant in the northern Gulf of Mexico. They are both surface deposit feeders. The tubeworm builds its tube from shell fragments and can move vertically and laterally within the sediment. The tube sits about an inch above the sediment allowing the worm to bend the tube and feed on surface sediments. The brittlestar burrows, positioning its oral disk within an inch of the surface. A brittlestar's arms extend above the surface to collect sediment on tube feet.

To the research team's knowledge, these taxa had not been previously evaluated for responses to hydrocarbon exposure.

Overall, it was determined there was little direct response of sediment animals to oil-contaminated water. It's believed they would be more susceptible to sediment contamination. Notably, the metrics used in this study are broadly applicable to sediment-dwelling animals and could be usefully applied to future exposure studies.

Dorgan and her team introduced a novel method to quantify horizontal bioturbation and believe it will be a helpful tool in understanding how marine animals mix sediments. They measured bioturbation using luminophores, which are fluorescent sediment grains that glow when illuminated. Luminophores have been used to measure vertical bioturbation before; however, in this study, the researchers also estimated horizontal clumping/dispersion using tools from spatial analysis. They found differences in both horizontal and vertical mixing between the two species studied.

LEXINGTON, Ky. (Feb. 10, 2020) - A new study led by University of Kentucky Markey Cancer Center researchers suggests that implementing cancer education curricula in middle and high schools may improve cancer literacy in Kentuckians and ultimately help reduce cancer rates.

The study, published in the Journal of Cancer Education, included 349 middle and high school students in Kentucky. Students were given a baseline test to determine their cancer literacy, followed by a cancer education presentation. Following the presentation, students were tested again. Results showed that the scores for all individual items increased after the intervention, and the average test scores improved by 30%.

The low levels of cancer literacy pre-intervention weren't too surprising, according to Nathan Vanderford, assistant director for research at Markey and director of the Appalachian Career Training in Oncology (ACTION) Program. Having grown up in rural Tennessee, Vanderford recalls that his early educational experiences didn't include much information on the topic.

"Thinking back on my own pre-college education, I do not recall learning in-depth about cancer in school," Vanderford said. "From that perspective, the lower levels of cancer knowledge these students displayed at baseline are not too surprising. At the same time, given the increased information age we live in, there was some thought that perhaps students' baseline levels would be higher."

Kentucky is home to the highest overall rates of cancer incidence and death in the country. In the Appalachian region of the state, this problem is even more pronounced. Among many other factors, the lack of health literacy plays a part in the state's poor health. Research shows that people with inadequate health literacy are less likely to participate in preventive measures (such as cancer screenings, one of the best ways to reduce cancer rates) and making healthy lifestyle choices.

Based on their study, Vanderford notes that implementing cancer education into the existing curriculum for middle and high school students could pay off in the long run by encouraging change in many behaviors that lead to higher cancer rates.

"Youth represent a vulnerable population that is at risk for beginning behaviors - like smoking - that increase cancer risk," Vanderford said. "At the same time, this is a malleable group that may be more positively influenced by cancer prevention and control strategies. Our results highlight opportunities we have to provide cancer education material to students in a way that will greatly affect their cancer knowledge, which could result in lowering cancer risks through increased cancer prevention/control behaviors."

If you've ever opened an umbrella or set up a folding chair, you've used a deployable structure - an object that can transition from a compact state to an expanded one. You've probably noticed that such structures usually require rather complicated locking mechanisms to hold them in place. And, if you've ever tried to open an umbrella in the wind or fold a particularly persnickety folding chair, you know that today's deployable structures aren't always reliable or autonomous.

Now, a team of researchers from the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) have harnessed the domino effect to design deployable systems that expand quickly with a small push and are stable and locked into place after deployment.

The research is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

"Today, multi-stable structures are being used in a range of applications including reconfigurable architectures, medical devices, soft robots, and deployable solar panels for aerospace," said Ahmad Zareei, a postdoctoral fellow in Applied Mathematics at SEAS and first author of the paper. "Usually, to deploy these structures, you need a complicated actuation process but here, we use this simple domino effect to create a reliable deployment process."

Mechanically speaking, a domino effect occurs when a multi-stable building block (the domino) switches from its high-energy state (standing) to its low-energy state (laying down), in response to an external stimulus like the push of a finger. When the first domino is toppled, it transfers its energy to its neighbor, initiating a wave that sequentially switches all building blocks from high to low energy states.

The researchers focused on a simple system of bistable joints linked by rigid bars. They first showed that by carefully designing the connections between the links, transition waves could propagate through the entire structure -- transforming the initial straight configuration to a curved one. Then, using these building blocks, the research team designed a deployable dome that could pop-up from flat with one small push.

"Being able to predict and program this kind of highly non-linear behavior opens up many opportunities and has the potential not only for morphing surfaces and reconfigurable devices but also for propulsion in soft robotics, mechanical logic, and controlled energy absorption," said Katia Bertoldi, the William and Ami Kuan Danoff Professor of Applied Mechanics at SEAS and senior author of the study.

Bertoldi's lab is also working on understanding and controlling transition waves in two-dimensional mechanical metamaterials. In a recent paper, also published in PNAS, the team demonstrated a 2D system in which they can control the direction, shape, and velocity of transition waves by changing the shape or stiffness of the building blocks and incorporating defects into the materials.

The researchers designed materials wherein the waves moved horizontally, vertically, diagonally, circularly, and even wiggled back and forth like a snake.

"Our work significantly increases the design space and functionality of metamaterials, and opens up a new pathway to control deformations within the material at desired locations and speed," said Ahmad Rafsanjani, a postdoctoral fellow at SEAS and co-first author of the paper.

Support cells in the nervous system help protect motor neurons in the early-stages of sporadic motor neuron disease, according to new research from the Crick and UCL.

Motor neuron disease is a degenerative condition which destroys the nerve cells (motor neurons) in the brain and spinal cord, which control movement, speech, swallowing and breathing. The most common type of motor neuron disease is amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), which affects around 5,000 people in the UK at any one time.

The study, published in Brain, found that in this disease, the motor neurons in the brain and spinal cord become sick and die when a protein, called TDP-43, misfolds and accumulates in the wrong place within the motor neurons. Conversely, when this happens in a type of cell that supports motor neurons, called astrocytes, these cells appear comparatively resistant and survive.

When these two types of cells are close together, the more-resistant astrocytes are able to protect motor neurons from the misfolded protein. This rescue-mechanism helps the motor neurons, which are needed to control muscles, live longer.

"The role astrocytes have played in dealing with toxic forms of TDP-43 in motor neurons has not been previously well documented in motor neuron disease. It's exciting that we've now found that they may play an important protective role in the early-stages of this disease," explains Phillip Smethurst, lead author and former postdoc in the Human Stem Cells and Neurodegeneration Laboratory at the Crick. "This has huge therapeutic potential - finding ways to harness the protective properties of astrocytes could pave the way to new treatments. This could prolong their rescue function or find a way to mimic their behaviour in motor neurons so that they can protect themselves from the toxic protein."

This research also established a new model for studying motor neuron disease. This new method more closely resembles the disease in patients as it uses healthy human stem cells, derived from skin cells, and spinal cord tissue samples donated by patients with motor neuron disease, collected post-mortem.

"It is thanks to the selfless donations from people with motor neuron disease, that we were able to study the interplay between motor neurons and astrocytes in conditions that closely resemble what happens in humans. These human cell models are a powerful tool for further studies of motor neuron disease and in the hunt for effective therapies," explains Katie Sidle, co-senior author, neuroscientist and consultant neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square, University College London Hospitals.

"For the first time, we have been able to create a model of sporadic motor neuron disease by essentially 'transferring' the toxic TDP-43 protein from post-mortem tissue into healthy human stem cell-derived motor neurons and astrocytes in order to understand how each cell type responds to this insult, both in isolation and when mixed together. The insights made in this work are testament to the power of creative collaboration and interdisciplinarity. It is through many years working together as a group of clinicians, pathologists, stem cell biologists, protein biochemists and other experts, and with a joint aim of increasing knowledge about motor neuron disease (to ultimately help find a cure), that these results have been possible," says Rickie Patani, co-senior author, group leader of the Human Stem Cells and Neurodegeneration Laboratory at the Crick, consultant neurologist at the National Hospital for Neurology in Queen Square, University College London Hospitals and Professor of Human Stem Cells and Regenerative Neurology at UCL Queen Square Institute of Neurology.

NASA analyzed Tropical Storm Uesi's rainfall and found moderate to heavy rainfall around the storm's center and in a large band of thunderstorms south of the center. That heavy rainfall has triggered warnings for Vanuatu in the Southern Pacific Ocean.

NASA has the unique capability of peering under the clouds in storms and measuring the rate in which rain is falling. The Global Precipitation Measurement mission or GPM core passed over Uesi from its orbit in space and measured rainfall rates throughout the storm on Feb. 10 at 2:31 a.m. EST (0731 UTC).

The heaviest rainfall around the center was falling at a rate of 1.2 inches (30 mm) per hour. In a large band of thunderstorms south of the center, rainfall occurring at a rate of 1 inch (25 mm) per hour. Light rain was occurring throughout the rest of the storm.

On Feb. 10, the Vanuatu Meteorology and Geo-Hazards Department (VMGD), in Port Vila issued an update on Uesi.  At 7 a.m. EST (11 p.m. Vanuatu local time), Tropical Cyclone Uesi was located at latitude 17.6 degrees south and longitude 162.4 east, about 348 miles (560 km) west southwest of Malekula. Winds close to the center of the system were estimated near 55 mph (90 kph/50 knots) and Uesi was moving in a southwest direction.

VMGD's latest update said, "Rainfalls will be heavy with flash flood over low lying areas and areas close to river banks, including coastal flooding expected about the islands of the northern and parts of the central provinces. The marine strong wind warning is in effect for all Vanuatu coastal waters, while High seas warning is current for the central waters. Very rough to phenomenal seas and heavy to phenomenal swells expected to continue to affect the western parts of the northern and central waters tonight and tomorrow and extending to southern waters thereafter. People, including sea going vessels are strongly advised not to go out to sea until the system has moved out of the area."

The National Disaster Management Office (NDMO) posted a Blue Alert for the SHEFA and TAFEA provinces.

Safe and environmentally-friendly hydrogen gas on demand could be on the horizon following a new "hydrogenation" chemical process in development at The City College of New York. Led by Mahesh K. Lakshman, the research uniquely bypasses the need for an external source of hydrogen gas to accomplish a wide range of hydrogenations. It appears as an inside cover feature in the 2020 issue #1 of journal "Advanced Synthesis and Catalysis."

Lakshman explained hydrogenation as the addition of hydrogen atoms. For instance, a very common application is for the production of fats from vegetable oils. In industry, production of paraffin is an example.

"Hydrogenation is an old and well established method that relies on the use of a finely divided metal such as palladium, often supported on charcoal," said Lakshman, a Fellow of Britain's Royal Society of Chemistry and a former vice chair of the Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry. "It also needs a source of hydrogen gas, which to date is available from compressed hydrogen gas cylinders. These compressed hydrogen gas cylinders are not only expensive but they pose an extreme explosion and fire hazard."

He noted that the destruction of the Zeppelin Hindenburg airship in New Jersey in 1937 was attributed to this.

The research developed in CCNY's Division of Science eliminates the need for this compressed gas and results in a safer operational procedure.

"What we have found is that we can mix two stable materials together in the presence of palladium on charcoal and this produces a mixture capable of "hydrogenation," without requiring an external source of compressed hydrogen gas," said Lakshman. "This work was inspired by a publication from the Benjamin Stokes labs at University of California -- Merced. Stokes used water as the source of hydrogen atoms but there were certain things that did not seem achievable under his conditions. Our conditions seem much broader in that many different types of hydrogenations can be accomplished."

Among its other applications, Lakshman pointed that this new process of hydrogenation could be useful in undergraduate chemistry teaching modules. It would allow labs to dispense with compressed hydrogen gas cylinders.

"In addition, we have also developed conditions for introducing the heavier isotope (deuterium) by understanding the underlying mechanistic aspects. The concept of heavy drugs utilizes deuterium in place of hydrogen to slow down metabolism, with beneficial medicinal applications," added Lakshman.

What The Study Did: This randomized clinical trial that included 210 patients with Parkinson disease and related disorders and 175 caregivers examined whether outpatient palliative care was associated with better patient or caregiver outcomes compared with standard care.

To access the embargoed study: Visit our For The Media website at this link https://media.jamanetwork.com/

Authors: Benzi M. Kluger, M.D., of the University of Rochester Medical Center in Rochester, New York, is the corresponding author.

(doi:10.1001/jamaneurol.2019.4992)

Editor's Note: The article includes conflict of interest and funding/support disclosures. Please see the article for additional information, including other authors, author contributions and affiliations, financial disclosures, funding and support, etc.

As AI data sets get bigger and bigger, computers need more memory

New memory device uses pillar-shaped antiferromagnetic (AFM) materials

AFM materials are inherently fast, secure and require little power to read and write data

EVANSTON, Ill. -- Memory-hungry, power-sapping big data might finally have met its match.

Electrical engineers at Northwestern University and the University of Messina in Italy have developed a new magnetic memory device that could potentially support the surge of data-centric computing, which requires ever-increasing power, storage and speed.

Based on antiferromagnetic (AFM) materials, the device is the smallest of its kind ever demonstrated and operates with record-low electrical current to write data.

"The rise of big data has enabled the emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in the cloud and on edge devices and is fundamentally transforming the computing, networking and data storage industries," said Northwestern's Pedram Khalili, who led the research. "However, existing hardware cannot sustain the rapid growth of data-centric computing. Our technology potentially could solve this challenge."

The research will be published on Feb. 10 in the journal Nature Electronics.

Khalili is an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering in Northwestern's McCormick School of Engineering. He co-led the study with Giovanni Finocchio, an associate professor of electrical engineering at the University of Messina. The team also included Matthew Grayson, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at McCormick. Jiacheng Shi and Victor Lopez-Dominguez, who are both members of Khalili's laboratory, served as co-first authors of the paper.

From promise to probable

Although AI offers promise to improve many areas of society, including health care systems, transportation and security, it can only meet its potential if computing can support it.

Ideally, AI needs all the best parts of today's memory technologies: Something as fast as static random access memory (SRAM) and with a storage capacity similar to dynamic random access memory (DRAM) or Flash. On top of that, it also needs low power dissipation.

"There is no existing memory technology that meets all of these demands," Khalili said. "This has resulted in a so-called 'memory bottleneck' that severely limits the performance and energy consumption of AI applications today."

To meet this challenge, Khalili and his collaborators looked to AFM materials. In AFM materials, electrons behave like tiny magnets due to a quantum mechanical property called "spin," but the material itself does not demonstrate a macroscopic magnetization because the spins are aligned in antiparallel fashion.

Typically, memory devices require an electric current to retain stored data. But in AFM materials, it is the magnetically ordered spins that perform this task, so a continuously applied electric current is not needed. As an added bonus, the data cannot be erased by external magnetic fields. Because densely packed devices will not interact with magnetic fields, AFM-based devices are very secure and easy to scale down to small dimensions.

Easily adoptable technology

Because they are inherently fast and secure and use lower power, AFM materials have been explored in past studies. But previous researchers experienced difficulties controlling the magnetic order within the materials.

Khalili and his team used pillars of antiferromagnetic platinum manganese -- a geometry not previously explored. With a diameter of just 800 nanometers, these pillars are 10 times smaller than earlier AFM-based memory devices.

Importantly, the resulting device is compatible with existing semiconductor manufacturing practices, which means that current manufacturing companies could easily adopt the new technology without having to invest in new equipment.

"This brings AFM memory -- and thus highly scaled and high-performance magnetic random-access memory (MRAM) -- much closer to practical applications," Khalili said. "This is a big deal for industry as there is a strong demand today for technologies and materials to extend the scaling and performance of MRAM and increase the return on the huge investment that industry has already made in this technology to bring it to manufacturing."

Khalili's team is already working on the next steps toward this translation to applications.

"We are working now to further downscale these devices and to improve methods to read out their magnetic state," Khalili said. "We also are looking at even more energy-efficient ways to write data into AFM materials, such as replacing the electric current with an electric voltage, a challenging task that could further increase the energy efficiency by another order of magnitude or more."

Researchers at the University of Oxford are now closer to finding the cell of origin of ovarian cancer, and their ultimate aim of developing a much needed screening tool for ovarian cancer.

Ovarian cancer is the sixth most common cancer in women, with around 7,500 new cases diagnosed in the UK each year1. Currently only 35% of patients in England will live 5 years beyond their diagnosis. Less than 1 in 3 patients in England are diagnosed at Stage 1 where survival rates are as good as 95%2. The development of screening tools have transformed survival rates for other cancers such as cervical and breast cancer.

The new technique is called single cell RNA sequencing. It examines all the RNA molecules in a cell, whereas the traditional technique can only look at a group of cells at a time. In this study, the researchers used single-cell sequencing to look at the RNA in individual normal cells from the inner layer (epithelium) of Fallopian tubes, which carry eggs from the ovaries to the uterus, and which is the origin of the vast majority of ovarian cancers. By doing so, they were able to identify new subtypes of normal Fallopian tube cells.

Surprisingly, the molecular fingerprints of these subtypes were mirrored in individual ovarian cancers. Scientists discovered that single cell sequencing of the normal Fallopian tube can identify a particular group of ovarian cancer patients who have the poorest chance of surviving the disease and do not benefit from current treatments. Focussing on new treatments for this particular group of patients will be an important way to improve overall survival rates.

Professor Ahmed Ashour Ahmed, Director of the Ovarian Cancer Cell Laboratory at the MRC Weatherall Institute of Molecular Medicine at Oxford University, said: "Identifying the type of cancer cells is an important early step in choosing which drugs and treatments to use because different types of cells respond differently to treatment. The "Oxford Classic", our new tumour classifier should give us much more accurate predictions for disease outcome in patients as well as helping us to develop targeted therapies for each type of cancer."

Zhiyuan Hu, first author on the paper, said: "The discovery of new types of cells sheds new light onto the complexity of ovarian cancers. This research should take us a step closer to identifying the cell of origin of ovarian cancer and to developing a new tool for screening. It also opens the door for similar research for other types of cancers."

Cary Wakefield, Chief Executive of charity Ovarian Cancer Action who funded the research, said: "We fund world-class research to address the low survival rate women diagnosed with ovarian cancer currently face. These exciting findings take us closer to both a screening tool and personalised treatments, the two key elements we know will transform the lives of women diagnosed with ovarian cancer today and for generations to come."

Fuel cells turn chemicals into electricity. Now, a University of Toronto Engineering team has adapted technology from fuel cells to do the reverse: harness electricity to make valuable chemicals from waste carbon (CO2).

"For decades, talented researchers have been developing systems that convert electricity into hydrogen and back again," says Professor Ted Sargent, one of the senior authors of the paper published in Science. "Our innovation builds on that legacy, but by using carbon-based molecules, we can plug directly into existing hydrocarbon infrastructure."

In a hydrogen fuel cell, hydrogen and oxygen come together on the surface of a catalyst. The chemical reaction releases electrons, which are captured by specialized materials within the fuel cell and pumped into a circuit.

The opposite of a fuel cell is an electolyzer, which uses electricity to drive a chemical reaction. The paper's authors are experts in designing electrolyzers that convert CO2 into other carbon-based molecules, such as ethylene. The team includes PhD candidate Adnan Ozden, who is supervised by Professor David Sinton, as well as several members of Sargent's team, including PhD candidate Joshua Wicks, postdoctoral fellow F. Pelayo García de Arquer and former postdoctoral fellow Cao-Thang Dinh.

"Ethylene is one of the most widely produced chemicals in the world," says Wicks. "It's used to make everything from antifreeze to lawn furniture. Today it is derived from fossil fuels, but if we could instead make it by upgrading waste CO2, it would provide a new economic incentive for capturing carbon."

Today's electrolyzers do not yet produce ethylene on a scale large enough to compete with what is derived from fossil fuels. Part of the challenge lies in the unique nature of the chemical reaction that transforms CO2 into ethylene and other carbon-based molecules.

"The reaction requires three things: CO2, which is a gas; hydrogen ions, which come from liquid water; and electrons, which are transmitted through a metal catalyst," says Ozden. "Bringing those three different phases -- especially the CO2 -- together quickly is challenging, and that is what has limited the rate of the reaction."

In their latest electrolyzer design, the team used a unique arrangement of materials to overcome the challenges of bringing the reactants together. Electrons are delivered using a copper-based catalyst that the team had previously developed. But instead of a flat sheet of metal, the catalyst in the new electrolyzer is in the form of small particles embedded within a layer of a material known as Nafion.

Nafion is an ionomer -- a polymer that can conduct charged particles known as ions. Today, it is commonly used in fuel cells, where its role is to transport positively charged hydrogen (H+) ions around within the reactor.

"In our experiments, we discovered that a certain arrangement of Nafion can facilitate the transport of gases such as CO2," says García de Arquer. "Our design enables gas reactants to reach the catalyst surface fast enough and in a sufficiently distributed manner to significantly increase the rate of reaction."

With the reaction no longer limited by how quickly the three reactants can come together, the team was able to transform CO2 into ethylene and other products 10 times faster than before. They accomplished this without reducing the overall efficiency of the reactor, meaning more product for roughly the same capital cost.

Despite the advance, the device remains a long way from commercial viability. One of the major remaining challenges has to do with the stability of the catalyst under the new higher-current densities.

"We can pump in electrons 10 times faster, which is great, but we can only operate the system for about ten hours before the catalyst layer breaks down," says Dinh. "This is still far from the target of thousands of hours that would be needed for industrial application."

Dinh, who is now a professor of chemical engineering at Queen's University, is continuing the work by looking into new strategies for stabilizing the catalyst layer, such as further modifying the chemical structure of the Nafion or adding additional layers to protect it.

The other team members plan to work on different challenges, such as optimizing the catalyst to produce other commercially valuable products beyond ethylene.

"We picked ethylene as an example, but the principles here can be applied to the synthesis of other valuable chemicals, including ethanol" says Wicks. "In addition to its many industrial uses, ethanol is also widely used as a fuel."

The ability to produce fuels, building materials and other products in a carbon-neutral way is an important step towards reducing our dependence on fossil fuels.

"Even if we stop using oil for energy, we are still going to need all of these molecules," says García de Arquer. "If we can produce them using waste CO2 and renewable energy, we can have a major impact in terms of decarbonizing our economy."

February 10, 2020 - Men with localized prostate cancer are faced with deciding among a range of options for treatment - including a choice between robot-assisted versus conventional prostatectomy. A new follow-up study in The Journal of Urology® finds that most patients choosing surgery for prostate cancer don't regret their decisions. The Journal of Urology®, Official Journal of the American Urological Association (AUA), is published in the Lippincott portfolio by Wolters Kluwer.

Patients who play a more active role in making decisions about prostate cancer surgery are less likely to experience "decision regret" about their choices, according to the new research by Johannes Huber, MD, PhD, of Technische Universität Dresden, Germany, and colleagues. The study also finds no difference in decision regret in men opting for open versus robot-assisted surgery.

Study Looks at Decision Regret after Prostate Cancer Surgery

The study included data from a large-scale German healthcare research project, called HAROW, that analyzed outcomes for men choosing different treatments for localized prostate cancer - meaning that the cancer hasn't spread beyond the prostate gland. "The name HAROW refers to the major treatment options for patients with this diagnosis - namely hormone therapy, active surveillance, radiation, operation (surgery), or watchful waiting," explains study coauthor Dr. Lothar Weissbach, founder of the HAROW project.

In recent years, robot-assisted prostatectomy has become an increasingly popular alternative to conventional open surgery. While the robot-assisted procedure may enable faster recovery, studies have shown "no definite advantage" in terms of prostate cancer outcomes.

Few studies have looked at decision regret by men choosing among prostate cancer treatments. "Decision related regret is a negative emotion associated with thinking about a past choice and comparing the status quo with a hypothetical situation which might have taken place with having chosen a different treatment alternative," Dr. Huber and coauthors explain.

The authors analyzed decision regret in 936 men who underwent prostate cancer surgery, of whom 532 underwent open prostate surgery and 404 underwent robot-assisted surgery. At follow-up of about six years, patients rated their "distress or remorse" about their treatment choice using a 0 to 100 Decision Regret Scale (with 100 being the highest level of regret).

Men who underwent robot-assisted surgery showed a more "self-determined role" in treatment decision-making. They were more likely to use the internet to research their treatment options and were more active in selecting the hospital where the procedure would be performed. They also chose hospitals that performed a higher volume of prostate cancer surgeries, where robot-assisted surgery was more likely to be available. "[A]ctively involved patients may choose another hospital if there is a strong desire for robotic surgery," the researchers write.

Overall, rates of decision regret about prostate cancer surgery were low: average score on the Decision Regret Scale was just 14 of 100. Decision regret scores were similar for men undergoing robot-assisted versus open surgery, with scores of 12 and 15, respectively.

Not surprisingly, patients with better treatment outcomes - which included no cancer recurrence, good erectile function and no incontinence - had fewer regrets. Men who played a more active role in treatment decision-making were about twice as likely to have a low decision regret score (less than 15). Shorter follow-up times were also associated with lower decision regret.

Decision regret could have a lasting impact on patient satisfaction with choices for prostate cancer treatment. The new results suggest generally low levels of decision regret several years after prostate cancer surgery, regardless of the choice of surgical approaches.

While good outcomes are obviously important, being more actively involved in treatment decision-making may also lead to fewer regrets. In a discussion accompanying their paper, Dr. Huber and coauthors write, "As our study shows, personal responsibility for one's own decisions has a significant influence on decision regret."

Seurat Therapeutics, Inc. (Seurat) announced today the publication of preclinical studies of its lead product candidate, intranasal insulin-like growth factor-1 (IGF-1), in a rat model of migraine headaches, in the scientific journal Brain Research. The studies were conducted in Dr. Richard Kraig's laboratory at the University of Chicago. Seurat is the world-wide licensee of patents for nasal IGF-1 treatment of migraine headaches from the University of Chicago.

The publication reports that trigeminal pain pathway activation is significantly reduced after intranasal IGF-1 treatment. The studies demonstrated that oxidative stress increases calcitonin gene-related peptide (CGRP) expression, a trigeminal system pain pathway mediator associated with migraine; and that intranasal IGF-1 significantly reduces oxidative stress levels and trigeminal ganglion CGRP. This beneficial effect was not associated with hypoglycemia, which can occur with systemic administration of IGF-1. These findings support that intranasal IGF-1 has a unique potential to safely prevent migraine headaches through multiple novel mechanisms. "Further studies and clinical trials will be needed to validate this observation in humans, but we are enthusiastic about the results," said Yuan Zhang, Ph.D., M.S., CEO of Seurat.

"IGF-1's therapeutic effects involve reducing oxidative stress and the amount of CGRP, which are known to be involved in human migraine headaches. This suggests that IGF-1 alone or in combination with other ant-CGRP agents may provide better migraine relief, something we are actively testing in the lab," said Richard Kraig, M.D., Ph.D., the William D. Mabie Professor in the Neurosciences at The University of Chicago and CSO of Seurat.

"If continued testing demonstrates that nasal delivery of IGF-1 is safe and effective for treatment of migraine headaches in humans, Seurat has the potential of helping approximately 39 million migraine sufferers in the United States," said Martin Sanders, MD, Chairman of Seurat.

The studies were supported with funding from Seurat, the National Institute of Neurologic Diseases and Stroke, the University of Chicago's Institute for Translational Medicine, Polsky Center's George Schultz Innovation Fund, Booth School of Business's Edward L. Kaplan, '71, New Venture Challenge, the Chicago Biomedical Consortium, and CuresWithinReach.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- You don't have to be a drinker for your brain to be affected by alcoholism.

A new study shows that just having a parent with an alcohol use disorder affects how your brain transitions between active and resting states - regardless of your own drinking habits.

The study, performed by researchers at Purdue University and the Indiana University School of Medicine, discovered that the brain reconfigures itself between completing a mentally demanding task and resting.

But for the brain of someone with a family history of an alcohol use disorder, this reconfiguration doesn't happen.

While the missing transition doesn't seem to affect how well a person performs the mentally demanding task itself, it might be related to larger scale brain functions that give rise to behaviors associated with addiction. In particular, study subjects without this brain process demonstrated greater impatience in waiting for rewards, a behavior associated with addiction.

Findings are published in the journal NeuroImage. The work was led by Enrico Amico, a former Purdue postdoctoral researcher who is now a researcher at EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland.

How the brain reconfigures between active and resting states is like how a computer closes down a program after you're finished with it.

"The moment you close a program, a computer has to remove it from memory, reorganize the cache and maybe clear out some temporary files. This helps the computer to prepare for the next task," said Joaquín Goñi, a Purdue assistant professor in the School of Industrial Engineering and the Weldon School of Biomedical Engineering.

"In a similar way, we've found that this reconfiguration process in the human brain is associated with finishing a task and getting ready for what's next." Goñi's research group, the CONNplexity Lab, takes a computational approach to neuroscience and cognitive science.

Past research has shown that a family history of alcoholism affects a person's brain anatomy and physiology, but most studies have looked at this effect only in separate active and quiet resting states rather than the transition between them.

"A lot of what brains do is switch between different tasks and states. We suspected that this task switching might be somewhat lower in people with a family history of alcoholism," said David Kareken, a professor of neurology at the Indiana University School of Medicine and director of the Indiana Alcohol Research Center.

The study defined a "family history of alcoholism" as someone with a parent who had enough symptoms to constitute an alcohol use disorder. About half of the 54 study participants had this history.

Researchers at Indiana University measured the brain activity of subjects with an MRI scanner as they completed a mentally demanding task on a computer. The task required them to unpredictably hold back from pressing a left or right key. After completing the task, the subjects rested while watching a fixed point on the screen.

A separate task outside of the MRI scanner gauged how participants responded to rewards, asking questions such as if they would like $20 now or $200 in one year.

Amico and Goñi processed the data and developed a computational framework for extracting different patterns of brain connectivity between completing the mentally demanding task and entering the resting state, such as when brain areas rose and fell together in activity, or one brain area rose while another fell at the same time.

The data revealed that these brain connectivity patterns reconfigured within the first three minutes after finishing the task. By the fourth minute of rest, the effect had completely disappeared.

And it's not a quiet process: Reconfiguration involves multiple parts of the brain at once.

"These brain regions talk to each other and are very strongly implicated in the task even though by this point, the task is already completed. It almost seems like an echo in time of what had been going on," Kareken said.

Subjects lacking the transition also had the risk factors that researchers have seen to be consistent with developing alcoholism. These include being male, a greater number of symptoms of depression, and reward-impatience.

A family history of alcoholism, however, stood out as the most statistically significant difference in this brain reconfiguration.

The finding affects research going forward.

"In the past, we've assumed that a person who doesn't drink excessively is a 'healthy' control for a study. But this work shows that a person with just a family history of alcoholism may also have some subtle differences in how their brains operate," Goñi said.

WEST LAFAYETTE, Ind. -- Computer chips use billions of tiny switches, called transistors, to process information. The more transistors on a chip, the faster the computer.

A material shaped like a one-dimensional DNA helix might further push the limits on a transistor's size. The material comes from a rare earth element called tellurium.

Researchers found that the material, encapsulated in a nanotube made of boron nitride, helps build a field-effect transistor with a diameter of two nanometers. Transistors on the market are made of bulkier silicon and range between 10 and 20 nanometers in scale.

The research is published in the journal Nature Electronics. Engineers at Purdue University performed the work in collaboration with Michigan Technological University, Washington University in St. Louis, and the University of Texas at Dallas.

Over the past few years, transistors have been built as small as a few nanometers in lab settings. The goal is to build transistors the size of atoms.

Peide Ye's lab at Purdue is one of many research groups seeking to exploit materials much thinner than silicon to achieve both smaller and higher-performing transistors.

"This tellurium material is really unique. It builds a functional transistor with the potential to be the smallest in the world," said Ye, Purdue's Richard J. and Mary Jo Schwartz Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering.

In 2018, the same research team at Purdue discovered tellurene, a two-dimensional material derived from tellurium. They found that transistors made with this material could carry significantly more electrical current, making them more efficient.

The discovery made them curious about what else tellurium could do for transistors. The element's ability to take the form of an ultrathin material in one dimension could help with downsizing transistors even further.

One way to shrink field-effect transistors, the kind found in most electronic devices, is to build the gates that surround thinner nanowires. These nanowires are protected within nanotubes.

Jing-Kai Qin and Pai-Ying Liao, Purdue electrical and computer engineering doctoral students, led work in figuring out how to make tellurium as small as a single atomic chain and then build transistors with these atomic chains or ultrathin nanowires.

They started off growing one-dimensional chains of tellurium atoms. Wenzhuo Wu's lab at Purdue synthesized bare tellurium nanowires for comparison. A team led by Li Yang at Washington University simulated how tellurium might behave.

The researchers were surprised to find that the atoms in these one-dimensional chains wiggle. These wiggles were made visible through TEM imaging performed by Moon Kim at the University of Texas at Dallas and Hai-Yan Wang at Purdue.

"Silicon atoms look straight, but these tellurium atoms are like a snake. This is a very original kind of structure," Ye said.

The wiggles were the atoms strongly bonding to each other in pairs to form DNA-like helical chains, then stacking through weak forces called van der Waals interactions to form a tellurium crystal.

These van der Waals interactions would set apart tellurium as a more effective material for single atomic chains or one-dimensional nanowires compared with others because it's easier to fit into a nanotube, Ye said.

Since the opening of a nanotube can't be any smaller than the size of an atom, tellurium helices of atoms could achieve smaller nanowires and, therefore, smaller transistors.

The researchers built a transistor with a tellurium nanowire encapsulated in a boron nitride nanotube, provided by physics professor Yoke Khin Yap's lab at the Michigan Technological University. A high-quality boron nitride nanotube effectively insulates tellurium, making it possible to build a transistor.

Xianfan Xu's lab at Purdue characterized the material's properties with Raman spectroscopy to benchmark its performance.

"This research reveals more about a promising material that could achieve faster computing with very low power consumption using these tiny transistors," said Joe Qiu, program manager for the U.S. Army Research Office, which funded this work. "That technology would have important applications for the Army."