Getting rid of those Damn Dendrites, that cause short circuits, in Lithium Batteries, has always been a struggle, but researchers have found a simple solution.

Researchers design dendrite-free lithium battery

By designing a solid electrolyte that is rigid on one side and soft on the other, researchers have fabricated a lithium-metal battery that completely suppresses dendrite formation-a major safety hazard that can cause fires ...

From article, (By designing a solid electrolyte that is rigid on one side and soft on the other, researchers have fabricated a lithium-metal battery that completely suppresses dendrite formation—a major safety hazard that can cause fires and shorten battery lifetime. This design also overcomes a tradeoff that is typically present in these batteries, by simultaneously eliminating dendrite growth and reducing the resistance at the electrode/electrolyte interface. Typical methods cannot achieve both of these goals at the same time.

As the researchers explain, the tradeoff in lithium batteries occurs because the lithium anode and the cathode have requirements that are inherently contradictory. While the anode requires a rigid electrolyte to block dendrite growth, it is difficult for a rigid electrolyte to maintain sufficient contact with the solid cathode, which creates a highly resistive cathode/electrolyte interface.

To address this problem, the researchers designed an asymmetrical solid electrolyte, in which each side has a different type of surface. The side facing the anode is a rigid ceramic material that presses against the lithium anode to discourage dendrite growth. On the other hand, the side facing the cathode is made of a soft polymer, which allows for a strong interfacial connection with the cathode. The entire electrolyte is also very thin, at just under 36 micrometers.

 In tests, the researchers compared batteries with the new electrolyte to those with a conventional electrolyte. After 1750 hours of cycling, they found that the batteries with the conventional electrolyte exhibited rough morphologies indicative of dendrite formation, while those with the new electrolyte showed no morphological changes even after 3200 hours of cycling, indicating that dendrite growth was effectively eliminated.

Going forward, the researchers expect that the dendrite-free lithium batteries will lead to energy-storage systems that combine the high energy and power densities of lithium batteries with improved safety and longer lifetimes due to eliminating dendrite growth.

"We plan to design pouch cells with this asymmetric solid electrolyte for attaining a high energy density in solid batteries," Guo said.)

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`The Move to Solid State Lithium and Magnesium Batteries is starting and will reshape how far you go in an electric car on a charge.

The future of our technology and our planet depends on one thing: the battery

Most of us are running on empty. Since the mobile phone spawned a smartphone-first world, we've all been tending to the needs of batteries. The daily or nightly charge of the smartphone is the most prevalent, but laptops, tablets, drones, wireless headphones, smartwatches and other wearable devices are becoming more common.

From article, (with an expected 20 million electric vehicles to be selling each year by 2030, each using a massive lithium-ion battery.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) thinks there will be 530 million electric vehicles by 2040, and that their electricity consumption will grow to 1,800 terawatt hours in 2040 – or 5% of global power demand – from just 6 terawatt hours in 2016.

The batteries needed by an electric car are really big. The 2016 Nissan Leaf has a 30kWh battery capable of going for 172km/107 miles, while the upcoming Tesla Model 3 will have a 50kWh or optional 75kWh battery, which can go for 355km/220 miles and 500km/310 miles respectively. Is that your road-range-anxiety gone?

"The battery pack is likely to remain the single most expensive component in EVs for some time to come, and the costs are broadly proportional to capacity," says Robin Shaw, Chief Technology Officer for battery and energy storage supplier Hyperdrive Innovation.

He thinks the crucial point will come when the cost of a battery pack with enough range makes an electric car cheaper than an equivalent petrol or diesel car. "Having said that, I think the 400 mile range on a single charge is just around the corner, certainly within the next three years," he adds.
"Increasing energy density for lithium-ion, coupled with falling costs per unit, is an exciting innovation in itself," says Shaw, who thinks we're on the cusp of everything becoming electric.

“The way in which energy is generated, distributed and consumed is being transformed – it means a huge range of vehicles including warehouse robots, construction equipment, municipal transport and airport ground fleets turning electric," he adds.
Vehicle fleets in city centers, construction sites and transport hubs are all up for electrification. The key is to efficiently store energy collected from sun or wind, which at present can be done using lithium-ion batteries purely because of their decreasing cost.

lithium-ion batteries wear out relatively quickly.

Cue magnesium-ion batteries, which have a significant advantage over lithium-ion; they don't wear out as quickly, and they don't explode as easily. That's an underrated problem for electric vehicles (when they crash, specifically), so magnesium-ion batteries are an attempt to make a much more stable solid-state battery.

Researchers at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Argonne National Laboratory are working on a magnesium battery, which offers higher energy density than lithium, but they couldn't find a non-corrosive liquid electrolyte (which serves as the catalyst to make a battery conductive).

"Magnesium is such a new technology, it doesn’t have any good liquid electrolytes,” said Gerbrand Ceder, a Berkeley Lab Senior Faculty Scientist. “We thought, why not leapfrog and make a solid-state electrolyte?” They managed it, too, discovering that magnesium scandium selenide spinel worked great.

It could have a transformative impact on energy storage. “There are enormous efforts in industry to make a solid-state battery," said Ceder.

The search for a solid-state battery that's safe and can store more energy is what electric cars need, it's what grids need, and it's what the world needs if vehicles are to run on electric power rather than fossil fuels. The planet depends on it.)

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Over the Air-Charging is coming. Maybe not tomorrow, but soon. You may first see the technology in stores and factories.

This AA Battery Sucks Power Right Out of the Air

After covering CES for 10 years, nothing I've seen at the show has me as excited about the future as Ossia's wireless charging technology. The company's developed a way to deliver power to your gadgets the same way internet is delivered by wi-fi, and one of the first real-world applications of the tech is a AA battery that may never need replacing.

 From article, (A gross simplification of Ossia’s Cota over-the-air charging technology, which is explained in more detail here, is that the transmitter broadcasts a directed and concentrated RF signal towards a given device in a room, which is absorbed by the gadget’s own RF antennas inside, and turned into usable power. If that device doesn’t have a Cota RF antenna inside it, as no gadgets on the market currently do, you’d need to use a bulky case on a smartphone, for example, to make it compatible with wireless power.
Unfortunately, when you look at how long it took a company like Apple to embrace and include induction charging on the latest iPhone, it’s going to be a long time before a technology like Ossia’s wireless power will be incorporated into devices by OEM manufacturers, freeing us all from charging cables.
But that’s where the Cota Forever Battery enters the picture. Featuring the exact same size, form factor, and power output of a traditional AA battery, it can be inserted into a battery-powered device to instantly and easily make it compatible with Cota wireless power transmitters. Imagine never have to change the batteries in your TV remotes ever again, or not having to stay on top of countless IOT devices in your home that are constantly demanding a charge.
Putting the Cota technology into a AA battery, which is technology even your grandparents’ grandparents are familiar with, is a clever way to help improve adoption of this tech. But the unfortunate reality is that it’s still going to be quite a few years before you’ll be able to upgrade your home, and all of your gadgets, with wireless power.
The early adopters of this technology will most likely be those with commercial applications in mind, like stores and factories, before you’ll see it showing up in homes. And device-makers aren’t going to even start considering incorporating wireless power technology until the transmitters are more ubiquitous.)

End of a very Long Error... er.. Era.

A Republican Star Fallen, Chris Christie Leaves Office

New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose popularity soared during his first term but then fell from grace, leaves office Tuesday. The Republican served a term-limited eight years in a majority blue state and spent much of that time in the national limelight as he built a reputation as a "tell-it-like-it-is" politician.

From article (New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie, whose popularity soared during his first term but then fell from grace, leaves office Tuesday.
The Republican served a term-limited eight years in a majority blue state and spent much of that time in the national limelight as he built a reputation as a "tell-it-like-it-is" politician. But the Bridgegate scandal, a losing campaign for president and a day spent on a closed beach during a government shutdown left him with the lowest approval ratings for any governor in New Jersey history.)


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Turns out you can use X-Rays, from Pulsar Stars, for autonomous navigation in Space.

Future spacecraft can use pulsars to navigate completely autonomously

Although it's possible for space missions to communicate data with Earth, the process is anything but fast. Voyager 1, for example, takes about 19 hours to send a signal back to Earth, and that lag only increases as the spacecraft gets further away.

From article, (Although it’s possible for space missions to communicate data with Earth, the process is anything but fast. Voyager 1, for example, takes about 19 hours to send a signal back to Earth, and that lag only increases as the spacecraft gets further away.  For truly long-term, deep space missions, the significant amount of time it takes to send a signal isn’t going to cut it. The spacecraft will need to adjust its own trajectory without relying on ground navigation. That’s where pulsars come in.

Though the Global Positioning System (GPS) can track objects located on Earth or in low-Earth orbit, GPS navigation isn’t an option for long-distance spacecraft because its Earth-orbiting satellite network quickly loses the signal once the craft travels away from Earth. In order to autonomously track deep space vehicles, researchers needed to find a strong signal that is capable of propagating many light-years. For this, the researchers turned to pulsars — the rapidly rotating cores of neutron stars — because they are available virtually everywhere (especially in deep space), and emit strong X-ray signals.

NICER has studied various aspects of neutron stars since its ISS deployment in June 2017, and it is currently using its 52 X-ray telescopes and silicon-rift detectors to study the radiation that pulsars emit into the electromagnetic spectrum. Pulsar radiation comes to us as narrow beams of light that flash when they speed past us, similar to the flashes of light emitted from a lighthouse. Their pulsations are also predictable in nature, enabling them to serve as highly meticulous timing agents, comparable to GPS’ atomic-clock signals. In fact, they are so predictable that the arrival times for beats of a millisecond pulsars can be predicted years into the future, with timing accuracies in the microseconds.

During the SEXTANT experiment, researchers chose four millisecond pulsar targets and positioned NICER so that it could detect X-rays within the targets’ narrow beams of light. To obtain timing data, NICER collected 78 measurements over a two-day period. These were then fed into SEXTANT’s onboard algorithms, creating a navigational solution that disclosed NICER’s orbital position. The solution was then compared to NICER’s onboard GPS-derived location.

Though NICER travels aboard the ISS at a speed of over 17,500 miles per hour (28,164 kilometers per hour) relative to the Earth, the study aimed to pinpoint NICER’s location to within a 10-mile (16-kilometer) radius. The team was allotted two weeks to locate the craft with such accuracy, but was able to detect its location within the given radius after only eight hours. Location accuracy improved from there on out, with a signification portion of the data from the remainder of the experiment being within three miles of the craft’s true location. Although three miles might not seem that precise, it’s sufficient for deep space travel due to the vast distance between objects, which are typically millions of miles apart.

 Now that the researchers have proven X-ray navigation is possible, the team will start working on updating and improving the software in anticipation of an additional experiment later in 2018. They will also work toward narrowing the instruments’ size, reducing power requirements, and improving sensitivity. The goal is to make X-ray navigation technology readily available for all space missions that could benefit from autonomous navigation without ground communication.

"This successful demonstration firmly establishes the viability of X-ray pulsar navigation as a new autonomous navigation capability. We have shown that a mature version of this technology could enhance deep-space exploration anywhere within the solar system and beyond," said Mitchell. "It is an awesome technology first.")

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Does it Plume, or does it not Plume? That is the question.

Hubble telescope ramps up search for Europa's watery plumes

OXON HILL, Md. - Astronomers may soon know for sure if Europa is spouting off. After finding signs that Jupiter's icy moon emits repeating plumes of water near its southern pole, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope hope to detect more evidence of the geysers.

 From article, (Astronomers may soon know for sure if Europa is spouting off. After finding signs that Jupiter’s icy moon emits repeating plumes of water near its southern pole, astronomers using the Hubble Space Telescope hope to detect more evidence of the geysers.

Sparks’ team started observing Europa on January 5, hoping to catch it passing in front of Jupiter 30 times before September. Hubble can detect active plumes silhouetted against background light from Jupiter. If the plume repeats as often as it seems to, “it’s essentially a certainty we’ll see it again if it’s real,” Sparks said.

using Jupiter as a backdrop for the plumes, Sparks and his colleagues spotted several eruptions (SN Online: 9/26/16) — once in March 2014, again in February 2016 and possibly also in March 2017, Sparks said.)

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Seeing how Catalysts work in real time, are Key to making CO2 into CO, hydrocarbons, and of all things, plastic? It's true. Your future plastic item may be made from CO2 taken out of the atmosphere, chemically converted, forever, into plastic.

From greenhouse gases to plastics: New catalyst for recycling carbon dioxide discovered

Imagine if we could take CO2, that most notorious of greenhouse gases, and convert it into something useful. Something like plastic, for example. The positive effects could be dramatic, both diverting CO2 from the atmosphere ...

From article, (Imagine if we could take CO2, that most notorious of greenhouse gases, and convert it into something useful. Something like plastic, for example. The positive effects could be dramatic, both diverting CO2 from the atmosphere and reducing the need for fossil fuels to make products.

Using the Canadian Light Source and a new technique exclusive to the facility, they were able to pinpoint the conditions that convert CO2 to ethylene most efficiently. Ethylene, in turn, is used to make polyethylene—the most common plastic used today—whose annual global production is around 80 million tonnes.

At the heart of this work is the carbon dioxide reduction reaction, wherein CO2 is converted into other chemicals through the use of an electrical current and a chemical reaction, aided by a catalyst.

Many metals can serve as catalysts in this type of reaction: gold, silver and zinc can make carbon monoxide, while tin and paladium can make formate. Only copper can produce ethylene, the core component of polyethylene plastic.

"Copper is a bit of a magic metal. It's magic because it can make many different chemicals, like methane, ethylene, and ethanol, but controlling what it makes is difficult," says De Luna.

That is precisely what the team's results address, however. They were able to design a catalyst and pinpoint the ideal conditions to maximize ethylene production, while minimizing the methane output to nearly nothing.

Paired with carbon capture technology, this could lead to an incredibly green production mechanism for everyday plastics, meanwhile sequestering harmful greenhouse gases.

"I think the future will be filled with technologies that make value out of waste . It's exciting because we are working towards developing new and sustainable ways to meet the energy demands of the future," says De Luna.)

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Water is definitely on Mars. Not just at the poles, but underground. But... There's always a but.

Large Reservoirs Of Water Ice Found On Mars, Says NASA

In a recent study published in the journal Science, researchers from the Arizona detachment of United States Geological Survey reported, with the help of NASA images, that they discovered significant reservoirs of water ice very close to the surface of Mars.

From article, (Human missions to Mars could extract water from the environment by exploiting these ice reserves. Ice could be mined from the deposits or water could be obtained by boiling it out of hydrated minerals. The water could then be used for drinking, or it could be broken down into both hydrogen and oxygen, which could be used as ingredients for rocket fuel and as breathable air respectively.

Yet there is a problem with using the ice deposits that were identified in the study as resources. A recent NASA study was done to find potential landing zones for astronauts, and the cliffs which contain the ice are located around latitudes 55° north or south. Mars explorers are unlikely to use these regions as bases because the Martian winter sees the regions growing dark and cold for long periods of time. As solar power is likely to be one of the primary power sources for explorers, this represents a problem.

 Space scientist G. Scott Hubbard, from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California would like to see if similar deposits of ice closer to proposed NASA landing zones could be found. NASA limited the potential landing zones to within 50 degrees of the equator, and Hubbard wants to see where the cutoff point is. Ice deposits found within the Martian tropics would be a substantial boon to NASA explorers.

Even if the deposits of ice are found near NASA landing zones, there’s no guarantee the water would be clean enough for humans to use. High levels of salt within the ice would demand that astronauts bring desalinating units with them to Mars, adding to the cost of exploration. Even more of a problem is that the water could have perchlorates in them, a branch of chemicals common on Mars that are toxic to people. Water gained from the ice would require special filtration if this turned out to be true. It’s impossible to say what the quality of the ice would be like until more research is done.

Efforts to send manned missions to Mars have plenty of problems to deal with, including the fact that atmospheric electrical charges could end up zapping astronauts or equipment. The puzzle of how to utilize stores of ice on Mars is just one more thing NASA will have to grapple with, but the discovery of the ice stores brings many new possibilities with it, in addition to the challenges.)

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The U.S. Government does not need to set rules for self driving cars because the car manufacturers' reputations are on the line. They have to strive for a zero accident self-driving car because, if even one gets into a serious accident, people will be leary of purchasing self-driving cars from that company.

Americans still deeply skeptical about driverless cars: poll

Amid the daily cacophony of news and announcements about self-driving cars - Have you heard? They're coming! - it's easy to lose sight of a fundamental truth: most people still don't know what to think about this new technology.

From article, (Amid the daily cacophony of news and announcements about self-driving cars — Have you heard? They’re coming! — it’s easy to lose sight of a fundamental truth: most people still don’t know what to think about this new technology. What they do feel, however, is that Congress and the federal government should impose minimum safety requirements on these vehicles before they hit the road in mass numbers. But lawmakers and regulators in Washington appear poised to do just the opposite, and that has safety advocates up in arms.

“The Department of Transportation needs to issue some regulations as driverless vehicles are put onto the road to ensure a minimum level of safety and security,” said Jackie Gillan, president emeritus at the Advocates for Highway and Auto Safety. “Right now, that’s not the case.”

Congress has been under intense lobbying by the tech and auto industries to take a hands-off approach to autonomous vehicles. And in large part, Congress has complied, passing bills that maintain the laissez-faire approach first perfected by the Obama administration and now carried over to the Trump White House.

“I have repeatedly seen that when people ride in a fully self-driving vehicle for the first time, they quickly begin to recognize the tangible safety and mobility benefits this innovation will have for their daily life,” said David Strickland, a former administrator at the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration who now runs the Self-Driving Coalition for Safer Streets, a lobbying group funded by Ford, Lyft, Uber, Volvo, and Waymo. “As more consumers across the country experience self-driving in action, I’m confident that Americans will become more trusting in the technology and its transformational potential.”)

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Me, "The U.S. Government does not need to set rules for self driving cars because the car manufacturers' reputations are on the line. They have to strive for a zero accident car because, if even one gets into a serious accident, people will be leary of purchasing self-driving cars from them. 
While I admit, there should be some Data shown, at point of sales, of self-driving cars to allow a car buyer to have the knowledge of which car or brand to buy from. If a Self-driving car has all the safety features, of today's car, and can seriously limit accidents, I think those results will speak for themselves, and not need additional regulations."

Arson of Tesla Models. A Message by Someone Offended by Electric Cars or Just Vandalism?

Tesla vehicles were set on fire in apparent act of anti-EV vandalism

Tesla has more than its fair share of naysayers, but it's generally limited to some nasty internet comments or in the worst cases, some legislation preventing them from selling their cars directly to customers. Now it looks like some people are taking it to a new level as Tesla vehicles were set on fire in an apparent anti-EV/Tesla vandalism act.

From article, (Tesla has more than its fair share of naysayers, but it’s generally limited to some nasty internet comments or in the worst cases, some legislation preventing them from selling their cars directly to customers.

Now it looks like some people are taking it to a new level as Tesla vehicles were set on fire in an apparent anti-EV/Tesla vandalism act.

 In Amsterdam last week, two Tesla vehicles parked only about 100 meters apart were both set on fire by two arsonists.

One of the two Tesla owners caught the arsonists on camera.

Considering there were plenty of other cars around, it clearly looks like the Tesla vehicles were targeted. Though the actual motivation behind the act is less obvious.

It’s reminiscent of previous strange vandalism incidents of Tesla products, like when a Tesla Supercharger was sabotaged in 2016 or when a Model S was graffitied.

But burning cars is a whole new level.

Forget the criminal aspect to it, I mean if Tesla is the target here, that’s not the way to go. If anything the owners are in for a headache, the insurers are the ones who are going to pay, and Tesla is just going to have to make two more cars.)

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