thewayne | Entries tagged with science

Well, this is kinda interesting! It's hard to say at the moment what the significance of it is, though. This is what I love about medicine: they discover one thing, only for it to prove how little we know about the body. "Hey! We know how to stimulate growth of gray matter! But we don't know why or if it's good for anything...." But hey, it's science, and science builds upon science, so it's all good.

From the article: "Researchers from Kyoto University and the University of Tsukuba in Japan asked 28 women to wear a specific rose scent oil on their clothing for a month, with another 22 volunteers enlisted as controls who put on plain water instead. (and that's not entirely accurate: 29 women wore the scent, but one was unable to do the post-MRI)

Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans showed boosts in the gray matter volume of the rose scent participants.

While an increase in brain volume doesn't necessarily translate into more thinking power, the findings could have implications for neurodegenerative conditions such as dementia."

There was no change in the areas of the brain where smell or emotions were processed, which is interesting. But "significantly more gray matter in the posterior cingulate cortex or PCC (linked to memory and association)."

They don't know why this change is happening. One thought put forth is that the rose scent is acting as an irritant, which is interesting. I'm hoping they do longer term studies to see if it actually affects dementia-related illnesses! Of course, I'd also like to see this study replicated using men. It's the same problem of most medical studies using only men because they don't want to have to bother with accommodating women's hormonal variances, it's just so yucky and unpredictable! Then they proclaim that everything applies equally to all women, and they just don't.

The scent-wearing group were 29 participants aged 41–69 years, the control group 22 participants aged 41–65 years.

https://www.sciencealert.com/smelling-this-one-specific-scent-can-boost-the-brains-gray-matter

The full paper is currently available at
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0361923024000297?via%3Dihub

If it becomes restricted, I downloaded the PDF and would be happy to supply it.

There used to be up to a twelve-month embargo on the release of the full papers of NIH research, starting in July that goes away! People were able to access the abstracts for free, but if you needed the full paper, you had to have insider access via library or other research connections. But now you won't need an intermediary!

Of course, there's always a chance that Our Beloved Leader or other Powers That Be will shut this down. But this is THE Director of NIH that announced this, so with luck it will hold.

https://www.nih.gov/about-nih/who-we-are/nih-director/statements/accelerating-access-research-results-new-implementation-date-2024-nih-public-access-policy

Aix-Marseille Université accepted applications from NASA, Yale, and Stanford scientists to move to France and continue their research under, shall we say, less politically-fraught conditions. The president of the université said, "We expect to be able to raise up to 15 million euros for a 3-year program, and will be working with local institutions to host around 15 researchers."

I expect other smart countries to do this. I know there are companies that already have facilities in Canada that are moving all operations up there. Apparently no one running the country realizes what the long-term ramifications of academic brain drain will have on the country.

https://www.univ-amu.fr/en/public/actualites/safe-place-science-aix-marseille-universite-ready-welcome-american-scientists

Article paywalled:
https://www.404media.co/nasa-yale-and-stanford-scientists-consider-scientific-exile-french-university-says/

The real interest here is battery electric and hybrid vehicles as those batteries are huge and expensive, but it would also be cool if you could double the service life of your smart phone or tablet battery!

The issue is pretty simple. We've always charged batteries using Constant Current (CC), where we apply a constant voltage and current to the batteries until they charge. We do it because we've always done it that way, and it's really, really easy from an electronics standpoint. I could sketch you a basic rectifying circuit to convert AC to DC at any given time, and that is what a charger does. The problem is, it increases the thickness of the anode of the Li-Ion battery, which decreases the battery's life.

Enter Pulse Charging (PC). With Pulse Charging, you're needing a more intelligent charging apparatus (okay, doable) that is introducing brief bursts (pulses) of electricity into the battery. This does not lead to anode thickening over time, and subsequent study of the test batteries shows that they can nearly double the life of the battery while retaining 80% of its capacity!

From the article: "The batteries were either charged conventionally with constant current (CC) or with a new charging protocol with pulsed current (PC). Post-mortem analyses revealed clear differences after several charging cycles: In the CC samples, the solid electrolyte interface (SEI) at the anode was significantly thicker, which impaired the capacity.

The team also found more cracks in the structure of the NMC532 and graphite electrodes, which also contributed to the loss of capacity.

In contrast, PC-charging led to a thinner SEI interface and fewer structural changes in the electrode materials."

and...

"The pulsed current charging promotes the homogeneous distribution of the lithium ions in the graphite and thus reduces the mechanical stress and cracking of the graphite particles. This improves the structural stability of the graphite anode," he concludes.

The pulsed charging also suppresses the structural changes of NMC532 cathode materials with less Ni-O bond length variation.

...

However, the frequency of the pulsed current counts: High-frequency PC charging protocols with square-wave current extend the service life of commercial LIBs the most, with a doubled cycle life (with 80% capacity retention) achieved in this study. Co-author Prof. Dr Julia Kowal, an expert in electrical energy storage technology at TU Berlin, emphasises: "Pulsed charging could bring many advantages in terms of the stability of the electrode materials and the interfaces and significantly extend the service life of batteries."

Very cool stuff. And since this is charging methodology, you're not changing the battery technology - though that's improving at a fairly rapid pace - so this should be implemented fairly easily. For certain values of the word easily.

There were a couple of things in the article that I didn't see that I'd like more information on. They didn't talk about any difference in heat of the test batteries during the charging cycles of the two methodologies, nor did they talk about any difference in the charging times. Both of those have some importance in a variety of applications.

It will be very interesting to see how this develops into field-deployed tech.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/04/240409123909.htm

https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/04/14/020205/could-a-new-charge-double-the-service-life-of-li-ion-batteries

The photo is pretty impressive!

The mission, called OSIRIS-REx, launched in 2016, to visit the asteroid Bennu in December 2018. The sampler, dubbed TAGSAM for Touch and Go Sampler Module, had a sampler arm and a one-way flap that sort of bounced on the asteroid, gathering material and shoving it down the flap. It bounced all over the surface of the asteroid getting different material.

Then it came back to Earth!

It landed in Utah in September of last year and was put into an isolation chamber and thoroughly documented. Lots of asteroid dust was removed from the surface of the container, in fact that material alone was greater than what was expected to be gathered from the mission! Before they got the canister open, they recovered 8.8 ounces of rock (250 grams), the goal of the mission was to recover at least 60 grams, so it was already Mission Accomplished.

The problem was that when they stated removing the bolts to open the canister that held the bulk of the sample collection, two bolts didn't want to come out! This was a very big problem because the canister was in a clean box, the kind where you stick your hand in gloves that are permanently attached to the side, that sort of thing. The box had an air lock so things could be moved in and out of it, but any tools used to work on the container had to be specifically approved to avoid contaminating the samples. What's the point of analyzing asteroid samples and finding flakes of steel only to later realize it came from a wrench that you used to open it? You'd look pretty stupid.

So anything new brought in to try to help open it had to be very space-constrained, had to be made out of very specific materials, and probably had a lot of other restrictions.

With the canister now open, the samples will be cataloged and 30% will be sent out to a team of international scientists for study.

But here's the cool and smart part: NASA is holding on to 70% of the samples for FUTURE STUDY. They're waiting for advances in technology and methods over the coming years/decades before they dig into the remaining samples! I think that's pretty smart. So we get instant(ish) gratification from studying what was brought back, from which we'll learn a lot, and we'll get more results at some later point as science improves, which will have a foundation of the previous study(ies) to build upon.

I really hope they are planning other OSIRIS-REx-like missions to take samples from other asteroids.

https://gizmodo.com/nasa-osiris-rex-canister-reveal-asteroid-sample-trove-1851184737

This article describes the problem encountered with the stuck bolts:
https://gizmodo.com/nasa-osiris-rex-asteroid-samples-bennu-stuck-container-1851102598

An experiment - which was successfully demonstrated on Earth - was launched into space in January. It uses solar collectors and a microwave system to beam power down to the planet, and they have been successful!

The part that I especially loved was that it was beamed to a receiver on the roof of the "Gordon and Betty Moore Laboratory of Engineering on Caltech’s campus in Pasadena." Sadly, Gordon Moore passed away about a month ago. It would have been so awesome if he'd been around to see it happen!

One thing that I wish the article had addressed, and perhaps future articles will as this one was kinda scant on details, is what is the transmission efficiency and how well do they expect it to scale up. Solar panels have enjoyed great improvements in efficiency in the last few years, and obviously they're more efficient in space. Inquiring minds want to know!!!

https://gizmodo.com/scientists-beam-space-based-solar-power-earth-first-tim-1850500731

Basically they launched a little milling machine on the end of a robotic arm that had one objective: cut through a piece of composite that simulated the exterior of a rocket's upper stage. The concept being that cutting and welding are very messy processes, but on Earth the debris just falls to the ground, in space it's kind of a problem. The experiment was to do it cleanly in microgravity, and it was a success.

Pretty cool!

It wasn't a 100% success: there were two other samples to be cut through, and that didn't happen and they don't know why.

The experiment was launched on SpaceX early this year and was carried out in May, the results announced Friday.

https://techcrunch.com/2022/09/16/nanoracks-metal-cutting/

https://science.slashdot.org/story/22/09/16/2226205/nanoracks-cut-a-piece-of-metal-in-space-for-the-first-time