Category: Science

WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic said it will lay off staff and cut expenses to conserve resources for its next generation of suborbital spaceplanes.

In a statement Nov. 7, Virgin Galactic announced a “strategic realignment of the Company’s resources and a related workforce reduction” to allow the company to focus on development of the Delta class of vehicles the company has pinned its future hopes on.

The company did not provide specifics, including the number of people who are being laid off, saying it was still in the process of individually notifying individual employees and that it would provide more information in a previously scheduled earnings call Nov.  8.

The company’s facilities will be closed through the rest of this week. Virgin Galactic reported having 1,166 employees as of the end of 2022 in an annual report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission in February.

In a memo to employees, Michael Colglazier, chief executive of Virgin Galactic, said the layoffs and other reductions in expenses are intended to conserve the company’s funding so it can focus on development of the Delta vehicles, which are intended to fly more frequently and at a lower cost than its existing SpaceShipTwo suborbital vehicle, VSS Unity.

He also cited “uncertainty” in the markets caused by high interest rates and geopolitical events. That uncertainty, he said, “makes near-term access to capital much less favorable.”

“The Delta ships are powerful economic engines,” he wrote. “To bring them into service, we need to extend our strong financial position and reduce our reliance on unpredictable capital markets. We will accomplish this, but it requires us to redirect our resources toward the Delta ships while streamlining and reducing our work outside of the Delta program.”

The company reported having $980 million of cash and equivalents on hand at the end of the second quarter this year, when it reported a net loss of $134.4 million. The company has not disclosed its estimated costs for development of the Delta vehicles, but said it expected those vehicles to enter service in 2026. The company expects only limited revenue from VSS Unity, which is able to fly monthly carrying up to four customers at a time.

Virgin Galactic has previously taken other steps to reduce costs. The company said in May it was deferring work for about a year on a new line of mothership aircraft that will carry the Delta-class spaceplanes aloft, concluding that the plane it currently uses for VSS Unity flights, VMS Eve, could also be used for test flights of Delta-class vehicles. The company had also all but abandoned plans to bring another spaceplane, VSS Imagine, into service before introducing the Delta line of vehicles.

Colglazier, in the memo, did not state what impact the layoffs would have on operations of VSS Unity. Virgin Galactic completed Galactic 05, its fifth commercial flight of the vehicle, Nov. 2, carrying two researchers and one private astronaut. That was the last scheduled flight of the vehicle this year as it and VMS Eve go into an annual maintenance period. The company said after Galactic 05 that flights would resume in January.

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Measuring water loss from the skin can predict anaphylaxis during oral food challenges before it becomes clinically evident, say researchers.

Anaphylaxis—a severe allergic reaction that may include a skin rash, nausea, vomiting, difficulty breathing, and shock—from a food allergy sends 200,000 people to the emergency room annually in the United States.

Because pinpointing a food allergy could mean life or death, an accurate diagnosis is critical.

Oral food challenges—when a patient ingests increasing doses up to a full serving of the suspected food allergen under supervision of a medical provider—are the diagnostic standard because skin and blood allergy tests have high false positive rates.

Although the diagnostic tests are highly accurate, patients often experience anaphylaxis during oral food challenges necessitating an epinephrine injection.

“This method could enhance the ability to detect and predict anaphylaxis during oral food challenges prior to the need for epinephrine, greatly improving patient safety and comfort,” says Charles Schuler of the University of Michigan, lead author of the study and an immunologist at Michigan Medicine.

The results appear in the Journal of Clinical Investigation.

During anaphylaxis, the dilation or widening of the blood vessels increases heat and water loss from the surface of the skin.

Previous research has assessed facial thermography, which uses a specialized camera to detect heat patterns emitted from the skin, as a method to predict anaphylaxis.

However, this method requires optics expertise, tightly controlled conditions and for the patient to sit still for an extended period—making this an impractical choice, especially for assessing food allergies in children.

The researchers validated the use of transepidermal water loss, a measurement that represents the amount of water that escapes from a given skin area per hour, by comparing its ability to detect anaphylaxis with biochemical and clinical observation methods.

They found that transepidermal water loss increases during food allergy reactions and anaphylaxis.

The rise in skin water loss correlated with biochemical markers of anaphylaxis and substantially preceded clinical detection of anaphylaxis.

“Transepidermal water loss measurement can be done in office without specialized equipment, affixed to the skin, and works in children making it a vast improvement from previous attempts at early anaphylaxis detection methods,” says Schuler.

Schuler’s research group is currently recruiting participants aged six months to five years old for a pilot clinical trial, Predicting Peanut Anaphylaxis and Reducing Epinephrine, that monitors transepidermal water loss from the forearm during a peanut allergy food challenge.

Results will help pinpoint values associated with anaphylaxis to determine “stopping rules” to end oral food challenges, hopefully reducing the need for epinephrine injections.

Source: Patricia DeLacey for University of Michigan

WASHINGTON — Virgin Galactic will reduce the frequency of flights of its current suborbital vehicle and stop them entirely by mid-2024 as it concentrates resources on the next generation of vehicles.

In a Nov. 8 earnings call, company executives said flights of VSS Unity, which completed its fifth commercial suborbital mission Nov. 2, would move to a quarterly frequency starting with its next mission, Galactic 06 in January. That would be followed by Galactic 07 early in the second quarter.

There could be a third mission, Galactic 08, around the middle of the year, but Michael Colglazier, Virgin Galactic’s chief executive, said the company had not decided yet whether to fly that mission before moving personnel and other resources to work on its Delta-class of vehicles.

Virgin Galactic announced Nov. 7 it would be laying off staff and reducing other expenses to concentrate resources on the Delta class, which Colglazier said was key to the company’s future. The company said in a Securities and Exchange Commission filing that it would be cutting 185 jobs, or about 18% of its current workforce.

That announcement did not provide any indications about the future of Unity, but Colglazier suggested in the earnings call that the company had learned what it needed about spaceflight operations and the experience of its customers over the five commercial flights it carried out between June and November.

“Unity’s flight objectives are to demonstrate our system, showcase our astronaut experience and provide learnings for our Delta program,” he said. “The total costs to support Unity’s flights surpass the relatively modest monthly revenues.”

“The big move we’re making here is pivoting the resources that have been put into the Unity flights and redirecting them over to get the Delta ships done with the cash we have on hand,” he said later in the call.

Colglazier said that for the remaining flights, Virgin Galactic will concentrate on higher revenue opportunities. That includes research, which offers more revenue per seat than private astronauts. He said some seats might be sold to private astronauts who are willing to pay a “premium price” of up to $1 million each, versus the current price of $450,000.

Once Unity flights end, he said company staff who work on the vehicles at Spaceport America in New Mexico will go to a new factory near Phoenix the company expects to complete in the second quarter of 2024 to help with the assembly of the first Delta-class vehicles. Doing so, he said, will help with company resources and give personnel experience with the spaceplanes before test flights begin in 2025.

Those layoffs and other cost-cutting measures, along with a sale of stock in an “at-the-market” deal in the third quarter, should give the company enough funding to complete development of the first two Delta vehicles and begin commercial flights in 2026, the company concluded. Virgin Galactic ended the quarter with $1.1 billion of cash and equivalents on hand.

He said the company projected that the Delta-class vehicles will be able to fly twice a week, versus the monthly cadence of Unity flights. With the Delta vehicles able to carry six customers versus four on Unity, each Delta vehicle will be able to produce 12 times as much revenue per month as Unity.

That is key, executives said, in enabling the company to achieve a positive cash flow in 2026, with the increased revenues from Delta flights and a reduction in expenses from the end of the vehicles’ development.

“We project we have sufficient capital to build the revenue-generating assets necessary to achieve positive free cash flow,” said Doug Ahrens, the chief financial officer of Virgin Galactic. He added there is still $113 million available in its at-the-market stock offering it can sell for additional funding.

Virgin Galactic reported $1.7 million in revenue in the third quarter from its spaceflight as well as “membership fees” from customers, and projects $3 million in revenue in the fourth quarter. The company had a net loss of $105 million in the third quarter.

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Hummingbirds use two unique strategies for flying through gaps in vegetation, report researchers.

Most birds that flit through dense, leafy forests have a strategy for maneuvering through tight windows in the vegetation—they bend their wings at the wrist or elbow and barrel through.

But hummingbirds can’t bend their wing bones during flight, so how do they transit the gaps between leaves and tangled branches?

A study published today in the Journal of Experimental Biology shows that hummingbirds have evolved their own strategies, which have not been reported before, likely because hummers maneuver too quickly for the human eye to see.

For slit-like gaps too narrow to accommodate their wingspan, they scooch sideways through the slit, flapping their wings continually so as not to lose height.

For smaller holes—or if the birds are already familiar with what awaits them on the other side—they tuck their wings and coast through, resuming flapping once clear.

“They seem to do the faster method, the ballistic buzz-through, when they get more acquainted with the system.”

“For us, going into the experiments, the tuck and glide would have been the default. How else could they get through?” says Robert Dudley, a professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and senior author of the paper. “This concept of sideways motion with a total mix-up of the wing kinematics is quite amazing—it’s a novel and unexpected method of aperture transit. They’re changing the amplitude of the wing beats so that they’re not dropping vertically when they do the sideways scooch.”

Using the slower sideways scooch technique may allow birds to better assess upcoming obstacles and voids, thereby reducing the likelihood of collisions.

Why study hummingbirds?

“Learning more about how animals negotiate obstacles and other ‘building-blocks’ of the environment, such as wind gusts or turbulent regions, can improve our overall understanding of animal locomotion in complex environments,” notes first author Marc Badger, a 2016 PhD graduate of UC Berkeley. “We still don’t know very much about how flight through clutter might be limited by geometric, aerodynamic, sensory, metabolic, or structural processes. Even behavioral limitations could arise from longer-term effects, such as wear and tear on the body, as hinted at by the shift in aperture negotiation technique we observed in our study.”

Understanding the strategies that birds use to maneuver through a cluttered environment may eventually help engineers design drones that better navigate complex environments, he notes.

“Current remote control quadrotors can outperform most birds in open space across most metrics of performance. So is there any reason to continue learning from nature?” says Badger. “Yes. I think it’s in how animals interact with complex environments. If we put a bird’s brain inside a quadrotor, would the cyborg bird or a normal bird be better at flying through a dense forest in the wind? There may be many sensory and physical advantages to flapping wings in turbulent or cluttered environments.”

Mind the gap

To discover how hummingbirds—in this case, four local Anna’s hummingbirds (Calypte anna)—slip through tiny openings, despite their inability to fold their wings, Badger and Dudley teamed up with UC Berkeley students Kathryn McClain, Ashley Smiley, and Jessica Ye.

“We set up a two-sided flight arena and wondered how to train birds to fly through a 16-square-centimeter gap in the partition separating the two sides,” Badger says, noting that the hummingbirds have a wingspan of about 12 centimeters (4.75 inches). “Then, Kathryn had the amazing idea to use alternating rewards.”

That is, the team placed flower-shaped feeders containing a sip of sugar solution on both sides of the partition, but only remotely refilled the feeders after the bird had visited the opposite feeder. This encouraged the birds to continually flit between the two feeders through the aperture.

The researchers then varied the shape of the aperture, from oval to circular, ranging in height, width, and diameter, from 12 cm to 6 cm, and filmed the birds’ maneuvers with high-speed cameras. Badger wrote a computer program to track the position of each bird’s bill and wing tips as it approached and passed through the aperture.

They discovered that as the birds approached the aperture, they often hovered briefly to assess it before traveling through sideways, reaching forward with one wing while sweeping the second wing back, fluttering their wings to support their weight as they passed through the aperture. They then swiveled their wings forward to continue on their way.

“The thing is, they have to still maintain weight support, which is derived from both wings, and then control the horizontal thrust, which is pushing it forward. And they’re doing this with the right and left wing doing very peculiar things,” Dudley says. “Once again, this is just one more example of how, when pushed in some experimental situation, we can elicit control features that we don’t see in just a standard hovering hummingbird.”

The ‘ballistic buzz-through’

Alternatively, the birds swept their wings back and pinned them to their bodies, shooting through—beak first, like a bullet—before sweeping the wings forward and resuming flapping once safely through.

“They seem to do the faster method, the ballistic buzz-through, when they get more acquainted with the system,” Dudley says.

Only when approaching the smallest apertures, which were half a wingspan wide, would the birds automatically resort to the tuck and glide, even though they were unfamiliar with the setup.

The team pointed out that only about 8% of the birds clipped their wings as they passed through the partition, although one experienced a major collision. Even then, the bird recovered quickly before successfully reattempting the maneuver and going on its way.

“The ability to pick among several obstacle negotiation strategies can allow animals to reliably squeeze through tight gaps and recover from mistakes,” Badger notes.

Dudley hopes to conduct further experiments, perhaps with a sequence of different apertures, to determine how birds navigate multiple obstacles.

The work had funding from the National Science Foundation.

Source: UC Berkeley

WASHINGTON — Ball Aerospace, Parsons, General Dynamics, and Omni Federal each won $9.7 million contracts from the U.S. Space Force to develop competing designs of next-generation ground systems. 

The contracts, announced Nov. 9, are for a project known as FORGE C2, short for Future Operationally Resilient Ground Evolution Command and Control. The Space Force wants to modernize the ground systems that control spacecraft and process data from existing and future geostationary and polar orbit satellites — including the Space Based Infrared System (SBIRS) and Next-Generation Overhead Persistent Infrared (Next-Gen OPIR) constellations.

The Space Systems Command started the FORGE program in 2019 with the goal of creating an open architecture for missile-warning ground systems to replace the current proprietary ground stations developed and operated by SBIRS and Next-Gen OPIR prime contractor Lockheed Martin.

“The FORGE C2 prototype will lay the groundwork for a government-owned, cyber secure modular open systems approach for missile warning satellite command and control, including mission management, ground control, telemetry, tracking and commanding,” said the Nov. 9 announcement.

Bids selected by SpEC consortium

The four vendors were competitively selected by the Space Enterprise Consortium, known as SpEC, an organization created to attract startups and commercial companies to compete for defense programs. 

“The use of the SpEC other transaction authority provided the Space Systems Command access to innovative technology that isn’t otherwise available with traditional contracting methods,” said the consortium’s director Mike Malinowski.

FORGE C2 is one piece of a broader $2.8 billion program to modernize missile-warning ground systems. In a separate project, companies like Raytheon and SciTec are working on software to process, analyze and disseminate data collected by missile-warning satellites.  

The four vendors selected for the FORGE C2 project have 16 months to develop prototypes. One or more may be chosen for the next phase of the program, which will focus on the Next-Gen OPIR polar satellites.

Two of the four, Parsons and General Dynamics, recently won contracts for other Space Force ground systems. Parsons earlier this year was selected to develop a ground system for missile-warning satellites in medium Earth orbit. General Dynamics Mission Systems last year got a contract to operate the ground systems of DoD’s future low Earth orbit constellation being acquired by the Space Development Agency.

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A new study reveals a path toward reducing United States greenhouse gas emissions by 50 to 52% below 2005 levels by 2030.

It’s one of the goals outlined by the Biden administration’s National Climate Task Force in 2021.

Now, the study investigates one of the strategies to achieve this goal, which is to increase new vehicle sales to 50% electric by 2030.

The paper in the journal Nature Communications investigates the 50% electric vehicle sales target, modeling how much transportation sector emissions would fall by 2030 if that target is met.

The researchers find that meeting greenhouse gas emissions goals for light-duty vehicles, which are passenger vehicles such as cars and trucks, is possible, but not just by increasing EV sales.

“Transportation is the highest emitting sector in the US, with the majority of emissions coming from light-duty vehicles. Fortunately, there is a clear path to decarbonizing light-duty transportation,” says Maxwell Woody, lead author of the study and research assistant at the Center for Sustainable Systems at the University of Michigan’s School for Environment and Sustainability.

“Our study finds that it will take a combination of strategies working together to create a greater impact than each strategy can have individually.”

According to the study, the US will reach a 25% reduction in light-duty vehicle emissions by 2030 if the 50% EV sales target is met. A reduction of 45% is possible by 2035, reaching 50% shortly thereafter if EV sales and grid decarbonization goals are both met.

This suggests that, to accelerate the reduction of emissions and meet goals on time, additional strategies should be implemented. Additional strategies include reducing vehicle production emissions, vehicle size, and the number of miles traveled in vehicles, which can be done by working remotely or shifting to less carbon-intensive modes of transportation such as walking, biking, or taking public transportation.

There’s also a need to continue improving gas and EV fuel economies, meaning that in the process of fleet turnover, attention will need to be given to gas vehicle fuel economy standards. This is because fleet turnover takes time, as does the ramping up of EV production.

“Electrifying vehicles is essential, but not enough,” Woody says. “We need to maintain emissions standards for gasoline vehicles, continue cleaning the electric grid, and invest in walkable, bikeable, and transit-oriented cities.

“In the short term, the impact of EV sales is limited because of how long it takes to replace vehicles. For example, if the 50% sales goal is met in 2030, that may mean only 10% of the vehicles on the road are electric. This is because vehicles last nearly 20 years on average in the US.”

To come to these conclusions, the researchers combined several different models. They built a vehicle stock model that uses sales projections by state and vehicle survival curves (how long a vehicle is expected to last) to construct the US light-duty vehicle fleet.

They then built an emissions model that estimates the total emissions from all the vehicles in the stock model each year, which depends on how much the vehicles are driven, how fuel efficient the vehicles are, and for the electric vehicles, what mixture of technologies are producing the electricity used to charge the vehicle. The model also includes emissions from producing the vehicles themselves, not just the emissions from driving the vehicles.

This study was the first to quantify the gap between the stated US vehicle electrification goals and the US economy-wide decarbonization goals. It was also the first to focus on shorter-term goals rather than 2050 targets and the first to model the EV transition for each state rather than the country as a whole.

In addition, the study incorporated updated electric grid decarbonization scenarios that better reflect recent targets, such as the Biden administration’s goal of 100% clean electricity by 2035.

“This study examined EV sales trajectories for each state in the US with California leading, along with 14 other states that have set more aggressive sales goals than the federal government. Light-duty vehicles are less difficult to decarbonize than other transportation modes, such as aircraft and ships, so it is particularly important to support industry and government initiatives to accelerate EV adoption,” says study senior author Greg Keoleian, professor of environment and sustainability and co-director of the Center for Sustainable Systems.

“Ultimately, growth in EV sales is dependent on the new vehicle purchasing decisions of individual consumers. Those households that have the economic means to buy new electric vehicles have an important opportunity to address our climate emergency by speeding up the replacement of carbon-intensive internal combustion engine vehicles.”

Source: Nayiri Mullinix for University of Michigan

Researchers report new ways to accurately identify possible biomarkers in adolescent brains that can reliably predict cognitive developments and psychiatric issues.

Their new study, published in Nature Mental Health, represents the first large-scale analysis of its kind in which researchers analyzed functional network connectivity (FNC) across scans and identified associations with a diverse range of health measures in children. Researchers believe that inferences about early cognitive and psychiatric behaviors in children may be made using these intra-subject variabilities as a useful biomarker.

Researchers studied four scans from more than 9,000 subjects ages 9 to 11.

Vince Calhoun, head of the Translational Research in Neuroimaging and Data Science (TReNDs) Center at Georgia State University, worked with the research team to develop the study. He says the research demonstrates that, independent of brain growth and development, a child’s FNC is robust and stable with high similarity across scans and can serve as a fingerprint to identify an individual child from a large group.

“This study is quite exciting as it shows the promise of using advanced machine learning to identify brain patterns which might help us intervene early in children who are most at risk for cognitive or psychiatric problems,” says Calhoun, senior author of the study.

Researchers say that brain functional connectivity derived from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) is commonly used as a potential blueprint for adults. But they believe that intra-subject variation of FNC can carry biologically meaningful information, especially during adolescence, which is a time of significant change in the brain.

Principal investigator Zening Fu says the study demonstrates that functional connectivity variability can predict a wide range of children’s behavior, including cognition, mental health, and sleep conditions.

“Most previous fMRI studies believe that resting-state functional connectivity can provide a fingerprint of an individual, and that variability in connectivity is due to noise or other confounding effects,” says Fu. “However, we found that the variations of individualized FNC across scans are notable and convey psychological and physiological information underlying distinct behavioral phenotypes in children. Multivariate methods could help to capture much larger effects between FNC stability and children’s behavior.”

The research team was able to predict with surprising accuracy a number of conditions or outcomes, including cognitive performance and psychiatric problems. Researchers were also able to predict sleep conditions and screen usage based on FNC stability. Additionally, they were able to identify brain-behavior correlations with parent psychopathology and prenatal exposure to marijuana and other drugs.

Fu explains how they are able to read the results and, in many cases, predict outcomes in children based on the scans over time.

“FNC stability in our present work is defined as the variability or changes in the resting-state functional connectivity across scans (measurements),” Fu says. “That is, if a subject has been collected using resting-state fMRI scans multiple times, the functional connectivity estimated using each fMRI scan should be different, even if they are from the same subject. Such difference or variability is not trivial, but biologically meaningful. Subjects with larger FNC variability (smaller stability) might tend to have lower cognitive performance and more mental health problems.”

In a second study, published in Biological Psychiatry, research conducted at the TReNDS Center and led by Weizheng Yan finds that functional network connectivity, which steadily reconfigures over time, potentially contains abundant information to assess psychiatric risks. Yan is a former postdoctoral research associate with the TReNDS Center now working with the National Institutes of Health.

As part of the study, researchers developed a brain-wide risk score (BRS), a novel FNC-based metric that contrasts the relative distances of an individual’s FNC to that of psychiatric disorders versus healthy control references.

The research team discovered that the BRS revealed a distinct, repeatable gradient of FNC patterns for each psychiatric disorder in over 8,000 unaffected teenagers, ranging from low to high risk. The BRS could also identify people with early psychosis from healthy controls and predict psychosis scores.

To generate group-level disorder and healthy control references, researchers used a large brain imaging dataset containing more than 5,000 individuals diagnosed with schizophrenia, autism spectrum, major depressive and bipolar disorders, and their corresponding healthy controls.

The findings show that the BRS could be a new image-based tool for assessing psychiatric vulnerability over time and in unaffected individuals, and could also serve as a potential biomarker, facilitating early screening and monitoring interventions.

Both studies used a multimodal database known as the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development (ABCD) Study. The dataset contains a wide range of measurements of mental health, cognition and other health-related factors that have been found to be helpful in examining the connection between teenage behaviors and brain function.

TReNDS is a collaboration among Georgia State University, the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Emory University.

Source: Georgia State University

The key to making batteries last longer may be found in how soap works, new research shows.

Take handwashing, for instance. When someone washes their hands with soap, the soap forms structures called micelles that trap and remove grease, dirt, and germs when flushed with water. The soap does this because it acts as bridge between the water and what is being cleaned away, by binding them and wrapping them into those micelle structures.

As reported in Nature Materials, researchers noticed that a similar process plays out in what has become one of the most promising substances for designing longer lasting lithium batteries—a new type of electrolyte called a localized high-concentration electrolyte.

This new understanding of how this process works might be the missing piece to fully kicking the door open in this emerging sector of technology, the researchers suggest in their paper.

“The big picture is that we want to improve and increase the energy density for batteries, meaning how much energy they store per cycle and how many cycles the battery lasts,” says Yue Qi, a professor in the School of Engineering at Brown University.

“To do this, materials inside of traditional batteries need to be replaced to make long-life batteries that store more energy a reality—think batteries that can power a phone for a week or more, or electric vehicles that go for 500 miles.”

Scientists have been actively working to transition to batteries made from lithium metal because they have a much higher energy storage capacity than today’s lithium-ion batteries.

The holdup is traditional electrolytes, which are integral because they allow an electrical charge to pass between a battery’s two terminals, sparking the electrochemical reaction needed to convert stored chemical energy to electric energy. Traditional electrolytes for lithium-ion batteries, which are essentially made of low-concentration salt dissolved in a liquid solvent, don’t do this effectively in metal-based batteries.

Scientists at Idaho National Laboratory and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory engineered localized high-concentration electrolytes to address this challenge. They are made by mixing high concentrations of salt in solvent with another liquid called a diluent, which makes the electrolyte flow better so that the power of the battery can be maintained.

So far, in lab tests, this new type of electrolyte has shown promising results, but how it works and why has never been fully understood—putting a cap on how effective it can be and how it can be better developed. This is what the new study helps to address.

“The paper provides a unified theory to why this electrolyte works better and the key understanding of it came by finding that micelle-like structures form within this electrolyte—like they do with soap,” says Bin Li, a senior scientist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory who worked on the study.

“Here we see that the role of the soap or surfactant is played by the solvent that binds both the diluent and the salt, wrapping itself around the higher concentration salt in the center of the micelle.”

Understanding this, the researchers were able to break down the ratios and concentrations needed to bring about the optimal reactions for the batteries. This should help solve one of the main trouble points in engineering this electrolyte, which is finding the proper balance for the three ingredients.

In fact, the work not only provides better guidelines for making localized high-concentration electrolytes that function, but for making ones that work even more effectively.

Researchers at Idaho National Laboratory put the theory into action. Doing so, they found the theory, so far, holds up and helps to extend the life of lithium metal batteries.

The team is excited to see what designs for localized high-concentration electrolytes come from their work but know significant progress remains to overcome the electrolyte design bottleneck for high-density batteries. Right now, they are amused that the secret may have been in something as mundane and everyday as soap.

“The concept of the micelle may be new for the electrolyte, but it’s actually very common for our daily life,” Qi says. “Now we have a theory, and we have guidelines to get interactions we want from the salt, the solvent and the diluent in the electrolyte, and what concentration they have to be at and how you mix them.”

Corey M. Efaw at Idaho National Laboratory and Qisheng Wu, a senior research associate at Brown’s School of Engineering are the study’s lead authors.

Other collaborators are from Boise State University, Brookhaven National Laboratory, and the University of Washington. NASA funded the theoretical work at Brown. The US Department of Energy Battery500 Consortium funded the experimental work.

Source: Brown University

Researchers have analyzed the relationship between loneliness and aloneness—and found that they are two different things that aren’t closely correlated.

According to the study, people don’t feel lonely until they spend three-quarters of their time alone. When that happens, it becomes difficult to avoid feelings of loneliness.

Published in the Journal of Research in Personality, the study also concludes that among older adults, there is a particularly strong association between time spent alone and feeling lonely.

The social network of people gets smaller as they get older, and the ability to spend time with others diminishes for many older adults, says David Sbarra, a professor of psychology at the University of Arizona and the study’s senior author.

“Among adults 68 years and older, we found that loneliness is strongly connected with being socially isolated,” Sbarra says.

Mentioning the 2023 US Surgeon General’s advisory about the pattern of increase in loneliness, Sbarra says attention increasingly has focused on loneliness as a health determinant.

“We are learning more and more about the importance of social connections for human health, and it appears that loneliness and isolation are related but distinct concepts,” he says.

“We needed a good measure of how much time people spend alone, and that’s why we started this research,” says Matthias Mehl, a psychology professor and senior author of the study.

Over the course of his career, Mehl has developed a method for studying social activity in everyday life. The Electronically Activated Recorder, or EAR, is a smartphone app that records with participants’ permission the sounds they make for 30 seconds every 12 minutes.

EAR is a useful tool for observing daily social behaviors, Sbarra says. In this study, the researchers used EAR to characterize time spent alone.

“Feeling lonely is different from being alone, and EAR is an exciting new method for assessing time spent alone,” Sbarra says.

Overall, the study participants spent 66% of their time alone, and those who were alone for more than 75% of their time were the ones who felt the most lonely. On analyzing the result from the entire participant pool, there was only a 3% overlap between aloneness and loneliness.

In younger people, aloneness and loneliness are just two different things, Mehl says. They may feel lonely in a crowd, or they may not feel lonely when they are by themselves.

The case is different with older adults, Mehl says. In older people, since feeling lonely and being alone are tightly linked, being with others and socializing is the way to combat feelings of loneliness. The strong relationship between the two was found in adults older than 67, and there was an overlap of about 25% between loneliness and aloneness in older people, he says.

The study involved over 400 participants with archival data collected in a series of studies completed over the last 20 years.

“For instance, we know if the person is on the phone, if they are driving, watching television, or if they are interacting with a partner or a stranger,” Mehl says.

Although EAR has many benefits, it is a time-consuming method for researchers to quantify the metrics of social behavior. To avoid hours of coding sound files and to more efficiently measure aloneness, Mehl is now working with a team to develop SocialBit, an app that runs on a smartwatch, analogous to commercially available fitness trackers.

Much as fitness trackers measure physical activity by counting steps per day, SocialBit will measure social activity by measuring minutes of conversations per day, Mehl says.

The device is expected to be rolled out in the next couple of years. The researchers are developing it for stroke patients during recovery, given that social isolation after stroke is significant, Mehl says.

“In order to facilitate more social connection, we first need to be able to measure it well,” Mehl says. “Methods like SocialBit can tell people, ‘You’ve been solitary for too long. It’s time to try to have a conversation.’”

Source: University of Arizona